us who oppose unions on the (ideological) basis that a free[er] market is a Good Thing
Therein, to me, lies a fundamental contradiction of a lot of the anti-Union comments. In what way is a union anti-free market? Is a union, far from being the opposite, itself a product and example of one?
If it sounds contradictory, a Union is ultimately a group of employees who have grouped together to share negotiating rights and use their muscle as a labour block to strengthen their own terms and conditions. That's pretty much what the average business is doing in the marketplace - in this case, the marketplace is the labour market, and the business is a union. Would Microsoft be as effective if the sales people had to sell what they themselves produce, if the programmers had to program in isolation, if the "innovators" (ha) had to implement their own ideas? Would it be economically that viable if it had a tiny percentage of the overall market? In much the same way, are you as affective as an employee defending your own rights as you would be when you lack the power of a large labour group, market share, and resources you earn by acting as a group?
Because unions are often run by the left, and because the left shares the same rhetoric, it's almost always assumed that unions must, ergo, be anti-capitalist. The truth is that unions cannot survive in anything but a capitalist market. They cannot operate without the right of free association. They cannot negotiate without the ability to incorporate and act as a business on the same level as the businesses they deal with.
They must supply a portfolio of services for those cases where competitors muscle into their territory, be that employers HR departments being "just enough" to keep employees happy, or other unions or professional organisations. Hence the pension plans and health benefits.
To my mind, arguments are used against unions that the self-same people never make in other situations. A union that has a monopoly on labour at a particular site is usually decried as "against the right to work" on the grounds that you must join the union to work at that particular company, whereas if you're forced to, say, buy Microsoft products in order to get a computer capable of sensibly supporting you in the IT field, the self-same people tend to argue that that's free market capitalism friend, and you can always "choose" between buying that Microsoft product and throwing away that career choice so who cares?
I'm not necessarily advocating either, and for the most part, union "monopolies" are few and far between these days making the argument moot. It'd be nice for some of the pseudo-libertarians to admit that, rather than drum on the somewhat old and stupid sounding "unions remove freedom" line, while defending the rights of massive corporations to monopolise anything they want.
--
Last time this topic came up, 6 months ago or so, I recall large numbers of heavily anti-Union comments. I wonder if, given the dramatic change in the jobs market over the last 6 months in the US especially, with many employers taking advantage of the downturn (in addition to those affected by the downturn, ie who have to do it for economic survival) to freeze wages and reduce the quality of working conditions for employees, whether attitudes today will be more pro-union than they were?
To me, if so, that's got to be more irony piled on top of that wire report of two days ago where ex-Dot-COMers are living from government handouts, as I suspect the people hardest hit by the downturn are going to be those who rejoiced in being able to negotiate their own situation and get the 6 digit salaries and game playing privileges that were oft-talked about. Just as the west coast dot-commers were the ones screaming about being over taxed, laughing at those paid less than they were in "old-economy" "secure jobs", those who are used to the high-living of a skills-shortage job market are going to find themselves most battered when their conditions suddenly look out of place - especially when general conditions plummet to below what they ought to be for any decent employer. Pay freezes and cuts, unfair (but difficult to prove unfair) dismissals, are all becoming more common.
I shall read this with interest... --
Re:Who has $15,000 to spend?
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 1
which for free decoders is $0.
Only on two brands of proprietary operating systems: Windows and Mac OS.
No. There's a flat fee you can pay for those operating systems if you write a commercial decoder. For free decoders, you pay zilch, and do not need a licence.
mp3 Software Decoders/Players distributed free-of-charge via
the Internet for personal use of end-users
No license fee is expected for desktop software mp3 decoders/players that are distributed
free-of-charge via the Internet for personal use of end-users.
This doesn't change the fact that the regime (for encoders) is free software hostile (as was implied by the posting you responded to), but for decoders, the regime is very, well, Trolltech like. You don't pay, unless you want to make money.
As was said in that post:
This is not to suggest that MP3/MP3Pro wouldn't be a whole lot better without the Fraunhofer patents for the free
software and open source software communities, but Thompson and Fraunhofer aren't as closed as they're being
made out to be.
They just want to be paid, and have chosen a method which doesn't help us very much.
It's wise to read what you're responding to, else you flame someone you agree with.
