When will you folks learn. In the US, our reps won't listen unless there's a huge PAC donation included with your letter.
People who sell out their country, traitors, are usually killed, and few people mourn their passing. How is that traitors in US congress are so popular?
Their CEO speaking on one of the previous virus: "somehow, I'm not sure exactly how this virus get installed on my phone" He did't remember answering "Yes" three times ?
Of course he remembered answering it - well, probably didn't remember actually answering yes, but he remembered the sales and marketing meeting where the Marketing Director told them all about the plan to have the CEOs phone "infected" with a virus of an "unknown" origin - and told them that this would get press releases and make the news because of his very position.
He remembered that all right, and he followed the script when talking to the press.
You insinuate the CEO is slow for not remembering clicking "yes" - I insinuate you are slow for not realising this was fiction, a marketing trick.
It's been fairly well established tyhat it was the metallised skin of the Hindenburg that caught fire - the hydrogen burned off very quickly after the structure started to collapse.
This is true - but the main difference between the Hindenburg and Hydrgoen-Powered Cars is energy density.
The hydrogen in The Hindenburg was contained in a non pressurised containerbecause its' density was lower than the air around to provide buoyancy... The hydrogen in cars is designed to provide the maximum energy density and is stored at a very high pressure - it's the not the pressure that's dangerous however, it's the fact that because it's pressurised there may hundreds, or thousands of times more hydrogen per cubic metre in a car H tank than in the same cubic metre of airship, producing a significantly more powerful explosion when adjusted for scale.
If the hindenburg had its hydrogen pressurised at 1000psi, not only would it have failed to take off, but none of the bystanders would have been around to talk about it.
I find it a bit sickening that the military is producing games to attract people to join... Are they hoping for gamers to think "hmm- this game is fun, I think I'll join the army so I can HAVE FUN KILLING PEOPLE IN REAL LIFE." ?... Does anybody else find that unsettling?
The military also pays salarys to people - are they hoping people will think "Hmm, I need some money and I can't get a job, I think I'll join the military and KILL PEOPLE FOR MONEY"?
Well, actually, yes they are - that's why they recruit most actively in poor areas, for the same reasons that terrorist-financiers recruit most (but not all) of their suicide bombers from youngsters with no jobs and impoverished families.
There are groups of people ideologically at odds with one another on our planet, fighting for power and control of a variety of things - there is no way to win, and the only way to avoid losing is to not play their game.
I don't know how the tax system in the US works, but at least in the UK if you have some "bad debtors" who owe you money but do not pay up, you can claim this back from your corporation tax at the end of a year.
So, essentially, tax payers end up footing the bill - but this isn't a bad thing, it helps to keep companies solvent who might otherwise go under through no fault of their own, and as long as the debts are legitimate (and the size of them realistic) it's not great burden on the taxpayer.
So... all the slashbots celebrating how massive the fines were supposed to be (5k per item?) may now suddenly be wondering if it was set at5k per item so MS and other lawyer-heavy organisations could go out there get enormous tax cuts, at the cost of having a few lawyers issue procedings against some spammers who probably don't even show in court.
let's be realistic here, we've got a long way to go before we're anything *remotely* like North Korea.
I agree that the US is currently a long way from the situation that exists in North Korea - but as history has taught us, the road to that place is a very very short one that comes about when people least expect it, and in a matter of only a few years if the apparatus are there to support such a regime.
Few sane people argue that Bush is another Mao - but many sane people and students of history argue that the laws and processes being brought into place under Bush (and some previous presidents) make it considerably easier to start down that path - and are arguably of no benefit to citizens.
It goes without saying this wasn't a liscensed protest.
The very thought of having to "license" a protest utterly, utterly sickens me. There is no way to pretend a country which requires government licensing before people can protest is in any way "free". Which country are you from?
so why would a supposedly reputable marketing company have a cell phone as a primary contact point ?
Perhaps the company in question is in fact one person, and he uses his mobile number as primary contact because he spends most of his time out of the office (home office perhaps) with clients.
Im am in the UK, a one-man business, involved in web development (not SEO) and I use my mobile number as a main point of contact - it doesn't mean I'm not reputable, it means I want my clients to be able to talk to me directly, instead of through a receptionist who knows nothing except how to look after her nails.
