It's your use of parallelization in sentences. My theory of management miscommunication is that these muppets only get the first and last part of the parallelization. For example:
I was forced to sit on the sidelines and watch as my predictions of poor requirements, poor design, and poor process turned into schedule nightmares, budget balloons, and gargantuan maintenance efforts proved to be true
Is heard as:
I was forced to sit on the sidelines and watch as my predictions of... process turned into schedule... maintenance efforts proved to be true
So I figure one should always start and end conversations with management with "I would benefit from" or "we would benefit from" and end it with "giving me more power/money" or "which I can do for you", no matter what the middle part says.
I hope that we never reach a time where the majority of people accept the idea of "proving one's innocence." That innocence is presumed while guilt must be proven is at the very bedrock of any free society and god help us if that ever truly changes.
I suggest reading John Grisham's only non-fiction to date, "The Innocent Man". The nomenclature is grossly misconstrued, and criminal "justice" really comes across as a euphemism. In gist, the presumption that cops, prosecutors, judges and experts are competent enough to only accuse someone who is probably guilty is sufficient to convince a jury of guilt. Under that presumption, the accusation of guilt is sufficient proof.
Mr. Burns mighta been onto something there, in that Simpson's episode...
If our climate is being deleteriously affected by too much energy coming into our climate syste, is it practical to throw up a satellite at the Lagrangian point between Earth and the Sun that effectively shades the Earth from some of the Sun's solar output?
These messages seem to fall through a loophole in European laws against spam since they do not travel through an 'intermediary network.'
Well, the reason for anti-SPAM legislation being written that way is that SPAM passes over an anonymous intermediary network. If you know who sent it, and can identify the sender, you can thus take legal action against them directly, so it probably should be handled in a different way. If it becomes a big enough problem, something will be done about it.
I agree. I work with some engineering firms, and these are businesses. They hire graduates of an engineering school with a view to employing them as engineers within the known scope of engineering. Adam Smith's theory of specialization is enhanced by efficiently producing effective specialized workers, not by producing generalist thinkers who need subsequent training to become effective engineers. (Ultimately mind you, there may be an argument that a generalist thinker will eventually produce more output than a worker; I don't know, personally) Thus, a vocational school has a definite advantage, and the working world requires more effective engineers.
Those who want to have a generalist "thinker" engineering career can take a masters or Ph.D. in engineering. I think it's at that level that it makes sense to start broadening the theoretical view.
What business is it of yours how much the CEO makes?
If a CEO gets an extra $100 and his employee gets an extra $1, is the employee worse off? No, he's better off by $1.
I agree with you, but there's a caveat that may be worth mentioning: inflation. Without getting into the details, if you inflate everyone's income, then prices will reflect (oversimplified, but not incorrect). Thus, if you have a bunch of CEO's whose incomes are growing faster than inflation, but employees whose incomes are growing at less than the inflation rate, then the income disparity between them grows, and you end up with an ever widening class disparity. Thus, there is a reason for concern over the richest getting richer, and the poorer not getting richer.
Example in point: I can't speak for anywhere else, but in the US and Canada, I understand that when adjusted for inflation, the average income has gone down $800 in the last 20 years.
I think Wikipedia should be a shared burden, in terms of cost for overhead such as bandwidth, between universities and other higher educational institutions. It is the very role of government and these higher educational institutions to see that knowledge is dispersed, correlating quite nicely with the objective of Wikipedia.
Universities have the funding, infrastructure, relative impartiality, purpose and incentive that imbues them not just with the ability, but with the obligation in my opinion, to support a global knowledge system such as Wikipedia.
I think advertising on Wikipedia is equivalent to advertising in a University classroom, and barred from the latter for the same reasons it should be barred from the prior.
How odd. To me, everything you've said on this topic seems to be infused with a "do X because it will cause / force / prevent others from doing Y" mentality. So far as I can tell, pretty much everything you've said on the topic has been about the behavior of others; I haven't seen any "I do / won't do X because I choose not to / enjoy it / whatever" statements.
You described a "solution", however you have since failed to point out what it was a solution for, nor exactly how it purports to solve a problem. I rebutted with an actual solution, describing how it works, and predicting its effects. I have no vested interest beyond the common-sense public benefit, and describing the reasons for the decision. I've advocated a position with disinterest and factual support. You've responded with essentially nothing but logical fallacies, from ad hominen through hasty generalization through (faulty) guilt by association through personal attack.