--
Without disagreeing with you that setting out to prove something is bad science (can't comment if that's true in this case), your proposal of what constitutes "best research" strikes me is flawed too.
For the most part, research tends to constitute looking at the evidence already available and forming theories (explanations that are capable of being proven wrong if they are wrong), and then subsequently testing those theories (trying to prove those theories are wrong.)
If you start out with no prior opinion, (or better, opinions) you're unlikely to have a basis with which to start - where do you start looking?
Trying to prove theories right is obviously a wrong approach. Trying to test them to see if they can be proven wrong, and reporting the results - together with any circumstantial evidence to back up the theory - would strike me as being fundamentally good research.
--
Carphones radiate 1W. As there are very few carphones in circulation at the moment (no, a handset with a hands free kit doesn't count;-) and as you don't generally hold them to your head, it's highly unlikely that anyone will ever get radiation as strong radiating through their head as you describe.
The usual maximum strength emission for a standard cellphone is between an eighth and a quarter of a watt, depending on the mobile phone standard and frequency. You can find out what it is for yours by checking the back pages of your mobile phone manual.
Modern digital phones, both CDMA and TDMA (I'm talking underlying transmission method here, not standard, so GSM and D-AMPS counts, in this case, as the latter. Please be aware that the two standards are not the same and are in no way similar aside from the way they get data from a phone to a basestation and back) also reduce the amount of radiation in two more ways. To begin with, both only transmit at their highest rated power output if they absolutely have to. It's reasonable to suggest that the vast majority of the time, a cellphone is outputting much less than 1/10th of a watt when it is transmitting.
Secondly, both transmit in "bursts" rather than all of the time. TDMA, in this respect, is more efficient than CDMA because CDMA retransmits the same data several times, but in both cases, neither phone type is transmitting constantly. From memory, GSM (I don't know the figure for TDMA, but I believe it's even lower) the fraction of time it transmits for is 1/6, or 1/12 when transmitting HR.
So, no, by holding a mobile phone to your head, you'll never get anything close to the levels of radiation you describe. At worst, with an analog phone in a poor reception area, you'll get perhaps a quarter of that, with anything more modern in an area with reasonable reception, you'd be unlikely to get more than a single digit percentage of that power.
--
This strikes me as a can on worms. If Reed has worked out some deal with the NetBSD/FreeBSD teams to allow IPFilter to be integrated with the kernel, then one of two things have happened. Either the Net/FreeBSD kernels have been compromised with non-free software, in which case working on those kernels becomes somewhat more hairy, or Reed has agreed to let the Free/NetBSD versions of IPFilter be covered by the BSD licence, in which case, what prevents any group (including Reed's nemesi at the OpenBSD core) from taking the IPFilter parts of those kernels and using the software the way they wish to?
My guess is the former has happened, which then raises of the issue of how many BSD developers will be happy about continuing to work on something that, in some cases, they've decided to work on because of "freedom" issues concerning Linux (and the oh-so-hated GPL)?
Either way it's a nasty can of worms. Reed is entitled, of course, to control the licencing of his project as he sees fit, but at the same time, the onus is on free operating systems to eschew non-free components. On the conversations on OpenBSD journal Reed has indicated somewhat strong hostility to the idea of free rivals to IPFilter being produced. But just as he has the right to restrict the use of IPFilter, so he cannot prevent others from producing replacements, and has to expect that if he overly restricts use of IPFilter, that will have negative consequences for the future of the IPFilter project.
It's his ball. He can take it away. He can only let people he thinks are his friends play with it. But if he forces his friends to play by his rules only, rules contrary to those his friends want to play, those friends may disappear and play with others, and he can't stop the people who aren't his friends from getting their own ball.
All of which is a shame. IPFilter is a good product. It'll be a waste to see it go.
--
Yeah, I know it's a troll. But it did make me wonder: Surely if there was a "conspiracy" involved, it would be the other way around?
Right now, NASA is getting its budgets squeezed while the current administration promises large amounts of funding for son-of-SDI type programs. If NASA wants funding, perhaps it would be better off making peaceful, scientific, programs look like hard-core military projects?
--
No, because the FSF are doing exactly what they suggest, ie getting the permission of contributors to FSF code before making changes to the licence. In this case, the permission part is done by making a condition of having contributions be a part of the "official" FSF release have their copyrights transfered over to the FSF.
