You've enumerated nothing but income taxes. All participants in any transaction, internet-related or otherwise, pay income taxes on what they earn. But on top of that, whenever you buy something, it's usually subject to sales tax. ISP service currently has a special exemption from sales tax. Why should that be?
Maybe it made sense to give internet access special status back in the days when the idea of connecting computers was novel and fragile, and people dialed in to ISPs run by mom-and-pop businesses. Nowdays, most people get their ISP service from giant corporations like AT&T and Time Warner. There's little chance anymore that the internet is going to go away. What makes it deserve an unusual and specific exemption from sales taxes? With the current situation, sales taxes on physical goods are effectively subsidizing ISP service. Is there a good reason for that?
I think that I can write better logic to lower my heating bill but the company wont give me the microcode. Are they evil corporate nazis by preventing me from modifying their stuff?
They are if they grabbed somebody else's GPLd microcode and shipped it in the thermostat.
But I would think most commercials could be conceived to accommodate cropping.
What gets me is all the 16:9 ads that they show on HD channels in SD format, but letterboxed into a 4:3 window. Those ads end up as a postage-stamp size rectangle in the middle of my screen. What are they thinking?
us. Just because you bought something doesn't mean you have unlimited rights to do as you wish to it. Would you consider a book that you bought now exclusively yours, then copy it and redistribute it?
The specific act of copying the information in the book is regulated by copyright law. Other than that, I'm free to do what I wish with the book, including modifying it and using the modified book.
You own your house so does that give you the right to modify your water, gas and electrical hookups to bypass the meters?
I wouldn't expect to, since I don't own the meters or utility pipes.
Do you have the right to drive your property you bought however you feel like?
If I drive on my own land, pretty much as long as I don't hurt anybody. Haven't you ever wondered why NASCAR drivers don't get speeding tickets during races?.
they also have a right to put mechanisms in place to deny you further service if you do.
And the people who wrote the software that Tivo uses have the right to prevent them from applying those mechanisms to copies of that software which Tivo redistributes. See the book example above.
Because apparently, Tivo couldn't be bothered to write their own goddamned software. So they decided to use somebody else's at no charge, and the authors of that software thought that end users should have those freedoms.
You have the typical low-level software developer blinders on. The GPL is not all that concerned about the 1% of people who redistribute software; it's concerned about the 99% of people who are end users. You're just upset because you can't take the software gratis, then redistribute it under your own terms. That's not a concern for end users, but the restrictions that you would add under your terms would be.
When you bought it, you knew what the restrictions, both legal and technological, on it were.
The legal "restrictions" on it, the GPL, are what you're complaining about here. As far as technological shortcomings, property owner has a right to fix what he owns.
You just want to play pretend hacker with your toys.
Yeah, and you just want to play patsy to some OEM and tell yourself that that's somehow "freedom".
I'd respond, what about their right to attempt to prevent their product from being hacked?
Once Tivo has sold it to me, it's not "their product" any more. It's my property, and any "freedoms" regarding it belong to me. As it happens, the particular copyright license in the software that Tivo chose to redistribute may help ensure that Tivo is prevented from interfering with my freedom to use my property as I see fit.
...and if you concentrate the sunlight 1000 times, then the thing will melt...
Not necessarily. The thermal power would be comparable to an ordinary microprocessor die. If you had a 2cm**2 die at 1000X concentration, you'd be gathering focusing 2000cm**2 of sunlight on it, which is in the ballpark of 200W. That's not hugely more than the amount of heat that an ordinary CPU creates in the same area, and a small heatsink easily handles that job.
Look at the single claim in the Eolas patent. That huge run-on sentence is nothing but a badly-worded description of the totally obvious way to solve the the following problem: "Expose a browser's plugin functionality to a scripting language.". Anybody, even less than ordinarilly skilled in the art of CS, would have come up with essentially the same series of steps.
