7 Justices voted to overturn the FSC. Only 5 voted to halt the recount. That point may well be debatable. But the fact that 7 of 9 Justices found the FSC's decisions about election law to be unconstitional is not.
I don't know if you'll see this reply, but I think you might want to look at David Brin's _The Transparent Society_ and consider if this is really all bad.
The reality is that if all of this stuff is really tracked for everyone, then none of those bad consequences will probably occur. There simply aren't enough people who live lives that don't have the kinds of elements you mention.
Who hasn't bought a pack of smokes for someone else, or some beer, or stayed out late on a work night, or something like that? And are people really going to change their behaviors in that regard? I think not. So the net result will be a host of new information about everyone, more or less equally suggestive or equally damning. I don't care for the loss of privacy myself, due to my background, but I think by 2030 you can pretty much assume that anything you do outside a dark windowless room is on the record. Given that, maybe we can start thinking about how that will change things and try to ride the wave someplace more desirable than some of the alternatives.
OK, offtopic, but brake (not break) before the tight corner. Anyone who's been to track school or ridden a motorcycle at any sort of speed can tell you that bad things happen when you brake during a tight turn.
WaPo story says that Court split 6-3. Slashdot says 5-4. People who follow the court will tell you that 6-3 is a lot different than 5-4 in terms of how the decision is viewed.
Well, here's where we part company. You're looking at the actions of a single developer, the nmap guy, who works for free in his spare time to develop software and gives it away, and comparing it "other vendors." But he isn't a vendor. When he says that he won't support changes for the SCO platform because of what SCO is doing, that's a reasonable decision on his part.
Now, Red Hat may do something entirely different. They are an actual vendor, and if they sold a CD of software to run on SCO, and their customers wanted nmap, they would maintain a patch set and apply to the mainline. That's what they do, and what all the major distros do.
So I think the problem here is that you are using the decision of a volunteer to act on his principles to predict the behavior of a corporate OSS software vendor. I suggest that they will not necessarily coincide.
BTW, as a consultant I often find clients who made normal, reasonable software choices that with the passage of time have left them stranded. Like for example, Sybase customers who have a hard time getting support by LDAP synchronization tools is a recent one. If you're lucky enough to predict who will be the market leader in x years, then you don't have to change platforms to add new applications and tools to your corporate platform. But if you are unlucky, then you get hosed. If you choose OSS at least you always have the choice of continuing maintenance yourself (or by proxy) rather then just consigning yourself to a vendor switch for bug fixes and upgrades. This may not always occur at an opportune time, to say the least.
How about Bungie and Halo, or every other company Microsoft has bought? (Mac users will remember almost not getting MS Office not too long back.)
How about Oracle's announcement that they'll discontinue Peoplesoft apps if they buy the company?
If you're under the impression that commercial companies always support every customer platform in perpuity, you haven't been in this business very long. You pays your money, you places your bets. The difference with OSS is that, if your platform gets dropped, or the whole application stops development, you still have the source, which is a damn sight better than the situation with commercial software as a rule.
Well, Linus himself says that if he had known about the BSDs then that's what he would have worked on. So I guess, yes, there shouldn't be a Linux. I personally am happy that there is, because I think the GPL is a good device to ensure that business' relationship with free software isn't a one-way street. But that's my opinion, not Linus'.
You should just read "The Predators Ball" by Connie Bruck. It's not as if senior mgt wanted to have a totally independant operation run thousands of miles away by a secretive control freak. It's just that he was making about %80 of their firm's revenues and all his customers would follow him anywhere else he went. In those circumstances, it is very, very difficult to tell that guy "my way or the highway."
Drexel failed because Mike was breaking the law and because years of doing "whatever Mike says" prevented the company from pushing him to take a plea or make a deal much earlier. Frankly, if some guy at your company had decided to let you into some financial deal, on his own and for no personal gain, and made you into a multimillionaire, don't you think you'd stand up for him when the time came?