...which is probably the only viable way of making sure the licence control remains with the maintainer of the code for any large project, as it should be.
Also be aware that there is a different between FSF/GNU code and GPL'd code. If you release something under the GPL, it is your code. You may do with it whatever you want, including change the licence. You can choose whether or not to accept modifications to your officially maintained version of the code, and if so what restrictions to place on such modifications - ie should the author of the modifications give up their copyrights, keep in touch with you, etc, etc.
If a contributor doesn't want to transfer the copyright to you, they have the right, because the GPL allows it, to release their own version of your program with their modifications. They don't have to submit the changes to you.
For a real life example of this happening, which involves the FSF and GNU software, see the history of XEmacs (formerly Lucid Emacs.) The original program, GNU Emacs, was copyrighted by the FSF, and Stallman wanted to make sure all modifications were also copyrighted by the FSF to make it easier to protect the copyrights of the entire package. The authors of the modifications that begat Lucid Emacs didn't want to give up those rights, so they released, and are maintaining, their own version. That version is GPL protected, and if the FSF were, erm, bought by Microsoft-AOL-Time-Warner-Fox-Worldcom tomorrow and told that no new versions of EMACS should be released under the GPL, it wouldn't affect XEmacs in the slightest.
(Which is somewhat ironic as I know both parties in the XEmacs/GNU Emacs saga are unhappy about the situation, but it does have the side effect of making it much more difficult for up-to-date versions of EMACS to ever be removed from free circulation.)
--
Quite. It'll be somewhat ironic that though the movie studios have used Linux to make the movie, it'll remain illegal (within US borders) to use Linux to actually watch the movie, whether you've forked out $25 for the privilege of owning an encrypted, region encoded, DVD, or not.
Thank you MPAA. Thank you DCMA. Thank you Orin Hatch. Thank you "Justice" Kaplan.
--
Let's be honest. What Microsoft is really trying to do is ensure that open source and free software supporters across the world are so busy writing "Mundie Rebuttals" that none of them get a chance to do any coding, thus allowing Microsoft to sneak way ahead of everyone until they notice.
If you don't believe me, ask yourself this: Why did Microsoft invest $50,000,000 in Andover.net* only the other day? Huh? Huh?
I think the truth speaks for itself. Anyway, enough of this, I have a rebuttal to write...
Of the three innovators above, Bell is probably the only person whose key discovery qualifies as an invention. The infamous patent office story is both widely accepted to be a red herring (Bell clearly developed the telephone independently, and the rival invention was actually a way of transmitting multiple morse code signals by using different frequency tones as carriers - it wasn't intended as a voice-based communication device.)
Edison's picked up a lot of credit for stuff he developed rather than invented. The lightbulb? That was Joseph Swan's. Edison merely made it last long enough and packaged the infrastructure to go with it. Most of the major discoveries to do with electricity and ways of transmitting it long distances were Tesla's doing.
Ford didn't invent anything. He was an innovator in the classic sense - putting together different technologies, from the assembly line to the motor vehicle, and using business know how to turn it into a success. Ford did not invent the assembly line, despite being credited with it - that honour goes to Ransome Olds, 10-15 years previously.
As a group of "inventors", Mundie seems to wide of the mark again. Ironic really. Microsoft's apologists usually claim that Microsoft is being innovative, and when forced to justify that given they've never invented anything, point out that innovation does not equal invention, merely the popularisation commercially of a new technology.
And Microsoft didn't even do that. Xerox put together the first GUIs. Apple turned them into commercial successes. Microsoft merely jumped on the bandwagon, and managed to take over the market doing that.
--
Even better... a ".not" domain, reserved for anyone except legitimate trademark holders. "You can't have mattel.not, you are mattel, that would be saying that you're not, when you are, and, erm..."
Did ICANN ever resolve the issue that there was a pre-existing.biz domain which the (IIRC) Alternic people were supporting?
I mean, with ICANN being based on consensus building and cooperation, I assume they did resolve the issue didn't they? After all, not resolving the issue would look, well, caustic, pointlessly uncooperative for the sake of, well, spoiling other communities on the Internet. I mean, isn't the whole reason Cerf et al thinks that making ICANN democratically accountable is bunk based on the idea that ICANN is founded on the principles of cooperation and consensus building?
