>Note most companies claim copyright on the object code not the source. Where did you get the idea that companies don't claim copyright on the source code? My sample set might not be representative but I have no reason to believe that right now.
You're right. He would have been right in the USA in 1975. The publishing requirement for copyright was removed in 1976 to satisfy the Berne convention. Europe for many years gave authors moral rights to works. If you made an attempt to keep the work propietary you got many of the protections of copyright, but in the US you could only sue under trade secret law. So you had to prove it was your work and not the publishers, in Europe the publisher usually had to prove it was his to publish. The Berne convention tried to unify the rules, at least as they pertained to books, and made some halting efforts with music. Then in 1995 the creation of the WTO and the TRIPS treaty required nations to bring their law in line with the worst aspects of everyone else's system, including on software. A little over 150 countries have either adapted the system or have deadlines to come in line. Some poor african countries made a special application to keep the old system for a few more years, but most third world countries took the excemption that didn't require asking for permission which has already expired.
I'm a little foggy on European copyrights, so take my European copyrights assertions with a grain of salt, but basically with the US laws copyright and secrecy prior to 1976 wasn't allowed, you had to at least send the Library of Congress two copies for their public library. A little known fact is the Library of Congress pulps those books if they are ever published. Registering your copyright even today gives you more standing in court because no one can legitamitely claim they got a copy of your work without the notice and assumed it was in the public domain, they should have looked it up in the library catalog (assuming it has the same title etc.) So they owe you back damages, otherwise they might just have to make an effort to stop infringing. Ignorance is a defense if you made a good faith effort to redress it. Hence the "Registered Copyright(c)" notice, a sort of "don't ya dare republish this, or we'll own ya" notice.
So there's a lot of economic value in 5 year old unsupported software. It's highly likely there will still be economic value in it when it's 95 years old.
You are right, there will be someone to whom it is cheaper to emulate a 95 year old machine than to reverse engineer the file format and creating new software. If it ain't broke... But in the context of copyright when I say "economic value" I mean "economic value to the copyright holders."
In 5 years they are unlikely to be making money from this version of the product, either there is a maintenance contract and the product is patched and no longer the same program or the application has been orphaned. In 95 years they are unlikely to have any special advantage or interest in patching the software over competitors.
I think many software packages will be in use 95 years after their creation, and hence valuable, but as we saw with the Y2K patching few of the packages had a known copyright holder (bankrupcy & death + no percieved value to transfer.) Even when the copyright holder was known, the source (or flow diagrams for that stuff coded in machine language) was long ago lost. These programs would be more valuable if you could legally send a copy to your consultant instead of having him patch live code, with no real loss to the entity that gets a 95 year copyright or life + 75 years on binaries today.
I think "state institutions and businesses" means the government and government owned businesses (like bridge and tunnel or turnpike businesses in the US). The sentence is ambiguous, but mandating all business adopt open source solutions would be a bit premature. Brazil could just allow software copyrights and enforce that copyright aggressively if they wanted to switch businesses to open source.
Open source is about a lot more than choice, you could have choice between proprietary solutions if our governments enforced their monopoly laws. For government, open source is about open formats supported by free beer software so your citizens don't have to subsidize some corporation to work with you effectively, access to the source code and the freedom to change it so that you can access your data 5, 50, or 500 years hence, and it is about saving huge heaps of money.*
*as a dyed in the wool liberterian, I would define open differently for government, and contract that gave the government source code and allowed it to distribute free beer binaries for all platforms and publish the open file formats but only allowed distribution of the source after 5 years would be sufficient as long as binaries were available for all platforms with more than say 0.001% market share. I would still give a preference based on $ savings plus small bonus for the simpler open source licenses. Maybe there is no market reason for the more restrictive license to exist but I think laws should only specify what we want and not some proxy for what we want like specifying GPL/LGPL/BSD/"Open Source" so that the market can decide if there is value in the alternatives that would satisfy your requirements. If Microsoft adapts some GPL like license for "Windows YQ free beer edition" except with a 2 year embargo on source for non-licensed developers I think that would be acceptible for government purposes.
PS When did copyright start applying to closed source software anyway? When I was registering my first copyright with the Library of Congress they required a printout of the source code. I was allowed to take a black marker over sensitive parts of the code, but I had to print it. Does anyone have references to the cases that decided binaries were works of art? It seems like a seperate law should have been passed with a reasonable protection length, what exactly is the economic value of 95 year old software? Or, 5 year old unsupported software for that matter.
I try to stay away from doing business with companies I feel their vale/price ratio to be too high
That's not really an analog. The value/price should always be positive even with monopoly pricing, if it didn't generate more value than you are giving up in the purchase it's irrational to buy. Also if the average value/price ratio is 20:1 then it makes no sense to buy something that has a 5:1 value/price ratio while the other options are on the market. It would be like buying a government bond at 0.5% yield when an equally risky one was on sale with 2.0% yield. Only if you were in a an economy where less goods were on sale than you could afford to buy would you need to buy anything below the average value/price ratio to maximize returns. In any moderately healthy economy you could buy an radio instead of a telephone if that gave you more value, there doesn't have to be competition in that particular good. An exception being for an essential good like food. But then if there isn't much food its value to you is probably very high.
This would only be an analog if the price to you was zero and you still refused it. Consider a tax cut where you get back $300, your neighboor gets back $300,000 and your children and the neighbors' children pick up $3,000,000 in debt service. Refusing that no cost value would be a closer analog. You might give up the $300 because you saw the scheme on the whole as unfair, even though it is of direct benefit to you, you still might refuse. You wouldn't want others to be making the same decision for you as you would be by putting that large obligation on your children with so little gain. Essentially your neighboor has the same choice but it's harder with real money at stake, I think some famous Jew said something about a rich man having as much chance of being good as a camel has of getting through the eye of a needle. I think if they had given the one actor 10 $100,000 checks the receiver might accept just 2-3 of them... I think even at $100,000 out of $1,000,000 most people would refuse, but anything they could convince themselves was fair would usually be accepted. It's sort of like the teachers strike in Peru over the last month, the teachers wouldn't agree to a $28/mo raise to their $180/mo income until the president said he'd take a paycut from $12,000/mo to $6,000/mo, then they saw him as feeling their pain and being more fair even though it made no immediate change in their situation. (For perspective minimum wage there is $110, the dollar will get you about 3 times as far as in the US, and during the strike the teachers approval rating went from 70% to 85% and the president fell from 17%(the GDP rose 5% last year) to 12%.)
So then....what are emotions??? I would say emotions are only rational behavior but with rationality hidden a little deeper non-obvious way. But we still call them emotions after all....so this ultimatum experiment's claim of this as an emotion is not incorrect.
I haven't really thought about this with the brain in mind. My guess is that there is a rational basis for our emotions. Some which, at least, we reasoned through in early childhood or learned through conditioning. But for the most part they are hard code, sort of like other things we learn yet don't think about afterward, we learn to balance ourselves when first walking, but at a certain point it becomes automatic. We can adjust later if injured or when first walking on stilts so it's not permanent, but it can take months for someone to learn to walk again after a major accident.