You actually don't have the right to strip the DRM (thanks to the DMCA) nor do you have the right to use the iTunes Music Store with any client other than iTunes (thanks to the user agreement you agreed to before using the store).
1] No-one is stripping the DRM - the files are sent to your computer DRM free. People are just saving the files as they were sent. 2] The user agreement is invalid in many countries 3] If this is a "sale" then the laws of my country give me full rights to a copy of the work as with any other sale. I can do what I like with it within these laws. If this is not a "sale" then it sure feels like one - and any court would almost certainly agree with this.
As you say, the ability to conveniently obtain the music you want has driven your MP3 download count to nothing. Removing the DRM from the bought tracks would only strengthen that impulse
Not necessarily correct - by removing the DRM they will significantly increase the number of people who can casually share the material - making it far easier for potential "pirate" downloaders to obtain it by increasing the scale of the black-market distribution net. This could decrease the number of people who then subscribe to the DRM service.
I'm not saying either scenario is true - just that you appear to have missed this possibility.
Except that they don't quite seem to get it yet. They are offering here some videos from this car programme which apparently didn't quite make it to air, for the princely sum of £1.50 (about $3), in DRM'd WMV 10 format (mplayer plays them fine).
Why does their choice of platform mean they "don't quite seem to get it"? This is fanatical raving - choosing a closed codec is a perfectly valid thing to do, and ensures at least casual copiers will not be able to pirate this material.
Hopefully they won't take the lack of response as 'proof' that there's no demand. There's more about this at the BBC's website."
What lack of response? Do we have any stats on how many people took up this offer versus their expectations, or is the submitters comment mired in biased speculation?
Not necessarily. Look at the electric grid. It's a vast, complex system with lots of things that can go wrong, hundreds of thousands of main elements and billions of outlets. But the user interface is one of the simplest one can imagine: a switch with two possible positions: 0 and 1, almost every time to find near the door in about three feet above the ground.
That's not correct. You are discussing the user interface for a lightbulb (a non-complex entity) while your preamble discusses the national electric grid. Take a tour of a power station or grid control centre sometime, and you will see the interface is FAR from simple - entire walls are consumed with displays and instruments and software used to control it is not intuitive.
If you work for a reasonable enlightened company [yes, there are a few], they can see that most of the software generated internally has no value as a sales proposition. So get them to release it as free software. Explain that it means that the cost of developing new software will drop, because you can now use and redistribute the work of all the other coders.
I hear this often touted as a way to get free software (development resources) for the organisation but none of the free software advocates seem to have considered the real-world ramifications, so I would appreciate it if someone could explain the following:
Code written for in-house software which would never see the light of day is written for a reason. Generally, that is because this software is not available for free, or to purchase at a reasonable price and the company *needs* it. If you write some good software in-house (for less than it would cost to license commercial software to do the same job) that belongs to your company and your company alone, you have a competitive advantage over your competitors - that is, they either spent MORE money than you did, or they simply do not have the software do carry out the task. If you then open source the software you have written you, may gain some cost savings on forward development of the software, but you LOSE the competitive advantage - each and EVERY one of your competitors is free to take and use your software (written at your own expense) and implement it.
The net result is that your competitors who used to spend more money than you on proprietary solutions now spend alot less money than they used to, and competitors who didn't have the software capability you developed now do have it, and they have it for free
Can someone from the open-source advocacy world please explain to me how this is a good trade-off for a business?
A (possible) small reduction in development costs seems hard to palatte when offset against a (probably) huge loss in competitive advantage...
(Bear in mind when answering, that if none of your competitors take up and use the software then there are likely to be few to no coders working on, so you have gained nothing except legal bills..)
Terrorists tend to be very clever, sly and intelligent people. They work with limited resources, frequently in enemy territory against a much larger force.
Terrorists will not rely on GPS. The military is increasing its' reliance on GPS. therefore Shutting down the GPS will have no negative effect on the terrorists, but will hamper the military (and probably civil emergency efforts too).
Finally, if the terrorists do mount an attack on us that somehow utilises GPS, it is unlikely we will know about it until after it has happened.
If he had just taken it on the chin and laughed about it with his mates, it wouldn't have been such a big deal.