Are we likely to see a major ISP turn around and point their root servers at a rival any time soon, or do we have to put up with this crap forever more? --
Britain has a constitution, it's just not a written constitution. Trust me, it's perfectly possible for someone to be forbidden from doing something because it's unconstitutional, in the UK as with virtually every other governed place.
US law has its roots in English common law. Need an authoritive reference? Ask the CIA.
The appearance of a (written or otherwise) constitution has no bearing, in itself, on whether a religion is recognised or not. Only if the constitution actually mentions religion does it become an issue. In the US constitution, religion is relevent because of the 1st Ammendment, part of the bill of rights. In the British, the Queen is both the head of state and head of the Church of England. In British law, the concept of "recognised religions" is largely irrelevent, the government not formally recognising religions, nor granting any but the CofE special status, nor banning nor confering any other special rights upon them, but Britain does have several written bills of rights, varying from the Magna Carta to the European Declaration of Human Rights which was recently signed into British law.
So, other than demonstrating cluelessness about the workings of worlds outside that of the US, it's difficult to work out what the poster you're replying to was trying to say...
--
Sullivan manages to undermine her argument by suggesting that someone can always use a video camera to tape a copy of a DVD being played on approved equipment, and then suggests that DeCSS is speech because it can be written as a hiaku, rather than suggesting that it's speech because it's a list of instructions for decoding CSS encrypted content - something that's unquestionably speech.
It's as if the intent is for 2600, etc, to lose this case. Is this so it can go to the Supreme Court and be ruled upon definitively, or is it just bad lawyering?
--
If I look at Linux, and then write an entirely new operating system or go to work for Microsoft or whatever, and use techniques and skills gleaned from studying the Linux source code, but, and this is the critical part, do not use code from Linux, then what I've done is perfectly legal, and RMS isn't going to sue me, audit me, turn me into a banana, or anything else.
If, on the other hand, I work on Windows source under the "shared source" rationale, and then turn to work on my new OS, Linux, go to work for Be and work on BeOS, etc, then, yes, it is a breach of contract and Microsoft can slaughter my first born son.
It's rather a big difference, I think you'll agree. --
If you are
calm, and simply point out the 'benefits' of open source, you end up sounding like an MS commercial.
"Improved uptime, better security, more stability, etc".
Sounds like those MS commercials where they show the machines in the server room silently chugging away.
"This user is trying to read his documents after reinstalling the latest bug fix to his operating system last night. He's getting frustraited, as every button he hits seems to do nothing at all. The computer's responding, it's just his wordprocessor keeps beeping at him and he can't seem to close the window or bring up the file menu.
"But the paperclip doesn't mind. The paperclip can cope with the user's frustraition as he bangs away at the keyboard trying to get something to work. The paperclip is happy to sit in the corner, unseen, with a modal requester disguised as a help window waiting for the user to notice. The paperclip doesn't mind that the user's only question is "How do I get the file menu to open" to which the answer is "close the f---ing paperclip.". The paperclip will be there as long as it takes. And when the user finally throws the entire machine out of the window, the paperclip wont mind either.
Seriously though, the major complaint I hear amongst people wanting to move over to Linux isn't that there aren't enough games but that their existing game collection would go out the window if they were to switch.
And they don't want to do that.
I say go on, get 'em to both projects. We need compatability, and we need a genuine native powerful platform that lets Linux beat the crap out of the competition. --
Obviously this topic has brought out all the morons. You can't call the OS/2 mouse button assignments "untintuitive"
simply because you're so damned used to what Microsoft decided to do *years* later. Further, if you had half-a-brain
you could have open the freaking mouse control panel and reassigned the god-damned buttons yourself! Idiot.
It certainly seems to have brought the OS/2 fanatics who'll insult anyone who disagrees with them. All you've proven is that (a) OS/2 is even less intuitive than previously written - if a control panel switch isn't easily found and is needed to correct an obviously controvertial IBM design decision, and (b) that you clearly have no idea about any OSes outside of Microsoft and OS/2.
Grow up sonny. You give OS/2 zealots a bad name. --
The post you're responding to was saying it was unintuitive and explained why it was unintuitive - it's outside of the model of the left mouse button being the 'finger'. Whether there are functionality reasons for it being counter to what you'd expect seems irrelevent to that, it is either intuitive or it isn't.