I have an early memory... I remember having a problem with others taking me seriously when I was two or three, and thought that it was because I reacted to everything rationally and whenever anything noticable happened I recalled the pertinent facts then thought about the possible solutions and their probability of success and of the various states of failure and my confidence in those probabilities and then assigned values to the indefinates(success/failures) and calculated the best action. -- My parents were artists and pretty much thought I was a freak. My plan was to simulate emotion by applying the same calculation to the desireability of my current situation after notable events. And it sort of worked, at least on my parents. At some point the calculation became almost automatic. Maybe because my memory recall got quicker and those paths were all optimized. Or, maybe it was just positive reenforcement, I got others to solve my problems with happyness and anger alike. My point isn't that this is really how everyone learns to react emotionally to life, but more that just because we notice emotion in small children it doesn't mean they didn't think about it first. I think the research shows that kids are analytical monsters; everyone is born a scientist, it just gets pounded out of some of us. (I took a graduate school probablity class when I was little and left 10 mins in to the final and got a 100% when the next score was a 53% and the average was in the 20%'s, it did bad bad things to my ego.)
The personal anecdote explains why I've suspected a rational basis, but I could tell other story about me in my teans which show a complete lack of rationality. Ignoring anecdotes, I think there is some real evidence for a rational basis, starting with all our emotions having very believable post-facto reasoning behind them. But it doesn't have to be something we reasoned to be reasonable, it could be that emotions are pre-wired, that we evolved to react to our world in a certain way. One thing that seems to support that is that babies cry and smile at birth (or a few days after at least.) But there is really no evidence for there being an emotion behind this. There is a good strong evolutionary reason for them to look like they feel anguish or happyness to their caretakers, but there is no need for them to actually an emotion behind these things, it is enough for them to cry at pain and smile in reaction to their caretakers.
I think many animals do have feelings, it's a good idea for evolution to reward positive outcomes and punish negative ones with drugs. And, I have cats. But emotion as I think of it is a reaction to complex events that must be interpreted and understood, at least to the point that you can tell that $1 is unfair out of a possible $10 when sharing. With our brains constructed by genes little different from their analogs in the genes of earthworms it's hard to believe any complex reaction is really pre-programmed. Plus there are all those people who are sociopathic, many with perfectly normal ancestors. I think we can confuse emotions with the feelings that are triggered by our emotional state. But feelings are easy to trigger
So, it's a nice illustration of rational vs. irrational thought.
I don't think it's that clearcut. In our normal lives you often have transactions where you will never interact with the same person again, but by punishing bad actors you often get them to behave better in future transactions. The punishing them costs you more than just ignoring bad actor, but you accept that for everyone you bust and spend time dealing with someone that was going to harm you in the future is being punished for harming someone else.
The way I understand this expirement was run was that each person got to either make 10 offers to 10 different people, or accept/reject 10 offers from 10 different people. On average the least punishing player will end up with the most money of all the people accepting and rejecting offers. But I bet you would also notice that in a egaliterian society (small democratic republic say) the split will be 1:1 and they will have near the highest total payout. In a broken society the split will be more like 1:4 in favor of the offerers, and many transactions will be rejected. Here the least punising receiver will have much more money than the most punishing, unlike in the egaliterian society where the income inbalance will be small. Since they didn't write about this in the article I think the expirementers really don't understand what they are dealing with, or the reporter is just clueless.
If they are right about a considerable emotional component it is probably just rightous indignation, something you might need in order to overcome the rational thought that you can get the most money by leaving the punishment to others. There is a bit of a prisoners dilema though, because if everyone else does the same thing you will get a smaller payoff next time, and no matter what they did you have betrayed another receiver so there would also be the emotion of guilt for your evil dead. There would be less guilt if you've been cheated much before, or if you get a low offer next time. This reinforces the brokeness in broken societies, conversely a fair offer next time will reenforce good feelings about a previous punishing round.
It sort of makes sense that this is acts as an emotion and not just on the rational level. Presumably we developed the emotional part of the brain before we got rational, and this kind of skill would be needed for any social group large enough to have strangers. Not having "a conscience" might be what restricts some of our primate cousins to small groups, they are restricted to group sizes where the possibility of developing a bad reputation is enough to keep actors in line. (Possibly it's just bad government:) I wonder if bonobos treat strangers better than other chimps...)
Still I'm not convinced, memory lights up all over the brain, and you would be remembering previous times you were cheated when considering not punishing the bad actor, i.e. cheating yourself. The emotion they measure might be just a side effect of accessing memory associated with being cheated and hence associated with feeling rotten or angry.
Sorry I meant warrants. I think SCO as at like $11 and change now.
People can be so technical around here:)
I had a bad feeling I was using the wrong word too, it was just a "me too" message so I didn't check on it. I hope anyone reading stock chat on/. will check things out themselves... A plain short isn't a bad idea either, as long as IBM doesn't buy SCO and you have enough to cover the current upswing + market fluctuations.
Yeah, it's a "me too." I'm just glum because I think they will crash before I can transfer enough funds into my account to make a real killing.
BTW anyone wanting to make "easy money" should follow the case better than/. You want to know dates ahead of time and a good guess on the rulings and evidence ahead of time. Read the check-in logs and correlate them with witnesses. And don't do too much margin, IBM could always settle out of court instead of squashing them, it's also possible that Unixware won't fall under the GPL when this all works itself out, so they may still be a viable, if crippled company for a few more years. Shorts are _dated_, and the contracts are market priced so if too many people want to short the price can still be to high.
I'd like to see some kernel hackers sue SCO in forums at all ends of the world. A really spectacular end to the whole thing would be fun to watch.
I agree that caps suck, but how often do you download the RH ISO and all the components you develop with???
I think you might be surprised how many OS's and OS distributions a developer downloads. When I'm working on something I usually work on it on a few different computers, with a range of different compilers, operating systems and library sets. It helps get rid of bugs that hide in any articular setup and also makes the thing easier to support in a year or two when I'm running it on a different OS with a different compiler. I may have not tested on that particular setup but a lot of cross-compatibility bugs are really because you assume too much of the library API, or because one compiler forgives some of your deviation from the language standard, or has defaults for pointer alignment that match your needs, etc. Plus developers like to try new things, read lots of articles (pdf|ps==big), I think there is a saying, "eat like a bird, poop like an elephant." (Consume much information and share your findings.)
A day later, my friend got around to checking his email, and found a series of messages warning him that he was over his cap, and that charges were accumulating at 14c/MB. I consider myself lucky that, despite my carelessness, I escaped with a mere $110 of excess bandwidth fees... (Mark, when are you going to let me pay you back?;-)
I haven't used bittorrent yet. I'm really a casual broadband user at home, but I do download a few ISO's a week and prolly eat another few hundred megabytes a day with X sessions and downloading datasets from work. I have the slowest connection my ISP sells (1.5Mbps, I do pay an extra $10/mo for a shareable business line and a block of IP addresses) but the actual bandwidth to the ISP is higher, so I've considered using bittorrent within the local net (The ISP mirrors Linux and NetBSD ISOs which is prolly why I've been lazy). Does bittorrent allow you to download just from your neighbors? If so would that count toward an Australian ISP's bandwidth cap?
BTW Are you guys really stuck with landline ISPs? In the states you can get two way satelite broadband for about 1/10th what you guys are paying. It's not suitible for X11 or ssh, but it's fine for ISOs and web use. (One of those free dialup connections could be used when you need ssh.)
First, the credit card companies (or, usually, the bank that issued the credit card) generally give you advance notice of any changes. You can sometimes find an insert in with your bill describing the changes that will happen next month.
