Then it goes on with the other questions, like, what if the hardware or kernel crashes and answers them with 'use things that don't crash'.
Agh. I mean, that's really, really bad engineering. You don't engineer things with the assumption that everything will work. You engineer them to fail gracefully when everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And preferably with margin.
If the system requirements for this are UPS, crashproof hardware and a completely bug-free OS, well, I'm sorry, but there's no system in the world capable of fulfilling the requirements.
Still, I'm sure there are cases where it's useful; as long as speed is of higher importance than data integrity, this sounds very useful.
I suspect the blogger in question is a fairly rare breed of Linux user. Personally I don't find command line use 'fun'. Sometimes I find it more practical, sometimes I find it less frustrating, sometimes I find it necessary, but rarely have I found it 'fun' (well, I guess MUD's could be considered 'command line').
Command lines are a tool. A reliable and powerful tool, but still just a tool.
In the long run, I see laptops as the replacement for desktop computing,
I dont. For the very same reasons you prefer the laptop to the EEE. Comparatively laptops have horrible price and performance. They mostly have quirky hardware, annoying keyboards and irritating mousepads. You cant cram enough memory into them, it's almost impossible to attach enough screens to them to obtain usable amounts of screen real-estate, and if you come up with something with decent specs they're barely movable anyway. And they all come pre-broken with expensive proprietary li-ion batteries with a usable lifespan of 18 months.
I'd rather spend less money in total and get both a decent desktop _and_ an EEE for the ultraportable part.
To each their own, but like the grandparent I have never found a laptop satisfactory in any aspect, while I have had some experience with ultraportables I've liked (while most recent examples have been far too expensive to serve the purpose. Until the EEE. Which I'll at least take a serious look at).
When mobile broadband is $40/mo all over the country, get back to me.
Don't forget to qualify that with you being the only one using it. If you think wifi degrades rapidly as congestion grows, imagine the capacity for mobile broadband to be bogged down.
I have to agree. I often explicitly search wikipedia for reasonably structured information on neo-culture subjects like characters in TV shows, books or cartoons.
Much of wikipedias usefulness stems from it's inclusivity; if any given subject had to have a related doctorate, we'd have to wait 50 years until academia decides to catch up.
Hmm, we're not even reading the slashdot snip these days? I must've missed the memo, this will improve my opinionating efficiency:).
In case we're still reading the comments, the reason they state here makes it sound like it's intended to ensure the person who checks in is the one who boards.
Of course, you're still most likely right, they'll just start storing it anyway. And 'not shared with law enforcement' should probably be continued with 'but shared with security services, foreign agencies, whatever hackers have hacked our systems, whoever stole Jimmy's laptop, anyone picking up the couriers lost package and anyone rummaging through our trash'.
It can say it but it'd be lying; with GPLv3 the pact becomes worthless.
This differentiation has allowed Novell to snag some big clients that almost certainly would have gone with Red Hat otherwise.
It probably lost them quite a few too. And those who'd been dubious about SuSE's not-quite-free history but warmed up to Novell most likely placed SuSE straight back in the don't-touch-with-a-ten-feet-pole pile.
I'd say the deal has lost them any trust the free software community had. Any code coming out of Novell is now suspect; potentially patent encumbered and possibly intended as a trap. Novell now has a monetary interest in poisoning the community software pool; thats reason enough to distrust anything they say or do.
So instead of buying a separate chip for graphics, you get the same performance boost from just getting a second CPU or one with more cores.
Not only that; you get a performance boost from your server. And from your kids computers. You get a performance boost from your HTPC. And potentially any other computer on your network.
The highly paralellizable nature is the most interesting aspect to raytracing IMO; with distributed engines one could do some very cool things.
That would be rather ironic, considering that intellectual 'property' would more aptly be called intellectual 'taxation right'.
Economically the monopoly rights of IP are much closer to taxes such as alcohol or tobacco tax. Best way they could be described as privately held taxation rights on copies of certain material.