* Perhaps you mean imposing an anti-binary driver policy on Linux users?
That would be one instance. Also, your stated motivation for supporting the patch:
* it forces them to open up their binary drivers
* I suspect you and your friends boycott is not the greatest threat to their bottom line and provides no incentive for them to concede to the desires of the open source community.
Here you seem to assume that I don't buy things I don't want in order to effect the behavior of the vendors.
I think I see what you're getting at, but you're providing a counterargument that is completely unrelated to your thesis that the solution is to not buy things. (per If people object to binary only drivers, the sollution (sic) is for those people to refuse to use them, not for them to try to game the system to prevent other people from using them.). This does not solve the greater issue that hardware manufacturers will not, because they have no incentive to, gratuitously open drivers permitting users to choose alternatives to those setups supported as dictated by the hardware manufacturers.
* quality open source products are valuable in their own right, but also as an incentive for commercial manufacturers to produce higher quality products
* corporate manufacturer who can continue to reproduce binary closed drivers without consequence
* policy is driven by the gatekeepers
* all the "the masses do / think this or that" stuff
In the case of the binary-only drivers, our behaviour is dictated to us by the video card manufacturers
Mine isn't. And really, I doubt that yours is either.
Of course it is. Whether you've got the insight, foresight, wisdom or intelligence to discern the constraints of your world is another matter.
Your arguments bear the inchoate, personal retribution and sense of entitlement of a bratty child. You may very well be an inchoate, bratty child, but that's no excuse for your personal attacks, nor your basic inability to comprehend and respond to valid and broadly very well supported arguments. Your reading skills, advocacy, and expression is severely wanting. Underlying that is a lack of empathy for the other side, compassion for the problems of others in general, and a foresight to comprehend the long-term effects of basic patterns and incentives. All to say, you've failed to demonstrate any qualities of intelligence, kindness or utility in your arguments, and your expression (or lack thereof) barely merit an intellectual classification of imbecile. (Not to say you're not clever, you may be, but what I've seen demonstrates no evidence thereof, for the reasons given) I suspect you have more interest in being heard and being "right" than actually learning or contributing. Perhaps you should rethink why and how you interact with others, lest you continue to be so labeled.
The rest of your response follows the same sort of pattern. You seem to be obsessed with controlling the behavior of others, for "the greater good" or whatever, while I am more concerned with not allowing others to control my behavior. Part of my policy for doing that is to engage in cooperative agreements with others, wherein we agree not to try to control each other's behavior.
I have no obsession or real concern with the behaviour of others, and I'm not sure how my post could be interpreted that way. Perhaps you mean imposing an anti-binary driver policy on Linux users? I think that imposition as a policy seeks to free us from the restrictions that binary drivers impose.
In the case of the binary-only drivers, our behaviour is dictated to us by the video card manufacturers (ala. use our drivers, on systems we support, as long as we support it). The loftier goal would be to be free of these restrictions, and I make no moral judgement as to its imposition but merely observe that Linus's anti-binary policy is a result of the same motivation, to be free of these restrictions.
In other words, I think freedom is important, and don't place much value on playing World of Warcraft or whatever, while you seem to be very concerned with being able to buy new things and play games and so forth, thus see controlling the rights of others and the "perceptions of the marketplace", promoting "the common good," retaliation against oligopolies, etc. as necessary to obtaining your goals. While I can support restricting the rights of some people to protect others in certain situations (e.g., I would restrict the US government's "right" to hold people indefinitely without charges in order to protect those people, and myself, from a potential police state) I just don't see the issue of gaming on bleeding edge graphics cards as being at that level of urgency.
Video games would simply be an example, and I speak not from a personal point of view, but from that of the masses, whose whims corporations do respond to (insofar as the whims translate into dollars), which furthers my point about the ability for Linus's policy to affect freedom as a consequence of binary-only driver restrictions. It simply is; I make no judgement call as to its benefits or costs.
You seem to have a very different view of the free software movement than I do.
It may be.
Where you see people "denied access to commodity products with limited alternatives" I see companies locking themselves out of a growing share of the market; they won't get my money, nor the money of most of my friends, until/unless they change their ways. I don't have an intrinsic need to buy their overpriced crap (as evidenced by the fact that they have hefty advertising budgets to woo me, and not the other way around) and don't feel particularly heart broken if I can't.