Actually, I had a card issued by a bank that was bought by another bank and they raised the interest rate from 5.9% to 27.9% overnight, even though the original issuer of the card had promised the original rate wouldn't change for at least another 8 months in writing. I payed off the balance and canceled the card, but not until after paying the crazy interest for two months balance.
There was a class action and under the settlement the offered me a card with a fixed rate of 6.9% for a year. They should have payed back the interest difference plus some compensation for breaking the contract, but unfortunately that's not how things work. Of course, I wasn't going to go back. Now years later, I still get mailings from them begging me to come back. I can't imagine why they would think I would ever trust a company that breaks written contracts and then sends me a sullen letter about how they are being forced by court order to accept me again at a rate higher than I was paying before they f*cked up.
Excepting that case I've always gotten a 60 day notice on changes to the agreement and have canceled two cards as a result. Sixty days is plenty of time to change any automatic billings and transfer the balance if you are carrying some large purchase on the card, so yeah no problem. With software I expect to be able to use it for at least a two years after purchase so that should be the grace period on any change in the licensing. Monopolies shouldn't be allowed to make any changes, and should have all EULAs approved by their supervising court.
Inheritance tax actually effects a totally different demographic than what people think. Most people, when asked, think that inheritance tax affects the rich family fortunes in an okay way, causing them to invest their fortunes in the economy or risk losing millions in savings. In fact, the people that inheritance tax most hurts is farmers.
I think someone else pointed out that without inheritence tax, capital gains go untaxed, increasing the burden on income taxation and other taxes. There are better solutions than scrapping the whole thing and raising income taxes (they will come). The simplest is probably to raise the exemption from 2 million to 5 million and then COLA adjust it for the future, unfortunately this is unfair to anyone whose parents have less than 5 million in debt free assets when they die. Another option would be to treat it like any other capital gains so you wouldn't ever be subject to double taxation, this is arguably "fairest" but would require a lot of records farmers might not have kept, like the value of the property when your father inherited it from his father, investments he made and write-offs he took in the last 40 years. Another idea is to simply offer morgage insurance on a morgage on those assets, since only the assets that over and above the morgages is taxable the morgage insurance would be really cheap. The bank would secure assets worth 4-5 times the debt if you defaulted, so we really only need the insurance to help those blacklisted from debt. This would probably be the most fair system, there is already a writeoff for a large portion of the tax, simply because the rate is much lower than the income tax + the payroll tax. But now a bank can refuse to give the inheritor the loan that the dead person had, if there was a loan guarantee on the first X million then someone would lend the money. If there is a bank shortage in rural America, perhaps a fully insured "must carry" for a three or five year balloon morgage would give the new framers/business owners time to find a suitable bank.
As for rich people avoiding much of their taxes with trusts and the, like that is a real problem. It would be easy to solve if we had the political will however, there aren't that many and as a taxpayer I'd gladly pay for the cost of auditing every billionaire on a five year schedule, including one after their death. Getting rid of loopholes like trusts isn't so hard really, except when you consider the members of the Senate are some of the loopholes main benefitiaries.
One thing that could be done to help small farms and small businesses survive the transition is to just pay an accountant to help them out. Whatever taxes they really owe would find its way to the IRS faster, and businesses that really were viable could continue. (Taxation is just one factor, there are a lot of reasons for the death of businesses when the owners die. One thing I don't want to do is pay extra taxes to subsidize some a kid living in Chicago so he can put an extra boat into the marina when his moma dies alone on the farm in Wyoming.)
I know this is a oft villified method of making money from your inventions, but if you don't have thousands of patents in your portfolio it is the only way you can do it.
If you actually make a prototype or worse try to sell the invention you can't protect your invention from IBM or another megacorp. If you build something you are violating hundreds if not thousands of patents and any large corporation that wants to use your patent can just send you a list of 10 or 20 of theirs that you are using. So you have to cross-license. If you simply sell licenses to your patent to others you can contractualy abide them to get any additional licenses they need to build the thing and the interested megacorp can't sue them to get the license and it can't sue you for violating their patent. They either pay your price or they abort the product. If they can force you to cross-license you don't generate any revenue and your patent is now worthless since no one wants to pay you to compete with some company that doesn't have to pay you a dime for the use of the patent.
I personally think the patent system should be scrapped in favor of a one or two automatic year "copyright" on ideas from the date of first publication. "Publication" would have to be refined to mean indexed in one of a short list of industry specific databases and available for free and within 5 seconds. Just so that you could properly figure out if your idea was covered by someone's "copyright". Then add a layer of comments, al la slashdot, and a 48 hour method for getting frivalous claims authoritatively marked so by experts... It would be much much more efficient and you could additionally have licensing prices published (perhaps even with URL's to commercial clearing houses). and the the two year window should assure that "copyrights" on fundamental concepts can only destroy only a company or ten and not entire industries. I also think the experts should be paid directly by the government (no fees) and voted for by the users of the system, on a field/sub-field basis, with intersubfield jurors selected on an ad-hoc basis. Maybe 48 hours isn't enough, but at least extra time should have serious discouragements. The jurors/reviewers should also be able to penalize a claim that does not properly site other people's non-frivalous claims (at least within a 2 year window.) Industries with high regulatory burdens, like drug companies, could get an extra year tacked on if they get approval within the two year window. -- This would force people to actually move in order to get six months to a year of monopoly prices, they could then continue as a commodity producer with first mover advantage or simply leave the generics to others and pluck something else from their invention pipeline. Big companies would probably continue making the products as they are usually inefficient inventors but efficient producers, and smaller outfits could innovate and actually make some licensing revenue from the big guys. $50,000 on your little invention can keep you working on the big one for six months to a year on the big one.
This doesn't fund basic science since that can take 5 to 50 years to become practical, but the R part of R&D is usually not so well executed by industry. Leave that to market leaders and universities which have the motivation to make those discoveries anyway. You could even continue the tax credit schemes we have now for research or fund them with industry taxes like we have for milk advertising and the like (for recession proofing, tax credits aren't as useful when your not profiting this quarter...)
M$ can not sell their products for "too much", since that is an abuse of their monopoly. And they can not sell them for "too little", since that is also an abuse of their monopoly.
I don't think there is anything preventing Microsoft from charging $200 or some other ridiculous amount for their OS. (I don't know what it costs now, if it's already more than that then I think the point is made).
But "too little" they can do because that was the what Standard Oil did. They would move into a market and under-sell all their competitors but subsidising prices with profits from their monopoly pricing in other areas. When their competitors went bust they raised prices through the roof and moved on to another strategic area with super low prices. But I don't think Microsoft is violating that law, the total cost of production is probably in the neighborhood of $20-35 including monopoly inefficiencies. The marginal cost is probably $1-2, mostly accounting overhead. The price wouldn't be set by any competitition commision, the injured party would sue and then a judge would ask MS for their tax records and compare the claimed cost per unit with the sale price.
In Microsoft's case this is moot because they settled out of court with a consent decree where they promised to offer the same deal to all OEM's. This is basically a law that applies only to Microsoft that they have accepted to avoid enforcement of the monopoly laws. It seems more likely that this would violate the decree, which is a much easier case to make than the full trial needed to get them on another monopoly abuse charge.
