On the other hand, the suit who robs the pension fund has caused harm, no question about it. These are the type of greedy bastards behind this kind of law, and when they get caught robbing the pension fund, they typically pay a fine equivelent to around 10% of what they stole -- and no jail time in most cases. Can you imagine their outrage if people convicted of piracy were routinely fined 10% of the value of what they were caught with?
It's rather easier to work out what 10% of the money someone stole from a pension fund is though. The value of pirated music/movies/etc is arbitary. Though it undoubtedly is lower than the retail price the ??AA like to claim.
Let me guess--you're one of those people who thinks that corporate executives should get many years in prison rather than fines because of the economic damage their misdeeds cause.
The simple fact is that "white coller criminals" do cause far more economic damage than any other kind of criminal.
Well, movie pirates likewise cause millions in economic damage.
There dosn't appear to be much evidence for this at all.
Laws do not apply to outlaws. If a terrorist cannot aquire the rockets premade, then they will make them themselves (infact they'd probably make them themselves anyway) and then what do you do ?
Assuming they need to bother. No doubt black market arms dealers have military rockets for sale...
Of course this same argument can be made for anything. I mean making a basic gun is easy -- long tube, black powder, and a projectile. Sure, it'll be inaccurate and the range will be crap, but the same thinking goes.
Guns are an old technology, which were perfected without the benefit of modern materials and tools. There's no actual reason to use black powder either, especially for a vehicle mounted gun.
As far as rocketry goes, if these type of regulations were put on other types of explosives (they are) there would be no fuss.
You can easily buy gas and liquid hydrocarbons which explode very well when appropriatly mixed with air. But it would be impossible to ban the sale of these...
Someone could make a weapon out of rocketry supplies, but anyone with the skills to build a halfway decent rocket could build a pretty impressive bomb a lot easier.
Solid rocket propellent is a low explosive specifically designed not to go bang that easily. Someone building a truck bomb is likely to prefer a high explosive. Anyway they are more likely to steal explosives than buy them.
American's are definitely being conditioned and kept fearful of potential terrorist attacks. I believe most Americans are more likely to either 1.)get shot by a fellow American, or 2.)perish in an automobile accident.
In a country like the US more people are killed by cars than guns. It's only in warzones that people are more likely to get killed by guns than cars.
Unless of course you believe that powers not specificially given to the government by the people are reserved for the people. It is called the Tenth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights. Before you spout off about Constitutional law, perhaps you should read the Constitution first.
The problem may be more of understanding than reading. How else do you get interpretations that the "Commerce Clause" supercedes the 10th Amendment. When the only part of the US Constitution which can (logically) supercede the 10th Amendment is a later amendment.
If there's something wrong with anything we're doing, we don't have the power or ability to fix it ourselves. What recourse do we have, other than saying "fix it please pretty please, or we're not going to buy from you anymore!"
Whilst all the time paying for the privilege of reporting a bug with the program. Or playing "it's a feature not a bug".
when in actuality, we'll have to anyway for backwards compatibility and continual operation of day to day activities.
The vendor knows full well that this is an idle threat.
The thing that's truly remarkable about non-US governments making the switch to Linux, is that they now consider independence from MS as an end in itself.
Only a stupid national government would want to be tied to a foreign corporation. It is very much a matter of "national security". Imagine if the US army used proprietary French software or the USAF used software from a company based just North of Tabriz. It almost certainly dosn't help that Microsoft are based in the US either though.
Do you realize the implications of that? It means that they're thinking the way much of the existing Linux community does -- that even if Microsoft manages to fix the bugs in their software, even if they lower the price, even if they do all these things -- being locked-in to Microsoft is still a problem, and a problem that must be eliminated.
Even if Microsoft gave their software away it would still be proprietary rather than free anyway.
For instance, the one print ad I keep seeing making it seem like Linux needs to run on a mainframe. Oh boy... Of course the truth is for most business use 4 year old hardware runs just fine with Linux and other FOSS OSes.
