If you liked this article, then definitely must read Juliet B. Schor's "The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need." She makes a great argument that Americans, by default, are caught in a see-want-borrow-buy-repay cycle.
The problem is marketers who traditionally appealled to the top 5% of income earners (e.g. Tommy Hillfiger) now direct their marketing efforts to all 100% of households. Whereas 95% of households never knew who Hillfiger was 20 years ago, everybody does does. And now that we see, we want, and borrow (because we're not among the top 5% of income earners) to buy, and repay. The repay part is a kicker. This means working longer hours in a job you may not even like because you have to pay back you $15,000 in credit card debt.
Ms. Schor makes a very well-researched article that explores the different influences that contribute to the desire to purchase. She also includes a discussion of how some people have bucked the trend to more by going less. She calls these folks, like the author above, "downshifters."
As a freshly minted "downshifter," I highly recommend the read.
These same psychological deficits in inhibition and attention have been found in numerous studies of identical and fraternal twins conducted across various countries (US, Great Britain, Norway, Australia, etc.) to be primarily inherited. The genetic contribution to these traits is routinely found to be among the highest for any psychiatric disorder (70-95% of trait variation in the population), nearly approaching the genetic contribution to human height. One gene has recently been reliably demonstrated to be associated with this disorder and the search for more is underway by more than 12 different scientific teams worldwide at this time.
Numerous studies of twins demonstrate that family environment makes no significant separate contribution to these traits. This is not to say that the home environment, parental management abilities, stressful life events, or deviant peer relationships are unimportant or have no influence on individuals having this disorder, as they certainly do. Genetic tendencies are expressed in interaction with the environment. Also, those having ADHD often have other associated disorders and problems, some of which are clearly related to their social environments. But it is to say that the underlying psychological deficits that comprise ADHD itself are not solely or primarily the result of these environmental factors.
This is why leading international scientists, such as the signers below, recognize the mounting evidence of neurological and genetic contributions to this disorder. This evidence, coupled with countless studies on the harm posed by the disorder and hundreds of studies on the effectiveness of medication, buttresses the need in many, though by no means all, cases for management of the disorder with multiple therapies. These include medication combined with educational, family, and other social accommodations. This is in striking contrast to the wholly unscientific views of some social critics in periodic media accounts that ADHD constitutes a fraud, that medicating those afflicted is questionable if not reprehensible, and that any behavior problems associated with ADHD are merely the result of problems in the home, excessive viewing of TV or playing of video games, diet, lack of love and attention, or teacher/school intolerance.
By the way, I wasted my entire morning on this posting. This was far more stimulating than cranking out bland exception reports...
Why didn't you act earlier?. . . The point is we're really only recently seeing significant moves by many players, specifically IBM, to come out and state that they are moving wholesale to Linux.
With that statement, it seems like SCO provided evidence that it is vulnerable to the "laches defense." According to well established law, you cannot sit back and watch while an infringer enhances and markets your work, then litigate when the infringer starts making big bucks. In effect, SCO let IBM, and many other companies, take the risk and then try to claim the rewards.
Judge Learned Hand wrote, in a 1916 copyright dispute, that:
It must be obvious to every one familiar with equitable principles that it is inequitable for the owner of a copyright, with full notice of an intended infringement, to stand inactive while the proposed infringer spends large sums of money in its exploitation, and to intervene only when his speculation has proved a success. Delay under such circumstances allows the owner to speculate without risk with the other's money; he cannot possibly lose, and he may win.
See the recent (and infinitely puckish) opinion from MGM v. Sony (pdf).
(a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or
(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
(b) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employment agency to fail or refuse to refer for employment, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, or to classify or refer for employment any individual on the basis of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Even Bush, and Monster.com, are not above the law.
Civil Rights Act of 1967:
SEC. 2000e-2. [Section 703]
(a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or
(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
(b) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employment agency to fail or refuse to refer for employment, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, or to classify or refer for employment any individual on the basis of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Any physics, math, computer science or philosophy student knows what I'm talking about. Hours in college are spent--some exhilarating, some tortuous--deciphering complex glyphs into natural language statements and vice-versa:
(some symbols fudged) (Ax)(Ey)((xa ^ ya) > x = y)
reads: for all x, there exists a y such that y is a dog, and x is dog, then x equals y.
means There is one, and only one dog.
In my Logic class, we took letters to the university paper's editor and converted them into happy, discrete, precise lines of "code." Those students without a solid stomach grew queasy at the inchoate symbolic soup. Yet this same "code" which "mathematically" formalizes a student's argument that drug's kill also provides the basics for circuit design, set-theory, philosophy of language/mathematics and (among other things) computer programming.