Jeez, why don't you quit bashing people whose arguments you don't understand? And how is it that someone can post making several points about OS/2's clunky user interface, yet you all concentrate on one of the (relatively minor) issues raised. Why not address some of the others?
--
For those interested, because it was mentioned but not linked to from LinuxPlanet, here's Stallman & Moglen's response to Craig Mundie's interview.
Quote:
Moglen noted that Microsoft's confusion about the GPL's origins is not surprising. He said that "taking advice on what the
GPL means from Microsoft is like taking Stalin's word on the meaning of the US Constitution.
Despite the above quote, it's a good response and also one that might take aback some of the "Free software is a tool of communism" people. --
Looking at the standard, it struck me that for the most part, all the things that define what a distribution is (packaging format, some of the hierarchy issues, init scripts, etc) are being standardised.
My question is, is it not so much that we're making it so all software can run on many distributions, as making all distributions essentially the same?
Slashdot Mirror
If it sounds contradictory, a Union is ultimately a group of employees who have grouped together to share negotiating rights and use their muscle as a labour block to strengthen their own terms and conditions. That's pretty much what the average business is doing in the marketplace - in this case, the marketplace is the labour market, and the business is a union. Would Microsoft be as effective if the sales people had to sell what they themselves produce, if the programmers had to program in isolation, if the "innovators" (ha) had to implement their own ideas? Would it be economically that viable if it had a tiny percentage of the overall market? In much the same way, are you as affective as an employee defending your own rights as you would be when you lack the power of a large labour group, market share, and resources you earn by acting as a group?
Because unions are often run by the left, and because the left shares the same rhetoric, it's almost always assumed that unions must, ergo, be anti-capitalist. The truth is that unions cannot survive in anything but a capitalist market. They cannot operate without the right of free association. They cannot negotiate without the ability to incorporate and act as a business on the same level as the businesses they deal with.
They must supply a portfolio of services for those cases where competitors muscle into their territory, be that employers HR departments being "just enough" to keep employees happy, or other unions or professional organisations. Hence the pension plans and health benefits.
To my mind, arguments are used against unions that the self-same people never make in other situations. A union that has a monopoly on labour at a particular site is usually decried as "against the right to work" on the grounds that you must join the union to work at that particular company, whereas if you're forced to, say, buy Microsoft products in order to get a computer capable of sensibly supporting you in the IT field, the self-same people tend to argue that that's free market capitalism friend, and you can always "choose" between buying that Microsoft product and throwing away that career choice so who cares?
I'm not necessarily advocating either, and for the most part, union "monopolies" are few and far between these days making the argument moot. It'd be nice for some of the pseudo-libertarians to admit that, rather than drum on the somewhat old and stupid sounding "unions remove freedom" line, while defending the rights of massive corporations to monopolise anything they want.
--
To me, if so, that's got to be more irony piled on top of that wire report of two days ago where ex-Dot-COMers are living from government handouts, as I suspect the people hardest hit by the downturn are going to be those who rejoiced in being able to negotiate their own situation and get the 6 digit salaries and game playing privileges that were oft-talked about. Just as the west coast dot-commers were the ones screaming about being over taxed, laughing at those paid less than they were in "old-economy" "secure jobs", those who are used to the high-living of a skills-shortage job market are going to find themselves most battered when their conditions suddenly look out of place - especially when general conditions plummet to below what they ought to be for any decent employer. Pay freezes and cuts, unfair (but difficult to prove unfair) dismissals, are all becoming more common.
I shall read this with interest...
--
The relevent page explains it specifically:
This doesn't change the fact that the regime (for encoders) is free software hostile (as was implied by the posting you responded to), but for decoders, the regime is very, well, Trolltech like. You don't pay, unless you want to make money.As was said in that post:
It's wise to read what you're responding to, else you flame someone you agree with.--
For the most part, research tends to constitute looking at the evidence already available and forming theories (explanations that are capable of being proven wrong if they are wrong), and then subsequently testing those theories (trying to prove those theories are wrong.)
If you start out with no prior opinion, (or better, opinions) you're unlikely to have a basis with which to start - where do you start looking?
Trying to prove theories right is obviously a wrong approach. Trying to test them to see if they can be proven wrong, and reporting the results - together with any circumstantial evidence to back up the theory - would strike me as being fundamentally good research.