The actual truth is that whilst Linux will run on a mainframe Windows will not. It's an attempt to portray the strength that Linux is highly cross platform as though it is a weakness.
Your making the assumption that all the government runs on it's desktop is OpenOffice. There are thousands (maybe millions) of DOD programs that would have to be rewritten in order to switch to Linux.
Are these all running on Windows now? If it's highly unlikely that porting these from whatever they are running on to Linux whould be more expensive that porting them to Windows. Especially since Linux includes compilers for languages such as FORTRAN and Ada as standard, which Windows does not. There is also the matter of exactly which version of Windows stuff is ported to and how much work it will need when Microsoft decides to EOL all current versions of Windows.
If they do switch to Linux guess who gets to pay for the porting of all those applications? American taxpayers.
As they will have to pay with porting to Windows and pay, pay, pay again once the "upgrade tredmill" gets up to speed.
But how many MCSE's with secret clearance does your MS system need? probably the same number as a linux/unix network of comparable size.
Unless the military is very unusual you'd need several times the number of MCSEs compared with unix admins. Windows administration just does not scale well, despite Microsoft apparently putting a lot of effort into it. The reason appears to be that Windows is a Personal Computer with a single user paradigm endemic in both the OS and many of its applications. Dispite what the original poster claimed it's big organisations where savings from the unix way of doing things, compared with the MS Windows way of doing things, are likely to show up.
You're leaving out the cost of additional internal support. You're forgetting that customization of your environment leads to additional hassles applying patches and upgrades. Finally, you're forgetting that switching hardware costs money.
You are forgetting that you need plenty of internal support with Windows. And that the same arguments about applying patches and upgrades apply to Windows
On how many more thousands of computers would I have to save $100 per license to pay the additional sysadmins, QA, and help desk personnel?
What makes you think you would need more rather than less of these people. Most evidence is that Windows has the worst sysadmin to user ratio of any OS.
What about the project managers that coordinate all these efforts? What about the additional oversight and compliance officers that ensure all of these activities meet regulations and standards?
As you can see, it quickly gets to a point where using a free as in beer product and supporting yourself is more expensive than buying from a vendor
What makes you think that a vendor should be trusted to comply with the relevent regulations and standards? In actual fact if it is important that the result complies with any standards at all then you probably shouldn't be touching a company like Microsoft with a long barge pole.
and getting a support contract.
Most so called "support contracts" for propriatary software arn't even worth the paper they are printed on.
A small to medium size business may save some money, but once you grow past that, it just makes more sense to pay for support.
If you want real support then open source really is your best option. But you've just said you prefer some fantasy of vendor support over having real support.
I'd guess there's been some serious cash kickbacks over the years to some big companies (individuals in companies) to get them to stick with microsoft.
The price Microsoft charges for their products is more or less arbitrary. They undoubtedly still make a profit on selling "educational licences". Giving the stuff away, even paying people to use it, is effectivly a "loss leader". As well as muddying the waters over the definition of "free".
This is one of the reasons I've wondered why the founding fathers didn't add a fourth branch. The other three are creationist, and regulatory, but NOT death for the output of the other three.
Most likely because they considered the role of the US Congress to be both creation and destruction of statute laws.
It looks as though Microsoft has been looking into how other special interest groups, in the US, conduct politics. These organisations are probably more accuratly described as "PACs" than "Think Tanks". Even down to their choosing names which imply some sort of independence.
Most of those sued settled out of court. It'd be interesting to know what the settlement was, because I doubt the RIAA is getting enough from these "John Doe" pirates to cover their lawyer costs.
How does someone in this kind of case even know they are being sued? If that can't happen how could anyone possible settle.
As opposed to wasting money on proprietary software...
Evidently they haven't looked at the Wired article. The one that says that an average Malaysian worker has to work 1,100 (yes, eleven hundred) hours to buy a licensed copy of Windows XP.
So there are probably a lot of pirate copies in Malaysia.
Today, the USA alone bears the distinction of being the only nation on the planet that has not yet made any sort of government sponsored effort to switch to the metric system. I find this slightly amusing personally.