Makes you wonder if it has something to do with human females being fertile year round. If I recall, chimp females are not. Because chimps can only mate at certain times, there is less oppurtunity for one male to sire all the children in a troop.
I think the article isn't specific enough to judge whether sexual practices have anything to do with it. Pygmy Chimps (Bonobos) always look like they are in heat and like humans who never look like they are fertive have sex with anything that moves. But most chimps have a stratified society where only one male at a time has sex with all the females. The females do cheat on him, but I don't know how common those children are. Even the Amish have plenty of out of 'falsely fathered' children so I don't think humans should be less diverse due to sexual exclusivity.
More likely there where several rounds of near human extinction and just the latest one was sometime in the last 100,000 years. We also have this nasty habit as a species to eat those that aren't 100% human...perhaps our competitors had similar tastes;) (JK! -- no homo erectus, homo neanderthalis hate mail pls)
1. Knowingly stating false information; or recklessly stating information with disregard for its truth or falsity; or omitting information with the intent to create a false impression;
2. With the intent that another rely upon your statements;
3. Where the other party actually relies upon your statements; and
4. Damages result.
It was called FRAUD. Then again, maybe law school somehow affected my sense of how the software industry is supposed to work. You decide.
But this describes 99% of business in America. To be liable from fraud in you have to be politically unpopular and go beyond the accepted norms for lying to your customers. The accepted norm in software for lying is much greater because software often either exceeds your expectations greatly or disappoints you immensely. Combine that with the expectation that CEO's, PR, and sales folk talk up their software and almost never really understand what they are selling and who their customers are and to have a case you almost need to have video tape of the CEO saying one thing on stage and coming back stage and laughing about what fools they are for believing him. Without the tape he can believably claim ignorance.
I think we've all wised up about FUD. You hardly hear FUD from Microsoft anymore, probably because it no longer works to scare away capital, and their still gullible customers and not just the industry listens to them now. There was that period where we were driven to distraction by VC's belief that Microsoft was really working on the pre-anounced products when we were trying to point out how many of those FUD announcements they had made, but it's over, VC's know now. Fraud isn't a big deal when you know who the liars are.
So, don't get too excited: becoming fully GPL-compliant might consist of them simply putting up source for a stock kernel, and putting something about the GPL in their documentation.
I'm pretty sure the programmers did create the drivers as modules so you're right. But even so having the source would be valuable. If you want to extend their or a similar wifi box to do more inteligent routing, or use ssh instead of telnet for configuration say, having a good basic linux setup for the box makes that easier. I know NYCWireless people want to be able to give non-technical people an easy way to set up a public wireless box. Right now they have something for Sokeris boxes, but that costs more than a conventional AP. If you could tell people buy this Linksys AP and then run our utility answering some simple questions and get a modified firmware with NoCAT and a decent firewall rules that would be a great way to get more people involved.
Most people don't get rich just to have a big bank account -- they get rich so they can buy stuff.
No one gets rich to buy stuff. That's what the middle class is for, even at a professional's $300k-500k middle class income you can buy most of the "stuff" you want. Getting rich is either the accidental result of doing something you want to do, like starting a company, or because you are motivated to see those numbers go higher.
So that's why my monitor keeps disappearing if I look at it for more than a few mi... oh...
If you take your finger and hold your eyeball in place things will fade to black (so long as you don't move your head and close the other eye.) I don't think this trick would work against us since we can and do move our eyeballs independently of our body. Fireflies only have to pull this trick on the flies they eat...
The eyemovements we make to be able to sit practically motionless before our monitors is called saccade. (Or "Freedom Eyes" in New American.)
Try working a phone as tech support sometime. I did ages ago in college. You'll learn very quickly that the script to follow will solve over 80% of the problems you'll get. It's not like the people who wrote the script were idiots.
The first time I ever called tech support was because a Power PC, mac compatible, had just electrocuted me and I wanted to send it in for repair. It ended with a lot of yelling after his script demanded I electrocute myself again.
I recently called tech support because the PCMCIA port on my in-warranty laptop was fried. I did some meditation and then called up and pretended to be clueless. "So what is this hardware manager you speak of?" I got through the script and was transfered to level 2 where I was asked one question, and then given a work order number. It was a much more pleasant experience for all involved. The scripted questions aren't so bad and if they ask you to do something stupid you can just say "Now it's making crackling and popping sounds and there are little lightning thingies, and there is a foul smelling blue smoke. Do you want me to unplug it?"
You don't actually have to plug it in again and witness those things again. In that first case I went out and bought some thick rubber gloves and gave them to my boss with the tech support number, then I took the rest of the day off. She managed to get them to send a new power supply by FedEx, I never asked for details.
Moral: The script may work to get that return authorization, but you might just be being played by someone who very well knows what's wrong but knows that telling you will do no good.
Ultimately, anything you've done on company time is owned by the company, and you have no rights to it whatsoever, NDA or no.
That so depends on your employer, if it's the US government everything you write is in the public domain. If you work for a university they often claim just your patents and leave copyrights in your hands, sometimes even patents are yours if you pay the fees. You really have to read company policy here, usually it's more restrictive if software/patents are a large part of their mission. Then they usually make a claim to your work done outside working hours, sometimes limited to something related to what your working on there. SGI had me list everything I wanted excepted on my employment contract (I'm not there now).
I've never had a problem getting permission to donate back to a project even when the contract said everything was theirs, you basically explain how much time it will save you merging your changes back into the code... If it's LGPL/GPL you remind them they need to publish the changes when they release the product anyway. You can also explain the benefits of making friendly with the lead developers, though business types seem to understand this with you pointing it out. The worst problem I've had was convincing someone it was a little tacky to release a "Partnership with project X" press release when a patch got accepted.
You must not work for the government. EVERYTHING operates at a glacial speed.
I think the speed of action to something an engineer asks for from managment is inversely proportional to the size of the organization. Where I work I proposed a minor license change that is required before we can release the next version of the only software we make money from. Everyone I managed to get into the meeting approved it six months ago, that is two levels above me out of four. The lawyers have yet to look at it, they're busy borrowing money to continue operations...at most it would take one of them a day to review the change. It's not just the government that is completely insane when it comes to prioritizing tasks to spend time on. Our economy would be a lot healthier if we passed a constitutional amendment limiting the size of organizations to about 100 employees. I worked at a software shop with 15 employees and the CEO would fax something to his lawyer and usually sign it within hours, the worst delay was like a day or two.
They may finally be able to avoid too many civilian casualties and friendly fire
Maybe, this would be great for asymetric warfare. You just need one smart kid to break into the system and you simultaniously give all the enemy troops a lethal dose of amphetamines....
Or, if not, just send all the American troops into attacks on each other.
You can already do that though, communication is already very bad. A lot of the nuclear and intelligence stuff is on private isolated networks, but a bunch of stuff is going over commercial lines between parties without a sufficient understanding of encryption. If we were to attack someone sufficiently paranoid to bring our military to it's knees informationally I'm sure we'd fix these things, but until then we'll just find more ways to burn money and increase our vulnerability.
That's what I meant. You also need retransmission for when you have unexpectedly high error rates. For transfering files you would want a relatively low level of error correction since higher latency is a good trade for greater bandwidth. For a live streaming video p2p-cast you want a much higher level of error correction.
Slashdot Mirror
>Note most companies claim copyright on the object code not the source.