Just because the people who Eolas bought the patent from were the first to pose the problem, that still doesn't make the solution any less obvious. This is a major flaw with the patent process that the SCOTUS has recently partially addressed: the fallacious assumption that if you're the first to solve a problem, then your solution must be nonobvious because nobody has solved it before. That's not true. Being the first to work on a problem has nothing to do with the obviousness of any solutions you come up with. And the Eolas patent is dead obvious, regardless of how many obfuscating phrases they pack into their claim.
The procedure to do an FTP or harddrive installation of Fedora is in the release notes or installation instructions for Fedora. I can't point you to a guide for Fedora 7 right now because their website seems to be overloaded. However, from what I remember, under Fedora Core 5 selecting an alternate install method like FTP was one of the boot menu selections on the install disks. If selected, near the beginning of the install process it prompts you for simple network card settings and the URL of your FTP source.
As far as mounting the ISO image directly from a hard drive, a command such as
sudo mount foo.iso some_dir/ -o ro,loop
should work. Then you can browse the DVD contents under some_dir/.
How to set up an FTP server depends on which one you pick. I think I installed vsftpd, then followed its instructions on configuring it. It's probably simplest to install the FTP server package, then mount the DVD within the default public share directory of the server. It's possible that could work without any configuration other than maybe opening the FTP ports on your firewall.
If you're only installing one or two machines and you have another partition with enough room on the systems, it could be simpler and faster to copy the contents of the DVD into the alternate partition and do a hard drive-based install instead of an FTP install. Then the installer prompts you for a partition device and a subdirectory to install from.
Download the DVD ISO into one computer on your LAN
Mount the ISO filesystem image on a loop device
Turn on an FTP daemon to serve up the DVD files
Tell the 17 computers to do an FTP-based install over your lan
I've done this. It's faster than a DVD or CD install because you don't have to deal with an optical drive's abysmal seek latency. And no swapping CDs for hours.
Ignoring any cash subsidies, how much do you think that it would have cost them if they had had to pay fair market price for all the easements that they use to run their wires rather than setting up privileged deals with local governments?
I think they should create a NASCAR-like race using SUVs.
They already have NASCAR races for pickup trucks. However, these "trucks" have no more relation to real-world vehicles than their "stock" sedans do (i.e., none at all). I'm sure that if NASCAR had SUVs, they would handle just great on an oval track. They would basically just be a different looking fiberglass shell on top of the same race car chassis that they use currently.
a GAO report that (among other things)documents IBM telling the US Federal Government that they will no longer be stocking spare parts for air traffic control mainframes that IBM installed only 13 years earlier.
That's not good, given that every time the government decides to update their air traffic control system, the project seems to end up at least 13 years behind schedule.
It's a little something that I have enjoyed my entire life. Something that Iraqis will enjoy in the near future (unless we pull our troops out immediately) - Freedom.
The *current situation* doesn't allow them to enjoy this unsolicited "freedom". Huge numbers of refugees who continue to flee Iraq attest to that. Given that we've already been there for 4 years and have achieved so little, it's unlikely that our troops are going to change that in the "near future" either.
Nobody really has a CLUE what is going on right now in Iraq because the media is doing a horrible job depicting what's happening.
OK, if you are privy to this secret inside scoop that nobody else knows about, maybe you could share with us exactly what about the current situation you find so wonderful.
The capsule probably just encountered a rift in spacetime and ended up landing somewhere like ancient Rome or 1920s Chicago. As I understand it, this kind of thing happens all the time to space vehicles. They probably shouldn't waste too much effort looking for it in the present.
Back in my college days I'd walk across campus to study in the library's 25-foot high reading room rather than slither down to my dorm basement to use one of the study cubes with a steam pipe right over my head. If nothing else, I was far less likely to doze off in the big room.
Well, you had me excited for a minute. However, if you're referring to the first two boxes on the page, as far as I can tell they only handle SD resolution (720x480). Most of the other cheap boxes don't seem to have component inputs at all. (Maybe I'm wrong, the site isn't very consistent on showing features.)