It looks even more ammusing when you consider that the US signed relevent treaty a long time ago and the US Constitution explicitally states that only the federal government has the authority to approve systems of measurement.
Personal anecdote: not that long ago, I was describing something to my kids and mentioned a measurement in yards. My children had no idea how long a "yard" was until I described the length with my hands... to which they said "Oh, you mean a metre!" As the measurement I was citing to them was just an estimate anyways, I told them yes... but I told them that a yard was about 3 and a third inches shorter than a metre. I got another blank stare at the word "inch", at which point I told them there is 36 inches in a yard...
Maybe it's the time for the US to join the metric world.
The US is a signatory to the "Treaty of the Metre" (n.b. the treaty and the US signing of it predates Noah Webster.) Just that the US Congress has yet to properly ratify it.
At least we wouldn't loose that Mars probe!
But a few people might die from the shock of seeing US politicans follow the US Consitution:)
Only because multiplication by 10 isnt even considered a calculation by most people.
We use decimal numbers, why not use metric measurements (unless of course you do math in hex, in which case your stuffed either way)
Similarly most currencies are decimal. AFAIK there are no examples of a country changing from a decimal currency to a non decimal one. As for the hex example such numbers would still be written in Arabic notation, where multiplication and division by the radix is trivial.
In fact, further investigation reveals that the US standard inch is defined to be exactly 2.54cm. Who'da thunk it?
Both the US and the Imperial inch were redefined to be exactly 25.4mm in world war 2. Having 3 different measuring systems hindered the allies in being able to make precision machine parts (for weapons) systems. So the solution used was to redefine two of these measuring systems in terms of the third.
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On the other hand, the suit who robs the pension fund has caused harm, no question about it. These are the type of greedy bastards behind this kind of law, and when they get caught robbing the pension fund, they typically pay a fine equivelent to around 10% of what they stole -- and no jail time in most cases. Can you imagine their outrage if people convicted of piracy were routinely fined 10% of the value of what they were caught with?
It's rather easier to work out what 10% of the money someone stole from a pension fund is though.
The value of pirated music/movies/etc is arbitary. Though it undoubtedly is lower than the retail price the ??AA like to claim.
Let me guess--you're one of those people who thinks that corporate executives should get many years in prison rather than fines because of the economic damage their misdeeds cause.
The simple fact is that "white coller criminals" do cause far more economic damage than any other kind of criminal.
Well, movie pirates likewise cause millions in economic damage.
There dosn't appear to be much evidence for this at all.
Tell me how on earth you expect them to "crack the DVD" when it hasn't even hit the cinema's yet?
Depends when the DVD is actually produced. There might well be quite a few movies where DVDs are produced before "release".
Laws do not apply to outlaws. If a terrorist cannot aquire the rockets premade, then they will make them themselves (infact they'd probably make them themselves anyway) and then what do you do ?
Assuming they need to bother. No doubt black market arms dealers have military rockets for sale...
Of course this same argument can be made for anything. I mean making a basic gun is easy -- long tube, black powder, and a projectile. Sure, it'll be inaccurate and the range will be crap, but the same thinking goes.
Guns are an old technology, which were perfected without the benefit of modern materials and tools. There's no actual reason to use black powder either, especially for a vehicle mounted gun.
As far as rocketry goes, if these type of regulations were put on other types of explosives (they are) there would be no fuss.
You can easily buy gas and liquid hydrocarbons which explode very well when appropriatly mixed with air. But it would be impossible to ban the sale of these...
Someone could make a weapon out of rocketry supplies, but anyone with the skills to build a halfway decent rocket could build a pretty impressive bomb a lot easier.
Solid rocket propellent is a low explosive specifically designed not to go bang that easily. Someone building a truck bomb is likely to prefer a high explosive. Anyway they are more likely to steal explosives than buy them.
American's are definitely being conditioned and kept fearful of potential terrorist attacks. I believe most Americans are more likely to either 1.)get shot by a fellow American, or 2.)perish in an automobile accident.