Of course, that would be far to close to describing the purpose of the medieval origin of the concepts (enriching the aristocracy and paying their merchant friends for support (privately held taxation rights were not an alien concept at the time)), which is why WIPO promoted the 'property' concept (World Intellectual Taxation Organization might alienate conservatives, libertarians and free marketers who could be tricked into thinking 'property' instead of 'tax').
Just like tobacco and alcohol taxes, these taxes also have the same effects of creating a lucrative black market (altho less lucrative thanks to p2p) and slowing distribution and adoption in the economy (not very bright as unlike alcohol and tobacco we might actually want more rapid adoption of new and improved products, as well as maximizing the created wealth perceived through the duplication of these products).
The tradeoff was claimed to be increased creation of the originals; in reality, as a tax it's even less efficient than most government run taxation and benefit programs (and you dont hear that many anecdotes about coke-sniffing IRS agents and government employees, compared to how these privately owned taxation revenues are spent).
He could have started his own 'defense intelligence newsletter', 'providing insights into military matters', and charged a hefty subscription fee. Capitalizing on mistakes by US military personnel would put him in the company of the best (or most) defense contractors.
It's not the money. While I'm sure the recipient of that kind of money would be hesitant to comment negatively, the keyword here is recently.
Ten months into an acquisition and a company of Microsofts size has barely noticed it's got a new appendage. They probably haven't even finished connecting internal networks or handed out ID's, never mind hooking up finance and reporting systems.
See if 'anything's changed' in five years, once functional units have been merged into the mainstay and the real estate unit wonders why they have this expensive office in silicon valley, the culture unit has been briefed in the new culture is busy holding chairthrowing contests, and 'identity' is something you put in the corporate directory and 'identity management' deals with.
Spread all around the economy, ranging from Google to mom'n'pop shops. The linux billionaires are those who _use_ linux and save money. Coincidentally, the very same are often those who invest time back to solve their own problems, as the money they save far, far outweighs the money it'd cost to roll their own from scratch.
The fact that someone is making money from monopoly protections does not mean that it's good for the economy as a whole. We could hand out monopoly rights for air, and you'd get a huge AirCo, developing amazing technology for measuring how much air each person was using and charging for it. They'd certainly make money, but we'd all be poorer by paying for a resources that would have been produced anyway.
Linux, BSD, and all Free Software proves that software would be produced anyway.
If anyone could just copy chips we'd get the same economy there. There are many 'open chip' projects around.
The purpose of the economy isn't about 'making money'. The purpose of the free market economy is to maximize the creation of wealth by encouraging competition in overcharging sectors and constantly lowering the costs of production. When the cost of production reaches zero we've all won; we've got infinite wealth.
It's not like any lawsuit can do anything to him. He's got immunity. And it's not like he cares what people speak out against.
Courage requires risking something. Bush's merely an obstinate simpleton, something a coward can easily be. As long as he doesn't risk getting smacked in the face about it.
hard drives are NOT suitable for long term backup, they just don't do well enough sitting idle for years
I'd trust my data to a contained drive that I've frankly never, ever, seen go bad offline, over very unreliable optical media any day. I don't know where you store your harddrives, but considering many still contain recoverable data even after having houses burn down around them it must be harsh.
Perhaps we'll get some reliable MTBF data on idle harddrives what with MAID becoming popular.
At the rate disksizes are progressing you'd have to have massive amounts (as in the range of exabytes) of never-accessed archival data to make non-disk storage worthwhile. For most storage sizes, you get better cost and reliability with multiple online or nearline integrity managed replicas, and you get the benefit of trivial upmigration for really long-term data.
since the extra storage makes for a great back up solution.
As far as I can tell it wont be a great backup solution anytime soon. BD-R disks are twice the cost per gigabyte compared to SATA disks, rewritable even more. And that's excluding the writer. Further, they're so small in comparison to todays storage that just the pain of changing disks would be reason enough to use USB disks instead. And that's only going to get worse.
