And if the company is bought out, the lawyers see their money regardless of the half-assed job they have done.
Except why on earth would IBM buy SCO unless they thought they were going to loose the case? IBM has deeper pockets than SCO, and a vested interest in proving that their new business ventures are sound. Buying SCO because it is cheaper than defeating them would make it look like IBM has something to hide.
So this clause is only a reasurance that if the lawyers are doing a good job, with much invested into the discovery, they will not be shafted because SCO decides to sell.
I'm not sure what you are asking, so I'll answer both possible interpretations:
1) Some states require ID's. Isn't this a violation of anonymity?
No, because things like that (and signing a ledger to vote) just verify that you did vote, that you only voted once, and there is a higher probability that it was really you that voted. But who you actually voted for is still anonymous.
2) Why don't we require everyone to show ID's to vote?
I'm divided on this. Basically it comes down to the question of whether we should have citzen ID's. Having them would make things alot more convient as you could have a single identifier to prove who you are. However, it would also make things more convient for Big Brother types to link together data from different sources.
If we were to do this today, many elderly voters would have to go through the hassle of getting an ID card, since they have no drivers licence, and anyone who wanted to vote fraudulently would just have to get a fake ID made. I don't know how big a problem fraud is, but it doesn't seem worth the hassle to me.
No, anonymous ballots are an important part of our system. That way you cannot be descriminated upon (by the government, or other institutions) because of how you voted.
But that's Hollywood for you - you can't just make one great movie and leave it alone. You have to squeeze every dollar out of the franchise while you can!
I would be really interested to hear what the Wachowski brothers honest opinion about the last two movies is. Do they think they are good? Are they disapointed that they were not able to bring acrossed the ideas they had as well as in the first one? Or did the know they had nothing and were deliberately just squeezing money out of the franchise?
For some reason answer three seems the least likely. My guess is that they had a rough idea for a trilogy, but when it didn't develop well they (and WB) were stuck in a bad spot. Fans would hate them for not putting out the other two movies, and would also hate them for putting out bad movies.
I agree that linux as a whole isn't ready for the desktop, unless you have a nearby linux geek who doesn't mind do the occasional difficult administrative things that a normal user can't.
On the other hand this announcement seems a little tactless. "We have decided to get out of the home desktop market, so no one should use linux on the desktop any more. Use windows, not those other linux distro's. I mean if we don't think this is a good market for linux than no one should market linux there." Now he was probably just explaining why they got out of the market but this is how it came acrossed to me.
For the lazy, non-RTFA'ers, this is only compared to CD singles, not CD sales in general. So not that surprizing seeing as how small a market that is and how expensive singles are.
Only if there is cancer in the reproductive system - the cells of the body that are producing eggs and sperm. Those are the only cells that can pass DNA onto offspring.
Hi, On my way to donate I noticed that they were a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. I thought that political groups were not allowed to be claimed as non-profit? Where exactly is the line drawn? thanks
Likewise, in the current system a corrupt vote counter could substitute a vote for one candidate for another. It depends on the technology being used. If you are using pencil-filled bubble scanning then fraud is possible in both methods. If you are using electronic counting, either you can modify the votes or not, adding is no different from changing. If you are using pen filled bubble scanning, then it would be possible to add votes, but not change them or take them away. However, a simple solution to this would be to have the user mark yes or no for each candidate.
So fraud really isn't any more of a problem for approval voting than for plurality voting.
Give them Knoppix. If is seems promising to them they can repartition and install it on their hard drive. If they really like it they can apt-get to a full blown version of debian. It is just as easy to use as redhat and requires less work to get going.
I don't know. I'm happily paying the membership fees at live365.com. Napster has the added advantage that you can listen to specific songs on demand, and offline, although that doesn't mean anything to someone on broadband unless I can put them on a portable player.
Then again live365 doesn't advertize itself as "selling" music, is much more diverse and is almost 1/2 to 1/3 of the price of the napster service depending on the duration of your membership.