The world is full of people who make tiny mistakes and then when called/publicised on them, they make it into an enormous deal by bitching/whinging/complaining about it. It was funny. Laugh about it. If he can't deal that it's his own problem - learning to laugh at *yourself* in life is one of the most valuable skills you can EVER learn - sadly some people never do.
The terms of service should state that the ISP can read your outgoing mail if you send more than 500 emails a day.
Illegal in many countries.
What ISPs need to do is have an admin assign accounts to a "tainted" list when incoming abuse complaints above a certain threshold (2/3 per week?) which is then on a quarantined subnet, and all attempts from the client at HTTP traffic returns a page indicating the connection has been disabled and containing instructions on how to deal with the problem (offering paid local tech support via reseller agreements) and request re-activation.
Cars need an "MOT" test every 12 months (to ensure they are safe to share the road with other car users) - how long before we get this for network hardware?
Let's compare this with what could happen for a kid from a Western European island like the UK...
#1. Euro-kid goes to India and works for 2 years. He makes a "mediocre" wage (1/10th what he'd make back home). He banks it all and lives on cheap rice, curry and lentils. After 2 years he goes home with $X (or whatever his currency is). $X is 1/10 that he'd make in 2 years at home under the same conditions.
#2. Indian guy goes to the US and works for 2 years. He makes a "mediocre" wage for a US job (still 10x what he'd make back home). Banks it all, eats rice, curry and lentils. After 2 years he, goes home. He now has 10x the money he'd have after 2 years of working in India.
Well, first of all the salary for a mediocre graduate in the UK in an IT/Project Management role is approximately £15k. These guys in India are getting £5-7k - so the difference is only 1/3. I don't know enough about tax rates, but let's assume they are the same... Take home on 15k in the UK is about 12-13k, in India let's assume a 5k take-home. Now in the UK living costs for a single man living alone in a major city will run you around 8k in a fairly cheap suburb. Add public transport daily onto that, food and just a small reasonable bit of a social life at Western prices and you're probably talking around 11-12k expenditure per year with no holidays, PCs, gadgets, clothes etc. In India our guy with a 5k take home only has to buy some food - which will set him back almost nothing in India. So at the end of the year our worker in India is 3k-4k up on our worker in the UK, has gained experience in a foreign country in a senior role, enriched his life, could easily be the life of the party everywhere by splashing cash and can now choose where to work... Hardly a difference of 100x... In fact I would bet our Indian is better off. Apart from health care and pollution standards, I can't think of anything our UK worker has that our Indian doesn't...
Interestingly, Nokia is a Scandinavian country - and these countries tend to have strong anti-corruption laws (especially Finland) - corruption is regarded as highly unethical and unacceptable from a social POV. If this act had been committed by Fins, or in Finland I imagine people from both sides would be doing jail time by now...
Reiser4 development was paid for by DARPA, SuSE and Lindows
DARPA is a government agency, and SuSE and Lindows are also free-software companies.
Other than the government, charity and the merry-go-round of money from one free software house to another, where are we going to get the vast sums of money needed to make free software competitive with commercial closed source software?
Oh and there's no really sure way of stocking tons of wastes for centuries either.
Of course there is. Thermal Subduction.
First use Breeder Reactors so the physical amount of waste is minimal, and cannot be weaponised, and is really efficient per unit mined.
Next up, infuse the waste material into relatively small glass rods, and bury these rods in the Ocean floor (probably mid-Atlantic, most consistent movement) very close to a faultline where the plate is burying itself beneath another. Hey presto, 50 years or so later your waste is buried pretty deep, getting deeper, and in a few centuries is part of our Magma. Problem solved.
Is there any way in corporate contract law to claim something like this side letter was accidental, or unauthorized, in a case such as this when apparently nobody at Novell was aware that someone had signed away the UNIX copyright? I don't know about the US, but in the UK a company is liable for the actions of its employees when they are acting in a capacity for the company.
The only way this could be rescinded, in the UK at least, would be if it were proved that the action was fraudulent (the person was bribed, or somehow co-erced to do it).
I was shopping for a new car 3 years ago. Wearing jeans, T-shirt and dirty trainers I went into a Vauxhall (UK) dealer and asked to test drive a Coupe Special edition at around £16,000. I got a grunt from the Senior Sales Manager and on pressing the issue he then waved me outside saying "Take a look at one in the lot, there's a yellow one out there somewhere".