Based on the antitrust investigation of ATi and nVidia, I suspect you and your friends boycott is not the greatest threat to their bottom line and provides no incentive for them to concede to the desires of the open source community.
Did you know that there are proprietary foods (for dieters, I gather) that you can only buy if you sign a contract to only eat food that you buy from them, and to eat all of it on the specified schedule? Do you care?
I don't quite know what you're hitting at with the reference.
And as for the limited alternatives nonsense, that is so backwards from a free software / open source perspective that I can't even get my head around it. You have more alternatives facing you right now than 99.9% of the people who ever lived, and if you don't like any of them you also have a greater opportunity to create your own alternatives by an even wider margin.
I think that's a wildly tangential and unrelated generalization. On point: there are two major video card manufacturers, ATi and nVidia. They are being investigated for anti-competitive behaviour, and they control the vast majority of the video card market vertical from OEM through on-board through retail video cards. Hence, if you want a video card that does what you want and expect it to do, you have to buy from them, therefore your choice in alternatives are limited.
Commensurately, you have to use their binary-only drivers, because there are no open source alternatives. Consequently, you cannot use their products on other types of systems than those for which a binary-only driver has been provided. Concurrently, you are prohibited from fixing, upgrading, expanding, or improving upon their driver, and if the company goes bankrupt or ceases to support that driver you no longer have access to that hardware on an open source system. It's the very raison d'etre of open source (from the RMS perspective, anyway).
A valid counterargument to this line of reasoning would be if, for example, you could point to a video card manufacturer besides ATi or nVidia (with their binary drivers) that lets you play World of Warcraft on Linux (without binary drivers). Mind you, the existence of an alternative would not undermine the argument that choices are limited, for a variety of reasons not worth getting into right now.
As for the otherwise indifferent masses "blaming Linux" for things why, exactly, do you care? Do you get a nickel every time someone installs Linux?
It's called goodwill, the capacity to exert influence based on the association between quality and brand. The brand "Linux" as a poster-child for open source underlies the ability for open source to be broadly accepted into the marketplace. This produces a healthier marketplace with higher quality products because there are more choices, and notably more choices beyond the proprietary model of development which is rife with self-serving interests and low quality production. Thus, quality open source products are valuable in their own right, but also as an incentive for commercial manufacturers to produce higher quality products, which in general makes my life better (as well as the lives of most people).
Or did the masses get together and appoint you their Lord Protector while I was busy doing something?
You didn't get the memo? We're putting cover pages on
If people object to binary only drivers, the sollution (sic) is for those people to refuse to use them, not for them to try to game the system to prevent other people from using them.
Solution for whom? The individual who is denied access to commodity products with limited alternatives? The corporate manufacturer who can continue to reproduce binary closed drivers without consequence? The masses who are indifferent until they encounter inexplicable issues that they blame on Linux and not rightly on the manufacturer of a broken closed source binary driver? I don't see any 'solution' arising out of the apathy of the masses, regardless of the objection of any individual. Policy is driven by the gatekeepers, in this case Linus et al.
A 'solution' would be to lock out binary-only drivers, so that problems in open source software can be solved with an open source methodology, accountability falling where it belongs, and the masses benefiting from accessible and openly fixable drivers. YMMV.
Make it playable and immersive like Microprose's Privateer universe (mutatis mutandis) and I'm sold. Throw in some original videos with the actors and / or voices for the occasional nostalgia, and it'd be gold for me.
Not exactly - only if it is a creative, intellectual or artistic act. If you are just copying the track names off the back of a CD case, it is not any of those things.
Arguably, even a shopping list is not copyright, because it's hardly intellectual or artistic, and its creativity is disputable!
Telephone books & databases aren't copyright, as I understand it. So a shopping list probably isn't either, having neither the creativity nor artistic contribution to make something worthy of state protection.
No one's hit this yet, but those hard-plastic impossible-to-open cases were designed, as I understand it, to prevent shoplifting. If you can't get it out of the plastic case, you have to lug out a big piece of plastic, which likely has something to trigger an alarm when you try to escape. It would be easer to snag things from a store if you could just pop these things out of the casing.
Yes, quite right. In general: A summary judgement happens when there is no question of fact, as facts can be decided by a jury.
Where there is only left a question of law, a judge may make a ruling on that law without entering into a fact-finding portion of a trial (via a judge or jury determination of fact).