--
The usual maximum strength emission for a standard cellphone is between an eighth and a quarter of a watt, depending on the mobile phone standard and frequency. You can find out what it is for yours by checking the back pages of your mobile phone manual.
Modern digital phones, both CDMA and TDMA (I'm talking underlying transmission method here, not standard, so GSM and D-AMPS counts, in this case, as the latter. Please be aware that the two standards are not the same and are in no way similar aside from the way they get data from a phone to a basestation and back) also reduce the amount of radiation in two more ways. To begin with, both only transmit at their highest rated power output if they absolutely have to. It's reasonable to suggest that the vast majority of the time, a cellphone is outputting much less than 1/10th of a watt when it is transmitting.
Secondly, both transmit in "bursts" rather than all of the time. TDMA, in this respect, is more efficient than CDMA because CDMA retransmits the same data several times, but in both cases, neither phone type is transmitting constantly. From memory, GSM (I don't know the figure for TDMA, but I believe it's even lower) the fraction of time it transmits for is 1/6, or 1/12 when transmitting HR.
So, no, by holding a mobile phone to your head, you'll never get anything close to the levels of radiation you describe. At worst, with an analog phone in a poor reception area, you'll get perhaps a quarter of that, with anything more modern in an area with reasonable reception, you'd be unlikely to get more than a single digit percentage of that power.
--
Whichever BSD Microsoft are taking the code from, it sure as hell isn't OpenBSD... ;-)
--
My guess is the former has happened, which then raises of the issue of how many BSD developers will be happy about continuing to work on something that, in some cases, they've decided to work on because of "freedom" issues concerning Linux (and the oh-so-hated GPL)?
Either way it's a nasty can of worms. Reed is entitled, of course, to control the licencing of his project as he sees fit, but at the same time, the onus is on free operating systems to eschew non-free components. On the conversations on OpenBSD journal Reed has indicated somewhat strong hostility to the idea of free rivals to IPFilter being produced. But just as he has the right to restrict the use of IPFilter, so he cannot prevent others from producing replacements, and has to expect that if he overly restricts use of IPFilter, that will have negative consequences for the future of the IPFilter project.
It's his ball. He can take it away. He can only let people he thinks are his friends play with it. But if he forces his friends to play by his rules only, rules contrary to those his friends want to play, those friends may disappear and play with others, and he can't stop the people who aren't his friends from getting their own ball.
All of which is a shame. IPFilter is a good product. It'll be a waste to see it go.
--
Right now, NASA is getting its budgets squeezed while the current administration promises large amounts of funding for son-of-SDI type programs. If NASA wants funding, perhaps it would be better off making peaceful, scientific, programs look like hard-core military projects?
--
Nah, it's just CNN used a Pentium to (FDIV) divide 64 by 32...
--
Also be aware that there is a different between FSF/GNU code and GPL'd code. If you release something under the GPL, it is your code. You may do with it whatever you want, including change the licence. You can choose whether or not to accept modifications to your officially maintained version of the code, and if so what restrictions to place on such modifications - ie should the author of the modifications give up their copyrights, keep in touch with you, etc, etc.
If a contributor doesn't want to transfer the copyright to you, they have the right, because the GPL allows it, to release their own version of your program with their modifications. They don't have to submit the changes to you.
For a real life example of this happening, which involves the FSF and GNU software, see the history of XEmacs (formerly Lucid Emacs.) The original program, GNU Emacs, was copyrighted by the FSF, and Stallman wanted to make sure all modifications were also copyrighted by the FSF to make it easier to protect the copyrights of the entire package. The authors of the modifications that begat Lucid Emacs didn't want to give up those rights, so they released, and are maintaining, their own version. That version is GPL protected, and if the FSF were, erm, bought by Microsoft-AOL-Time-Warner-Fox-Worldcom tomorrow and told that no new versions of EMACS should be released under the GPL, it wouldn't affect XEmacs in the slightest.
(Which is somewhat ironic as I know both parties in the XEmacs/GNU Emacs saga are unhappy about the situation, but it does have the side effect of making it much more difficult for up-to-date versions of EMACS to ever be removed from free circulation.)
--
Thank you MPAA. Thank you DCMA. Thank you Orin Hatch. Thank you "Justice" Kaplan.