This raises an interesting point. If a predicate logic is simultaneously powerful enough to both symbolically capture a political polemic and an algorithm to remove noise from a signal might not this be a candidate for a language proper? After all, we do have a grammar and lexicon. What more do we need? Perhaps nothing more than two people: one to encode information via the symbolic logic, and another to decode it. Maybe the encoder is also the decoder.
Indeed, the man who invented the first system of formal logic, Gottlob Frege, intended to map the human thought process onto paper. Language was too bound up with confusion and ambiguities. Only a new form of thought notation could provide one with the clarity of expression needed when thinking about the foundations of mathematics. Frege set out, for the first time in human history, a formal, symbolic logic in his essay Begriffschrift. The title, in this case, says it all: translated into English it means "concept writing" or "idea writing."
Thus, from its very inception, formal logical systems were meant to capture symbolically the transient thoughts of the human mind. This is the same lofty realm to which prose, poetry, painting, drama, videography and all the arts aspire. Surely, if programs--formalized symbolic "recipes"--are as expressive in nature as any other human outlet, they must surely be as protectable as any other form of speech.
Slashdot Mirror
If you liked this article, then definitely must read Juliet B. Schor's "The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need." She makes a great argument that Americans, by default, are caught in a see-want-borrow-buy-repay cycle.
The problem is marketers who traditionally appealled to the top 5% of income earners (e.g. Tommy Hillfiger) now direct their marketing efforts to all 100% of households. Whereas 95% of households never knew who Hillfiger was 20 years ago, everybody does does. And now that we see, we want, and borrow (because we're not among the top 5% of income earners) to buy, and repay. The repay part is a kicker. This means working longer hours in a job you may not even like because you have to pay back you $15,000 in credit card debt.
Ms. Schor makes a very well-researched article that explores the different influences that contribute to the desire to purchase. She also includes a discussion of how some people have bucked the trend to more by going less. She calls these folks, like the author above, "downshifters."
As a freshly minted "downshifter," I highly recommend the read.
With that statement, it seems like SCO provided evidence that it is vulnerable to the "laches defense." According to well established law, you cannot sit back and watch while an infringer enhances and markets your work, then litigate when the infringer starts making big bucks. In effect, SCO let IBM, and many other companies, take the risk and then try to claim the rewards.
Judge Learned Hand wrote, in a 1916 copyright dispute, that:
See the recent (and infinitely puckish) opinion from MGM v. Sony (pdf).
Civil Rights Act of 1964:
SEC. 2000e-2. [Section 703]
Civil Rights Act of 1967:
SEC. 2000e-2. [Section 703]
After all, it *is* called EVERquest...
"You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia or their products or services"
Basically they're saying that you can't use Frontpage to build frontpagesucks.com. . .
Any physics, math, computer science or philosophy student knows what I'm talking about. Hours in college are spent--some exhilarating, some tortuous--deciphering complex glyphs into natural language statements and vice-versa:
(some symbols fudged)
(Ax)(Ey)((xa ^ ya) > x = y)
reads:
for all x, there exists a y such that y is a dog, and x is dog, then x equals y.
means
There is one, and only one dog.
In my Logic class, we took letters to the university paper's editor and converted them into happy, discrete, precise lines of "code." Those students without a solid stomach grew queasy at the inchoate symbolic soup. Yet this same "code" which "mathematically" formalizes a student's argument that drug's kill also provides the basics for circuit design, set-theory, philosophy of language/mathematics and (among other things) computer programming.
This raises an interesting point. If a predicate logic is simultaneously powerful enough to both symbolically capture a political polemic and an algorithm to remove noise from a signal might not this be a candidate for a language proper? After all, we do have a grammar and lexicon. What more do we need? Perhaps nothing more than two people: one to encode information via the symbolic logic, and another to decode it. Maybe the encoder is also the decoder.
Indeed, the man who invented the first system of formal logic, Gottlob Frege, intended to map the human thought process onto paper. Language was too bound up with confusion and ambiguities. Only a new form of thought notation could provide one with the clarity of expression needed when thinking about the foundations of mathematics. Frege set out, for the first time in human history, a formal, symbolic logic in his essay Begriffschrift. The title, in this case, says it all: translated into English it means "concept writing" or "idea writing."
Thus, from its very inception, formal logical systems were meant to capture symbolically the transient thoughts of the human mind. This is the same lofty realm to which prose, poetry, painting, drama, videography and all the arts aspire. Surely, if programs--formalized symbolic "recipes"--are as expressive in nature as any other human outlet, they must surely be as protectable as any other form of speech.