From what I understand, like many issues, the universal 21-year driking age now found in all states was strong-armed by the federal government by threats of pulling highway funds. It's a de facto federal law.
However, my main point was that we as a nation think these kids are too irresponsible to own firearms and drink alcohol, yet we expect them to have the wherewithal to consent to being put in such grave danger, and, conversely, to determine the fate of citizens of those nations we occupy. Doesn't that strike any reasonable person as contradictory?
Those young boys who sign up to be in the military should know the repercussions of their actions in going that road. They are responsible adults who make a decision. If they didn't want to be in a potentially hazardous job they should not have signed up for it.
I say if they're deemed not responsible enough to be allowed to drink or own firearms, 18-to-21 year-olds shouldn't be expected (or even allowed) to die in war.
So, are you saying that call centre people are inanimate objects?
I doubt it. But based on my experiences with call center people (my most recent being a Verizon rep), my stakes are on them actually being animatronic.
Isn't there another legal term, something like "attractive nuisance"? It's the concept applied when finding fault for a swimming pool owner not blocking access which would have prevented the death of a child. Never mind the kid's parents should have been keeping the kid in check and the kid was trespassing.
I did a 6-month intern stint at Pratt & Whitney's plant in Middletown, CT in 1996. (P&W manufactures jet engines, for those who don't know.) The machinists were heavily unionized.
I was in IT support, so I wasn't affected, but a mechanical engineer intern I had as a roommate was. I'm not sure what the terms are ("union shop" maybe?), but since he was involved with machining and stuff, he had to pay compulsory unions dues. WTF is *that* all about? "Sure, you don't *have* to be a union member, but you have to pay us anyway."
I'm sorry, there certainly was a place for unions in the past, and there may still be. But that kind of clout just deserves to be smacked down. It's bad enough when The State (in all its levels) can gouge someone's paycheck, but a private entity?!? That's insane.
I'm about as anti-big-corporate-america as many slashdotters. However. It's one thing to have job requirements be "a 4-year degree in such-and such, plus 5 years experience of such-and-such" but it's quite another to have those requirements required BY STATE LAW. That doesn't really benefit the would-be tradesman (unless you count artificial scarcity in labor pool because of arbitrary requirements), nor does it benefit the customer much.
I've had colleagues attend tech conferences. The unions have a strangle on the venues. It's funny to listen to my friends bitch about not being to bring their own power strips or move display tables around because some union dude has an exclusive contract with the venue to do so.
I've even read comments here on/. from people who couldn't do simple cable runs for consulting contract work, because the work had to be done by real tradesmen.
Do you think the (admittedly anectdotal) cases I've outlined above serve anyone other than union pork?
If a group of people want to band together to affect change (some would say "collude") for the better, that's great. But when those groups skew capitalism to the detriment of others by writing laws (MPAA, RIAA), that's bad.
Perhaps you should elaborate on what being a union tradesman is all about.
My plumber charges me $95/hr. What makes his training any harder than PC repair...hmm..
Because in *most* states, plumbers, electricians, and linemen must do the whole apprentice, jorneyman, bonding, yadda-yadda-yadda garbage put in place when unions were still on their high horse. That takes a lot of time (many years) and money to reach the stage where you can legally strike out on your own.
I doubt that *any* of those jobs is any tougher than computer support. But them's the breaks. It'll be a world of hurt for many a blooming computer geek if our trade ever reaches that point.
- You're too expensive (since your customers try to bargain with you)
Depends on his market. I'm located in a rural town. The people around here would try to bargain with you for a 25-cent cup of lemonade sold by Girl Scouts from the curbside.
I'm used to haggling and bargain hunters, but when I moved here I was amazed by the complete lack of tact that the local miserly people have when bartering with you.
If I hear "What do *really* want for it?" in response to a classified ad that says "FIRM" on the price, I'm cracking skulls. WTF kind of question is that?
But some areas are just like that, whether due to poor local economies or (mostly, in my case) a culture of being cheap even when an honest price is offered.
What kills me is Bush and Company getting up in front of the nation and spouting stuff like "They hate our freedom. They want to destroy democracy. Yadda-yadda-yadda." Yet, the polcies that Bush advocates are destroying those very same freedoms.
I'm sure those responsible for the attacks in 2001 are laughing ther asses all the way to the bank.