There is great precedent value in seeing this case through, as a matter of jurisprudence, certainty, and predictability with respect to open source.
Legally speaking, 8500 pages isn't really that much at all. A pretty straightforward medical case can easily comprise well over 4,000 pages, and it'd be magnitudes upon magnitudes less value than this Microsoft case. I would have expected tens of thousands of pages for something like this. I suspect it's either extraordinarily well thought out and thus very concise, or intentionally glossed over to the point of being a debacle.
silly questions but......do the artists get an automatic percentage of this tax collected by the music industry in canada?
Not a silly question at all. I was one of the official objectors on this court case in federal court a few years back. Their inability to fairly distribute brought the whole regime into question, and for that reason (among others) I argued that it should be scrapped.
Right now it's collected and distributed by an agency called the Canadian Private Copying Collective. They base their distribution to each artist baseed on statistics from major commercial radio stations. Of course, this is problematic and anti-competitive because major radio stations have their play list dictated to them by major media conglomerates and monopolies such as ClearChannel, rather than responding to actual consumer demand.
Note, incidentally, that ClearChannel is essentially liquidating its assets, so this argument may no longer fly (at least as definitively), as a means of persuading the CPCC, or anyone else, that this mechanism of estimating fair distribution is anti-competitive. But I digress.
To date, it is my understanding that the CPCC has several hundred million dollars stored from this tax (*cough* "tarriff", per the Federal Court; a tax requires Parliamentary assent, which this did not receive... even though it is a tax), and they have distributed very little of it. It's a genuinely difficult problem. In my opinion, it's impossible to estimate consumer demand, and I argued that the levy is inappropriate, especially in a case such as this where free market forces exist precisely to determine value. (That's oversimplifying, but that's the gist)
Slashdot Mirror
Aliens are interested in colonization (because we are - but that may not follow)
Will to power, man. A species benefiting from expansive conquering, will. A flower that can grow, will, as Nietzsche put it. (Well, sort of. ha!)
It's your use of parallelization in sentences. My theory of management miscommunication is that these muppets only get the first and last part of the parallelization. For example:
... process turned into schedule ... maintenance efforts proved to be true
I was forced to sit on the sidelines and watch as my predictions of poor requirements, poor design, and poor process turned into schedule nightmares, budget balloons, and gargantuan maintenance efforts proved to be true
Is heard as:
I was forced to sit on the sidelines and watch as my predictions of
So I figure one should always start and end conversations with management with "I would benefit from" or "we would benefit from" and end it with "giving me more power/money" or "which I can do for you", no matter what the middle part says.
Or so go my Dilbert-esque thought for the day.
I hope that we never reach a time where the majority of people accept the idea of "proving one's innocence." That innocence is presumed while guilt must be proven is at the very bedrock of any free society and god help us if that ever truly changes.
I suggest reading John Grisham's only non-fiction to date, "The Innocent Man". The nomenclature is grossly misconstrued, and criminal "justice" really comes across as a euphemism. In gist, the presumption that cops, prosecutors, judges and experts are competent enough to only accuse someone who is probably guilty is sufficient to convince a jury of guilt. Under that presumption, the accusation of guilt is sufficient proof.
Mr. Burns mighta been onto something there, in that Simpson's episode ...
If our climate is being deleteriously affected by too much energy coming into our climate syste, is it practical to throw up a satellite at the Lagrangian point between Earth and the Sun that effectively shades the Earth from some of the Sun's solar output?
Keep racking up your prices and you'll lose customers.
Not if your customers are rich snobs. lol
These messages seem to fall through a loophole in European laws against spam since they do not travel through an 'intermediary network.'
:)
Well, the reason for anti-SPAM legislation being written that way is that SPAM passes over an anonymous intermediary network. If you know who sent it, and can identify the sender, you can thus take legal action against them directly, so it probably should be handled in a different way. If it becomes a big enough problem, something will be done about it.
My 2 cents.
google rot13
Even the US government, which moves at the speed of a glacier
With due thanks to the environmental policies of the US government, glaciers are moving faster now, too.
I agree. I work with some engineering firms, and these are businesses. They hire graduates of an engineering school with a view to employing them as engineers within the known scope of engineering. Adam Smith's theory of specialization is enhanced by efficiently producing effective specialized workers, not by producing generalist thinkers who need subsequent training to become effective engineers. (Ultimately mind you, there may be an argument that a generalist thinker will eventually produce more output than a worker; I don't know, personally) Thus, a vocational school has a definite advantage, and the working world requires more effective engineers.