There are at least two problems with that: due to media industry pressure, analog and unencrypted digital HD connections are probably going away before too long, and there are few if any consumer-grade video capture cards that have the bandwidth to handle uncompressed HD signals.
So, your kind of society is one where a private insurance company must insure everyone who walks in the office, against their own judgment, because to do otherwise is discrimination?
That's pretty much irrelevant. Since the medical costs for any individual are highly predictable, most health coverage is
not "insurance" at all. Individual plans for a few healthy human specimens are insurance, but most people aren't healthy enough (or have a family member who is not healthy enough) to get individual health insurance. Genuine insurance just isn't a big factor in overall healthcare spending.
The majority of people (ignoring for now the half of total healthcare costs that's shifted from taxpayers to retirees) are in group plans. These plans aren't insurance because the coverage intentionally ignores readily-available information about individuals in the group. That makes it a socialized cost-sharing program. In most every country in the world, the socialized program is run by the government. In the US, though, there are thousands of these programs each run by an employer. It's basically a feudal system where government functions are delegated to private lordships. This is very useful for employers; it keeps their employees highly dependent on staying with their current jobs, like serfs that are bound to their land. (Why else would employers be involved in this sideline that's totally irrelevant to their core business?).
So these private "insurance" companies already do insure almost anyone who walks in the office. There's just the catch that the system is rigged so that they have to be sponsored by an employer.
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Maybe it made sense to give internet access special status back in the days when the idea of connecting computers was novel and fragile, and people dialed in to ISPs run by mom-and-pop businesses. Nowdays, most people get their ISP service from giant corporations like AT&T and Time Warner. There's little chance anymore that the internet is going to go away. What makes it deserve an unusual and specific exemption from sales taxes? With the current situation, sales taxes on physical goods are effectively subsidizing ISP service. Is there a good reason for that?
They are if they grabbed somebody else's GPLd microcode and shipped it in the thermostat.
What gets me is all the 16:9 ads that they show on HD channels in SD format, but letterboxed into a 4:3 window. Those ads end up as a postage-stamp size rectangle in the middle of my screen. What are they thinking?
The specific act of copying the information in the book is regulated by copyright law. Other than that, I'm free to do what I wish with the book, including modifying it and using the modified book.
I wouldn't expect to, since I don't own the meters or utility pipes.
If I drive on my own land, pretty much as long as I don't hurt anybody. Haven't you ever wondered why NASCAR drivers don't get speeding tickets during races?.
And the people who wrote the software that Tivo uses have the right to prevent them from applying those mechanisms to copies of that software which Tivo redistributes. See the book example above.
Because apparently, Tivo couldn't be bothered to write their own goddamned software. So they decided to use somebody else's at no charge, and the authors of that software thought that end users should have those freedoms.
You have the typical low-level software developer blinders on. The GPL is not all that concerned about the 1% of people who redistribute software; it's concerned about the 99% of people who are end users. You're just upset because you can't take the software gratis, then redistribute it under your own terms. That's not a concern for end users, but the restrictions that you would add under your terms would be.
The legal "restrictions" on it, the GPL, are what you're complaining about here. As far as technological shortcomings, property owner has a right to fix what he owns.
Yeah, and you just want to play patsy to some OEM and tell yourself that that's somehow "freedom".
Once Tivo has sold it to me, it's not "their product" any more. It's my property, and any "freedoms" regarding it belong to me. As it happens, the particular copyright license in the software that Tivo chose to redistribute may help ensure that Tivo is prevented from interfering with my freedom to use my property as I see fit.
Just because the people who Eolas bought the patent from were the first to pose the problem, that still doesn't make the solution any less obvious. This is a major flaw with the patent process that the SCOTUS has recently partially addressed: the fallacious assumption that if you're the first to solve a problem, then your solution must be nonobvious because nobody has solved it before. That's not true. Being the first to work on a problem has nothing to do with the obviousness of any solutions you come up with. And the Eolas patent is dead obvious, regardless of how many obfuscating phrases they pack into their claim.