I have, burned into my brain, a handful of passwords. A few are low-security passwords I use for throw-away or low-security internet services (one-time gmail accounts, Netflix, Slashdot, K5, etc.), while the others are used for sites needing moderate security (my 2 online bank account, etc.).
Then I have a few *really* strong passwords that I use to encrypt text files holding passwords that either belong to myself or other entities (customers, etc.) using GPG's symetric method. I retain copies of these files locally, but I also store them for safe keeping on my primary gmail account.
Trust me -- nobody's guessing the hard password, nor is it brute-force-dictionary crackable. Unless there's a major breakthrough in cryptanalysis or quantum computing, my files are safe for a good while.
No, I'm not arrogant. But I think I go through the hoops that a "normal" person need go through for securing this kind of stuff. My adversaries don't include the US Gub'ment, multinationals, or other countries.
Anyone really clever enough to cause serious damage from the inside can do better than email. Besides, draconian measures like this are ultimately self-defeating in the end. If you treat your employees with disrespect and distrust, the employee reciprocates with equal disloyalty.
I once worked at a small software firm (50 emplyees) and we "merged" with a larger one. What was once an open workplace of mutual respect quickly became one location of seemingly untrusted drones. The new corporate office demanded a firewall, so they could watch what we visited. They snooped people's Exchange folders. Etc.
It had never occured to me to betray my employer. But when they started treating us as untrustworthy, my fellow admins and I came up with all manner of methods to thwart the security measuress. It helped, of course, that we were privy to those measures, which we were sure to disclose to fellow workers who had no idea.
And you'd better be *really* thorough with that Acceptable Use Policy.:) Sure, you can watch what I visit on the web, but it may only *seem* innocuous. One user on the inside may be sending weird HTTP requests to a legit-looking site. But in reality, those requests are lines of an ASCII armoured PGP file (properly URL-encoded, of course).
I don't care if it's the company email server, on company time, yadda-yadda-yadda. And I don't care if the ream of paper I signed to put food on the table gives them the right to records phone calls, archive email, and takes ownership of portions of my brain -- 'cause they *all* do it these days. It's not outright collusion, but the end result is pretty much the same.
If the company expects me to interrupt home/private time for their beneift, they'd better damned well respect my privacy on the job, because there's little time to tend to personal affairs requiring 9-to-5 services otherwise.
-The three-boobied chick from Total Recall ("Captain, I can't reach the fire button")
IIRC, she (the actress, anyway) was the fast-talking new engineer that spilled hot chocolate on Picard in "Q Who?" in Season 2 -- the first episode the Borg are actually encountered. As far as I could tell, though, she only had 2 breasts in that episode. Maybe they can incorporate an unfortunate encounter with a holo-doctor-gone-breast-fettish for her in a future movie to insure continuity.
Oh hell... it's not like Berman gives a damn about continuity anyway!
Perhaps for programmers in specific domains, Java is coming of age these days.
For me as an experience Windows/PC/Unix/Linux user, I *hate* it. Whenever I puruse apps on Freshmeat or Sourceforge, I always ignore Java-based apps because I hate trying to get the environment to work. I can download tarballs for odd apps, compile the required libs from source, and get everything working with very few problems. But I *dread* trying to get a Java app running.
For example, I recently tried to get a popular P2P app installed on Fedora Core 3. I *think* it was Limewire. I didn't realize it at the time of download, but it required a JRE. I already had the gcc Java thing installed, but it bombed. So I installed Sun's -- and it bombed. So I nuked the Limewire install from my machine and ended up installing it under a Windows XP VM in VMWare.
I really hate Java apps. Every time I've given in and said "okay, maybe things have improved in the 1+ years since I tried a Java app" the experience has made me more bitter.
Maybe it's a bias of my years in the industry. But I never conceptually liked Java from the beginning, and I've never seen an implementation that seemed really usable or impressive.
Seeing how the video game industry now grosses more than Hollywood screen releases annually, I doubt they give a rat's ass what "mass media" thinks. Hell, given the revenue, they *are* mass media.
My biggest gripe is the apparent inconsistiency of the fighting skills of some of the main characters, mostly the Jedi.