Those who want to have a generalist "thinker" engineering career can take a masters or Ph.D. in engineering. I think it's at that level that it makes sense to start broadening the theoretical view.
You'd wait until you had the technology to make self-replicating probes
I remember some giant bags of gas in Star Control II who did just that. It was a bad move on their part.
What business is it of yours how much the CEO makes?
If a CEO gets an extra $100 and his employee gets an extra $1, is the employee worse off? No, he's better off by $1.
I agree with you, but there's a caveat that may be worth mentioning: inflation. Without getting into the details, if you inflate everyone's income, then prices will reflect (oversimplified, but not incorrect). Thus, if you have a bunch of CEO's whose incomes are growing faster than inflation, but employees whose incomes are growing at less than the inflation rate, then the income disparity between them grows, and you end up with an ever widening class disparity. Thus, there is a reason for concern over the richest getting richer, and the poorer not getting richer.
Example in point: I can't speak for anywhere else, but in the US and Canada, I understand that when adjusted for inflation, the average income has gone down $800 in the last 20 years.
It's been plutoed.
(Ironic, for something named Mercury.)
I think Wikipedia should be a shared burden, in terms of cost for overhead such as bandwidth, between universities and other higher educational institutions. It is the very role of government and these higher educational institutions to see that knowledge is dispersed, correlating quite nicely with the objective of Wikipedia.
Universities have the funding, infrastructure, relative impartiality, purpose and incentive that imbues them not just with the ability, but with the obligation in my opinion, to support a global knowledge system such as Wikipedia.
I think advertising on Wikipedia is equivalent to advertising in a University classroom, and barred from the latter for the same reasons it should be barred from the prior.
How odd. To me, everything you've said on this topic seems to be infused with a "do X because it will cause / force / prevent others from doing Y" mentality. So far as I can tell, pretty much everything you've said on the topic has been about the behavior of others; I haven't seen any "I do / won't do X because I choose not to / enjoy it / whatever" statements.
You described a "solution", however you have since failed to point out what it was a solution for, nor exactly how it purports to solve a problem. I rebutted with an actual solution, describing how it works, and predicting its effects. I have no vested interest beyond the common-sense public benefit, and describing the reasons for the decision. I've advocated a position with disinterest and factual support. You've responded with essentially nothing but logical fallacies, from ad hominen through hasty generalization through (faulty) guilt by association through personal attack.
* Perhaps you mean imposing an anti-binary driver policy on Linux users?
That would be one instance. Also, your stated motivation for supporting the patch:
* it forces them to open up their binary drivers
* I suspect you and your friends boycott is not the greatest threat to their bottom line and provides no incentive for them to concede to the desires of the open source community.
Here you seem to assume that I don't buy things I don't want in order to effect the behavior of the vendors.
I think I see what you're getting at, but you're providing a counterargument that is completely unrelated to your thesis that the solution is to not buy things. (per If people object to binary only drivers, the sollution (sic) is for those people to refuse to use them, not for them to try to game the system to prevent other people from using them.). This does not solve the greater issue that hardware manufacturers will not, because they have no incentive to, gratuitously open drivers permitting users to choose alternatives to those setups supported as dictated by the hardware manufacturers.
* quality open source products are valuable in their own right, but also as an incentive for commercial manufacturers to produce higher quality products
* corporate manufacturer who can continue to reproduce binary closed drivers without consequence
* policy is driven by the gatekeepers
* all the "the masses do / think this or that" stuff
In the case of the binary-only drivers, our behaviour is dictated to us by the video card manufacturers
Mine isn't. And really, I doubt that yours is either.
Of course it is. Whether you've got the insight, foresight, wisdom or intelligence to discern the constraints of your world is another matter.
Your arguments bear the inchoate, personal retribution and sense of entitlement of a bratty child. You may very well be an inchoate, bratty child, but that's no excuse for your personal attacks, nor your basic inability to comprehend and respond to valid and broadly very well supported arguments. Your reading skills, advocacy, and expression is severely wanting. Underlying that is a lack of empathy for the other side, compassion for the problems of others in general, and a foresight to comprehend the long-term effects of basic patterns and incentives. All to say, you've failed to demonstrate any qualities of intelligence, kindness or utility in your arguments, and your expression (or lack thereof) barely merit an intellectual classification of imbecile. (Not to say you're not clever, you may be, but what I've seen demonstrates no evidence thereof, for the reasons given) I suspect you have more interest in being heard and being "right" than actually learning or contributing. Perhaps you should rethink why and how you interact with others, lest you continue to be so labeled.
