Hmmm. It seems to me that vast majority of users get KDE, not through the KDE project, but through their distro. So, isn't it up to the distro to configure KDE as they see best? Isn't that what distros are for? Since users can tweak everything, the distros choose what goes in by default and how it's configured by default.
So, it seems to me that criticism of KDE 4 should be focused on things which undermine its future adoption by distros.
For example, the idea that it is "released to early" makes no sense at all. If you get a not-ready-for-prime-time release, you either did it yourself, or your distro did it on your behalf, so blame the distro. Likewise, the default icons and menus and whatnot, if its a pain to adapt to something new, why not stay with the old?
On the other hand, if you think that Plasma is an architectural mistake for some reasons, then you'd have a legitimate complaint. Maybe you have security issues with it, or you think that it might not work acceptably on some class of machines you think KDE should support. Or maybe you think it's just not a good way to manage user interactions. That's a reasonable arena for debate, because getting around that technology would probably amount to managing a fork of KDE, rather than tweaking it for your target audience.
You can't cheat an honest man. He has to have larceny in his heart in the first place.
--W.C. Fields
The whole point of the this kind of tax break is to do a special favor for a business so that it will locate in your state rather than a different state that would charge them the same tax rate as everybody else.
I'm all for things like tax breaks for enterprise zones, because they address a real need. The intent, at least, is to increase the overall development pie by addressing persistent problems of underdevelopment. And the tax advantages are available to anybody who's willing to locate there. But this kind of sweetheart deal isn't about expanding the pie, it's about scamming a bigger slice than you'd deserve under and impartial tax system. It's a race to the bottom that is driven by people who, without any visibly conscious sense of irony, complain that the government interferes too much in private economic decision making.
If you want to be a sharp, you'd better be the sharpest, most ruthlessly cynical crook in town, because otherwise that larceny in your heart makes you ripe pickings for somebody just a wee bit slicker. The whole foundation of the 419 scam is that blinded by greed and narcissistic admiration of your own cleverness, you will eagerly send money, without any security, to a party you know is untrustworthy. In fact you are counting on that party to act in an untrustworthy way. In the light of cold reason, this is obviously incredibly stupid. While I might spare some bit of sympathy for an 80 year old grandmother who wants to leave a bit more nest egg to her grandkids, somebody elected to public office really should display more brains than to expect treatment for themselves better than that they deal to others.
So spare a little outrage against Nielsen and Tata for the supposed "victims" in this scam. I hope they're run out of office.
Once upon a time, localities used to produce all their own food. This was an era when famine was common.
If you tied the entire continent together with a superconducting grid, you'd have a bigger market for producers to enter. If a local producer was having problems, it would have no local effect. Likewise nuclear plants could be put in remote areas far from population centers.
Also, wind power plants and tidal power plants could sell their peak power production where it is most needed, even if local demand for electricity at 3am is smal.
So... you have it exactly backwards. It's more economically efficient and reliable to have huge electric markets, rather than small ones.
Well, lets start with some plausible hypotheses as to how the materials might be unsafe, and then study those.
Granted, there will be lots of media hysteria like there was in the case of the supposed cell phone/brain cancer link years ago, but that's inevitable. Since it's inevitable, we might as well proceed in the most epistemologically sound way. That would be to do our best to show that these materials are unsafe, then (hopefully) fail in each specific mechanism we can think of.
Logically, you might claim that we're assuming that the materials are unsafe, but that's only as a null hypothesis regarding specific mechanisms. That's not the same as assuming the materials might be unsafe in some way which is beyond the capacity of human ingenuity to anticipate. That would not only bar trying anything new, it would also bar continuing anything we're already doing. For that matter, it also bars stopping anything we're already doing.
Why not burn it in place and dump it on the electricity grid?
This shows, in my opinion, how important battery technology is. Once battery technology gets good enough, literally anything you might convert into gasoline could just as well be burned in a clean, efficient, high temperature engine and dumped onto a superconducting grid, no exotic tech required.
That's the point. Think of the next generation of students, who no longer will have to play with dangerous bunsen burners in the lab. Instead they'll fashion glassware and boil solutions in the safe, heatless flame of an alcohol lamp.
For that matter, what about people who use alcohol in their backpacking stoves? Since the alcohol doesn't burn with any heat, they can safely use their stoves in their tents.
There's no end to applications for this miracle material. We could replace the water in our fire sprinkler systems with cool burning alcohol, which would starve the fire of oxygen while burning at a temperature too low to cause damage.
I want to point out the obvious here that I'm being sarcastic. Although anybody who can't figure that out is arguably not long for this world, I'd rather not have their demises on my conscience.
Hmmm. An alcohol flame gets plenty hot. Hot enough to melt glass rods if you don't have a bunsen burner handy, so temps can probably reach over 1000 degrees F.
Alcohol flames burn so clean that they look innocuous. You also can do some impressive stunts that exploit the cooling effect of alcohol evaporation. These seem to have combined to create the myth that alcohol burns cool. Anybody mucking around with alcohol flames for amusement would be well advised not to believe this.
To answer your question, MS's power comes from what economists call the "network effect". Developers go to the MS platform because it has the most users. Users go to the MS platform because it has the most applications. Organizations choose MS for those reasons, and because they can find people with know how.