Where did you get the idea that companies don't claim copyright on the source code? My sample set might not be representative but I have no reason to believe that right now.
You're right. He would have been right in the USA in 1975. The publishing requirement for copyright was removed in 1976 to satisfy the Berne convention. Europe for many years gave authors moral rights to works. If you made an attempt to keep the work propietary you got many of the protections of copyright, but in the US you could only sue under trade secret law. So you had to prove it was your work and not the publishers, in Europe the publisher usually had to prove it was his to publish. The Berne convention tried to unify the rules, at least as they pertained to books, and made some halting efforts with music. Then in 1995 the creation of the WTO and the TRIPS treaty required nations to bring their law in line with the worst aspects of everyone else's system, including on software. A little over 150 countries have either adapted the system or have deadlines to come in line. Some poor african countries made a special application to keep the old system for a few more years, but most third world countries took the excemption that didn't require asking for permission which has already expired.
I'm a little foggy on European copyrights, so take my European copyrights assertions with a grain of salt, but basically with the US laws copyright and secrecy prior to 1976 wasn't allowed, you had to at least send the Library of Congress two copies for their public library. A little known fact is the Library of Congress pulps those books if they are ever published. Registering your copyright even today gives you more standing in court because no one can legitamitely claim they got a copy of your work without the notice and assumed it was in the public domain, they should have looked it up in the library catalog (assuming it has the same title etc.) So they owe you back damages, otherwise they might just have to make an effort to stop infringing. Ignorance is a defense if you made a good faith effort to redress it. Hence the "Registered Copyright(c)" notice, a sort of "don't ya dare republish this, or we'll own ya" notice.
So there's a lot of economic value in 5 year old unsupported software. It's highly likely there will still be economic value in it when it's 95 years old.
You are right, there will be someone to whom it is cheaper to emulate a 95 year old machine than to reverse engineer the file format and creating new software. If it ain't broke... But in the context of copyright when I say "economic value" I mean "economic value to the copyright holders."
In 5 years they are unlikely to be making money from this version of the product, either there is a maintenance contract and the product is patched and no longer the same program or the application has been orphaned. In 95 years they are unlikely to have any special advantage or interest in patching the software over competitors.
I think many software packages will be in use 95 years after their creation, and hence valuable, but as we saw with the Y2K patching few of the packages had a known copyright holder (bankrupcy & death + no percieved value to transfer.) Even when the copyright holder was known, the source (or flow diagrams for that stuff coded in machine language) was long ago lost. These programs would be more valuable if you could legally send a copy to your consultant instead of having him patch live code, with no real loss to the entity that gets a 95 year copyright or life + 75 years on binaries today.
I think "state institutions and businesses" means the government and government owned businesses (like bridge and tunnel or turnpike businesses in the US). The sentence is ambiguous, but mandating all business adopt open source solutions would be a bit premature. Brazil could just allow software copyrights and enforce that copyright aggressively if they wanted to switch businesses to open source.
Open source is about a lot more than choice, you could have choice between proprietary solutions if our governments enforced their monopoly laws. For government, open source is about open formats supported by free beer software so your citizens don't have to subsidize some corporation to work with you effectively, access to the source code and the freedom to change it so that you can access your data 5, 50, or 500 years hence, and it is about saving huge heaps of money.*
*as a dyed in the wool liberterian, I would define open differently for government, and contract that gave the government source code and allowed it to distribute free beer binaries for all platforms and publish the open file formats but only allowed distribution of the source after 5 years would be sufficient as long as binaries were available for all platforms with more than say 0.001% market share. I would still give a preference based on $ savings plus small bonus for the simpler open source licenses. Maybe there is no market reason for the more restrictive license to exist but I think laws should only specify what we want and not some proxy for what we want like specifying GPL/LGPL/BSD/"Open Source" so that the market can decide if there is value in the alternatives that would satisfy your requirements. If Microsoft adapts some GPL like license for "Windows YQ free beer edition" except with a 2 year embargo on source for non-licensed developers I think that would be acceptible for government purposes.
PS When did copyright start applying to closed source software anyway? When I was registering my first copyright with the Library of Congress they required a printout of the source code. I was allowed to take a black marker over sensitive parts of the code, but I had to print it. Does anyone have references to the cases that decided binaries were works of art? It seems like a seperate law should have been passed with a reasonable protection length, what exactly is the economic value of 95 year old software? Or, 5 year old unsupported software for that matter.
I try to stay away from doing business with companies I feel their vale/price ratio to be too high
That's not really an analog. The value/price should always be positive even with monopoly pricing, if it didn't generate more value than you are giving up in the purchase it's irrational to buy. Also if the average value/price ratio is 20:1 then it makes no sense to buy something that has a 5:1 value/price ratio while the other options are on the market. It would be like buying a government bond at 0.5% yield when an equally risky one was on sale with 2.0% yield. Only if you were in a an economy where less goods were on sale than you could afford to buy would you need to buy anything below the average value/price ratio to maximize returns. In any moderately healthy economy you could buy an radio instead of a telephone if that gave you more value, there doesn't have to be competition in that particular good. An exception being for an essential good like food. But then if there isn't much food its value to you is probably very high.
This would only be an analog if the price to you was zero and you still refused it. Consider a tax cut where you get back $300, your neighboor gets back $300,000 and your children and the neighbors' children pick up $3,000,000 in debt service. Refusing that no cost value would be a closer analog. You might give up the $300 because you saw the scheme on the whole as unfair, even though it is of direct benefit to you, you still might refuse. You wouldn't want others to be making the same decision for you as you would be by putting that large obligation on your children with so little gain. Essentially your neighboor has the same choice but it's harder with real money at stake, I think some famous Jew said something about a rich man having as much chance of being good as a camel has of getting through the eye of a needle. I think if they had given the one actor 10 $100,000 checks the receiver might accept just 2-3 of them... I think even at $100,000 out of $1,000,000 most people would refuse, but anything they could convince themselves was fair would usually be accepted. It's sort of like the teachers strike in Peru over the last month, the teachers wouldn't agree to a $28/mo raise to their $180/mo income until the president said he'd take a paycut from $12,000/mo to $6,000/mo, then they saw him as feeling their pain and being more fair even though it made no immediate change in their situation. (For perspective minimum wage there is $110, the dollar will get you about 3 times as far as in the US, and during the strike the teachers approval rating went from 70% to 85% and the president fell from 17%(the GDP rose 5% last year) to 12%.)
So then....what are emotions??? I would say emotions are only rational behavior but with rationality hidden a little deeper non-obvious way. But we still call them emotions after all....so this ultimatum experiment's claim of this as an emotion is not incorrect.
I haven't really thought about this with the brain in mind. My guess is that there is a rational basis for our emotions. Some which, at least, we reasoned through in early childhood or learned through conditioning. But for the most part they are hard code, sort of like other things we learn yet don't think about afterward, we learn to balance ourselves when first walking, but at a certain point it becomes automatic. We can adjust later if injured or when first walking on stilts so it's not permanent, but it can take months for someone to learn to walk again after a major accident.