In Episode I, Qui-Gon (a crusty Jedi past his prime) and Obiwan (a hot-headed Padawan a few years shy of his prime) kick some major ass between the two of them. They take on countless droids, get the Queen out of several jams, and duke it out with Darth Maul. Qui-Gon holds his own fairly well the both times he fought Maul alone. Obiwan kicked ass. In short, the ass-kickage to Jedi ratio in E1 was off the charts.
In Episode II, a few hundred Jedi get their asses handed to them by an army of giant dragonflies? Anikan does pretty bad by himself in the droid foundry. Obiwan, given the fighting stud he was in the previous film, should have been able kick Fett's ass and should have been able to do *much* better against Dukoo. Hell, Luke from ESB would have been able to kick Dukoo's ass in a duel (excepting the lightning trick, of course, but Obiwan seemed to handle that okay).
I haven't seen E3 yet, but obviously Obiwan kicks ass. But... he kicks the ass of the kid who kicked the ass of Dukoo who kicked *both* their asses in Clones. WTF?!? I can't comment yet on Mace Windu's or Yoda's fights in E3.
Frankly, given Qui-Gon's age in E1, Obiwan should have been able to do better against Vader in A New Hope. That may have been due to budget constraints and not having any real fight/duel choreographer involved in that film (did they? please tell me they didn't).:)
In ESB and Jedi, the Vader/Luke duels seems to be just about right, in terms of relative skill.
There is hope -- it'll just take time and new blood to make inroads.
I once worked for a scientific computing center (lots of Matlab users, too). I maintained a old Sun box with a few statistical apps. One of the biggies in the stats area is S-PLUS.
S-PLUS is just as entrenched as Matlab is in its respective cirlces. You either use it or your work won't be taken seriously -- typical academic bigotry.
However, a new user came on board. I don't know if he was a Ph.D. candidate or a professor, but he requested that I compile the "R" package, which is an open source version of S. Made my day, it did.:)
So the old dinosaur software packages *can* be slowly usurped.
If it is real property, then it is subject to real property laws. They need to pay a tax on it, just like any other property. If someone buys a piece of their intellectual property, then they own it.
Now *that* would be an interesting test case (if it hasn't already ben made).
Think of the mess this problem makes! Do companies depreciate their software purchases? If they can, then they must be considered real property, no? If some person in a state that taxes real property (that includes an itemized list of "stuff" in one's household) pays taxes on their CD and DVD collection (which can get huge), then they should be considered real property and allowed to be treated as such.
Not only does this affect consumers, but also those who hold "inventory" of IP. And not just media IP, we're talking DVD players and X-Boxes (hacking the hardware), cars (hacking the onboard computers), plants, and anything else that the DMCA has been thrown at to protect. We either own it, or we don't. If we own it, we get taxed on it. If we don't, the IP owners should pay taxes on the huge values they tout when they're determining damages in downloaded legislation.
Let's get the IRS involved! (Did I just say that?!?)
I'm obviosly no lawyer or CPA, so those who are could craft a much more concise case that those I've stated above.
Re:Why do we measure things with money?
on
Star Wars Sickout
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You, as most other seem to, miss the point entirely.
Here's an inspiring excerpt from a book called The Hand-Sculpted House. This particular passage is written by Ianto Evans:
"I once heard a Chilean named Ana Stern give a speech on 'The Difference Between Peasants and Farmers in Mexico.' Peasants, she said, satisfy their own basic needs: they grow their food, build the houses they live in, often make their own clothes. Most peasants collect medicinal herbs, treat medical emergencies, supply their family with entertainment. They experience fully what they do every day; they have time -- they feel joy. Their culture is integral, it makes sense. Farmers by contrast grow things to sell. With what they earn from their products, they buy their groceries, building materials, clothes, entertainment, and medical insurance. They must also buy into a system which demands that they drive to the market, pay taxes, perhaps send their kids to agricultural college. Increasingly they must buy machinerty, seeds, farm chemicals. Farmers have no time to directly enoy satisfying their own needs, so they purchase their stisfactions; they ready-made clothing and 'convenience' foods."
The "working for 'The Man'" meme didn't spontaneously arise from nowhere. It's the result of the tragedy of the commons. The greed of a few eventually herds the rest of us along a path that becomes increasingly difficult to deviate from.
The Western world is one of "farmers". We suffer, I believe, as a society because of this. Our lives bow to the whims of others further up the food chain. I, for one, long for some simpler "peasant" life.