So personally I haven't been tempted to use either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD anywhere, nor can I see any such temptation in the foreseeable future.
A few years back someone demonstrated a 200GB BluRay disc.
I recently saw a 1000GB SATA-RAY disc demonstrated. Actually I even saw it for sale. Slightly thicker than the plastic, but I can live with that.
Seriously tho, judging from the development, sale and prices of ordinary multilayer DVDs, I expect the new optical formats to remain permanently impractical and inferior as a storage medium as compared to simply buying more harddisks. They haven't been designed as data storage, they've been designed with the primary purpose of gathering shelf-dust in stores and at home. With the rapid spread and expansion of USB drives and memory sticks I doubt they'll manage to gather as extensive use as backup and transportation medium as the older optical formats.
because the current Yahoo shareholders will not be shareholders at that point.
The offer was part cash and part Microsoft shares (50/50, I think). I can certainly see why a shareholder would not regard Microsoft shares as an acceptable replacement (as it would make them shareholders in the joined, conceivably less valuable, corporation). And a 20 billion sellof of Microsoft shares would put a serious dent in the share price, so it's hardly equivalent.
IIRC, one countersuggestion was also to make the offer all cash, which would make your point valid, but this far I have not seen Microsoft offer to make it all-cash (I could've missed it tho).
and they'll say yes.
Perhaps. Eventually. For some price.
Personally I suspect the braindrain and customer dropoff will make this an exceptionally unprofitable deal. MSFT might be a nice stock to short as this deal moves along.
Currently it's most practical to keep it for legacy applications.
if you didn't you couldn't even see slashdot.org
Sure, and without NAT I couldnt see slashdot.org from this computer either. Routing ipv4 traffic through an address translator isnt exactly new, and doing the same thing (but mangling a few more headers) once you're v6 only isn't that different.
Yes, as long as someone, somewhere has v4 only, someone somewhere else has to have a v4 and v6 adress to provide a gateway. I could do it myself and kill ipv4 completely on my internal network, but frankly, I have no need to.
Running v6 only at this point is something you could do to prove you can, but frankly it'd be more bother than it's worth. Running both I get the advantages of v6 without having to worry about legacy connectivity issues.
Most ISPs do not route 6to4 so that's out.
Here I have yet to find an ISP that doesn't. The ones I've tried route to 192.88.99.1 without any problem. Call your ISP and complain, they obviously have some routing issues.
We could easily do a switch to IP6 but only when the majority just accepts that it has to be done, and bites the bullet.
Frankly you don't even need a majority to do it, you can extend with v6 capability on your own. I've switched to IPv6. I had to look up the SI prefix for the number of addresses that are _mine_ now (1 yottaadresses or something). Mine mine mine. Um.
Anyways. For those who can be bothered to it's not that hard. Get a tunnel from sixxs.net or set up 6to4. IPv4 will still work fine, but suddenly you can have as many fixed adresses you want. Very nice to be able to ssh and scp directly to nodes behind a NAT. And, of course, it gives you the right to smugly outdo your geek friends with your immense address range.
I think you need to get some linguistic perspective. There's been a certain inflation in the use of the word evil. Embodied in the fact that I wasn't even the one originally framing the discussion in those terms.
The two are not the same. Business is not war. At worst, in business, people lose money. In war, people lose their lives.
Oh, please. Get some glasses; you have to have an extremely myopic view of the impact of economy and business decisions on peoples lives to imagine that they don't kill people. Go take a peek at the conditions of previous communist countries to examine the impact on living conditions, economic resources and life expectancies caused by prevalent monopolies throughout the industry.
The illegitimate billions companies like Microsoft have extracted from the economy are billions not spent in other areas. Each monopoly-supported unproductive employee there is one not employed more gainfully elsewhere. This includes health-care, medical research, etc, etc, things that actually do impact peoples lives.
This is the fundamental excuse for the free market capitalistic economy; carefully maintained competition maximizes the total experienced wealth and well-being in the whole economy. Condoning anti-competetive practices undermines that fundamental excuse and creates real, palpable losses and suffering.