Radio is by far the most convient method of discovering new music, one that I am happy to pay for. What a great service to have a music enthusist, with simular tastes as you, actively seeking out and listening to all the new stuff, and bringing you his favorites every week. It is nice that the internet has opened up a route for good radio stations again. Now if only someone could give Michael Powell a good beating with a clue-by-four, and get rid of the rediculous restrictions on it.
Yeah, but all of the other console systems have the same business method - they are sold at a loss or very little profit and make up the money on the games. So microsoft had to sell their box cheap if they wanted it to be succesful - the market forced them to.
On the other hand, none of the mp3 players are sold at a loss, so microsoft can match their price without selling at a loss as well. Considering the fact that these are going to be rebranded products with licenced WMA codecs, I see no reason why they would be more expensive to produce, especially since microsoft tends to squeeze its partners pretty tight when it comes to money.
Since it supports a format that half the computers in the world can already rip to, it provides added convienence compared to existing products. Microsoft has a good chance here.
They released a web browser long after everyone else already had, too. Look where we are today.
The difference is that they won't be giving away free copies of thier hardware with every computer. A more apt analogy would be the xbox. With billions of dollars, smart programmers, and the cooporation of the best hardware companies in the world, yes you can come from nowhere and compete with todays' top players.
Yeah, and we still haven't gotten those buggers back! Tell your congressman that we must set the goal of Earth Attacking Mars by the 100 year aniversary, otherwise the terrorists have won!
What they don't live there anymore? Then we must colonize the planet so the don't come back!
Well, the problem with that is that pleasure itself is addictive, which is why pain killers are some of the most addictive drugs. There is no such thing as a non-addictive recreational drug, although making them less addictive and less harmfull might be a good thing.
I reason I say might, is that reducing the most obvious bad side effects makes the drugs appear more safe, so more people use them more often, and expose themselves to less obvious bad side effects. I have the same sort of questions about safe sex. By making sex safe from the obvious bad side effects, people became more sexually active. However, is this casual additude of 'sex as a recreation' healthy for our society?
Likewise do we really want the most pleasurable things in our lives to come from chemicals? Suddenly the pleasure we get from a job well done or a good relationship, pale in comparision to these recreational drugs. The conditioning we receive for doing a good job, and building strong relationships isn't as strong as the conditioning we receive from using drugs. This, in my humble opinion, is the main reason why I don't want to see (strong) drugs to become more wide spread.
'Everything in moderation' applies here. Look at the current situation: strong drugs (cocaine, etc) have strong bad concequences, mild drugs (marijuana, etc) have weaker bad concequences. This is good, let it stay that way.
The real problem in Vietnam (and most other countries run by communist, oligarchical governments) is that IP laws are treated as optional...
Yeah, but would that be a problem for free software? If you talk to Richard Stallman, he looks forward to the day where we don't have any software copyright at all; until that day we have the GPL. The purpose of GPL is to keep others from putting their own licence on modified free software restricting it from use. If there was no copyright, then there would be no legal mechanism to restrict the way people use code, and thus the GPL wouldn't be necisarry. The only mechanism for hording source code would be to keep it secret and well guarded. However, the Vietnam "IP problem" is that there is rampent software copying. In a society like this which considers copying software to be sharing, not stealing, the people would not like companies that held back code, and would have no qualms with leaking that code.
The complete lack of software copyright is exactly what the FSF would like to see. GPL'd software is a step in the process; a feasibility experiment you might say. The purpose of copyright is to provide insentive for the author to create more works. If free software succeeds in displacing proprietary software, then it proves that there is plenty of incentive to create software, even without copyright. In that case copyright is unnecisarry, and even harmful to society because it limits who can use the software without justification. If it turns out that the incentive provided by copyright is necisarry, then the free software movement will never be able to produce enough software as good as proprietary software so it fizzle out or remain on the sidelines, and no one will be harmed.