And software "plugins" have been obvious for decades. No matter what context they're used in.
As far as mounting the ISO image directly from a hard drive, a command such as
should work. Then you can browse the DVD contents under some_dir/.How to set up an FTP server depends on which one you pick. I think I installed vsftpd, then followed its instructions on configuring it. It's probably simplest to install the FTP server package, then mount the DVD within the default public share directory of the server. It's possible that could work without any configuration other than maybe opening the FTP ports on your firewall.
If you're only installing one or two machines and you have another partition with enough room on the systems, it could be simpler and faster to copy the contents of the DVD into the alternate partition and do a hard drive-based install instead of an FTP install. Then the installer prompts you for a partition device and a subdirectory to install from.
-
Download the DVD ISO into one computer on your LAN
- Mount the ISO filesystem image on a loop device
- Turn on an FTP daemon to serve up the DVD files
- Tell the 17 computers to do an FTP-based install over your lan
I've done this. It's faster than a DVD or CD install because you don't have to deal with an optical drive's abysmal seek latency. And no swapping CDs for hours.Ignoring any cash subsidies, how much do you think that it would have cost them if they had had to pay fair market price for all the easements that they use to run their wires rather than setting up privileged deals with local governments?
It'd be a lot cheaper to set up a base manned with a bunch of golf carts and a couple of golf cart repair robots.
They already have NASCAR races for pickup trucks. However, these "trucks" have no more relation to real-world vehicles than their "stock" sedans do (i.e., none at all). I'm sure that if NASCAR had SUVs, they would handle just great on an oval track. They would basically just be a different looking fiberglass shell on top of the same race car chassis that they use currently.
No, just segmented...
That's not good, given that every time the government decides to update their air traffic control system, the project seems to end up at least 13 years behind schedule.
The *current situation* doesn't allow them to enjoy this unsolicited "freedom". Huge numbers of refugees who continue to flee Iraq attest to that. Given that we've already been there for 4 years and have achieved so little, it's unlikely that our troops are going to change that in the "near future" either.
OK, if you are privy to this secret inside scoop that nobody else knows about, maybe you could share with us exactly what about the current situation you find so wonderful.
The capsule probably just encountered a rift in spacetime and ended up landing somewhere like ancient Rome or 1920s Chicago. As I understand it, this kind of thing happens all the time to space vehicles. They probably shouldn't waste too much effort looking for it in the present.
Back in my college days I'd walk across campus to study in the library's 25-foot high reading room rather than slither down to my dorm basement to use one of the study cubes with a steam pipe right over my head. If nothing else, I was far less likely to doze off in the big room.
Well, you had me excited for a minute. However, if you're referring to the first two boxes on the page, as far as I can tell they only handle SD resolution (720x480). Most of the other cheap boxes don't seem to have component inputs at all. (Maybe I'm wrong, the site isn't very consistent on showing features.)
There are at least two problems with that: due to media industry pressure, analog and unencrypted digital HD connections are probably going away before too long, and there are few if any consumer-grade video capture cards that have the bandwidth to handle uncompressed HD signals.
... and I suppose that the Spanish obtained control of Louisiana from its original occupants fair and square.
The majority of people (ignoring for now the half of total healthcare costs that's shifted from taxpayers to retirees) are in group plans. These plans aren't insurance because the coverage intentionally ignores readily-available information about individuals in the group. That makes it a socialized cost-sharing program. In most every country in the world, the socialized program is run by the government. In the US, though, there are thousands of these programs each run by an employer. It's basically a feudal system where government functions are delegated to private lordships. This is very useful for employers; it keeps their employees highly dependent on staying with their current jobs, like serfs that are bound to their land. (Why else would employers be involved in this sideline that's totally irrelevant to their core business?).
So these private "insurance" companies already do insure almost anyone who walks in the office. There's just the catch that the system is rigged so that they have to be sponsored by an employer.
Once again, you arbitrarily redefine the word "survival" to suit your argument.