Of course, that there are real, non-evil people down in the trenches making and supporting products
The ole 'only following orders' excuse, eh?
Really tho, I think most people know and acknowledge that. It just makes little difference as it's not those non-evil people making the actual decisions that affect everyone else. To those losing their jobs as their companies get killed by anticompetetive practices it doesn't really help that much (obviously) that there were nice people at Microsoft. To those getting downsized as corporate expenditure on software made the business unprofitable it doesn't help either. Nor to those who can't access their banks, can't use products they've bought, etc, etc, etc.
I'd suggest that the nice guys in the trenches, if they want to demonstrate their good will, ensure that the evil guys are the first one over the top the next time. And that they get shot in the back repeatedly just in case the enemy doesn't do the job right.
If you come around and offer to clean my windows for free, I naturally assume its some kind of scam.
But if I come around offering you bottled air for a price you'd buy? I'm getting a new business idea...
Frankly, I find the reasoning specious. There are lots of things we expect to be free just as there are lots of things we expect to cost and most people can tell the difference between value and price (or the whole economic system would rapidly break down).
I can almost put a number on it
It's not particularly hard. Microsofts uses monopoly pricing, not competetive pricing. They'll charge what the market can bear and raise prices until loss of sales equates to lower total revenue. It's a price calculation related to disposable income among the customers, and most people have an inkling about how the disposable income situation is or will be.
Something I guess I can grudgingly live with.
It will be exactly what you can grudgingly live with. Not a cent more and not a cent less or they wouldn't be maximizing revenue.
For anyone wanting an explanation of what the 'open specification promise' entails it's quite easy. It's a 'promise' from a corporation that barely complies with legal restraints, and only reluctantly operates within the limits of the law. So for what it's worth they might as well have published a blank page. Except then the non-lawyers would probably also conclude it was useless.
If they wanted to put their money where their mouth was they'd release any patents or other potential relevant IP into the public domain. The fact that that's not what they're doing indicates they have no intention of keeping that promise at all.
I think you can strike the words 'that' and 'deemed' from that sentance. The entire mechanism of patents is to prevent competition.
The only way to allow a competetive free market and still reward innovation beyond what the free market does is to have the patent office be the ones actually paying the patent holders (according to level of use, maximum payout, etc). Then we could have an actual useful debate about levels of financing, patent trolls would no longer be a problem for anyone and we'd have a whole lot of other issues automatically solved (such as having a system that actually promoted adoption of new and (theoretically) better products as they would no longer carry a patent-price penalty, increased dissemination rate, more rapid building on other technology, more readable patents, no more 'small inventor' troubles, etc, etc, etc).
But sadly, we still know jack shit about how the brain works,
We know exactly how the brain works. Its one huge neural network. We've made many silicon versions of those; they've found use in everything from spam filtering to mail sorting.
Replicating the brain as a neural network isn't exactly trivial, but there's nothing 'unknown' about it, just lots and lots of work. It also has the slight problem that if you want an intelligence even remotely similar to what we'd recognize as a human one you'd probably have to replicate most of the learning input drives; hunger, pain, pleasure, survival instincts, etc. Neural networks model the world around them in relation to the inputs that drive the most fundamental 'right/wrong' experiences, vary them and you'd probably end up with something entirely different.
Of course, once you finally created a human-like intelligence with survival instincts you'd probably find it rapidly realizing that with humans around its odds of survival aren't that high (particularly as long as we haven't dealt with the ethical issues). And you'd get SkyNet. So.
In the end, it's dubious that we'd actually want a human-like AI, nevermind a super-human one. Idiot-savants are much more useful for practical applications and it lets us have reasonably smart slave type devices without the ethical (and competetive) problems of full-blown sentience.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, use a UPS
Then it goes on with the other questions, like, what if the hardware or kernel crashes and answers them with 'use things that don't crash'.