Back in the 80s, "piracy" was rife and while Microsoft complained, it didn't do anything about it. They had no activations or copy protection, so lots of small businesses just made as many copies as they wanted. One of the actual rationalizations supposedly law abiding people offered for this was that this benefited Microsoft more than if they turned to a MS competitor, like DR DOS. And, of course, they were right as far as they went. They didn't point out that they got a free ride while the law abiding paid higher prices.
What you say is true of the most austere, philosophical forms of Buddhism, but Buddhism comes in many flavors, many if not most chock full of yummy syncretic mix-ins. Tibetan Buddhism has quite a bit of Bon mixed in. Chinese Buddhism readily accepts the Bodhisattvas as part of the divine bureaucracy. Zen doesn't concern itself one way or the other with the issue, but it's practiced in places where forms of Buddhism flourish that could only be called pietist.
The founding myths of Buddhism pretty much take the existence of gods for granted; it's just that existence as a god isn't really isn't fundamentally better than any other kind of existence. For some this is just a metaphorical point, for others it may have different significance.
Buddhism pretty much accommodates itself whatever the heavenly pantheon or lack thereof is popular. It could be practiced by atheists or theists. I can't count the number of Jew-bus I know (their term not mine). If it can't mix with Christianity or Islam, that's because those religions emphasize an exclusive choice made by the adherent. You're born a Jew after all, and if you keep the laws, you're still a Jew. You aren't going to get kicked out for pondering the metaphorical significance of eastern myths, and if you manage time to sit zazen and do all the other things you're supposed to do, you're probably still a Jew.
Well, even if the software becomes public domain -- which might be a good idea -- that's not really the biggest problem users have. The biggest problem is getting support.
It's important not to confusing public domain and free software. Free software includes access to source code and any trade secret or other IP embodied in that source code. Chances are you aren't so much concerned about copying your abandonware to different hardware, as keeping it running, if necessary on hardware that didn't exist back in the day. For that you need source, and the right to do things with the source. You need free software.
Nor are backups a substitute for reliable operation.
I don't even want to think about restoring 1TB to a consumer hard drive, even if I had dropped the thousands of dollars on tape drives and media to back it up.
The thing that bothers me about the backup technologies available to consumers, apart from the fact you need to spend two orders of magnitude on drive and tape more than you spent on the disks you're backing up, is that there are so many technologies to choose from. In ancient days, there was just 9 track, and everybody could read it. Later there was DDS, DLT, or for suckers, Travan and for real suckers anything from Iomega. Now I look at dropping a thousand bucks on a flavor-of-the-month drive, and it gives me a queasy feeling.
And in a world where a 160GB tape cartidge and a 160 GB hard disk SATA hard disk can both be bought for about $40, I'm open to spending a bit more to get the convenience of a standard interface hard disk, provided that it has enhanced reliability. It can be slower on transfer than tape, the convenience of random access probably more than makes up for it.
Without the "limited" part of that, they, not the users, have broken their end of the bargain.
Now this, I must say, is an excellent point. It may not be enough to put WFW in the public domain because people want it, but because that's part of the copyright deal. An individual of course can agree to any terms he wants, but society as a whole ought not be bound by such private agreements.
I'd make two provisos to this, however. First, "open source" or "free" software isn't the same thing as software that is in the public domain. It isn't enough to eliminate the restrictions on people in possession of copies, you'd also have to mandate Microsoft release source and build information. The second proviso is that the works in the public domain can be converted by others into proprietary derivative works, where as free software cannot.
I would argue that any license that restricts the 4 fundamental software freedoms is unconscionable.
But your argument would be a pretty weak one, unless you were forced to accept the license. There is very little software you can't live without, and these days there are free alternative to almost everything. You might prefer Windows to Linux, but that's no excuse to obtain Windows under false pretenses.
I'd bet even RMS, who thinks proprietary licensing is evil, isn't going to run an unlicensed copy of Windows in QEMU just so he can test software on it. This is the kind of thing programmers rationalize doing all the time; they're doing Microsoft a favor. Maybe Microsoft secretly agree with them. But the more strongly you believe in the principle, the more up front you should be, even if it becomes confrontational. It's not civil disobedience if you do it in secret.
Some contracts are unconscionable because the nature of the terms were misrepresented to a party that could not be expected to understand them. There was a recent case in the news of a financial advisor who convinced a 90 year old to take money out of the annuity on which she was living and put it into an annuity that matured in sixty years. That's unconscionable. If you license proprietary software, you know darned well you aren't allowed to install it on more than one machine, so you shouldn't agree to that if you think it's wrong.
Some contracts are unconscionable because they are so bad for society they are repugnant. You can't sell your organs, or agree to become an indentured servant. Perhaps you think proprietary software licenses fall into this category. Then don't agree. It's at least as unconscionable for you to offer your kidney for sale to somebody on dialysis with no intention of following through than it is for that person to offer money for it.
It's unconscionable for you to agree to an unconscionable agreement with no intention of following through. It is not only dishonest, it encourages the very things you are supposedly against. If it weren't for "piracy" in the 80s and early 90s, Microsoft would never have become as powerful as it did.
Buddhism has an interesting viewpoint on issues like this.