I left, walked down the road to Audi where I walked in and was offered a cup of tea. A nice young lady talked to me for 10 minutes about my options, arranged a test drive the next day (which I took the car out ALONE...!) and when I got back from that I signed on the dotted line to order a car for £2,000 more than I would have paid to Vauxhall.
Vauxhall lost alot of business due to their "senior" salesman dismissing me. In addition, as I was signing on the dotted line another gentleman next to me was busy putting down £45,000 for a rather gorgeous Sports Saloon - he was also wearing ripped jeans and trainers.
Slashdot Mirror
He remembered that all right, and he followed the script when talking to the press.
You insinuate the CEO is slow for not remembering clicking "yes" - I insinuate you are slow for not realising this was fiction, a marketing trick.
The hydrogen in The Hindenburg was contained in a non pressurised containerbecause its' density was lower than the air around to provide buoyancy... The hydrogen in cars is designed to provide the maximum energy density and is stored at a very high pressure - it's the not the pressure that's dangerous however, it's the fact that because it's pressurised there may hundreds, or thousands of times more hydrogen per cubic metre in a car H tank than in the same cubic metre of airship, producing a significantly more powerful explosion when adjusted for scale.
If the hindenburg had its hydrogen pressurised at 1000psi, not only would it have failed to take off, but none of the bystanders would have been around to talk about it.
Well, actually, yes they are - that's why they recruit most actively in poor areas, for the same reasons that terrorist-financiers recruit most (but not all) of their suicide bombers from youngsters with no jobs and impoverished families.
There are groups of people ideologically at odds with one another on our planet, fighting for power and control of a variety of things - there is no way to win, and the only way to avoid losing is to not play their game.
I don't know how the tax system in the US works, but at least in the UK if you have some "bad debtors" who owe you money but do not pay up, you can claim this back from your corporation tax at the end of a year.
So, essentially, tax payers end up footing the bill - but this isn't a bad thing, it helps to keep companies solvent who might otherwise go under through no fault of their own, and as long as the debts are legitimate (and the size of them realistic) it's not great burden on the taxpayer.
So... all the slashbots celebrating how massive the fines were supposed to be (5k per item?) may now suddenly be wondering if it was set at5k per item so MS and other lawyer-heavy organisations could go out there get enormous tax cuts, at the cost of having a few lawyers issue procedings against some spammers who probably don't even show in court.
Few sane people argue that Bush is another Mao - but many sane people and students of history argue that the laws and processes being brought into place under Bush (and some previous presidents) make it considerably easier to start down that path - and are arguably of no benefit to citizens.
Im am in the UK, a one-man business, involved in web development (not SEO) and I use my mobile number as a main point of contact - it doesn't mean I'm not reputable, it means I want my clients to be able to talk to me directly, instead of through a receptionist who knows nothing except how to look after her nails.
2] The user agreement is invalid in many countries
3] If this is a "sale" then the laws of my country give me full rights to a copy of the work as with any other sale. I can do what I like with it within these laws. If this is not a "sale" then it sure feels like one - and any court would almost certainly agree with this.
I'm not saying either scenario is true - just that you appear to have missed this possibility.
Why does their choice of platform mean they "don't quite seem to get it"? This is fanatical raving - choosing a closed codec is a perfectly valid thing to do, and ensures at least casual copiers will not be able to pirate this material.
What lack of response? Do we have any stats on how many people took up this offer versus their expectations, or is the submitters comment mired in biased speculation?
I went to university in 1997. They tried to teach me FORTRAN. I quit after 10 weeks.
Code written for in-house software which would never see the light of day is written for a reason. Generally, that is because this software is not available for free, or to purchase at a reasonable price and the company *needs* it.
If you write some good software in-house (for less than it would cost to license commercial software to do the same job) that belongs to your company and your company alone, you have a competitive advantage over your competitors - that is, they either spent MORE money than you did, or they simply do not have the software do carry out the task.
If you then open source the software you have written you, may gain some cost savings on forward development of the software, but you LOSE the competitive advantage - each and EVERY one of your competitors is free to take and use your software (written at your own expense) and implement it.