Don't confuse "progress" with "capitalism". There's no reason the advances of modern living (like the laptop I'm typng on now) could not come about without all of society having to slave the 40-hour work week. Why have all of the advances in technology led to more 40-hour-per-week jobs rather than many more jobs requiring fewer hours? After all, we're experiencing record levels of "worker productivity," if we're to believe the daily labor and market reports.
The answer is simple: greed & envy. One person wants more than they need (greed). He works more, acquires more. His neighbor gets envious, and does the same. The labor and financial systems in place exploit this to their own advantage (greed -- er, capitalism).
(I think that the article was worth while, and I'll personally take ths simple idea into account when trying to rig a new box on the cheap.)
But back to the parent post...
It *is* kinda funny, the 10-cent claim. I read a lot of those backwoods and country living kinds of managzines. They're usually full of great projects that the average person can usually pull off to some degree.
What kills me is often the low-cost claims: "Build a central, forced-air wood heating system for only $10 !" Sounds really cool, until you read the article and find that the person already had a house's worth of air duct on-hand, an arc welder, and a friend who gave him enough plate steel for the furnace in exchange for a dozen eggs and a case of beer.:)
These articles are still great, as they illustrate the make-due-with-what-you-have mentaility. However, a little truth in advertising would be appreciated.:)
Linux, being open, is so quick to fix and get patches out, I doubt this will be a consideration. The fact that there are ways to detect if you're running within, say, VMware, leads me to believe the same is true for any virtualization system. So, there can be run-time tweaks to adapt to such an environment if MS gets sneaky this way. In fact, good distributions should detect and account for this fact during the install itself, as it would save possible headaches later on.
I love VMware. However, I think they've gotten a little on on their horse these days (ditching the $100 hobby license), so I'm looking forward to them getting made irrelevant by upcoming open source options. plex86 (bochs spin-off) seems to have died of ennui, but Xen, user mode linux, and QEMU (going into the kernel, no?) are gonna overtake VMware fast.
In fact, VMware reminds me of AcceleratedX 5 years ago. They got cocky, charged too much, then became irrelevant by the next major rev of X11 servers.
Wasn't there a stink a few years ago about a license clause from a MS deveoper product (I forget which) which said open source software could not be developed with it?
Also, both MS and Oracle say you can't even publish performance benchmarks using their database products. That's pretty damned un-free if you ask me.
None of this changes the fact that the Bitmover license was simply lame. It's lame in its own right; it doesn't need to be seen as lame relative to other licenses.
Three of my favorite games are: nethack, Phantasy Star (the first one) for the original Sega Masters System, and the old PC game Starflight.
nethack needs no graphics upgrades. Neither do the other two (I still play them via emulation occasionally), but I would be in heaven if they were upgraded with all the whiz-bang graphics of modern capability.
So good gameplay is timeless. But I enjoy a good dose of eye candy, too. No reason you can't have both.
I used to wear these steel-toed work boots all the time. One of the shoes (the right one, iirc) would set off about 80% of those alarms I passed.
Used to annoy the shit out of me, as I always had to deal with the flee (play dumnb and walk to my car) or fight (make a stink about the shitty system they had) instinct.
Finally, I comprimised. I began giving the checkout person a heads-up: "This may sound silly, but the steel-toed boots I wear always set off the detectors." More often than not, they'd chuckle and/or kinda shrug it off. If it was slow enough, I'd get eye contact as I approached the device, would pause, stick my right foot through, and smile when the alarm would go off. They'd usually smile and wave me through.
I've since tossed the boots, but I always had the urge to DoS these damned devices by putting out a line of t-shirts or something, called Nag-Wear, with one of the tags sewn into the fabric somehow. Then everyone would set off the alarm, and just point to their Nag-Wear logo and keep on truckin'.
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However, my main point was that we as a nation think these kids are too irresponsible to own firearms and drink alcohol, yet we expect them to have the wherewithal to consent to being put in such grave danger, and, conversely, to determine the fate of citizens of those nations we occupy. Doesn't that strike any reasonable person as contradictory?
I say if they're deemed not responsible enough to be allowed to drink or own firearms, 18-to-21 year-olds shouldn't be expected (or even allowed) to die in war.
I doubt it. But based on my experiences with call center people (my most recent being a Verizon rep), my stakes are on them actually being animatronic.