It's pretty clear that the top levels of Drexel management had no idea what was going on in as far as insider trading, just from their reaction to another case that came to their attention only months before Millikin's.
I read not that long ago that Indian lawyers were getting trained up on US patent law and doing patents for around 1/5 of the cost of a Silicon Valley attorney. When you think about it, there's no reason at all why most legal work can't be done overseas. Sure, you need an attorney who is admitted to the bar to actually go to court and litigate. And maybe a larger company needs a US attorney to review the documents created elsewhere just to cover its ass in the event that something is wrong and shareholders lose some money. But I don't see that law is any different then development - some advantages for local, and a substantial price discount for international. Since this is already happening I would think twice about law school unless my speciality (like trial law) prevented international competition.
Not to be too snide, but if you think that a $1000 computer every two years is "'current' tech" or "the latest gadgets" then I rest my case.
I'm not trying to suggest that western Europeans are all living in huts, give me a break. But it's just simple economics that if you want six weeks of vacation and a 33 hour work week you can't create as much value as you can with one week of vacation and a 60 hour work week. Is the trade worth it? I don't see how a universal answer can exist.
Europeans seem to make much better use of their machines than people in the U.S. This is not just a difference in how they treat hardware, but how they feel about software, too. Many people in the rest of the world don't have the budgets at work or home to have "current" tech, and they just have better sense in realising that learning to use your tools effectively makes you more productive in general.
What the hell do you think? That western europe is part of the third world? The american ignorance is getting absurd.
Shit, I've been to western europe a number of times. When vactioning in people's homes (bed & breakfast) one comment I heard from almost everyone was about how Americans work too much and buy too many things, while they had short hours and lots of vacations but had to make do without the latest gadgets, giant houses, etc.
So, fine. Everyone does it the way they like. But then you can't get upset when the perception is that Europeans don't have or even want to have the latest, fastest PCs and other assorted gizmos. Of course you have the idle rich, but that's a small enough population as to be insignificant.
This notion that Americans are "ignorant" is getting pretty absurd, too. Of course people elsewhere know more about us then we do about them. After all, our movies and television are shown everywhere. The average American knows as much about foreign places as anyone, but it's just a small amount about a lot of places. A European may feel superior for knowing a good bit about the six adjoining foreign countries and their cultures, but in that same distance an American may not have any foreign countries. So we're not as likely to have that personal contact.
You want to see some real foreign ignorance, go visit mainland China sometime. Get your translator guy to ask a regular-joe local about Europe. When you've got your jaw all healed up from hitting the ground, get back to me about ignorant Americans.
I work from home full-time, and make a good rate doing it. (Occasionally I have business travel, to client sites, say about 10 days/year.) I work for an software consultancy.
The way I got here was to work for this group full-time on-site on a number of different engagements over a few years. When the first opportunity to work at home came up, I took it. I provide my own hardware and net connectivity.
Since I have proven my ability to get results and to do whatever it takes to satisfy the customer, I got this chance. Since I still make my dates and satisfy the customer, I am still afforded this opportunity.
It has its downsides, no doubt. My 2-year old daughter doesn't always understand when I can't interrupt myself and come do what she wants. But the time I've been able to spend with her has been priceless, from coming up to eat lunch with her, to dropping by the pool in the afternoon for a half-hour swim, it's been wonderful.
I consider myself lucky and work hard to keep this opportunity in my life.
I'd started to say something sarcastic here, but let me say it straight. Blizzard is the company that threatened legal action against b.net, which was free software that let people play together on their lans without talking to battle.net. A battle.net emulator, essentially.
I realize that it could be used to play warez copies of WCIII, and that battle.net could not. But it was pretty clear that there were substantial uses other than facilitating the enjoyment of "pirates."
I wrote them and told them that, my shelf of blizzard games notwithstanding, that I would never buy another blizzard product. I'm standing by that statement, until they either change management or issue an apology. I hope other/.ers will remember who their friends are.