The net result is that your competitors who used to spend more money than you on proprietary solutions now spend alot less money than they used to, and competitors who didn't have the software capability you developed now do have it, and they have it for free
Can someone from the open-source advocacy world please explain to me how this is a good trade-off for a business?
A (possible) small reduction in development costs seems hard to palatte when offset against a (probably) huge loss in competitive advantage...
(Bear in mind when answering, that if none of your competitors take up and use the software then there are likely to be few to no coders working on, so you have gained nothing except legal bills..)
Terrorists tend to be very clever, sly and intelligent people. They work with limited resources, frequently in enemy territory against a much larger force.
Terrorists will not rely on GPS.
The military is increasing its' reliance on GPS.
therefore
Shutting down the GPS will have no negative effect on the terrorists, but will hamper the military (and probably civil emergency efforts too).
Finally, if the terrorists do mount an attack on us that somehow utilises GPS, it is unlikely we will know about it until after it has happened.
If he had just taken it on the chin and laughed about it with his mates, it wouldn't have been such a big deal.
The world is full of people who make tiny mistakes and then when called/publicised on them, they make it into an enormous deal by bitching/whinging/complaining about it. It was funny. Laugh about it. If he can't deal that it's his own problem - learning to laugh at *yourself* in life is one of the most valuable skills you can EVER learn - sadly some people never do.
What ISPs need to do is have an admin assign accounts to a "tainted" list when incoming abuse complaints above a certain threshold (2/3 per week?) which is then on a quarantined subnet, and all attempts from the client at HTTP traffic returns a page indicating the connection has been disabled and containing instructions on how to deal with the problem (offering paid local tech support via reseller agreements) and request re-activation.
Cars need an "MOT" test every 12 months (to ensure they are safe to share the road with other car users) - how long before we get this for network hardware?
Hardly a difference of 100x... In fact I would bet our Indian is better off. Apart from health care and pollution standards, I can't think of anything our UK worker has that our Indian doesn't...
And just in defence of Americans, I'm from the UK and usually bash Americans for getting geography wrong
Interestingly, Nokia is a Scandinavian country - and these countries tend to have strong anti-corruption laws (especially Finland) - corruption is regarded as highly unethical and unacceptable from a social POV. If this act had been committed by Fins, or in Finland I imagine people from both sides would be doing jail time by now...
Other than the government, charity and the merry-go-round of money from one free software house to another, where are we going to get the vast sums of money needed to make free software competitive with commercial closed source software?
First use Breeder Reactors so the physical amount of waste is minimal, and cannot be weaponised, and is really efficient per unit mined.
Next up, infuse the waste material into relatively small glass rods, and bury these rods in the Ocean floor (probably mid-Atlantic, most consistent movement) very close to a faultline where the plate is burying itself beneath another. Hey presto, 50 years or so later your waste is buried pretty deep, getting deeper, and in a few centuries is part of our Magma. Problem solved.
Is there any way in corporate contract law to claim something like this side letter was accidental, or unauthorized, in a case such as this when apparently nobody at Novell was aware that someone had signed away the UNIX copyright? I don't know about the US, but in the UK a company is liable for the actions of its employees when they are acting in a capacity for the company.
The only way this could be rescinded, in the UK at least, would be if it were proved that the action was fraudulent (the person was bribed, or somehow co-erced to do it).
Not a good idea... example:
I was shopping for a new car 3 years ago. Wearing jeans, T-shirt and dirty trainers I went into a Vauxhall (UK) dealer and asked to test drive a Coupe Special edition at around £16,000. I got a grunt from the Senior Sales Manager and on pressing the issue he then waved me outside saying "Take a look at one in the lot, there's a yellow one out there somewhere".
I left, walked down the road to Audi where I walked in and was offered a cup of tea. A nice young lady talked to me for 10 minutes about my options, arranged a test drive the next day (which I took the car out ALONE...!) and when I got back from that I signed on the dotted line to order a car for £2,000 more than I would have paid to Vauxhall.
Vauxhall lost alot of business due to their "senior" salesman dismissing me. In addition, as I was signing on the dotted line another gentleman next to me was busy putting down £45,000 for a rather gorgeous Sports Saloon - he was also wearing ripped jeans and trainers.