You'll notice all kinds of gods in Buddhist iconography and mythology. If you're a Buddhist, you're not expected to believe in any of them. You can if you want, but belief isn't an end in itself. Belief is something that on its own is hard to maintain. You can't be expected to believe in something all the time. You may believe in the non-existence of ghosts, you might find it difficult to maintain that belief if you are alone in a creepy house.
Since a belief is something you put mental energy into, it ought to pull its weight. Therefore, a Buddhist might ask, not whether a belief is true, but whether a belief is useful. Etymologically, the English world "belief" carries this sense of investment, being related to "beloved".
In the case of Last Tuesdayism, you can't prove its factuality one way or the other, so it's pointless to have an opinion on that. But a Buddhist might ask, "Well, suppose everything was created last Tuesday. What would be different?" Well, one thing that might be different is that you might choose to forgo revenge against somebody who "injured" you on Monday. The utility of Last Tuedayism, then, is this: it raises the question of whether your past pain is a better guide to choosing your behavior than your future happiness.
The Buddha himself once referred to beliefs as being like rafts. Once you have crossed the river, you leave them behind. Christianity, unfortunately, filtered down to us through Greek thought, with its bitter rivalry between philosophical schools. Therefore, much more emphasis is put on orthodoxy (right teaching) over orthopraxy (right action). Whereas the Jews produced Talmudic commentaries from almost every conceivable position, Christians produced diatribes against each other for heresy (which comes from the Greek word meaning to "choose" -- that is to choose for oneself).
I have a problem with the idea of software becoming open sourced just because the users want it. If you knowingly agree to be bound by a license, you should honor that agreement unless the licensor acts in an unconscionable way, and then your own actions should only be sufficient to address the specific issue. Everybody knows vendors stop supporting old software. You can't complain if the vendor gives you a couple years to upgrade and then pulls support, because you bought the license to use the software knowing this could happen.
This is important. This is why businesses and individuals should use open source software wherever possible: in order to control their future. Much of the open source software I use is because I don't like the license restrictions of the proprietary alternative.
People and organizations should support open source and free software rather than make deals with proprietary vendor then renege on them. And if people should be so cavalier with licenses, then the same applies to free licenses as well.
This is a quite (unintentionally) interesting post. The words "stealing" and "piracy" are criticized here because they are inaccurate metaphors for the thing being described, chosen to sway the debate by their emotional impact. Here we have an AC troll who is trying to veer the conversation back into emotionalism by yet another inaccurate metaphor.
You can see that the words "stealing" and "piracy" obscure the issue, without necessarily thinking that copyright infringement is acceptable.
Some cases of piracy are reasonably close to theft: unauthorized commercial duplication for example. In this case, the copyright holders aren't deprived of the material, they are deprived of the revenue, which the infringer enjoys. Other cases are not very much like theft, but are still not very admirable. They are more like freeloading.
Still other forms of copyright infringement represent the user trying to exercise a right he believes he has but which the copyright holder does not believe he has. In some cases that may be a legal right (such as archival copying), in other cases it may be a moral right, like replacing a CD lost in a fire. Such infringements have to be viewed on a case by case basis. Some are be reasonable and others are not, some are legal and others are not, but none are precisely "stealing" nor are any "piracy", which technically means robbery on the ocean without a valid legally recognized license from a sovereign nation.
Ah, but the subconscious, unlike the unconscious lies beyond the reach of consciousness. All subconscious behavior is unconscious, but only some unconscious behavior is subconscious, because nothing stands in the way of becoming aware of it.
When you mindlessly set down your keys without noting where they are, you do so unconsciously. When you deliberately (on a deeply buried level) deliberately put your keys where you won't find them, because the phallic shape arouses the deep seated and unbearable desire to castrate yourself and live as a woman, you are doing so subconsciously.
In this case, you clearly are capable of becoming conscious of dismissing the article's author, so that much is merely unconscious. However, the energy of subconscious urges, such as the urge to castrate yourself and thus appease the wrath of your father by taking your mother's place, cannot be "bottled up". They appear in surprising ways; you might find yourself intending to type ":-)", but instead typing something else symbolic of the suppressed wish. Clearly, you have not blocked the awareness of your irrational dismissal of the author based on his peculiar preference for the golden aspect ration; however you do seem to have a block about distinguishing "un-" from "sub-" conscious. This probably indicates you have no suppressed issues with photographers dabbling in mathematics, but you might have an issue related to Greeks doing so.
I support FISA, but not the amendments made this year.
I support FISA becuase it's better to be realistic about what we're going to do in a situation and have rules governing that situation, than to pretend we're going to do something different and then make up the rules as we go along.
The Fourth Amendment, if you read it carefully, doesn't actually require searches to have warrants. It requires them to be reasonable. It also requires warrants to be issued by probable cause. This doesn't mean searches without warrants are automatically unreasonable. Common sense shows there are lots of situations where the police search without warrants that are reasonable and constitutional. Nobody objects to a SWAT team entering a private building if there is a sniper there.
It's the borderline cases that we have to watch; that's where civil liberties are nibbled away.
FISA is a critical law because it defines how the border between legal and illegal will be policed. It basically says, OK do what you have to in a hot pursuit situation, but be prepared to justify your actions afterwards in a court of law. FISA, in its original form, unlike the amendments passed this year, doesn't fundamentally alter the boundary between legal and illegal searches. It creates an accountability mechanism that allows legal searches to proceed unhindered while preventing the government slipping in a few illegal searches among them without somebody noticing.