In a country like the US more people are killed by cars than guns. It's only in warzones that people are more likely to get killed by guns than cars.
Unless of course you believe that powers not specificially given to the government by the people are reserved for the people. It is called the Tenth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights. Before you spout off about Constitutional law, perhaps you should read the Constitution first.
The problem may be more of understanding than reading. How else do you get interpretations that the "Commerce Clause" supercedes the 10th Amendment. When the only part of the US Constitution which can (logically) supercede the 10th Amendment is a later amendment.
If there's something wrong with anything we're doing, we don't have the power or ability to fix it ourselves. What recourse do we have, other than saying "fix it please pretty please, or we're not going to buy from you anymore!"
Whilst all the time paying for the privilege of reporting a bug with the program. Or playing "it's a feature not a bug".
when in actuality, we'll have to anyway for backwards compatibility and continual operation of day to day activities.
The vendor knows full well that this is an idle threat.
The thing that's truly remarkable about non-US governments making the switch to Linux, is that they now consider independence from MS as an end in itself.
Only a stupid national government would want to be tied to a foreign corporation. It is very much a matter of "national security". Imagine if the US army used proprietary French software or the USAF used software from a company based just North of Tabriz.
It almost certainly dosn't help that Microsoft are based in the US either though.
Do you realize the implications of that? It means that they're thinking the way much of the existing Linux community does -- that even if Microsoft manages to fix the bugs in their software, even if they lower the price, even if they do all these things -- being locked-in to Microsoft is still a problem, and a problem that must be eliminated.
Even if Microsoft gave their software away it would still be proprietary rather than free anyway.
For instance, the one print ad I keep seeing making it seem like Linux needs to run on a mainframe. Oh boy... Of course the truth is for most business use 4 year old hardware runs just fine with Linux and other FOSS OSes.
The actual truth is that whilst Linux will run on a mainframe Windows will not. It's an attempt to portray the strength that Linux is highly cross platform as though it is a weakness.
Your making the assumption that all the government runs on it's desktop is OpenOffice. There are thousands (maybe millions) of DOD programs that would have to be rewritten in order to switch to Linux.
Are these all running on Windows now?
If it's highly unlikely that porting these from whatever they are running on to Linux whould be more expensive that porting them to Windows. Especially since Linux includes compilers for languages such as FORTRAN and Ada as standard, which Windows does not. There is also the matter of exactly which version of Windows stuff is ported to and how much work it will need when Microsoft decides to EOL all current versions of Windows.
If they do switch to Linux guess who gets to pay for the porting of all those applications? American taxpayers.
As they will have to pay with porting to Windows and pay, pay, pay again once the "upgrade tredmill" gets up to speed.
But how many MCSE's with secret clearance does your MS system need? probably the same number as a linux/unix network of comparable size.
Unless the military is very unusual you'd need several times the number of MCSEs compared with unix admins.
Windows administration just does not scale well, despite Microsoft apparently putting a lot of effort into it. The reason appears to be that Windows is a Personal Computer with a single user paradigm endemic in both the OS and many of its applications.
Dispite what the original poster claimed it's big organisations where savings from the unix way of doing things, compared with the MS Windows way of doing things, are likely to show up.
You're leaving out the cost of additional internal support. You're forgetting that customization of your environment leads to additional hassles applying patches and upgrades. Finally, you're forgetting that switching hardware costs money.
You are forgetting that you need plenty of internal support with Windows. And that the same arguments about applying patches and upgrades apply to Windows
On how many more thousands of computers would I have to save $100 per license to pay the additional sysadmins, QA, and help desk personnel?
What makes you think you would need more rather than less of these people. Most evidence is that Windows has the worst sysadmin to user ratio of any OS.
What about the project managers that coordinate all these efforts? What about the additional oversight and compliance officers that ensure all of these activities meet regulations and standards?
As you can see, it quickly gets to a point where using a free as in beer product and supporting yourself is more expensive than buying from a vendor
What makes you think that a vendor should be trusted to comply with the relevent regulations and standards?