Note: I did not extend my arguement to all works. Some may need the insentive that copyright provides, others may not. So Vietnam's copyright policies (not IP - there is no such thing as IP) may be bad for some industries, but if the FSF is right (which I think they are) it is not bad for software.
Interesting idea, but it would have to be quite a large deposit. Consider how many man hours (lawyer man hours at that) go into writing a claim. In order to deter any corporation the deposit would proably have to be 10x that.
Another tweak towards making it easier for good patents, but not bad one, would be if you took an approach simular to EPA inspections, where your first patent requires little or no deposit, but after every rejection, the deposit amount doubles. Have the amount decay at a slow rate, to allow companies to learn from their mistakes but not get a clean slate every year.
Anyhow, granting fewer crap patents or making them easier to overturn is a very important step in getting back to a healthy patent system. So this report is good news (or atleast the summary on the FTC site is, haven't read the whole report yet). Let your senator know that you agree with the FTC report and inform him that shortening patent duration to reflect the business cycle of the respective industries, is the next step.
Yeah I think part of the reason it would be hard to make enough money reviewing parts is that there isn't a big enough market for it. Not many people buy their own components, and people that build and sell systems have the money to do their own testing. Compare that to say cars and major appliances which many more people buy, and have a greater margin for saving money, it makes sense why taking the high road is easier for CR than Tom.
Yeah I agree. Like for a while Creative Labs was shipping some modems with the same model number, but some of them were winmodems and others were not. I got bit by this, as I purchased the modem specifically because someone else had had success using it on linux. There was no way to tell by looking at the box (and if i recall correctly, the number on the card itself was the same also). The only difference is that I could see that it didn't have a UART on the chip after I bought it.
While they didn't say themselves that it was not a winmodem, they did say that it was identical to other cards that were. This was a lie. It affected all of their customers, not just linux users, but they got away with it because most windows users didn't notice that it caused their CPU load to go up.
This is a crummy thing for the companies to do but it also makes you wonder about the reliability of reviewing companies. Like how he stated that designtechnica prided itself on reviewing retail products, but then never explained why they were using a review unit, and after noticing the discrepency did a lot of talking but still did not bother to pick up a shelf unit and test it, to see if it was true. Most of the hardware reviewers seem really flakey to me, more fan boys than reliable testing labs.
Unfair tweeking is part of the reason why Consumer Reports never accepts review units from companies, but rather buys them from retail stores, just like anyone else would. The other reason is that receiving free stuff creates a potential conflict of interest which is why they also do not have any advertizing in their magazine or their website. This means that you won't have reviews out before products are released, and operating this way is more expensive, relying on subscribers to run, but it is worth it. I don't always agree with CR's subjective descriptions of products (cars especially), but the hard numbers they provide are the most usefull I have found, and have saved me plenty of money.
I really wish that there was some site equally trustworthy in the computing world. For providing informative analysies there are usefull sites (I have always been impressed with anandtech). But for reviewing components, I have yet to find one I trust.
This is really interesting news, I wish I had mod point right now. Perhaps you should submit this to Taco as another article; I think it deserves to get that much attention.
Your are absolutely right, they definately can be made to do those things. The point of capsles, however, is that they would be disposable, so you would not want spend extra money to add extra capibilities that would be burned up at the end of each mission. Better to build a custom craft that stayed in space - then it could be designed to be as usefull as possible, with a cargo bay, robotic arm, had tug capabilities, facilitated ease of space walk etc. What this would look like would be a different matter, probably like a shuttle with no wings, although more girder-like. Or perhaps it would be a like a semitruck where the cab was a capsle.
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And if the company is bought out, the lawyers see their money regardless of the half-assed job they have done.
Except why on earth would IBM buy SCO unless they thought they were going to loose the case? IBM has deeper pockets than SCO, and a vested interest in proving that their new business ventures are sound. Buying SCO because it is cheaper than defeating them would make it look like IBM has something to hide.