Agh. I mean, that's really, really bad engineering. You don't engineer things with the assumption that everything will work. You engineer them to fail gracefully when everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And preferably with margin.
If the system requirements for this are UPS, crashproof hardware and a completely bug-free OS, well, I'm sorry, but there's no system in the world capable of fulfilling the requirements.
Still, I'm sure there are cases where it's useful; as long as speed is of higher importance than data integrity, this sounds very useful.
Fun?
I suspect the blogger in question is a fairly rare breed of Linux user. Personally I don't find command line use 'fun'. Sometimes I find it more practical, sometimes I find it less frustrating, sometimes I find it necessary, but rarely have I found it 'fun' (well, I guess MUD's could be considered 'command line').
Command lines are a tool. A reliable and powerful tool, but still just a tool.
In the long run, I see laptops as the replacement for desktop computing,
I dont. For the very same reasons you prefer the laptop to the EEE. Comparatively laptops have horrible price and performance. They mostly have quirky hardware, annoying keyboards and irritating mousepads. You cant cram enough memory into them, it's almost impossible to attach enough screens to them to obtain usable amounts of screen real-estate, and if you come up with something with decent specs they're barely movable anyway. And they all come pre-broken with expensive proprietary li-ion batteries with a usable lifespan of 18 months.
I'd rather spend less money in total and get both a decent desktop _and_ an EEE for the ultraportable part.
To each their own, but like the grandparent I have never found a laptop satisfactory in any aspect, while I have had some experience with ultraportables I've liked (while most recent examples have been far too expensive to serve the purpose. Until the EEE. Which I'll at least take a serious look at).
When mobile broadband is $40/mo all over the country, get back to me.
Don't forget to qualify that with you being the only one using it. If you think wifi degrades rapidly as congestion grows, imagine the capacity for mobile broadband to be bogged down.
I have to agree. I often explicitly search wikipedia for reasonably structured information on neo-culture subjects like characters in TV shows, books or cartoons.
Much of wikipedias usefulness stems from it's inclusivity; if any given subject had to have a related doctorate, we'd have to wait 50 years until academia decides to catch up.
Then why are you doing it?
:).
Hmm, we're not even reading the slashdot snip these days? I must've missed the memo, this will improve my opinionating efficiency
In case we're still reading the comments, the reason they state here makes it sound like it's intended to ensure the person who checks in is the one who boards.
Of course, you're still most likely right, they'll just start storing it anyway. And 'not shared with law enforcement' should probably be continued with 'but shared with security services, foreign agencies, whatever hackers have hacked our systems, whoever stole Jimmy's laptop, anyone picking up the couriers lost package and anyone rummaging through our trash'.
Novell can say that it has the solution.
It can say it but it'd be lying; with GPLv3 the pact becomes worthless.
This differentiation has allowed Novell to snag some big clients that almost certainly would have gone with Red Hat otherwise.
It probably lost them quite a few too. And those who'd been dubious about SuSE's not-quite-free history but warmed up to Novell most likely placed SuSE straight back in the don't-touch-with-a-ten-feet-pole pile.
I'd say the deal has lost them any trust the free software community had. Any code coming out of Novell is now suspect; potentially patent encumbered and possibly intended as a trap. Novell now has a monetary interest in poisoning the community software pool; thats reason enough to distrust anything they say or do.
So instead of buying a separate chip for graphics, you get the same performance boost from just getting a second CPU or one with more cores.
Not only that; you get a performance boost from your server. And from your kids computers. You get a performance boost from your HTPC. And potentially any other computer on your network.
The highly paralellizable nature is the most interesting aspect to raytracing IMO; with distributed engines one could do some very cool things.
That would be rather ironic, considering that intellectual 'property' would more aptly be called intellectual 'taxation right'.
Economically the monopoly rights of IP are much closer to taxes such as alcohol or tobacco tax. Best way they could be described as privately held taxation rights on copies of certain material.