Well shit, there's a big difference between not having an opinion about a border dispute and not having an opinion about overrunning another country entirely. For example, I don't think we have an opinion about the Russia/Japan dispute over the Kuril islands that Russia invaded around WWII (right at the end), but I'm quite sure that we'd have a negative reaction to either country conquering the other.
Don't you think that when a reasonable way to interpret the statement exists, we should prefer that interpretation to one that depends on a shadowy world-wide consipiracy to make sense?
So, he was planning to attack Iraq, and the US knew this. April Glaspie, the US ambassador to Iraq, greenlighted the fucking invasion. She basically said "We won't do a thing, have your way." Link.
Well, that link goes to a page with a transcript and a note that says "I cannot confirm the reliability of the source." To date, the only source for this claim that April Glaspie said anything of the kind has been the Iraqi government.
The facts are essentially as reported in Bob Woodward's book "The Commanders." Glaspie told Saddam that the US had "no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait," a reference to a long standing border disagreement between Iraq and Kuwait. Saddam then told her that he was willing to meet with the Kuwaitis. With this news, Glaspie returned to the United States.
That's a very different picture than the half-baked conspiracy-theory vision of the US telling Saddam that it's OK to invade and then running right over to kick his ass. Even Iraq didn't make that claim at the time.
I just saw the first half of this scenario play out on a flight from Boston. The lady with the phone/pda just turned the screen toward the flight attendant and said, I'm just entering information. Flight attendant was satisfied, no problems.
I guess you could run into a cast-iron idiot up there, but by and large if you can make a case that you're in compliance they don't want to hassle you, and don't really have a lot of time to either.
Oh, pardon me, I had the second Nixon challenger instead of the first. So sorry. At least I can see that you agree with the rest of my post, since you couldn't find anything sarcastic to say about it. You can rake muck all day but you'll not pin starting Vietnam or the draft for that war on the Republicans, "Dogfart."
Thank you for your thoughtful answer. I guess I'm old enough now, and have had science change its collective mind about enough things, that I am prepared to believe just about anything about the universe provided some plausible explanation is attached. I mean, if you had said in reply that the moon is really almost black but that atmospheric diffraction makes it look white, and had a link to, say, NASA or JPL, I'd have clicked through expecting to read more or less that exact explanation. Hey, we can stop light, we have working quantum dots and quantum computers, the the universe is beige, and mitochondria used to be on their own. ?!
The funny thing is how bright it seems in those old Apollo shots, but of course there's no atmosphere to speak of either.
Sorry this is so late, but if you see this, I'd appreciate a reply.
If what you say is true, why does the moon still look white when we see it in the daytime against a blue sky? I've seen the moon in full dark, indigo, dark blue, all the way to a very light carolina blue, and it's always white. (Excepting harvest moon and similar atmospheric effects.)
I'd have thought it was because the light from the moon was actually mostly white light.
Vietnam started under Democrats and continued under Democrats until McGovern's defeat, looking only at the White House. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives during the entire conflict. Pointing the finger at Republicans for the draft during that time is entirely disengenuous.
I got an m-audio omni studio for $275 on ebay. I did have to hunt for some time to do that well, but you can easily snap one up for $325. Once again, balanced outs, plus a good bunch of ins and outs, soft mixer with zero latency monitoring, terrific ASIO drivers, and some acceptable mic pres. I have a standalone pre so I didn't really care. You might not either unless you're recording something really nice through a nice mic. (I use the studio projects c1 condensor for vocals, and I can tell a difference. With this AKG D880S dynamic it's pretty much the same.)
Another choice would be to get a real mixer and the delta 1010 or layla24, but that will leave your price target range. The omni studio acts sort of like a mixer so it's a good choice for those who don't have one.