The problem with the FISA amendments is that they create a de facto shift in what is allowable, not a de jure one. It's basically a license to break the law.
Almost all the ills of democratic government come from hiding the illegitimate with the legitimate, and then obscuring the two. You take your pork barrel favors for your friends and hide them in a bill everybody needs to pass. You take your political black bag jobs and mix them in with counter-terrorism. Even the PATRIOT Act has a lot of reasonable and important provisions in it. It's just that if you want to make democracy the tool of your private interests, you never let a piece of medicine go without carrying along its share of poison.
Frankly, I don't really don't care that much that the telecoms get off the hook in this instance. Yes, it's a bad precedent, but it's far from the biggest problem here. It's part of a pattern that is far more worrying.
The biggest problem is that the FISA amendments allow the government to destroy surveillance records, or not to keep them in the first place. What possible legitimate purpose could that serve? The telecom thing isn't there to protect the telecoms, it's there to make it impossible for private individuals to determine the scope of the government's intrusion via discovery. Likewise, the amendment prevents states from investigating crimes committed against their citizens.
Clearly, the biggest practical effect of these amendments is to allow the executive branch to engage in criminal activities and obstruct any effort, private or public, to determine the extent of those crimes.
This is not a "liberal" issue. Concealing and destroying evidence shows this is not an argument about the extent to which the President is bound by one law or another, but whether he can exceed his constitutional powers with impunity and then escape accountability. This transcends liberal/conservative divide over the President's "inherent powers", because whatever you think the scope of the President's powers should be, this allows him to exceed that scope.
Well, I actually remember the fairness doctrine in operation, and while bloviation was nothing like the industry it is now, it wasn't like you couldn't find public affairs programming.
What used to happen was that every so often you'd get some private individual on TV giving a two minute editorial attacking an opinion stated or implied in the station's news coverage. As I recall, it was usually the arch-conservatives who took advantage of it.
The fairness doctrine is only part of what changed. The other thing was that ownership rules changed allowing people with enough money to control more of the media, which makes it attractive to people with an economic interest in swaying public opinion. The same viewpoints that used to be delivered in fairness doctrine are now the mainstream media party line.
Well, we don't know what the marginal cost of the Saturn program would be if we extended it to do hundreds of launches rather than a dozen or so. The numbers you allude to for the Saturn V are average numbers, including development costs spread over very few missions. Furthermore the Saturn V wouldn't be used for everything; we'd have used the Saturn 1B, which shared components with the Saturn V, for LEO and small payloads and moving crew around.
Substitute Ares for Saturn, and that's the current plan, IIRC. We'll use an Ares I to launch crews and small payloads, and an Ares V for heavy lifting.
The lack of enough missions is not only responsible for the cost of Shuttle launches, it's probably responsible for the two Shuttle disasters. Programs take on a life of their own; the idea of a reusable vehicle was conceived at at time when we thought we'd be doing more manned space exploration, but by the time the program was approved, it was clear that American manned space exploration was over for a generation at least. Rather than abandoning the program which had been the future of space vehicles, the program adapted by producing a more versatile vehicle that could scrounge more missions in an environment where missions were too scarce to justify its existence. Each vehicle carries the burden of being able to do more with less cost, and features contributing to that cheap versatility contributed to both failures.
Well, without taking issue with your comparison to the Saturn V, two of the most important questions you have to ask is this: how many launches are you expecting to do with your reusable vehicle and how frequently?
There were a total of 13 Saturn V launches. There have been a total of over 120 Shuttle launches, spread over six vehicles (including the two lost ones) for an average of twenty launches per vehicle and an average launch rate over 27 years of operation of four per year.
While that is pretty impressive, if you think about it, it's nothing like we thought it would be. When the Shuttle project was approved, yes, we were cutting the Apollo program short, but nobody knew we'd cut back so far on manned spaceflight. There was talk of turning around a Shuttle in as little a two weeks; at one point Columbia was relaunched in less than two months; if we'd been launching Shuttles at close to this rate, we'd probably have been flying twenty or thirty missions per year, rather than four.
In order to save money with a reusable vehicle, you have to use it a many times to amortize its greater acquisition cost, and you have to use if frequently to achieve operational efficiencies in preparing it for the next flight. It's a maxim that you lose money on a plane any time its wheels are on the ground. This is more true of the Shuttle than any other vehicle, because it is the most expensive, most complex vehicle ever created. Just having the capability to launch and re-launch the Shuttle is expensive, and underutilizing that capability makes each mission fabulously expensive. The cost per launch of the Shuttle is somewhat less than the Saturn V, but the entire program costs of the Saturn V were amortized over just a dozen or so missions.
The Shuttle program is a lot like all those people who took out jumbo mortgages in the anticipation that housing prices were only going to go up, up, up. If they had continued going up, increased equity would have canceled out the fact that they really couldn't afford the payments. And it wasn't just stupid homeowners, people who were supposed to know better bought as much mortgage debt as they could get their hands on. The Shuttle program was designed around the assumption of manned spaceflight being something that was going to grow rapidly for a number of years until we were flying a mission every week or two.
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Hmmm. It seems to me that vast majority of users get KDE, not through the KDE project, but through their distro. So, isn't it up to the distro to configure KDE as they see best? Isn't that what distros are for? Since users can tweak everything, the distros choose what goes in by default and how it's configured by default.