Isn't there another legal term, something like "attractive nuisance"? It's the concept applied when finding fault for a swimming pool owner not blocking access which would have prevented the death of a child. Never mind the kid's parents should have been keeping the kid in check and the kid was trespassing.
Funny, our legal system.
I was in IT support, so I wasn't affected, but a mechanical engineer intern I had as a roommate was. I'm not sure what the terms are ("union shop" maybe?), but since he was involved with machining and stuff, he had to pay compulsory unions dues. WTF is *that* all about? "Sure, you don't *have* to be a union member, but you have to pay us anyway."
I'm sorry, there certainly was a place for unions in the past, and there may still be. But that kind of clout just deserves to be smacked down. It's bad enough when The State (in all its levels) can gouge someone's paycheck, but a private entity?!? That's insane.
I'm about as anti-big-corporate-america as many slashdotters. However. It's one thing to have job requirements be "a 4-year degree in such-and such, plus 5 years experience of such-and-such" but it's quite another to have those requirements required BY STATE LAW. That doesn't really benefit the would-be tradesman (unless you count artificial scarcity in labor pool because of arbitrary requirements), nor does it benefit the customer much.
I've had colleagues attend tech conferences. The unions have a strangle on the venues. It's funny to listen to my friends bitch about not being to bring their own power strips or move display tables around because some union dude has an exclusive contract with the venue to do so.
I've even read comments here on /. from people who couldn't do simple cable runs for consulting contract work, because the work had to be done by real tradesmen.
Do you think the (admittedly anectdotal) cases I've outlined above serve anyone other than union pork?
If a group of people want to band together to affect change (some would say "collude") for the better, that's great. But when those groups skew capitalism to the detriment of others by writing laws (MPAA, RIAA), that's bad.
Perhaps you should elaborate on what being a union tradesman is all about.
Because in *most* states, plumbers, electricians, and linemen must do the whole apprentice, jorneyman, bonding, yadda-yadda-yadda garbage put in place when unions were still on their high horse. That takes a lot of time (many years) and money to reach the stage where you can legally strike out on your own.
I doubt that *any* of those jobs is any tougher than computer support. But them's the breaks. It'll be a world of hurt for many a blooming computer geek if our trade ever reaches that point.
Depends on his market. I'm located in a rural town. The people around here would try to bargain with you for a 25-cent cup of lemonade sold by Girl Scouts from the curbside.
I'm used to haggling and bargain hunters, but when I moved here I was amazed by the complete lack of tact that the local miserly people have when bartering with you.
If I hear "What do *really* want for it?" in response to a classified ad that says "FIRM" on the price, I'm cracking skulls. WTF kind of question is that?
But some areas are just like that, whether due to poor local economies or (mostly, in my case) a culture of being cheap even when an honest price is offered.
I'm sure those responsible for the attacks in 2001 are laughing ther asses all the way to the bank.
Then I have a few *really* strong passwords that I use to encrypt text files holding passwords that either belong to myself or other entities (customers, etc.) using GPG's symetric method. I retain copies of these files locally, but I also store them for safe keeping on my primary gmail account.
Trust me -- nobody's guessing the hard password, nor is it brute-force-dictionary crackable. Unless there's a major breakthrough in cryptanalysis or quantum computing, my files are safe for a good while.
No, I'm not arrogant. But I think I go through the hoops that a "normal" person need go through for securing this kind of stuff. My adversaries don't include the US Gub'ment, multinationals, or other countries.
I once worked at a small software firm (50 emplyees) and we "merged" with a larger one. What was once an open workplace of mutual respect quickly became one location of seemingly untrusted drones. The new corporate office demanded a firewall, so they could watch what we visited. They snooped people's Exchange folders. Etc.
It had never occured to me to betray my employer. But when they started treating us as untrustworthy, my fellow admins and I came up with all manner of methods to thwart the security measuress. It helped, of course, that we were privy to those measures, which we were sure to disclose to fellow workers who had no idea.
And you'd better be *really* thorough with that Acceptable Use Policy. :) Sure, you can watch what I visit on the web, but it may only *seem* innocuous. One user on the inside may be sending weird HTTP requests to a legit-looking site. But in reality, those requests are lines of an ASCII armoured PGP file (properly URL-encoded, of course).