Oh, the omni doesn't do midi. I use the m-audio uno usb for that. It's worlds better than the midi in on my motherboard, and the little signal lights help debug midi connections.
Slashdot Mirror
7 Justices voted to overturn the FSC. Only 5 voted to halt the recount. That point may well be debatable. But the fact that 7 of 9 Justices found the FSC's decisions about election law to be unconstitional is not.
I don't know if you'll see this reply, but I think you might want to look at David Brin's _The Transparent Society_ and consider if this is really all bad.
The reality is that if all of this stuff is really tracked for everyone, then none of those bad consequences will probably occur. There simply aren't enough people who live lives that don't have the kinds of elements you mention.
Who hasn't bought a pack of smokes for someone else, or some beer, or stayed out late on a work night, or something like that? And are people really going to change their behaviors in that regard? I think not. So the net result will be a host of new information about everyone, more or less equally suggestive or equally damning. I don't care for the loss of privacy myself, due to my background, but I think by 2030 you can pretty much assume that anything you do outside a dark windowless room is on the record. Given that, maybe we can start thinking about how that will change things and try to ride the wave someplace more desirable than some of the alternatives.
Right, because no one used SCSI in servers before the Mac people decided to standardize on it.
OK, offtopic, but brake (not break) before the tight corner. Anyone who's been to track school or ridden a motorcycle at any sort of speed can tell you that bad things happen when you brake during a tight turn.
WaPo story says that Court split 6-3. Slashdot says 5-4. People who follow the court will tell you that 6-3 is a lot different than 5-4 in terms of how the decision is viewed.
Well, here's where we part company. You're looking at the actions of a single developer, the nmap guy, who works for free in his spare time to develop software and gives it away, and comparing it "other vendors." But he isn't a vendor. When he says that he won't support changes for the SCO platform because of what SCO is doing, that's a reasonable decision on his part.
Now, Red Hat may do something entirely different. They are an actual vendor, and if they sold a CD of software to run on SCO, and their customers wanted nmap, they would maintain a patch set and apply to the mainline. That's what they do, and what all the major distros do.
So I think the problem here is that you are using the decision of a volunteer to act on his principles to predict the behavior of a corporate OSS software vendor. I suggest that they will not necessarily coincide.
BTW, as a consultant I often find clients who made normal, reasonable software choices that with the passage of time have left them stranded. Like for example, Sybase customers who have a hard time getting support by LDAP synchronization tools is a recent one. If you're lucky enough to predict who will be the market leader in x years, then you don't have to change platforms to add new applications and tools to your corporate platform. But if you are unlucky, then you get hosed. If you choose OSS at least you always have the choice of continuing maintenance yourself (or by proxy) rather then just consigning yourself to a vendor switch for bug fixes and upgrades. This may not always occur at an opportune time, to say the least.
Apologies for mistaking you for a troll.
Shit, with friends like that...
How about Bungie and Halo, or every other company Microsoft has bought? (Mac users will remember almost not getting MS Office not too long back.)
How about Oracle's announcement that they'll discontinue Peoplesoft apps if they buy the company?
If you're under the impression that commercial companies always support every customer platform in perpuity, you haven't been in this business very long. You pays your money, you places your bets. The difference with OSS is that, if your platform gets dropped, or the whole application stops development, you still have the source, which is a damn sight better than the situation with commercial software as a rule.
Yeah, IHBT, but come on, I had to say it.
Well, Linus himself says that if he had known about the BSDs then that's what he would have worked on. So I guess, yes, there shouldn't be a Linux. I personally am happy that there is, because I think the GPL is a good device to ensure that business' relationship with free software isn't a one-way street. But that's my opinion, not Linus'.
You should just read "The Predators Ball" by Connie Bruck. It's not as if senior mgt wanted to have a totally independant operation run thousands of miles away by a secretive control freak. It's just that he was making about %80 of their firm's revenues and all his customers would follow him anywhere else he went. In those circumstances, it is very, very difficult to tell that guy "my way or the highway."