So, it seems to me that criticism of KDE 4 should be focused on things which undermine its future adoption by distros.
For example, the idea that it is "released to early" makes no sense at all. If you get a not-ready-for-prime-time release, you either did it yourself, or your distro did it on your behalf, so blame the distro. Likewise, the default icons and menus and whatnot, if its a pain to adapt to something new, why not stay with the old?
On the other hand, if you think that Plasma is an architectural mistake for some reasons, then you'd have a legitimate complaint. Maybe you have security issues with it, or you think that it might not work acceptably on some class of machines you think KDE should support. Or maybe you think it's just not a good way to manage user interactions. That's a reasonable arena for debate, because getting around that technology would probably amount to managing a fork of KDE, rather than tweaking it for your target audience.
--W.C. Fields
The whole point of the this kind of tax break is to do a special favor for a business so that it will locate in your state rather than a different state that would charge them the same tax rate as everybody else.
I'm all for things like tax breaks for enterprise zones, because they address a real need. The intent, at least, is to increase the overall development pie by addressing persistent problems of underdevelopment. And the tax advantages are available to anybody who's willing to locate there. But this kind of sweetheart deal isn't about expanding the pie, it's about scamming a bigger slice than you'd deserve under and impartial tax system. It's a race to the bottom that is driven by people who, without any visibly conscious sense of irony, complain that the government interferes too much in private economic decision making.
If you want to be a sharp, you'd better be the sharpest, most ruthlessly cynical crook in town, because otherwise that larceny in your heart makes you ripe pickings for somebody just a wee bit slicker. The whole foundation of the 419 scam is that blinded by greed and narcissistic admiration of your own cleverness, you will eagerly send money, without any security, to a party you know is untrustworthy. In fact you are counting on that party to act in an untrustworthy way. In the light of cold reason, this is obviously incredibly stupid. While I might spare some bit of sympathy for an 80 year old grandmother who wants to leave a bit more nest egg to her grandkids, somebody elected to public office really should display more brains than to expect treatment for themselves better than that they deal to others.
So spare a little outrage against Nielsen and Tata for the supposed "victims" in this scam. I hope they're run out of office.
Yes, that would be quite the red flag if the former CIO of Citigroup and GE were found to have a lot of money in his bank account!
I detect a bit of unintentional irony here. Hopefully we won't find ourselves on the barricades waving the bloody shirt.
I'd be too, except that the ACLU is going to be arguing its cases against an ideologically stacked court.
Once upon a time, localities used to produce all their own food. This was an era when famine was common.
If you tied the entire continent together with a superconducting grid, you'd have a bigger market for producers to enter. If a local producer was having problems, it would have no local effect. Likewise nuclear plants could be put in remote areas far from population centers.
Also, wind power plants and tidal power plants could sell their peak power production where it is most needed, even if local demand for electricity at 3am is smal.
So ... you have it exactly backwards. It's more economically efficient and reliable to have huge electric markets, rather than small ones.
Well, lets start with some plausible hypotheses as to how the materials might be unsafe, and then study those.
Granted, there will be lots of media hysteria like there was in the case of the supposed cell phone/brain cancer link years ago, but that's inevitable. Since it's inevitable, we might as well proceed in the most epistemologically sound way. That would be to do our best to show that these materials are unsafe, then (hopefully) fail in each specific mechanism we can think of.
Logically, you might claim that we're assuming that the materials are unsafe, but that's only as a null hypothesis regarding specific mechanisms. That's not the same as assuming the materials might be unsafe in some way which is beyond the capacity of human ingenuity to anticipate. That would not only bar trying anything new, it would also bar continuing anything we're already doing. For that matter, it also bars stopping anything we're already doing.
Why not burn it in place and dump it on the electricity grid?
This shows, in my opinion, how important battery technology is. Once battery technology gets good enough, literally anything you might convert into gasoline could just as well be burned in a clean, efficient, high temperature engine and dumped onto a superconducting grid, no exotic tech required.
That's the point. Think of the next generation of students, who no longer will have to play with dangerous bunsen burners in the lab. Instead they'll fashion glassware and boil solutions in the safe, heatless flame of an alcohol lamp.
For that matter, what about people who use alcohol in their backpacking stoves? Since the alcohol doesn't burn with any heat, they can safely use their stoves in their tents.
There's no end to applications for this miracle material. We could replace the water in our fire sprinkler systems with cool burning alcohol, which would starve the fire of oxygen while burning at a temperature too low to cause damage.
I want to point out the obvious here that I'm being sarcastic. Although anybody who can't figure that out is arguably not long for this world, I'd rather not have their demises on my conscience.
Hmmm. An alcohol flame gets plenty hot. Hot enough to melt glass rods if you don't have a bunsen burner handy, so temps can probably reach over 1000 degrees F.
Alcohol flames burn so clean that they look innocuous. You also can do some impressive stunts that exploit the cooling effect of alcohol evaporation. These seem to have combined to create the myth that alcohol burns cool. Anybody mucking around with alcohol flames for amusement would be well advised not to believe this.
To answer your question, MS's power comes from what economists call the "network effect". Developers go to the MS platform because it has the most users. Users go to the MS platform because it has the most applications. Organizations choose MS for those reasons, and because they can find people with know how.