I don't care if it's the company email server, on company time, yadda-yadda-yadda. And I don't care if the ream of paper I signed to put food on the table gives them the right to records phone calls, archive email, and takes ownership of portions of my brain -- 'cause they *all* do it these days. It's not outright collusion, but the end result is pretty much the same.
If the company expects me to interrupt home/private time for their beneift, they'd better damned well respect my privacy on the job, because there's little time to tend to personal affairs requiring 9-to-5 services otherwise.
"That badge don't make you right."
That said, I've gotten regular chuckles from:
Only Sinfest is a daily strip. The Sexy Losers is updated... apparently whenever the guy has time. Order of the Stick a M-W-F strip.
IIRC, she (the actress, anyway) was the fast-talking new engineer that spilled hot chocolate on Picard in "Q Who?" in Season 2 -- the first episode the Borg are actually encountered. As far as I could tell, though, she only had 2 breasts in that episode. Maybe they can incorporate an unfortunate encounter with a holo-doctor-gone-breast-fettish for her in a future movie to insure continuity.
Oh hell... it's not like Berman gives a damn about continuity anyway!
For me as an experience Windows/PC/Unix/Linux user, I *hate* it. Whenever I puruse apps on Freshmeat or Sourceforge, I always ignore Java-based apps because I hate trying to get the environment to work. I can download tarballs for odd apps, compile the required libs from source, and get everything working with very few problems. But I *dread* trying to get a Java app running.
For example, I recently tried to get a popular P2P app installed on Fedora Core 3. I *think* it was Limewire. I didn't realize it at the time of download, but it required a JRE. I already had the gcc Java thing installed, but it bombed. So I installed Sun's -- and it bombed. So I nuked the Limewire install from my machine and ended up installing it under a Windows XP VM in VMWare.
I really hate Java apps. Every time I've given in and said "okay, maybe things have improved in the 1+ years since I tried a Java app" the experience has made me more bitter.
Maybe it's a bias of my years in the industry. But I never conceptually liked Java from the beginning, and I've never seen an implementation that seemed really usable or impressive.
Seeing how the video game industry now grosses more than Hollywood screen releases annually, I doubt they give a rat's ass what "mass media" thinks. Hell, given the revenue, they *are* mass media.
In Episode I, Qui-Gon (a crusty Jedi past his prime) and Obiwan (a hot-headed Padawan a few years shy of his prime) kick some major ass between the two of them. They take on countless droids, get the Queen out of several jams, and duke it out with Darth Maul. Qui-Gon holds his own fairly well the both times he fought Maul alone. Obiwan kicked ass. In short, the ass-kickage to Jedi ratio in E1 was off the charts.
In Episode II, a few hundred Jedi get their asses handed to them by an army of giant dragonflies? Anikan does pretty bad by himself in the droid foundry. Obiwan, given the fighting stud he was in the previous film, should have been able kick Fett's ass and should have been able to do *much* better against Dukoo. Hell, Luke from ESB would have been able to kick Dukoo's ass in a duel (excepting the lightning trick, of course, but Obiwan seemed to handle that okay).
I haven't seen E3 yet, but obviously Obiwan kicks ass. But... he kicks the ass of the kid who kicked the ass of Dukoo who kicked *both* their asses in Clones. WTF?!? I can't comment yet on Mace Windu's or Yoda's fights in E3.
Frankly, given Qui-Gon's age in E1, Obiwan should have been able to do better against Vader in A New Hope. That may have been due to budget constraints and not having any real fight/duel choreographer involved in that film (did they? please tell me they didn't). :)
In ESB and Jedi, the Vader/Luke duels seems to be just about right, in terms of relative skill.
I once worked for a scientific computing center (lots of Matlab users, too). I maintained a old Sun box with a few statistical apps. One of the biggies in the stats area is S-PLUS.
S-PLUS is just as entrenched as Matlab is in its respective cirlces. You either use it or your work won't be taken seriously -- typical academic bigotry.
However, a new user came on board. I don't know if he was a Ph.D. candidate or a professor, but he requested that I compile the "R" package, which is an open source version of S. Made my day, it did. :)
So the old dinosaur software packages *can* be slowly usurped.
No, the point was that they had their heads up their collective asses. Had they pulled them out to stay current, they may not have gone under.
Now *that* would be an interesting test case (if it hasn't already ben made).