Good response.
The rest of your response follows the same sort of pattern. You seem to be obsessed with controlling the behavior of others, for "the greater good" or whatever, while I am more concerned with not allowing others to control my behavior. Part of my policy for doing that is to engage in cooperative agreements with others, wherein we agree not to try to control each other's behavior.
I have no obsession or real concern with the behaviour of others, and I'm not sure how my post could be interpreted that way. Perhaps you mean imposing an anti-binary driver policy on Linux users? I think that imposition as a policy seeks to free us from the restrictions that binary drivers impose.
In the case of the binary-only drivers, our behaviour is dictated to us by the video card manufacturers (ala. use our drivers, on systems we support, as long as we support it). The loftier goal would be to be free of these restrictions, and I make no moral judgement as to its imposition but merely observe that Linus's anti-binary policy is a result of the same motivation, to be free of these restrictions.
In other words, I think freedom is important, and don't place much value on playing World of Warcraft or whatever, while you seem to be very concerned with being able to buy new things and play games and so forth, thus see controlling the rights of others and the "perceptions of the marketplace", promoting "the common good," retaliation against oligopolies, etc. as necessary to obtaining your goals. While I can support restricting the rights of some people to protect others in certain situations (e.g., I would restrict the US government's "right" to hold people indefinitely without charges in order to protect those people, and myself, from a potential police state) I just don't see the issue of gaming on bleeding edge graphics cards as being at that level of urgency.
Video games would simply be an example, and I speak not from a personal point of view, but from that of the masses, whose whims corporations do respond to (insofar as the whims translate into dollars), which furthers my point about the ability for Linus's policy to affect freedom as a consequence of binary-only driver restrictions. It simply is; I make no judgement call as to its benefits or costs.
You seem to have a very different view of the free software movement than I do.
It may be.
Where you see people "denied access to commodity products with limited alternatives" I see companies locking themselves out of a growing share of the market; they won't get my money, nor the money of most of my friends, until/unless they change their ways. I don't have an intrinsic need to buy their overpriced crap (as evidenced by the fact that they have hefty advertising budgets to woo me, and not the other way around) and don't feel particularly heart broken if I can't.
Based on the antitrust investigation of ATi and nVidia, I suspect you and your friends boycott is not the greatest threat to their bottom line and provides no incentive for them to concede to the desires of the open source community.
Did you know that there are proprietary foods (for dieters, I gather) that you can only buy if you sign a contract to only eat food that you buy from them, and to eat all of it on the specified schedule? Do you care?
I don't quite know what you're hitting at with the reference.
And as for the limited alternatives nonsense, that is so backwards from a free software / open source perspective that I can't even get my head around it. You have more alternatives facing you right now than 99.9% of the people who ever lived, and if you don't like any of them you also have a greater opportunity to create your own alternatives by an even wider margin.
I think that's a wildly tangential and unrelated generalization. On point: there are two major video card manufacturers, ATi and nVidia. They are being investigated for anti-competitive behaviour, and they control the vast majority of the video card market vertical from OEM through on-board through retail video cards. Hence, if you want a video card that does what you want and expect it to do, you have to buy from them, therefore your choice in alternatives are limited.
Commensurately, you have to use their binary-only drivers, because there are no open source alternatives. Consequently, you cannot use their products on other types of systems than those for which a binary-only driver has been provided. Concurrently, you are prohibited from fixing, upgrading, expanding, or improving upon their driver, and if the company goes bankrupt or ceases to support that driver you no longer have access to that hardware on an open source system. It's the very raison d'etre of open source (from the RMS perspective, anyway).
A valid counterargument to this line of reasoning would be if, for example, you could point to a video card manufacturer besides ATi or nVidia (with their binary drivers) that lets you play World of Warcraft on Linux (without binary drivers). Mind you, the existence of an alternative would not undermine the argument that choices are limited, for a variety of reasons not worth getting into right now.
As for the otherwise indifferent masses "blaming Linux" for things why, exactly, do you care? Do you get a nickel every time someone installs Linux?