Back in the 80s, "piracy" was rife and while Microsoft complained, it didn't do anything about it. They had no activations or copy protection, so lots of small businesses just made as many copies as they wanted. One of the actual rationalizations supposedly law abiding people offered for this was that this benefited Microsoft more than if they turned to a MS competitor, like DR DOS. And, of course, they were right as far as they went. They didn't point out that they got a free ride while the law abiding paid higher prices.
What you say is true of the most austere, philosophical forms of Buddhism, but Buddhism comes in many flavors, many if not most chock full of yummy syncretic mix-ins. Tibetan Buddhism has quite a bit of Bon mixed in. Chinese Buddhism readily accepts the Bodhisattvas as part of the divine bureaucracy. Zen doesn't concern itself one way or the other with the issue, but it's practiced in places where forms of Buddhism flourish that could only be called pietist.
The founding myths of Buddhism pretty much take the existence of gods for granted; it's just that existence as a god isn't really isn't fundamentally better than any other kind of existence. For some this is just a metaphorical point, for others it may have different significance.
Buddhism pretty much accommodates itself whatever the heavenly pantheon or lack thereof is popular. It could be practiced by atheists or theists. I can't count the number of Jew-bus I know (their term not mine). If it can't mix with Christianity or Islam, that's because those religions emphasize an exclusive choice made by the adherent. You're born a Jew after all, and if you keep the laws, you're still a Jew. You aren't going to get kicked out for pondering the metaphorical significance of eastern myths, and if you manage time to sit zazen and do all the other things you're supposed to do, you're probably still a Jew.
Well, even if the software becomes public domain -- which might be a good idea -- that's not really the biggest problem users have. The biggest problem is getting support.
It's important not to confusing public domain and free software. Free software includes access to source code and any trade secret or other IP embodied in that source code. Chances are you aren't so much concerned about copying your abandonware to different hardware, as keeping it running, if necessary on hardware that didn't exist back in the day. For that you need source, and the right to do things with the source. You need free software.
RAID is not a substitute for backups!
Nor are backups a substitute for reliable operation.
I don't even want to think about restoring 1TB to a consumer hard drive, even if I had dropped the thousands of dollars on tape drives and media to back it up.
The thing that bothers me about the backup technologies available to consumers, apart from the fact you need to spend two orders of magnitude on drive and tape more than you spent on the disks you're backing up, is that there are so many technologies to choose from. In ancient days, there was just 9 track, and everybody could read it. Later there was DDS, DLT, or for suckers, Travan and for real suckers anything from Iomega. Now I look at dropping a thousand bucks on a flavor-of-the-month drive, and it gives me a queasy feeling.
And in a world where a 160GB tape cartidge and a 160 GB hard disk SATA hard disk can both be bought for about $40, I'm open to spending a bit more to get the convenience of a standard interface hard disk, provided that it has enhanced reliability. It can be slower on transfer than tape, the convenience of random access probably more than makes up for it.
Now this, I must say, is an excellent point. It may not be enough to put WFW in the public domain because people want it, but because that's part of the copyright deal. An individual of course can agree to any terms he wants, but society as a whole ought not be bound by such private agreements.
I'd make two provisos to this, however. First, "open source" or "free" software isn't the same thing as software that is in the public domain. It isn't enough to eliminate the restrictions on people in possession of copies, you'd also have to mandate Microsoft release source and build information. The second proviso is that the works in the public domain can be converted by others into proprietary derivative works, where as free software cannot.
I would argue that any license that restricts the 4 fundamental software freedoms is unconscionable.
But your argument would be a pretty weak one, unless you were forced to accept the license. There is very little software you can't live without, and these days there are free alternative to almost everything. You might prefer Windows to Linux, but that's no excuse to obtain Windows under false pretenses.
I'd bet even RMS, who thinks proprietary licensing is evil, isn't going to run an unlicensed copy of Windows in QEMU just so he can test software on it. This is the kind of thing programmers rationalize doing all the time; they're doing Microsoft a favor. Maybe Microsoft secretly agree with them. But the more strongly you believe in the principle, the more up front you should be, even if it becomes confrontational. It's not civil disobedience if you do it in secret.
Some contracts are unconscionable because the nature of the terms were misrepresented to a party that could not be expected to understand them. There was a recent case in the news of a financial advisor who convinced a 90 year old to take money out of the annuity on which she was living and put it into an annuity that matured in sixty years. That's unconscionable. If you license proprietary software, you know darned well you aren't allowed to install it on more than one machine, so you shouldn't agree to that if you think it's wrong.
Some contracts are unconscionable because they are so bad for society they are repugnant. You can't sell your organs, or agree to become an indentured servant. Perhaps you think proprietary software licenses fall into this category. Then don't agree. It's at least as unconscionable for you to offer your kidney for sale to somebody on dialysis with no intention of following through than it is for that person to offer money for it.
It's unconscionable for you to agree to an unconscionable agreement with no intention of following through. It is not only dishonest, it encourages the very things you are supposedly against. If it weren't for "piracy" in the 80s and early 90s, Microsoft would never have become as powerful as it did.
Buddhism has an interesting viewpoint on issues like this.