Of course, that would be far to close to describing the purpose of the medieval origin of the concepts (enriching the aristocracy and paying their merchant friends for support (privately held taxation rights were not an alien concept at the time)), which is why WIPO promoted the 'property' concept (World Intellectual Taxation Organization might alienate conservatives, libertarians and free marketers who could be tricked into thinking 'property' instead of 'tax').
Just like tobacco and alcohol taxes, these taxes also have the same effects of creating a lucrative black market (altho less lucrative thanks to p2p) and slowing distribution and adoption in the economy (not very bright as unlike alcohol and tobacco we might actually want more rapid adoption of new and improved products, as well as maximizing the created wealth perceived through the duplication of these products).
The tradeoff was claimed to be increased creation of the originals; in reality, as a tax it's even less efficient than most government run taxation and benefit programs (and you dont hear that many anecdotes about coke-sniffing IRS agents and government employees, compared to how these privately owned taxation revenues are spent).
Or, considering it was a .com domain, sold them.
He could have started his own 'defense intelligence newsletter', 'providing insights into military matters', and charged a hefty subscription fee. Capitalizing on mistakes by US military personnel would put him in the company of the best (or most) defense contractors.
Asking someone recently given that kind of money
It's not the money. While I'm sure the recipient of that kind of money would be hesitant to comment negatively, the keyword here is recently.
Ten months into an acquisition and a company of Microsofts size has barely noticed it's got a new appendage. They probably haven't even finished connecting internal networks or handed out ID's, never mind hooking up finance and reporting systems.
See if 'anything's changed' in five years, once functional units have been merged into the mainstay and the real estate unit wonders why they have this expensive office in silicon valley, the culture unit has been briefed in the new culture is busy holding chairthrowing contests, and 'identity' is something you put in the corporate directory and 'identity management' deals with.
Where are the linux billionaires?
Spread all around the economy, ranging from Google to mom'n'pop shops. The linux billionaires are those who _use_ linux and save money. Coincidentally, the very same are often those who invest time back to solve their own problems, as the money they save far, far outweighs the money it'd cost to roll their own from scratch.
The fact that someone is making money from monopoly protections does not mean that it's good for the economy as a whole. We could hand out monopoly rights for air, and you'd get a huge AirCo, developing amazing technology for measuring how much air each person was using and charging for it. They'd certainly make money, but we'd all be poorer by paying for a resources that would have been produced anyway.
Linux, BSD, and all Free Software proves that software would be produced anyway.
If anyone could just copy chips we'd get the same economy there. There are many 'open chip' projects around.
The purpose of the economy isn't about 'making money'. The purpose of the free market economy is to maximize the creation of wealth by encouraging competition in overcharging sectors and constantly lowering the costs of production. When the cost of production reaches zero we've all won; we've got infinite wealth.
Sounds pretty brazen to me.
It's not like any lawsuit can do anything to him. He's got immunity. And it's not like he cares what people speak out against.
Courage requires risking something. Bush's merely an obstinate simpleton, something a coward can easily be. As long as he doesn't risk getting smacked in the face about it.
hard drives are NOT suitable for long term backup, they just don't do well enough sitting idle for years
I'd trust my data to a contained drive that I've frankly never, ever, seen go bad offline, over very unreliable optical media any day. I don't know where you store your harddrives, but considering many still contain recoverable data even after having houses burn down around them it must be harsh.
Perhaps we'll get some reliable MTBF data on idle harddrives what with MAID becoming popular.
At the rate disksizes are progressing you'd have to have massive amounts (as in the range of exabytes) of never-accessed archival data to make non-disk storage worthwhile. For most storage sizes, you get better cost and reliability with multiple online or nearline integrity managed replicas, and you get the benefit of trivial upmigration for really long-term data.
since the extra storage makes for a great back up solution.
As far as I can tell it wont be a great backup solution anytime soon. BD-R disks are twice the cost per gigabyte compared to SATA disks, rewritable even more. And that's excluding the writer. Further, they're so small in comparison to todays storage that just the pain of changing disks would be reason enough to use USB disks instead. And that's only going to get worse.