--
If you don't believe me, ask yourself this: Why did Microsoft invest $50,000,000 in Andover.net* only the other day? Huh? Huh?
I think the truth speaks for itself. Anyway, enough of this, I have a rebuttal to write...
* Well, ok, I made that up.
--
Edison's picked up a lot of credit for stuff he developed rather than invented. The lightbulb? That was Joseph Swan's. Edison merely made it last long enough and packaged the infrastructure to go with it. Most of the major discoveries to do with electricity and ways of transmitting it long distances were Tesla's doing.
Ford didn't invent anything. He was an innovator in the classic sense - putting together different technologies, from the assembly line to the motor vehicle, and using business know how to turn it into a success. Ford did not invent the assembly line, despite being credited with it - that honour goes to Ransome Olds, 10-15 years previously.
As a group of "inventors", Mundie seems to wide of the mark again. Ironic really. Microsoft's apologists usually claim that Microsoft is being innovative, and when forced to justify that given they've never invented anything, point out that innovation does not equal invention, merely the popularisation commercially of a new technology.
And Microsoft didn't even do that. Xerox put together the first GUIs. Apple turned them into commercial successes. Microsoft merely jumped on the bandwagon, and managed to take over the market doing that.
--
Oh well.
--
I mean, with ICANN being based on consensus building and cooperation, I assume they did resolve the issue didn't they? After all, not resolving the issue would look, well, caustic, pointlessly uncooperative for the sake of, well, spoiling other communities on the Internet. I mean, isn't the whole reason Cerf et al thinks that making ICANN democratically accountable is bunk based on the idea that ICANN is founded on the principles of cooperation and consensus building?
Are we likely to see a major ISP turn around and point their root servers at a rival any time soon, or do we have to put up with this crap forever more?
--
- Britain has a constitution, it's just not a written constitution. Trust me, it's perfectly possible for someone to be forbidden from doing something because it's unconstitutional, in the UK as with virtually every other governed place.
-
US law has its roots in English common law. Need an authoritive reference? Ask the CIA.
-
The appearance of a (written or otherwise) constitution has no bearing, in itself, on whether a religion is recognised or not. Only if the constitution actually mentions religion does it become an issue. In the US constitution, religion is relevent because of the 1st Ammendment, part of the bill of rights. In the British, the Queen is both the head of state and head of the Church of England. In British law, the concept of "recognised religions" is largely irrelevent, the government not formally recognising religions, nor granting any but the CofE special status, nor banning nor confering any other special rights upon them, but Britain does have several written bills of rights, varying from the Magna Carta to the European Declaration of Human Rights which was recently signed into British law.
So, other than demonstrating cluelessness about the workings of worlds outside that of the US, it's difficult to work out what the poster you're replying to was trying to say...--
It's as if the intent is for 2600, etc, to lose this case. Is this so it can go to the Supreme Court and be ruled upon definitively, or is it just bad lawyering?
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If, on the other hand, I work on Windows source under the "shared source" rationale, and then turn to work on my new OS, Linux, go to work for Be and work on BeOS, etc, then, yes, it is a breach of contract and Microsoft can slaughter my first born son.
It's rather a big difference, I think you'll agree.
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"But the paperclip doesn't mind. The paperclip can cope with the user's frustraition as he bangs away at the keyboard trying to get something to work. The paperclip is happy to sit in the corner, unseen, with a modal requester disguised as a help window waiting for the user to notice. The paperclip doesn't mind that the user's only question is "How do I get the file menu to open" to which the answer is "close the f---ing paperclip.". The paperclip will be there as long as it takes. And when the user finally throws the entire machine out of the window, the paperclip wont mind either.
"Microsoft, where do you want to go today?"
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And they don't want to do that.
I say go on, get 'em to both projects. We need compatability, and we need a genuine native powerful platform that lets Linux beat the crap out of the competition.
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Grow up sonny. You give OS/2 zealots a bad name.
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Jeez, why don't you quit bashing people whose arguments you don't understand? And how is it that someone can post making several points about OS/2's clunky user interface, yet you all concentrate on one of the (relatively minor) issues raised. Why not address some of the others?
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Despite the above quote, it's a good response and also one that might take aback some of the "Free software is a tool of communism" people.--
My question is, is it not so much that we're making it so all software can run on many distributions, as making all distributions essentially the same?
And if so, is this really a good thing?
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