I have an early memory... I remember having a problem with others taking me seriously when I was two or three, and thought that it was because I reacted to everything rationally and whenever anything noticable happened I recalled the pertinent facts then thought about the possible solutions and their probability of success and of the various states of failure and my confidence in those probabilities and then assigned values to the indefinates(success/failures) and calculated the best action. -- My parents were artists and pretty much thought I was a freak. My plan was to simulate emotion by applying the same calculation to the desireability of my current situation after notable events. And it sort of worked, at least on my parents. At some point the calculation became almost automatic. Maybe because my memory recall got quicker and those paths were all optimized. Or, maybe it was just positive reenforcement, I got others to solve my problems with happyness and anger alike. My point isn't that this is really how everyone learns to react emotionally to life, but more that just because we notice emotion in small children it doesn't mean they didn't think about it first. I think the research shows that kids are analytical monsters; everyone is born a scientist, it just gets pounded out of some of us. (I took a graduate school probablity class when I was little and left 10 mins in to the final and got a 100% when the next score was a 53% and the average was in the 20%'s, it did bad bad things to my ego.)
The personal anecdote explains why I've suspected a rational basis, but I could tell other story about me in my teans which show a complete lack of rationality. Ignoring anecdotes, I think there is some real evidence for a rational basis, starting with all our emotions having very believable post-facto reasoning behind them. But it doesn't have to be something we reasoned to be reasonable, it could be that emotions are pre-wired, that we evolved to react to our world in a certain way. One thing that seems to support that is that babies cry and smile at birth (or a few days after at least.) But there is really no evidence for there being an emotion behind this. There is a good strong evolutionary reason for them to look like they feel anguish or happyness to their caretakers, but there is no need for them to actually an emotion behind these things, it is enough for them to cry at pain and smile in reaction to their caretakers.
I think many animals do have feelings, it's a good idea for evolution to reward positive outcomes and punish negative ones with drugs. And, I have cats. But emotion as I think of it is a reaction to complex events that must be interpreted and understood, at least to the point that you can tell that $1 is unfair out of a possible $10 when sharing. With our brains constructed by genes little different from their analogs in the genes of earthworms it's hard to believe any complex reaction is really pre-programmed. Plus there are all those people who are sociopathic, many with perfectly normal ancestors. I think we can confuse emotions with the feelings that are triggered by our emotional state. But feelings are easy to trigger
So, it's a nice illustration of rational vs. irrational thought.
I don't think it's that clearcut. In our normal lives you often have transactions where you will never interact with the same person again, but by punishing bad actors you often get them to behave better in future transactions. The punishing them costs you more than just ignoring bad actor, but you accept that for everyone you bust and spend time dealing with someone that was going to harm you in the future is being punished for harming someone else.
The way I understand this expirement was run was that each person got to either make 10 offers to 10 different people, or accept/reject 10 offers from 10 different people. On average the least punishing player will end up with the most money of all the people accepting and rejecting offers. But I bet you would also notice that in a egaliterian society (small democratic republic say) the split will be 1:1 and they will have near the highest total payout. In a broken society the split will be more like 1:4 in favor of the offerers, and many transactions will be rejected. Here the least punising receiver will have much more money than the most punishing, unlike in the egaliterian society where the income inbalance will be small. Since they didn't write about this in the article I think the expirementers really don't understand what they are dealing with, or the reporter is just clueless.
If they are right about a considerable emotional component it is probably just rightous indignation, something you might need in order to overcome the rational thought that you can get the most money by leaving the punishment to others. There is a bit of a prisoners dilema though, because if everyone else does the same thing you will get a smaller payoff next time, and no matter what they did you have betrayed another receiver so there would also be the emotion of guilt for your evil dead. There would be less guilt if you've been cheated much before, or if you get a low offer next time. This reinforces the brokeness in broken societies, conversely a fair offer next time will reenforce good feelings about a previous punishing round.
It sort of makes sense that this is acts as an emotion and not just on the rational level. Presumably we developed the emotional part of the brain before we got rational, and this kind of skill would be needed for any social group large enough to have strangers. Not having "a conscience" might be what restricts some of our primate cousins to small groups, they are restricted to group sizes where the possibility of developing a bad reputation is enough to keep actors in line. (Possibly it's just bad government
Still I'm not convinced, memory lights up all over the brain, and you would be remembering previous times you were cheated when considering not punishing the bad actor, i.e. cheating yourself. The emotion they measure might be just a side effect of accessing memory associated with being cheated and hence associated with feeling rotten or angry.
Sorry I meant warrants. I think SCO as at like $11 and change now.
:)
/. will check things out themselves... A plain short isn't a bad idea either, as long as IBM doesn't buy SCO and you have enough to cover the current upswing + market fluctuations.
People can be so technical around here
I had a bad feeling I was using the wrong word too, it was just a "me too" message so I didn't check on it. I hope anyone reading stock chat on
Yeah, it's a "me too." I'm just glum because I think they will crash before I can transfer enough funds into my account to make a real killing.
/. You want to know dates ahead of time and a good guess on the rulings and evidence ahead of time. Read the check-in logs and correlate them with witnesses. And don't do too much margin, IBM could always settle out of court instead of squashing them, it's also possible that Unixware won't fall under the GPL when this all works itself out, so they may still be a viable, if crippled company for a few more years. Shorts are _dated_, and the contracts are market priced so if too many people want to short the price can still be to high.
BTW anyone wanting to make "easy money" should follow the case better than
I'd like to see some kernel hackers sue SCO in forums at all ends of the world. A really spectacular end to the whole thing would be fun to watch.
I agree that caps suck, but how often do you download the RH ISO and all the components you develop with???
I think you might be surprised how many OS's and OS distributions a developer downloads. When I'm working on something I usually work on it on a few different computers, with a range of different compilers, operating systems and library sets. It helps get rid of bugs that hide in any articular setup and also makes the thing easier to support in a year or two when I'm running it on a different OS with a different compiler. I may have not tested on that particular setup but a lot of cross-compatibility bugs are really because you assume too much of the library API, or because one compiler forgives some of your deviation from the language standard, or has defaults for pointer alignment that match your needs, etc. Plus developers like to try new things, read lots of articles (pdf|ps==big), I think there is a saying, "eat like a bird, poop like an elephant." (Consume much information and share your findings.)
A day later, my friend got around to checking his email, and found a series of messages warning him that he was over his cap, and that charges were accumulating at 14c/MB. I consider myself lucky that, despite my carelessness, I escaped with a mere $110 of excess bandwidth fees... (Mark, when are you going to let me pay you back? ;-)
I haven't used bittorrent yet. I'm really a casual broadband user at home, but I do download a few ISO's a week and prolly eat another few hundred megabytes a day with X sessions and downloading datasets from work. I have the slowest connection my ISP sells (1.5Mbps, I do pay an extra $10/mo for a shareable business line and a block of IP addresses) but the actual bandwidth to the ISP is higher, so I've considered using bittorrent within the local net (The ISP mirrors Linux and NetBSD ISOs which is prolly why I've been lazy). Does bittorrent allow you to download just from your neighbors? If so would that count toward an Australian ISP's bandwidth cap?
BTW Are you guys really stuck with landline ISPs? In the states you can get two way satelite broadband for about 1/10th what you guys are paying. It's not suitible for X11 or ssh, but it's fine for ISOs and web use. (One of those free dialup connections could be used when you need ssh.)
First, the credit card companies (or, usually, the bank that issued the credit card) generally give you advance notice of any changes. You can sometimes find an insert in with your bill describing the changes that will happen next month.