It's called goodwill, the capacity to exert influence based on the association between quality and brand. The brand "Linux" as a poster-child for open source underlies the ability for open source to be broadly accepted into the marketplace. This produces a healthier marketplace with higher quality products because there are more choices, and notably more choices beyond the proprietary model of development which is rife with self-serving interests and low quality production. Thus, quality open source products are valuable in their own right, but also as an incentive for commercial manufacturers to produce higher quality products, which in general makes my life better (as well as the lives of most people).
Or did the masses get together and appoint you their Lord Protector while I was busy doing something?
You didn't get the memo? We're putting cover pages on
If people object to binary only drivers, the sollution (sic) is for those people to refuse to use them, not for them to try to game the system to prevent other people from using them.
Solution for whom? The individual who is denied access to commodity products with limited alternatives? The corporate manufacturer who can continue to reproduce binary closed drivers without consequence? The masses who are indifferent until they encounter inexplicable issues that they blame on Linux and not rightly on the manufacturer of a broken closed source binary driver? I don't see any 'solution' arising out of the apathy of the masses, regardless of the objection of any individual. Policy is driven by the gatekeepers, in this case Linus et al.
A 'solution' would be to lock out binary-only drivers, so that problems in open source software can be solved with an open source methodology, accountability falling where it belongs, and the masses benefiting from accessible and openly fixable drivers. YMMV.
Make it playable and immersive like Microprose's Privateer universe (mutatis mutandis) and I'm sold. Throw in some original videos with the actors and / or voices for the occasional nostalgia, and it'd be gold for me.
Not exactly - only if it is a creative, intellectual or artistic act. If you are just copying the track names off the back of a CD case, it is not any of those things.
Arguably, even a shopping list is not copyright, because it's hardly intellectual or artistic, and its creativity is disputable!
Telephone books & databases aren't copyright, as I understand it. So a shopping list probably isn't either, having neither the creativity nor artistic contribution to make something worthy of state protection.
No one's hit this yet, but those hard-plastic impossible-to-open cases were designed, as I understand it, to prevent shoplifting. If you can't get it out of the plastic case, you have to lug out a big piece of plastic, which likely has something to trigger an alarm when you try to escape. It would be easer to snag things from a store if you could just pop these things out of the casing.
Yes, quite right. In general: A summary judgement happens when there is no question of fact, as facts can be decided by a jury.
Where there is only left a question of law, a judge may make a ruling on that law without entering into a fact-finding portion of a trial (via a judge or jury determination of fact).
There is great precedent value in seeing this case through, as a matter of jurisprudence, certainty, and predictability with respect to open source.
I guess animals just don't evolve receptors for substances not usually found in nature.
;-)
Artifical flavours taste pretty strong to me.
Legally speaking, 8500 pages isn't really that much at all. A pretty straightforward medical case can easily comprise well over 4,000 pages, and it'd be magnitudes upon magnitudes less value than this Microsoft case. I would have expected tens of thousands of pages for something like this. I suspect it's either extraordinarily well thought out and thus very concise, or intentionally glossed over to the point of being a debacle.
silly questions but... ...do the artists get an automatic percentage of this tax collected by the music industry in canada?
... even though it is a tax), and they have distributed very little of it. It's a genuinely difficult problem. In my opinion, it's impossible to estimate consumer demand, and I argued that the levy is inappropriate, especially in a case such as this where free market forces exist precisely to determine value. (That's oversimplifying, but that's the gist)
Not a silly question at all. I was one of the official objectors on this court case in federal court a few years back. Their inability to fairly distribute brought the whole regime into question, and for that reason (among others) I argued that it should be scrapped.
Right now it's collected and distributed by an agency called the Canadian Private Copying Collective. They base their distribution to each artist baseed on statistics from major commercial radio stations. Of course, this is problematic and anti-competitive because major radio stations have their play list dictated to them by major media conglomerates and monopolies such as ClearChannel, rather than responding to actual consumer demand.
Note, incidentally, that ClearChannel is essentially liquidating its assets, so this argument may no longer fly (at least as definitively), as a means of persuading the CPCC, or anyone else, that this mechanism of estimating fair distribution is anti-competitive. But I digress.
To date, it is my understanding that the CPCC has several hundred million dollars stored from this tax (*cough* "tarriff", per the Federal Court; a tax requires Parliamentary assent, which this did not receive
Our Pagan-Coca Cola holiday will be ruined! lol