Drexel failed because Mike was breaking the law and because years of doing "whatever Mike says" prevented the company from pushing him to take a plea or make a deal much earlier. Frankly, if some guy at your company had decided to let you into some financial deal, on his own and for no personal gain, and made you into a multimillionaire, don't you think you'd stand up for him when the time came?
It's pretty clear that the top levels of Drexel management had no idea what was going on in as far as insider trading, just from their reaction to another case that came to their attention only months before Millikin's.
I read not that long ago that Indian lawyers were getting trained up on US patent law and doing patents for around 1/5 of the cost of a Silicon Valley attorney. When you think about it, there's no reason at all why most legal work can't be done overseas. Sure, you need an attorney who is admitted to the bar to actually go to court and litigate. And maybe a larger company needs a US attorney to review the documents created elsewhere just to cover its ass in the event that something is wrong and shareholders lose some money. But I don't see that law is any different then development - some advantages for local, and a substantial price discount for international. Since this is already happening I would think twice about law school unless my speciality (like trial law) prevented international competition.
Not to be too snide, but if you think that a $1000 computer every two years is "'current' tech" or "the latest gadgets" then I rest my case.
I'm not trying to suggest that western Europeans are all living in huts, give me a break. But it's just simple economics that if you want six weeks of vacation and a 33 hour work week you can't create as much value as you can with one week of vacation and a 60 hour work week. Is the trade worth it? I don't see how a universal answer can exist.
Shit, I've been to western europe a number of times. When vactioning in people's homes (bed & breakfast) one comment I heard from almost everyone was about how Americans work too much and buy too many things, while they had short hours and lots of vacations but had to make do without the latest gadgets, giant houses, etc.
So, fine. Everyone does it the way they like. But then you can't get upset when the perception is that Europeans don't have or even want to have the latest, fastest PCs and other assorted gizmos. Of course you have the idle rich, but that's a small enough population as to be insignificant.
This notion that Americans are "ignorant" is getting pretty absurd, too. Of course people elsewhere know more about us then we do about them. After all, our movies and television are shown everywhere. The average American knows as much about foreign places as anyone, but it's just a small amount about a lot of places. A European may feel superior for knowing a good bit about the six adjoining foreign countries and their cultures, but in that same distance an American may not have any foreign countries. So we're not as likely to have that personal contact.
You want to see some real foreign ignorance, go visit mainland China sometime. Get your translator guy to ask a regular-joe local about Europe. When you've got your jaw all healed up from hitting the ground, get back to me about ignorant Americans.
I work from home full-time, and make a good rate doing it. (Occasionally I have business travel, to client sites, say about 10 days/year.) I work for an software consultancy.
The way I got here was to work for this group full-time on-site on a number of different engagements over a few years. When the first opportunity to work at home came up, I took it. I provide my own hardware and net connectivity.
Since I have proven my ability to get results and to do whatever it takes to satisfy the customer, I got this chance. Since I still make my dates and satisfy the customer, I am still afforded this opportunity.
It has its downsides, no doubt. My 2-year old daughter doesn't always understand when I can't interrupt myself and come do what she wants. But the time I've been able to spend with her has been priceless, from coming up to eat lunch with her, to dropping by the pool in the afternoon for a half-hour swim, it's been wonderful.
I consider myself lucky and work hard to keep this opportunity in my life.
I'd started to say something sarcastic here, but let me say it straight. Blizzard is the company that threatened legal action against b.net, which was free software that let people play together on their lans without talking to battle.net. A battle.net emulator, essentially.
/.ers will remember who their friends are.
I realize that it could be used to play warez copies of WCIII, and that battle.net could not. But it was pretty clear that there were substantial uses other than facilitating the enjoyment of "pirates."