So this clause is only a reasurance that if the lawyers are doing a good job, with much invested into the discovery, they will not be shafted because SCO decides to sell.
I'm not sure what you are asking, so I'll answer both possible interpretations:
1) Some states require ID's. Isn't this a violation of anonymity?
No, because things like that (and signing a ledger to vote) just verify that you did vote, that you only voted once, and there is a higher probability that it was really you that voted. But who you actually voted for is still anonymous.
2) Why don't we require everyone to show ID's to vote?
I'm divided on this. Basically it comes down to the question of whether we should have citzen ID's. Having them would make things alot more convient as you could have a single identifier to prove who you are. However, it would also make things more convient for Big Brother types to link together data from different sources.
If we were to do this today, many elderly voters would have to go through the hassle of getting an ID card, since they have no drivers licence, and anyone who wanted to vote fraudulently would just have to get a fake ID made. I don't know how big a problem fraud is, but it doesn't seem worth the hassle to me.
No, anonymous ballots are an important part of our system. That way you cannot be descriminated upon (by the government, or other institutions) because of how you voted.
But that's Hollywood for you - you can't just make one great movie and leave it alone. You have to squeeze every dollar out of the franchise while you can!
I would be really interested to hear what the Wachowski brothers honest opinion about the last two movies is. Do they think they are good? Are they disapointed that they were not able to bring acrossed the ideas they had as well as in the first one? Or did the know they had nothing and were deliberately just squeezing money out of the franchise?
For some reason answer three seems the least likely. My guess is that they had a rough idea for a trilogy, but when it didn't develop well they (and WB) were stuck in a bad spot. Fans would hate them for not putting out the other two movies, and would also hate them for putting out bad movies.
I agree that linux as a whole isn't ready for the desktop, unless you have a nearby linux geek who doesn't mind do the occasional difficult administrative things that a normal user can't.
On the other hand this announcement seems a little tactless. "We have decided to get out of the home desktop market, so no one should use linux on the desktop any more. Use windows, not those other linux distro's. I mean if we don't think this is a good market for linux than no one should market linux there." Now he was probably just explaining why they got out of the market but this is how it came acrossed to me.
For the lazy, non-RTFA'ers, this is only compared to CD singles, not CD sales in general. So not that surprizing seeing as how small a market that is and how expensive singles are.
Only if there is cancer in the reproductive system - the cells of the body that are producing eggs and sperm. Those are the only cells that can pass DNA onto offspring.
Hi,
On my way to donate I noticed that they were a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. I thought that political groups were not allowed to be claimed as non-profit? Where exactly is the line drawn?
thanks
Likewise, in the current system a corrupt vote counter could substitute a vote for one candidate for another. It depends on the technology being used. If you are using pencil-filled bubble scanning then fraud is possible in both methods. If you are using electronic counting, either you can modify the votes or not, adding is no different from changing. If you are using pen filled bubble scanning, then it would be possible to add votes, but not change them or take them away. However, a simple solution to this would be to have the user mark yes or no for each candidate.
So fraud really isn't any more of a problem for approval voting than for plurality voting.
Give them Knoppix. If is seems promising to them they can repartition and install it on their hard drive. If they really like it they can apt-get to a full blown version of debian. It is just as easy to use as redhat and requires less work to get going.
I don't know. I'm happily paying the membership fees at live365.com. Napster has the added advantage that you can listen to specific songs on demand, and offline, although that doesn't mean anything to someone on broadband unless I can put them on a portable player.
Then again live365 doesn't advertize itself as "selling" music, is much more diverse and is almost 1/2 to 1/3 of the price of the napster service depending on the duration of your membership.
Radio is by far the most convient method of discovering new music, one that I am happy to pay for. What a great service to have a music enthusist, with simular tastes as you, actively seeking out and listening to all the new stuff, and bringing you his favorites every week. It is nice that the internet has opened up a route for good radio stations again. Now if only someone could give Michael Powell a good beating with a clue-by-four, and get rid of the rediculous restrictions on it.