You'll notice all kinds of gods in Buddhist iconography and mythology. If you're a Buddhist, you're not expected to believe in any of them. You can if you want, but belief isn't an end in itself. Belief is something that on its own is hard to maintain. You can't be expected to believe in something all the time. You may believe in the non-existence of ghosts, you might find it difficult to maintain that belief if you are alone in a creepy house.
Since a belief is something you put mental energy into, it ought to pull its weight. Therefore, a Buddhist might ask, not whether a belief is true, but whether a belief is useful. Etymologically, the English world "belief" carries this sense of investment, being related to "beloved".
In the case of Last Tuesdayism, you can't prove its factuality one way or the other, so it's pointless to have an opinion on that. But a Buddhist might ask, "Well, suppose everything was created last Tuesday. What would be different?" Well, one thing that might be different is that you might choose to forgo revenge against somebody who "injured" you on Monday. The utility of Last Tuedayism, then, is this: it raises the question of whether your past pain is a better guide to choosing your behavior than your future happiness.
The Buddha himself once referred to beliefs as being like rafts. Once you have crossed the river, you leave them behind. Christianity, unfortunately, filtered down to us through Greek thought, with its bitter rivalry between philosophical schools. Therefore, much more emphasis is put on orthodoxy (right teaching) over orthopraxy (right action). Whereas the Jews produced Talmudic commentaries from almost every conceivable position, Christians produced diatribes against each other for heresy (which comes from the Greek word meaning to "choose" -- that is to choose for oneself).
I don't agree.
I have a problem with the idea of software becoming open sourced just because the users want it. If you knowingly agree to be bound by a license, you should honor that agreement unless the licensor acts in an unconscionable way, and then your own actions should only be sufficient to address the specific issue. Everybody knows vendors stop supporting old software. You can't complain if the vendor gives you a couple years to upgrade and then pulls support, because you bought the license to use the software knowing this could happen.
This is important. This is why businesses and individuals should use open source software wherever possible: in order to control their future. Much of the open source software I use is because I don't like the license restrictions of the proprietary alternative.
People and organizations should support open source and free software rather than make deals with proprietary vendor then renege on them. And if people should be so cavalier with licenses, then the same applies to free licenses as well.
Might I suggest "copyright infringement"?
This is a quite (unintentionally) interesting post. The words "stealing" and "piracy" are criticized here because they are inaccurate metaphors for the thing being described, chosen to sway the debate by their emotional impact. Here we have an AC troll who is trying to veer the conversation back into emotionalism by yet another inaccurate metaphor.
You can see that the words "stealing" and "piracy" obscure the issue, without necessarily thinking that copyright infringement is acceptable.
Some cases of piracy are reasonably close to theft: unauthorized commercial duplication for example. In this case, the copyright holders aren't deprived of the material, they are deprived of the revenue, which the infringer enjoys. Other cases are not very much like theft, but are still not very admirable. They are more like freeloading.
Still other forms of copyright infringement represent the user trying to exercise a right he believes he has but which the copyright holder does not believe he has. In some cases that may be a legal right (such as archival copying), in other cases it may be a moral right, like replacing a CD lost in a fire. Such infringements have to be viewed on a case by case basis. Some are be reasonable and others are not, some are legal and others are not, but none are precisely "stealing" nor are any "piracy", which technically means robbery on the ocean without a valid legally recognized license from a sovereign nation.
Ah, but the subconscious, unlike the unconscious lies beyond the reach of consciousness. All subconscious behavior is unconscious, but only some unconscious behavior is subconscious, because nothing stands in the way of becoming aware of it.
When you mindlessly set down your keys without noting where they are, you do so unconsciously. When you deliberately (on a deeply buried level) deliberately put your keys where you won't find them, because the phallic shape arouses the deep seated and unbearable desire to castrate yourself and live as a woman, you are doing so subconsciously.
In this case, you clearly are capable of becoming conscious of dismissing the article's author, so that much is merely unconscious. However, the energy of subconscious urges, such as the urge to castrate yourself and thus appease the wrath of your father by taking your mother's place, cannot be "bottled up". They appear in surprising ways; you might find yourself intending to type ":-)", but instead typing something else symbolic of the suppressed wish. Clearly, you have not blocked the awareness of your irrational dismissal of the author based on his peculiar preference for the golden aspect ration; however you do seem to have a block about distinguishing "un-" from "sub-" conscious. This probably indicates you have no suppressed issues with photographers dabbling in mathematics, but you might have an issue related to Greeks doing so.
I'm glad I could clear that up for you. :// =>
I support FISA, but not the amendments made this year.
I support FISA becuase it's better to be realistic about what we're going to do in a situation and have rules governing that situation, than to pretend we're going to do something different and then make up the rules as we go along.
The Fourth Amendment, if you read it carefully, doesn't actually require searches to have warrants. It requires them to be reasonable. It also requires warrants to be issued by probable cause. This doesn't mean searches without warrants are automatically unreasonable. Common sense shows there are lots of situations where the police search without warrants that are reasonable and constitutional. Nobody objects to a SWAT team entering a private building if there is a sniper there.
It's the borderline cases that we have to watch; that's where civil liberties are nibbled away.
FISA is a critical law because it defines how the border between legal and illegal will be policed. It basically says, OK do what you have to in a hot pursuit situation, but be prepared to justify your actions afterwards in a court of law. FISA, in its original form, unlike the amendments passed this year, doesn't fundamentally alter the boundary between legal and illegal searches. It creates an accountability mechanism that allows legal searches to proceed unhindered while preventing the government slipping in a few illegal searches among them without somebody noticing.