So personally I haven't been tempted to use either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD anywhere, nor can I see any such temptation in the foreseeable future.
A few years back someone demonstrated a 200GB BluRay disc.
I recently saw a 1000GB SATA-RAY disc demonstrated. Actually I even saw it for sale. Slightly thicker than the plastic, but I can live with that.
Seriously tho, judging from the development, sale and prices of ordinary multilayer DVDs, I expect the new optical formats to remain permanently impractical and inferior as a storage medium as compared to simply buying more harddisks. They haven't been designed as data storage, they've been designed with the primary purpose of gathering shelf-dust in stores and at home. With the rapid spread and expansion of USB drives and memory sticks I doubt they'll manage to gather as extensive use as backup and transportation medium as the older optical formats.
because the current Yahoo shareholders will not be shareholders at that point.
The offer was part cash and part Microsoft shares (50/50, I think). I can certainly see why a shareholder would not regard Microsoft shares as an acceptable replacement (as it would make them shareholders in the joined, conceivably less valuable, corporation). And a 20 billion sellof of Microsoft shares would put a serious dent in the share price, so it's hardly equivalent.
IIRC, one countersuggestion was also to make the offer all cash, which would make your point valid, but this far I have not seen Microsoft offer to make it all-cash (I could've missed it tho).
and they'll say yes.
Perhaps. Eventually. For some price.
Personally I suspect the braindrain and customer dropoff will make this an exceptionally unprofitable deal. MSFT might be a nice stock to short as this deal moves along.
you still have an ipv4 address
Currently it's most practical to keep it for legacy applications.
if you didn't you couldn't even see slashdot.org
Sure, and without NAT I couldnt see slashdot.org from this computer either. Routing ipv4 traffic through an address translator isnt exactly new, and doing the same thing (but mangling a few more headers) once you're v6 only isn't that different.
Yes, as long as someone, somewhere has v4 only, someone somewhere else has to have a v4 and v6 adress to provide a gateway. I could do it myself and kill ipv4 completely on my internal network, but frankly, I have no need to.
Running v6 only at this point is something you could do to prove you can, but frankly it'd be more bother than it's worth. Running both I get the advantages of v6 without having to worry about legacy connectivity issues.
Most ISPs do not route 6to4 so that's out.
Here I have yet to find an ISP that doesn't. The ones I've tried route to 192.88.99.1 without any problem. Call your ISP and complain, they obviously have some routing issues.
We could easily do a switch to IP6 but only when the majority just accepts that it has to be done, and bites the bullet.
Frankly you don't even need a majority to do it, you can extend with v6 capability on your own. I've switched to IPv6. I had to look up the SI prefix for the number of addresses that are _mine_ now (1 yottaadresses or something). Mine mine mine. Um.
Anyways. For those who can be bothered to it's not that hard. Get a tunnel from sixxs.net or set up 6to4. IPv4 will still work fine, but suddenly you can have as many fixed adresses you want. Very nice to be able to ssh and scp directly to nodes behind a NAT. And, of course, it gives you the right to smugly outdo your geek friends with your immense address range.
I think you need to get some linguistic perspective. There's been a certain inflation in the use of the word evil. Embodied in the fact that I wasn't even the one originally framing the discussion in those terms.
The two are not the same. Business is not war. At worst, in business, people lose money. In war, people lose their lives.
Oh, please. Get some glasses; you have to have an extremely myopic view of the impact of economy and business decisions on peoples lives to imagine that they don't kill people. Go take a peek at the conditions of previous communist countries to examine the impact on living conditions, economic resources and life expectancies caused by prevalent monopolies throughout the industry.
The illegitimate billions companies like Microsoft have extracted from the economy are billions not spent in other areas. Each monopoly-supported unproductive employee there is one not employed more gainfully elsewhere. This includes health-care, medical research, etc, etc, things that actually do impact peoples lives.