Yeah, but all of the other console systems have the same business method - they are sold at a loss or very little profit and make up the money on the games. So microsoft had to sell their box cheap if they wanted it to be succesful - the market forced them to.
On the other hand, none of the mp3 players are sold at a loss, so microsoft can match their price without selling at a loss as well. Considering the fact that these are going to be rebranded products with licenced WMA codecs, I see no reason why they would be more expensive to produce, especially since microsoft tends to squeeze its partners pretty tight when it comes to money.
Since it supports a format that half the computers in the world can already rip to, it provides added convienence compared to existing products. Microsoft has a good chance here.
Nah, GooSoft has the best ring to it. And apty describes what this merger would result it - a worthless sespool.
They released a web browser long after everyone else already had, too. Look where we are today.
The difference is that they won't be giving away free copies of thier hardware with every computer. A more apt analogy would be the xbox. With billions of dollars, smart programmers, and the cooporation of the best hardware companies in the world, yes you can come from nowhere and compete with todays' top players.
Yeah, and we still haven't gotten those buggers back! Tell your congressman that we must set the goal of Earth Attacking Mars by the 100 year aniversary, otherwise the terrorists have won!
What they don't live there anymore? Then we must colonize the planet so the don't come back!
Well, the problem with that is that pleasure itself is addictive, which is why pain killers are some of the most addictive drugs. There is no such thing as a non-addictive recreational drug, although making them less addictive and less harmfull might be a good thing.
I reason I say might, is that reducing the most obvious bad side effects makes the drugs appear more safe, so more people use them more often, and expose themselves to less obvious bad side effects. I have the same sort of questions about safe sex. By making sex safe from the obvious bad side effects, people became more sexually active. However, is this casual additude of 'sex as a recreation' healthy for our society?
Likewise do we really want the most pleasurable things in our lives to come from chemicals? Suddenly the pleasure we get from a job well done or a good relationship, pale in comparision to these recreational drugs. The conditioning we receive for doing a good job, and building strong relationships isn't as strong as the conditioning we receive from using drugs. This, in my humble opinion, is the main reason why I don't want to see (strong) drugs to become more wide spread.
'Everything in moderation' applies here. Look at the current situation: strong drugs (cocaine, etc) have strong bad concequences, mild drugs (marijuana, etc) have weaker bad concequences. This is good, let it stay that way.
The real problem in Vietnam (and most other countries run by communist, oligarchical governments) is that IP laws are treated as optional...
Yeah, but would that be a problem for free software? If you talk to Richard Stallman, he looks forward to the day where we don't have any software copyright at all; until that day we have the GPL. The purpose of GPL is to keep others from putting their own licence on modified free software restricting it from use. If there was no copyright, then there would be no legal mechanism to restrict the way people use code, and thus the GPL wouldn't be necisarry. The only mechanism for hording source code would be to keep it secret and well guarded. However, the Vietnam "IP problem" is that there is rampent software copying. In a society like this which considers copying software to be sharing, not stealing, the people would not like companies that held back code, and would have no qualms with leaking that code.
The complete lack of software copyright is exactly what the FSF would like to see. GPL'd software is a step in the process; a feasibility experiment you might say. The purpose of copyright is to provide insentive for the author to create more works. If free software succeeds in displacing proprietary software, then it proves that there is plenty of incentive to create software, even without copyright. In that case copyright is unnecisarry, and even harmful to society because it limits who can use the software without justification. If it turns out that the incentive provided by copyright is necisarry, then the free software movement will never be able to produce enough software as good as proprietary software so it fizzle out or remain on the sidelines, and no one will be harmed.
Note: I did not extend my arguement to all works. Some may need the insentive that copyright provides, others may not. So Vietnam's copyright policies (not IP - there is no such thing as IP) may be bad for some industries, but if the FSF is right (which I think they are) it is not bad for software.