In actual fact if it is important that the result complies with any standards at all then you probably shouldn't be touching a company like Microsoft with a long barge pole.
and getting a support contract.
Most so called "support contracts" for propriatary software arn't even worth the paper they are printed on.
A small to medium size business may save some money, but once you grow past that, it just makes more sense to pay for support.
If you want real support then open source really is your best option. But you've just said you prefer some fantasy of vendor support over having real support.
So when does their 'right to free speech' end and my right to be left alone on my personal computer, in my private residence, begin?
There is a difference between someone having this right and their being able to insist that someone else listen even assist them in their "speach".
I'd guess there's been some serious cash kickbacks over the years to some big companies (individuals in companies) to get them to stick with microsoft.
The price Microsoft charges for their products is more or less arbitrary. They undoubtedly still make a profit on selling "educational licences". Giving the stuff away, even paying people to use it, is effectivly a "loss leader". As well as muddying the waters over the definition of "free".
This is one of the reasons I've wondered why the founding fathers didn't add a fourth branch. The other three are creationist, and regulatory, but NOT death for the output of the other three.
Most likely because they considered the role of the US Congress to be both creation and destruction of statute laws.
It looks as though Microsoft has been looking into how other special interest groups, in the US, conduct politics. These organisations are probably more accuratly described as "PACs" than "Think Tanks". Even down to their choosing names which imply some sort of independence.
Most of those sued settled out of court. It'd be interesting to know what the settlement was, because I doubt the RIAA is getting enough from these "John Doe" pirates to cover their lawyer costs.
How does someone in this kind of case even know they are being sued? If that can't happen how could anyone possible settle.
Wasting money on Open Source?
As opposed to wasting money on proprietary software...
Evidently they haven't looked at the Wired article. The one that says that an average Malaysian worker has to work 1,100 (yes, eleven hundred) hours to buy a licensed copy of Windows XP.
So there are probably a lot of pirate copies in Malaysia.
Today, the USA alone bears the distinction of being the only nation on the planet that has not yet made any sort of government sponsored effort to switch to the metric system. I find this slightly amusing personally.
It looks even more ammusing when you consider that the US signed relevent treaty a long time ago and the US Constitution explicitally states that only the federal government has the authority to approve systems of measurement.
Personal anecdote: not that long ago, I was describing something to my kids and mentioned a measurement in yards. My children had no idea how long a "yard" was until I described the length with my hands... to which they said "Oh, you mean a metre!" As the measurement I was citing to them was just an estimate anyways, I told them yes... but I told them that a yard was about 3 and a third inches shorter than a metre. I got another blank stare at the word "inch", at which point I told them there is 36 inches in a yard...
You should have mentioned that an inch is 25.4 mm
Maybe it's the time for the US to join the metric world.
:)
The US is a signatory to the "Treaty of the Metre" (n.b. the treaty and the US signing of it predates Noah Webster.) Just that the US Congress has yet to properly ratify it.
At least we wouldn't loose that Mars probe!
But a few people might die from the shock of seeing US politicans follow the US Consitution
Only because multiplication by 10 isnt even considered a calculation by most people.
We use decimal numbers, why not use metric measurements (unless of course you do math in hex, in which case your stuffed either way)
Similarly most currencies are decimal. AFAIK there are no examples of a country changing from a decimal currency to a non decimal one. As for the hex example such numbers would still be written in Arabic notation, where multiplication and division by the radix is trivial.
In fact, further investigation reveals that the US standard inch is defined to be exactly 2.54cm. Who'da thunk it?
Both the US and the Imperial inch were redefined to be exactly 25.4mm in world war 2. Having 3 different measuring systems hindered the allies in being able to make precision machine parts (for weapons) systems. So the solution used was to redefine two of these measuring systems in terms of the third.
Sure, a "few" have broken. But other than games and some goofy stuff that relied on VXDs, you usually can bet that an old Windows app will Just Work.
:)
Ironically one which dosn't is called "MS Works"