The problem with the FISA amendments is that they create a de facto shift in what is allowable, not a de jure one. It's basically a license to break the law.
Almost all the ills of democratic government come from hiding the illegitimate with the legitimate, and then obscuring the two. You take your pork barrel favors for your friends and hide them in a bill everybody needs to pass. You take your political black bag jobs and mix them in with counter-terrorism. Even the PATRIOT Act has a lot of reasonable and important provisions in it. It's just that if you want to make democracy the tool of your private interests, you never let a piece of medicine go without carrying along its share of poison.
Frankly, I don't really don't care that much that the telecoms get off the hook in this instance. Yes, it's a bad precedent, but it's far from the biggest problem here. It's part of a pattern that is far more worrying.
The biggest problem is that the FISA amendments allow the government to destroy surveillance records, or not to keep them in the first place. What possible legitimate purpose could that serve? The telecom thing isn't there to protect the telecoms, it's there to make it impossible for private individuals to determine the scope of the government's intrusion via discovery. Likewise, the amendment prevents states from investigating crimes committed against their citizens.
Clearly, the biggest practical effect of these amendments is to allow the executive branch to engage in criminal activities and obstruct any effort, private or public, to determine the extent of those crimes.
This is not a "liberal" issue. Concealing and destroying evidence shows this is not an argument about the extent to which the President is bound by one law or another, but whether he can exceed his constitutional powers with impunity and then escape accountability. This transcends liberal/conservative divide over the President's "inherent powers", because whatever you think the scope of the President's powers should be, this allows him to exceed that scope.
Well, I actually remember the fairness doctrine in operation, and while bloviation was nothing like the industry it is now, it wasn't like you couldn't find public affairs programming.
What used to happen was that every so often you'd get some private individual on TV giving a two minute editorial attacking an opinion stated or implied in the station's news coverage. As I recall, it was usually the arch-conservatives who took advantage of it.
The fairness doctrine is only part of what changed. The other thing was that ownership rules changed allowing people with enough money to control more of the media, which makes it attractive to people with an economic interest in swaying public opinion. The same viewpoints that used to be delivered in fairness doctrine are now the mainstream media party line.
Well, we don't know what the marginal cost of the Saturn program would be if we extended it to do hundreds of launches rather than a dozen or so. The numbers you allude to for the Saturn V are average numbers, including development costs spread over very few missions. Furthermore the Saturn V wouldn't be used for everything; we'd have used the Saturn 1B, which shared components with the Saturn V, for LEO and small payloads and moving crew around.
Substitute Ares for Saturn, and that's the current plan, IIRC. We'll use an Ares I to launch crews and small payloads, and an Ares V for heavy lifting.
The lack of enough missions is not only responsible for the cost of Shuttle launches, it's probably responsible for the two Shuttle disasters. Programs take on a life of their own; the idea of a reusable vehicle was conceived at at time when we thought we'd be doing more manned space exploration, but by the time the program was approved, it was clear that American manned space exploration was over for a generation at least. Rather than abandoning the program which had been the future of space vehicles, the program adapted by producing a more versatile vehicle that could scrounge more missions in an environment where missions were too scarce to justify its existence. Each vehicle carries the burden of being able to do more with less cost, and features contributing to that cheap versatility contributed to both failures.
Well, without taking issue with your comparison to the Saturn V, two of the most important questions you have to ask is this: how many launches are you expecting to do with your reusable vehicle and how frequently?
There were a total of 13 Saturn V launches. There have been a total of over 120 Shuttle launches, spread over six vehicles (including the two lost ones) for an average of twenty launches per vehicle and an average launch rate over 27 years of operation of four per year.
While that is pretty impressive, if you think about it, it's nothing like we thought it would be. When the Shuttle project was approved, yes, we were cutting the Apollo program short, but nobody knew we'd cut back so far on manned spaceflight. There was talk of turning around a Shuttle in as little a two weeks; at one point Columbia was relaunched in less than two months; if we'd been launching Shuttles at close to this rate, we'd probably have been flying twenty or thirty missions per year, rather than four.
In order to save money with a reusable vehicle, you have to use it a many times to amortize its greater acquisition cost, and you have to use if frequently to achieve operational efficiencies in preparing it for the next flight. It's a maxim that you lose money on a plane any time its wheels are on the ground. This is more true of the Shuttle than any other vehicle, because it is the most expensive, most complex vehicle ever created. Just having the capability to launch and re-launch the Shuttle is expensive, and underutilizing that capability makes each mission fabulously expensive. The cost per launch of the Shuttle is somewhat less than the Saturn V, but the entire program costs of the Saturn V were amortized over just a dozen or so missions.
The Shuttle program is a lot like all those people who took out jumbo mortgages in the anticipation that housing prices were only going to go up, up, up. If they had continued going up, increased equity would have canceled out the fact that they really couldn't afford the payments. And it wasn't just stupid homeowners, people who were supposed to know better bought as much mortgage debt as they could get their hands on. The Shuttle program was designed around the assumption of manned spaceflight being something that was going to grow rapidly for a number of years until we were flying a mission every week or two.