You want a group that has been, historically, non-conformists to agree on something so singular as a logo?
Which is why this is a perfect logo for geeks:
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS/FA d- s: a--- C+++ UL++ P++ L++(+++) E W+>++ N+ o+ k? w !O M@ V? PS+@
PE Y PGP->-(++) t+@ 5@ X+@ !R !tv() b+ DI+ D++(----)>++++$ G e>+++$(*) h-
r-- z-
-------END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
which reminds me, I haven't updated that in a while.
Interesting idea, but it would have to be quite a large deposit. Consider how many man hours (lawyer man hours at that) go into writing a claim. In order to deter any corporation the deposit would proably have to be 10x that.
Another tweak towards making it easier for good patents, but not bad one, would be if you took an approach simular to EPA inspections, where your first patent requires little or no deposit, but after every rejection, the deposit amount doubles. Have the amount decay at a slow rate, to allow companies to learn from their mistakes but not get a clean slate every year.
Anyhow, granting fewer crap patents or making them easier to overturn is a very important step in getting back to a healthy patent system. So this report is good news (or atleast the summary on the FTC site is, haven't read the whole report yet). Let your senator know that you agree with the FTC report and inform him that shortening patent duration to reflect the business cycle of the respective industries, is the next step.
nah, the NT kernal really isn't that bad, its everything surrounding it that is very insecure, and a little unstable.
Yeah I think part of the reason it would be hard to make enough money reviewing parts is that there isn't a big enough market for it. Not many people buy their own components, and people that build and sell systems have the money to do their own testing. Compare that to say cars and major appliances which many more people buy, and have a greater margin for saving money, it makes sense why taking the high road is easier for CR than Tom.
Yeah I agree. Like for a while Creative Labs was shipping some modems with the same model number, but some of them were winmodems and others were not. I got bit by this, as I purchased the modem specifically because someone else had had success using it on linux. There was no way to tell by looking at the box (and if i recall correctly, the number on the card itself was the same also). The only difference is that I could see that it didn't have a UART on the chip after I bought it.
While they didn't say themselves that it was not a winmodem, they did say that it was identical to other cards that were. This was a lie. It affected all of their customers, not just linux users, but they got away with it because most windows users didn't notice that it caused their CPU load to go up.
This is a crummy thing for the companies to do but it also makes you wonder about the reliability of reviewing companies. Like how he stated that designtechnica prided itself on reviewing retail products, but then never explained why they were using a review unit, and after noticing the discrepency did a lot of talking but still did not bother to pick up a shelf unit and test it, to see if it was true. Most of the hardware reviewers seem really flakey to me, more fan boys than reliable testing labs.
Unfair tweeking is part of the reason why Consumer Reports never accepts review units from companies, but rather buys them from retail stores, just like anyone else would. The other reason is that receiving free stuff creates a potential conflict of interest which is why they also do not have any advertizing in their magazine or their website. This means that you won't have reviews out before products are released, and operating this way is more expensive, relying on subscribers to run, but it is worth it. I don't always agree with CR's subjective descriptions of products (cars especially), but the hard numbers they provide are the most usefull I have found, and have saved me plenty of money.
I really wish that there was some site equally trustworthy in the computing world. For providing informative analysies there are usefull sites (I have always been impressed with anandtech). But for reviewing components, I have yet to find one I trust.
This is really interesting news, I wish I had mod point right now. Perhaps you should submit this to Taco as another article; I think it deserves to get that much attention.
Your are absolutely right, they definately can be made to do those things. The point of capsles, however, is that they would be disposable, so you would not want spend extra money to add extra capibilities that would be burned up at the end of each mission. Better to build a custom craft that stayed in space - then it could be designed to be as usefull as possible, with a cargo bay, robotic arm, had tug capabilities, facilitated ease of space walk etc. What this would look like would be a different matter, probably like a shuttle with no wings, although more girder-like. Or perhaps it would be a like a semitruck where the cab was a capsle.