I wrote them and told them that, my shelf of blizzard games notwithstanding, that I would never buy another blizzard product. I'm standing by that statement, until they either change management or issue an apology. I hope other
Well shit, there's a big difference between not having an opinion about a border dispute and not having an opinion about overrunning another country entirely. For example, I don't think we have an opinion about the Russia/Japan dispute over the Kuril islands that Russia invaded around WWII (right at the end), but I'm quite sure that we'd have a negative reaction to either country conquering the other.
Don't you think that when a reasonable way to interpret the statement exists, we should prefer that interpretation to one that depends on a shadowy world-wide consipiracy to make sense?
Well, that link goes to a page with a transcript and a note that says "I cannot confirm the reliability of the source." To date, the only source for this claim that April Glaspie said anything of the kind has been the Iraqi government.
The facts are essentially as reported in Bob Woodward's book "The Commanders." Glaspie told Saddam that the US had "no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait," a reference to a long standing border disagreement between Iraq and Kuwait. Saddam then told her that he was willing to meet with the Kuwaitis. With this news, Glaspie returned to the United States.
That's a very different picture than the half-baked conspiracy-theory vision of the US telling Saddam that it's OK to invade and then running right over to kick his ass. Even Iraq didn't make that claim at the time.
Umm, that's with a single reading. Think about it.
I just saw the first half of this scenario play out on a flight from Boston. The lady with the phone/pda just turned the screen toward the flight attendant and said, I'm just entering information. Flight attendant was satisfied, no problems.
I guess you could run into a cast-iron idiot up there, but by and large if you can make a case that you're in compliance they don't want to hassle you, and don't really have a lot of time to either.
Oh, pardon me, I had the second Nixon challenger instead of the first. So sorry. At least I can see that you agree with the rest of my post, since you couldn't find anything sarcastic to say about it. You can rake muck all day but you'll not pin starting Vietnam or the draft for that war on the Republicans, "Dogfart."
Thank you for your thoughtful answer. I guess I'm old enough now, and have had science change its collective mind about enough things, that I am prepared to believe just about anything about the universe provided some plausible explanation is attached. I mean, if you had said in reply that the moon is really almost black but that atmospheric diffraction makes it look white, and had a link to, say, NASA or JPL, I'd have clicked through expecting to read more or less that exact explanation. Hey, we can stop light, we have working quantum dots and quantum computers, the the universe is beige, and mitochondria used to be on their own. ?!
:)
The funny thing is how bright it seems in those old Apollo shots, but of course there's no atmosphere to speak of either.
Anyway, thanks again for the reply.
Sorry this is so late, but if you see this, I'd appreciate a reply.
If what you say is true, why does the moon still look white when we see it in the daytime against a blue sky? I've seen the moon in full dark, indigo, dark blue, all the way to a very light carolina blue, and it's always white. (Excepting harvest moon and similar atmospheric effects.)
I'd have thought it was because the light from the moon was actually mostly white light.
It's the radiation superhighway... ;)
Vietnam started under Democrats and continued under Democrats until McGovern's defeat, looking only at the White House. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives during the entire conflict. Pointing the finger at Republicans for the draft during that time is entirely disengenuous.
OK, now that I've seen this child post...
I got an m-audio omni studio for $275 on ebay. I did have to hunt for some time to do that well, but you can easily snap one up for $325. Once again, balanced outs, plus a good bunch of ins and outs, soft mixer with zero latency monitoring, terrific ASIO drivers, and some acceptable mic pres. I have a standalone pre so I didn't really care. You might not either unless you're recording something really nice through a nice mic. (I use the studio projects c1 condensor for vocals, and I can tell a difference. With this AKG D880S dynamic it's pretty much the same.)
Another choice would be to get a real mixer and the delta 1010 or layla24, but that will leave your price target range. The omni studio acts sort of like a mixer so it's a good choice for those who don't have one.
Oh, the omni doesn't do midi. I use the m-audio uno usb for that. It's worlds better than the midi in on my motherboard, and the little signal lights help debug midi connections.