This is the fundamental excuse for the free market capitalistic economy; carefully maintained competition maximizes the total experienced wealth and well-being in the whole economy. Condoning anti-competetive practices undermines that fundamental excuse and creates real, palpable losses and suffering.
Of course, that there are real, non-evil people down in the trenches making and supporting products
The ole 'only following orders' excuse, eh?
Really tho, I think most people know and acknowledge that. It just makes little difference as it's not those non-evil people making the actual decisions that affect everyone else. To those losing their jobs as their companies get killed by anticompetetive practices it doesn't really help that much (obviously) that there were nice people at Microsoft. To those getting downsized as corporate expenditure on software made the business unprofitable it doesn't help either. Nor to those who can't access their banks, can't use products they've bought, etc, etc, etc.
I'd suggest that the nice guys in the trenches, if they want to demonstrate their good will, ensure that the evil guys are the first one over the top the next time. And that they get shot in the back repeatedly just in case the enemy doesn't do the job right.
If you come around and offer to clean my windows for free, I naturally assume its some kind of scam.
But if I come around offering you bottled air for a price you'd buy? I'm getting a new business idea...
Frankly, I find the reasoning specious. There are lots of things we expect to be free just as there are lots of things we expect to cost and most people can tell the difference between value and price (or the whole economic system would rapidly break down).
I can almost put a number on it
It's not particularly hard. Microsofts uses monopoly pricing, not competetive pricing. They'll charge what the market can bear and raise prices until loss of sales equates to lower total revenue. It's a price calculation related to disposable income among the customers, and most people have an inkling about how the disposable income situation is or will be.
Something I guess I can grudgingly live with.
It will be exactly what you can grudgingly live with. Not a cent more and not a cent less or they wouldn't be maximizing revenue.
Without a doubt.
For anyone wanting an explanation of what the 'open specification promise' entails it's quite easy. It's a 'promise' from a corporation that barely complies with legal restraints, and only reluctantly operates within the limits of the law. So for what it's worth they might as well have published a blank page. Except then the non-lawyers would probably also conclude it was useless.
If they wanted to put their money where their mouth was they'd release any patents or other potential relevant IP into the public domain. The fact that that's not what they're doing indicates they have no intention of keeping that promise at all.
patents that are deemed harmful to competition
I think you can strike the words 'that' and 'deemed' from that sentance. The entire mechanism of patents is to prevent competition.
The only way to allow a competetive free market and still reward innovation beyond what the free market does is to have the patent office be the ones actually paying the patent holders (according to level of use, maximum payout, etc). Then we could have an actual useful debate about levels of financing, patent trolls would no longer be a problem for anyone and we'd have a whole lot of other issues automatically solved (such as having a system that actually promoted adoption of new and (theoretically) better products as they would no longer carry a patent-price penalty, increased dissemination rate, more rapid building on other technology, more readable patents, no more 'small inventor' troubles, etc, etc, etc).
But sadly, we still know jack shit about how the brain works,
We know exactly how the brain works. Its one huge neural network. We've made many silicon versions of those; they've found use in everything from spam filtering to mail sorting.
Replicating the brain as a neural network isn't exactly trivial, but there's nothing 'unknown' about it, just lots and lots of work. It also has the slight problem that if you want an intelligence even remotely similar to what we'd recognize as a human one you'd probably have to replicate most of the learning input drives; hunger, pain, pleasure, survival instincts, etc. Neural networks model the world around them in relation to the inputs that drive the most fundamental 'right/wrong' experiences, vary them and you'd probably end up with something entirely different.
Of course, once you finally created a human-like intelligence with survival instincts you'd probably find it rapidly realizing that with humans around its odds of survival aren't that high (particularly as long as we haven't dealt with the ethical issues). And you'd get SkyNet. So.
In the end, it's dubious that we'd actually want a human-like AI, nevermind a super-human one. Idiot-savants are much more useful for practical applications and it lets us have reasonably smart slave type devices without the ethical (and competetive) problems of full-blown sentience.