Actually, I had a card issued by a bank that was bought by another bank and they raised the interest rate from 5.9% to 27.9% overnight, even though the original issuer of the card had promised the original rate wouldn't change for at least another 8 months in writing. I payed off the balance and canceled the card, but not until after paying the crazy interest for two months balance.
There was a class action and under the settlement the offered me a card with a fixed rate of 6.9% for a year. They should have payed back the interest difference plus some compensation for breaking the contract, but unfortunately that's not how things work. Of course, I wasn't going to go back. Now years later, I still get mailings from them begging me to come back. I can't imagine why they would think I would ever trust a company that breaks written contracts and then sends me a sullen letter about how they are being forced by court order to accept me again at a rate higher than I was paying before they f*cked up.
Excepting that case I've always gotten a 60 day notice on changes to the agreement and have canceled two cards as a result. Sixty days is plenty of time to change any automatic billings and transfer the balance if you are carrying some large purchase on the card, so yeah no problem. With software I expect to be able to use it for at least a two years after purchase so that should be the grace period on any change in the licensing. Monopolies shouldn't be allowed to make any changes, and should have all EULAs approved by their supervising court.
Inheritance tax actually effects a totally different demographic than what people think. Most people, when asked, think that inheritance tax affects the rich family fortunes in an okay way, causing them to invest their fortunes in the economy or risk losing millions in savings. In fact, the people that inheritance tax most hurts is farmers.
I think someone else pointed out that without inheritence tax, capital gains go untaxed, increasing the burden on income taxation and other taxes. There are better solutions than scrapping the whole thing and raising income taxes (they will come). The simplest is probably to raise the exemption from 2 million to 5 million and then COLA adjust it for the future, unfortunately this is unfair to anyone whose parents have less than 5 million in debt free assets when they die. Another option would be to treat it like any other capital gains so you wouldn't ever be subject to double taxation, this is arguably "fairest" but would require a lot of records farmers might not have kept, like the value of the property when your father inherited it from his father, investments he made and write-offs he took in the last 40 years. Another idea is to simply offer morgage insurance on a morgage on those assets, since only the assets that over and above the morgages is taxable the morgage insurance would be really cheap. The bank would secure assets worth 4-5 times the debt if you defaulted, so we really only need the insurance to help those blacklisted from debt. This would probably be the most fair system, there is already a writeoff for a large portion of the tax, simply because the rate is much lower than the income tax + the payroll tax. But now a bank can refuse to give the inheritor the loan that the dead person had, if there was a loan guarantee on the first X million then someone would lend the money. If there is a bank shortage in rural America, perhaps a fully insured "must carry" for a three or five year balloon morgage would give the new framers/business owners time to find a suitable bank.
As for rich people avoiding much of their taxes with trusts and the, like that is a real problem. It would be easy to solve if we had the political will however, there aren't that many and as a taxpayer I'd gladly pay for the cost of auditing every billionaire on a five year schedule, including one after their death. Getting rid of loopholes like trusts isn't so hard really, except when you consider the members of the Senate are some of the loopholes main benefitiaries.
One thing that could be done to help small farms and small businesses survive the transition is to just pay an accountant to help them out. Whatever taxes they really owe would find its way to the IRS faster, and businesses that really were viable could continue. (Taxation is just one factor, there are a lot of reasons for the death of businesses when the owners die. One thing I don't want to do is pay extra taxes to subsidize some a kid living in Chicago so he can put an extra boat into the marina when his moma dies alone on the farm in Wyoming.)
I know this is a oft villified method of making money from your inventions, but if you don't have thousands of patents in your portfolio it is the only way you can do it.
If you actually make a prototype or worse try to sell the invention you can't protect your invention from IBM or another megacorp. If you build something you are violating hundreds if not thousands of patents and any large corporation that wants to use your patent can just send you a list of 10 or 20 of theirs that you are using. So you have to cross-license. If you simply sell licenses to your patent to others you can contractualy abide them to get any additional licenses they need to build the thing and the interested megacorp can't sue them to get the license and it can't sue you for violating their patent. They either pay your price or they abort the product. If they can force you to cross-license you don't generate any revenue and your patent is now worthless since no one wants to pay you to compete with some company that doesn't have to pay you a dime for the use of the patent.
I personally think the patent system should be scrapped in favor of a one or two automatic year "copyright" on ideas from the date of first publication. "Publication" would have to be refined to mean indexed in one of a short list of industry specific databases and available for free and within 5 seconds. Just so that you could properly figure out if your idea was covered by someone's "copyright". Then add a layer of comments, al la slashdot, and a 48 hour method for getting frivalous claims authoritatively marked so by experts... It would be much much more efficient and you could additionally have licensing prices published (perhaps even with URL's to commercial clearing houses). and the the two year window should assure that "copyrights" on fundamental concepts can only destroy only a company or ten and not entire industries. I also think the experts should be paid directly by the government (no fees) and voted for by the users of the system, on a field/sub-field basis, with intersubfield jurors selected on an ad-hoc basis. Maybe 48 hours isn't enough, but at least extra time should have serious discouragements. The jurors/reviewers should also be able to penalize a claim that does not properly site other people's non-frivalous claims (at least within a 2 year window.) Industries with high regulatory burdens, like drug companies, could get an extra year tacked on if they get approval within the two year window. -- This would force people to actually move in order to get six months to a year of monopoly prices, they could then continue as a commodity producer with first mover advantage or simply leave the generics to others and pluck something else from their invention pipeline. Big companies would probably continue making the products as they are usually inefficient inventors but efficient producers, and smaller outfits could innovate and actually make some licensing revenue from the big guys. $50,000 on your little invention can keep you working on the big one for six months to a year on the big one.
This doesn't fund basic science since that can take 5 to 50 years to become practical, but the R part of R&D is usually not so well executed by industry. Leave that to market leaders and universities which have the motivation to make those discoveries anyway. You could even continue the tax credit schemes we have now for research or fund them with industry taxes like we have for milk advertising and the like (for recession proofing, tax credits aren't as useful when your not profiting this quarter...)
M$ can not sell their products for "too much", since that is an abuse of their monopoly. And they can not sell them for "too little", since that is also an abuse of their monopoly.
I don't think there is anything preventing Microsoft from charging $200 or some other ridiculous amount for their OS. (I don't know what it costs now, if it's already more than that then I think the point is made).
But "too little" they can do because that was the what Standard Oil did. They would move into a market and under-sell all their competitors but subsidising prices with profits from their monopoly pricing in other areas. When their competitors went bust they raised prices through the roof and moved on to another strategic area with super low prices. But I don't think Microsoft is violating that law, the total cost of production is probably in the neighborhood of $20-35 including monopoly inefficiencies. The marginal cost is probably $1-2, mostly accounting overhead. The price wouldn't be set by any competitition commision, the injured party would sue and then a judge would ask MS for their tax records and compare the claimed cost per unit with the sale price.
In Microsoft's case this is moot because they settled out of court with a consent decree where they promised to offer the same deal to all OEM's. This is basically a law that applies only to Microsoft that they have accepted to avoid enforcement of the monopoly laws. It seems more likely that this would violate the decree, which is a much easier case to make than the full trial needed to get them on another monopoly abuse charge.
Makes you wonder if it has something to do with human females being fertile year round. If I recall, chimp females are not. Because chimps can only mate at certain times, there is less oppurtunity for one male to sire all the children in a troop.