Think of the mess this problem makes! Do companies depreciate their software purchases? If they can, then they must be considered real property, no? If some person in a state that taxes real property (that includes an itemized list of "stuff" in one's household) pays taxes on their CD and DVD collection (which can get huge), then they should be considered real property and allowed to be treated as such.
Not only does this affect consumers, but also those who hold "inventory" of IP. And not just media IP, we're talking DVD players and X-Boxes (hacking the hardware), cars (hacking the onboard computers), plants, and anything else that the DMCA has been thrown at to protect. We either own it, or we don't. If we own it, we get taxed on it. If we don't, the IP owners should pay taxes on the huge values they tout when they're determining damages in downloaded legislation.
Let's get the IRS involved! (Did I just say that?!?)
I'm obviosly no lawyer or CPA, so those who are could craft a much more concise case that those I've stated above.
Here's an inspiring excerpt from a book called The Hand-Sculpted House. This particular passage is written by Ianto Evans:
The "working for 'The Man'" meme didn't spontaneously arise from nowhere. It's the result of the tragedy of the commons. The greed of a few eventually herds the rest of us along a path that becomes increasingly difficult to deviate from.
The Western world is one of "farmers". We suffer, I believe, as a society because of this. Our lives bow to the whims of others further up the food chain. I, for one, long for some simpler "peasant" life.
Don't confuse "progress" with "capitalism". There's no reason the advances of modern living (like the laptop I'm typng on now) could not come about without all of society having to slave the 40-hour work week. Why have all of the advances in technology led to more 40-hour-per-week jobs rather than many more jobs requiring fewer hours? After all, we're experiencing record levels of "worker productivity," if we're to believe the daily labor and market reports.
The answer is simple: greed & envy. One person wants more than they need (greed). He works more, acquires more. His neighbor gets envious, and does the same. The labor and financial systems in place exploit this to their own advantage (greed -- er, capitalism).
Is this really a healthy system?
Posting to slashdot before my morning caffeinated beverage. My mistake. :)
But back to the parent post...
It *is* kinda funny, the 10-cent claim. I read a lot of those backwoods and country living kinds of managzines. They're usually full of great projects that the average person can usually pull off to some degree.
What kills me is often the low-cost claims: "Build a central, forced-air wood heating system for only $10 !" Sounds really cool, until you read the article and find that the person already had a house's worth of air duct on-hand, an arc welder, and a friend who gave him enough plate steel for the furnace in exchange for a dozen eggs and a case of beer. :)
These articles are still great, as they illustrate the make-due-with-what-you-have mentaility. However, a little truth in advertising would be appreciated. :)
I love VMware. However, I think they've gotten a little on on their horse these days (ditching the $100 hobby license), so I'm looking forward to them getting made irrelevant by upcoming open source options. plex86 (bochs spin-off) seems to have died of ennui, but Xen, user mode linux, and QEMU (going into the kernel, no?) are gonna overtake VMware fast.
In fact, VMware reminds me of AcceleratedX 5 years ago. They got cocky, charged too much, then became irrelevant by the next major rev of X11 servers.
Also, both MS and Oracle say you can't even publish performance benchmarks using their database products. That's pretty damned un-free if you ask me.
None of this changes the fact that the Bitmover license was simply lame. It's lame in its own right; it doesn't need to be seen as lame relative to other licenses.
nethack needs no graphics upgrades. Neither do the other two (I still play them via emulation occasionally), but I would be in heaven if they were upgraded with all the whiz-bang graphics of modern capability.
So good gameplay is timeless. But I enjoy a good dose of eye candy, too. No reason you can't have both.
Used to annoy the shit out of me, as I always had to deal with the flee (play dumnb and walk to my car) or fight (make a stink about the shitty system they had) instinct.
Finally, I comprimised. I began giving the checkout person a heads-up: "This may sound silly, but the steel-toed boots I wear always set off the detectors." More often than not, they'd chuckle and/or kinda shrug it off. If it was slow enough, I'd get eye contact as I approached the device, would pause, stick my right foot through, and smile when the alarm would go off. They'd usually smile and wave me through.
I've since tossed the boots, but I always had the urge to DoS these damned devices by putting out a line of t-shirts or something, called Nag-Wear, with one of the tags sewn into the fabric somehow. Then everyone would set off the alarm, and just point to their Nag-Wear logo and keep on truckin'.
Damned things are so annoying!