;) (JK! -- no homo erectus, homo neanderthalis hate mail pls)
I think the article isn't specific enough to judge whether sexual practices have anything to do with it. Pygmy Chimps (Bonobos) always look like they are in heat and like humans who never look like they are fertive have sex with anything that moves. But most chimps have a stratified society where only one male at a time has sex with all the females. The females do cheat on him, but I don't know how common those children are. Even the Amish have plenty of out of 'falsely fathered' children so I don't think humans should be less diverse due to sexual exclusivity.
More likely there where several rounds of near human extinction and just the latest one was sometime in the last 100,000 years. We also have this nasty habit as a species to eat those that aren't 100% human...perhaps our competitors had similar tastes
1. Knowingly stating false information; or recklessly stating information with disregard for its truth or falsity; or omitting information with the intent to create a false impression;
2. With the intent that another rely upon your statements;
3. Where the other party actually relies upon your statements; and
4. Damages result.
It was called FRAUD. Then again, maybe law school somehow affected my sense of how the software industry is supposed to work. You decide.
But this describes 99% of business in America. To be liable from fraud in you have to be politically unpopular and go beyond the accepted norms for lying to your customers. The accepted norm in software for lying is much greater because software often either exceeds your expectations greatly or disappoints you immensely. Combine that with the expectation that CEO's, PR, and sales folk talk up their software and almost never really understand what they are selling and who their customers are and to have a case you almost need to have video tape of the CEO saying one thing on stage and coming back stage and laughing about what fools they are for believing him. Without the tape he can believably claim ignorance.
I think we've all wised up about FUD. You hardly hear FUD from Microsoft anymore, probably because it no longer works to scare away capital, and their still gullible customers and not just the industry listens to them now. There was that period where we were driven to distraction by VC's belief that Microsoft was really working on the pre-anounced products when we were trying to point out how many of those FUD announcements they had made, but it's over, VC's know now. Fraud isn't a big deal when you know who the liars are.
The fatal flaw is that the Constitution counted on a watchful populace that cared more about what their government was doing...
If in the next election we all voted for the liberterians or the greens, do you really think they would hand over power?
I think your a wee bit to drunk on the ideals they drugged you with in "history" class.
So, don't get too excited: becoming fully GPL-compliant might consist of them simply putting up source for a stock kernel, and putting something about the GPL in their documentation.
I'm pretty sure the programmers did create the drivers as modules so you're right. But even so having the source would be valuable. If you want to extend their or a similar wifi box to do more inteligent routing, or use ssh instead of telnet for configuration say, having a good basic linux setup for the box makes that easier. I know NYCWireless people want to be able to give non-technical people an easy way to set up a public wireless box. Right now they have something for Sokeris boxes, but that costs more than a conventional AP. If you could tell people buy this Linksys AP and then run our utility answering some simple questions and get a modified firmware with NoCAT and a decent firewall rules that would be a great way to get more people involved.
Most people don't get rich just to have a big bank account -- they get rich so they can buy stuff.
No one gets rich to buy stuff. That's what the middle class is for, even at a professional's $300k-500k middle class income you can buy most of the "stuff" you want. Getting rich is either the accidental result of doing something you want to do, like starting a company, or because you are motivated to see those numbers go higher.
So that's why my monitor keeps disappearing if I look at it for more than a few mi... oh...
If you take your finger and hold your eyeball in place things will fade to black (so long as you don't move your head and close the other eye.) I don't think this trick would work against us since we can and do move our eyeballs independently of our body. Fireflies only have to pull this trick on the flies they eat...
The eyemovements we make to be able to sit practically motionless before our monitors is called saccade. (Or "Freedom Eyes" in New American.)
Try working a phone as tech support sometime. I did ages ago in college. You'll learn very quickly that the script to follow will solve over 80% of the problems you'll get. It's not like the people who wrote the script were idiots.
The first time I ever called tech support was because a Power PC, mac compatible, had just electrocuted me and I wanted to send it in for repair. It ended with a lot of yelling after his script demanded I electrocute myself again.
I recently called tech support because the PCMCIA port on my in-warranty laptop was fried. I did some meditation and then called up and pretended to be clueless. "So what is this hardware manager you speak of?" I got through the script and was transfered to level 2 where I was asked one question, and then given a work order number. It was a much more pleasant experience for all involved. The scripted questions aren't so bad and if they ask you to do something stupid you can just say "Now it's making crackling and popping sounds and there are little lightning thingies, and there is a foul smelling blue smoke. Do you want me to unplug it?"
You don't actually have to plug it in again and witness those things again. In that first case I went out and bought some thick rubber gloves and gave them to my boss with the tech support number, then I took the rest of the day off. She managed to get them to send a new power supply by FedEx, I never asked for details.
Moral: The script may work to get that return authorization, but you might just be being played by someone who very well knows what's wrong but knows that telling you will do no good.
Ultimately, anything you've done on company time is owned by the company, and you have no rights to it whatsoever, NDA or no.
That so depends on your employer, if it's the US government everything you write is in the public domain. If you work for a university they often claim just your patents and leave copyrights in your hands, sometimes even patents are yours if you pay the fees. You really have to read company policy here, usually it's more restrictive if software/patents are a large part of their mission. Then they usually make a claim to your work done outside working hours, sometimes limited to something related to what your working on there. SGI had me list everything I wanted excepted on my employment contract (I'm not there now).
I've never had a problem getting permission to donate back to a project even when the contract said everything was theirs, you basically explain how much time it will save you merging your changes back into the code... If it's LGPL/GPL you remind them they need to publish the changes when they release the product anyway. You can also explain the benefits of making friendly with the lead developers, though business types seem to understand this with you pointing it out. The worst problem I've had was convincing someone it was a little tacky to release a "Partnership with project X" press release when a patch got accepted.
You must not work for the government. EVERYTHING operates at a glacial speed.
I think the speed of action to something an engineer asks for from managment is inversely proportional to the size of the organization. Where I work I proposed a minor license change that is required before we can release the next version of the only software we make money from. Everyone I managed to get into the meeting approved it six months ago, that is two levels above me out of four. The lawyers have yet to look at it, they're busy borrowing money to continue operations...at most it would take one of them a day to review the change. It's not just the government that is completely insane when it comes to prioritizing tasks to spend time on. Our economy would be a lot healthier if we passed a constitutional amendment limiting the size of organizations to about 100 employees. I worked at a software shop with 15 employees and the CEO would fax something to his lawyer and usually sign it within hours, the worst delay was like a day or two.
They may finally be able to avoid too many civilian casualties and friendly fire
Maybe, this would be great for asymetric warfare. You just need one smart kid to break into the system and you simultaniously give all the enemy troops a lethal dose of amphetamines....
Or, if not, just send all the American troops into attacks on each other.
You can already do that though, communication is already very bad. A lot of the nuclear and intelligence stuff is on private isolated networks, but a bunch of stuff is going over commercial lines between parties without a sufficient understanding of encryption. If we were to attack someone sufficiently paranoid to bring our military to it's knees informationally I'm sure we'd fix these things, but until then we'll just find more ways to burn money and increase our vulnerability.
How about variable error-correction?
That's what I meant. You also need retransmission for when you have unexpectedly high error rates. For transfering files you would want a relatively low level of error correction since higher latency is a good trade for greater bandwidth. For a live streaming video p2p-cast you want a much higher level of error correction.