Who has ever shown that capitalism is a self-correcting system? Under specific assumptions, a competitive, free market system will self-correct. But capitalism does not necessarily meet those assumptions.
One reason it dosn't tend to work is that companies who get in a nice powerful position tend to lobby for laws to keep them there.
There is nothing wrong with BIG corporations, as long as they are BIG corporations in competition with each other. There is everything wrong with having one company (or even a handful of companies) dominate one sector of the market. Like Microsoft does.
Hence laws giving special treatment to monopolies and cartels.
Forgive me if I sound a little odd here, but why is it good to hate Microsoft and not Sony? I mean, both are large corporations motivated to make as much money as possible. Both screw the customer the same way.
Really if a retailer wants to sell Sony's products will they go out of their way to make it more difficult/expensive for the same retailer to sell similar products from Nintendo, Toshiba, Panasonic, etc?
Face it, the shuttle's design has been so badly compromised by decades of financial finagling that it is nothing like the "reusable" craft, launched from the back of a mother-craft, that it was first designed as (originally the fuel-tank-plus-boosters design was supposed to be a temporary solution until the launch craft was designed). We're about to spend $100M on occupying Iraq. How much would it have cost to develop a decent shuttle?
Probably not that much, considering the USSR already did most of the work.
Corporations don't like that idea, though, and that is one reason why Bill Gates has been so successful in convincing them that the GPL is viral [com.com] and evil. Gates often spreads misdirection (the word "viral" is inaccurate), but he can speak the truth too: when he tells CEOs that if their programmers modify GPLed code, the corporation might not be able to keep the changes from escaping to the public, he's right.
From Microsoft's point of view software is intrinsically highly valuable. So "escaping to the public" is something very bad. To people who actually use the software it's simply a tool.
What he doesn't tell them, of course, is that public release will usually be non-harmful or even beneficial. (Letting that slip undermines his business model)
If people strongly believed in supporting Microsoft's business model there wouldn't be so much "piracy" of their software...
Most people starving in the world today don't starve because of resource problems. They starve because of their own wars, not our wars.
Depends who's providing the guns and the money to buy the guns.
They starve because some communist crackpot gets into power and gives the ministry of agriculture to some guru who thinks you can plant according to chicken entrails.
As if it matters if a dictator left wing or right wing. The US has it it's time backed plenty of the latter.
They starve because somebody gets the idea that it would be a good idea to take farms away from farmers and give them to members of the "correct" race.
Not every dictator is Robert Mugabe. Especially when you look on the other side of the Atlantic.
We could give NK all the money in the world to help their agriculture, they'd just build more missiles. How do you suggest solving a problem like that?
So if you where to look at the EU vs the US in terms of money spent on developing nations, you'll find that they spend roughly equal amounts (with a roughly equal amount of inhabitant.
It's probably more important exactly how money is spent than the actual amount.
Part of our war on drugs in central america is destroying fields of suspected drug cultivation. Rather then try to control our country's appetite for drugs
Or even simply admitting that the policy of prohibition dosn't work any better than when the US tried the same thing with alcohol.
As soon as an informant tips off the US that a certain valley is farming pot, we go in and defoliate the entire valley. It doesn't matter that were destroying entire villages that are doing legitimate sustinance farming... we just took out a cartel! We pat ourselves on the back, the dealers find another valley to grow thier pot
Assuming they even were growing anything there in the first place. If they were all they need do is find somewhere a rival dealer is growing stuff and tip off the DEA. Why bother to risk their own people in a dispute with rivals when the US will do the job for them.
and the legitimate villagers slowly starve or go crowd some other village
I hadn't heard that the Middle East had any issues regarding money to buy food. In fact, don't some Middle Eastern countries have a higher per capita income than the US?
This number isn't much good without knowing the distribution of the income. Whilst places such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have some very rich people that does not stop them also having poor people.
They could use more water from what I've heard. But they have plenty of oil.
Look what happened to Iran when they attempted to nationalise their oil industry. The oil isn't owned by the bulk of the people in the Middle East.
Iraq's economy has been crappy since Saddam came around. When Saddam took office in 1979, Iraq had a good economy and a bright future, but the Iran/Iraq war starting in 1980 pretty much ruined them.
When he came to power he was supported by the US. The US government was hardly unhappy with Iraq attacking Iran. Remember that Iran had just booted out a US backed Tyrant. (Which the US and Britain had installed in the 1950's because they didn't want to deal with a nationalist democratic Iranian government.)
1) How the hell did the flights get DOWN once the radar died? It said they disappeared from radar, and you don't keep radar on the planes that are on the ground, so....?
They still had working primary RADAR and radios. Aircraft on the ground are managed by controllers at the airport itself.
2) Whose bright idea was it to do a "systems upgrade" while there were large, flying metal objects carrying many people still in the air?!?!
The problem with software development is that it's so damn easy to ship a product, let hundreds (thousands? tens of thousands?) of users test the product for you, then release appropriate bug fixes.
In the case of some proprietary software either charging for the bug fixes or intermingling them with new "features" (which may very well contain their own bugs). That's assuming they don't insist on playing "it's a feature not a bug".
People don't design a new bridge and let thousands of people try it out before declaring it safe,
There is a story that in the USSR once a bridge was completed the designers and archiects had to stand underneath whilst the Red Army drove a column of tanks across.
I bet they literally wouldn't be able to afford to use M$ alternatives - just think the same project could easily cost $26 billion a year for M$ licences alone given the number of users! You can just bet that M$ will class robots as users too in their license agreements.
What could Microsoft do, it's not like they can send the BSA after the US army. Even if they tried bringing along the FBI it would be a case of "we're not going in there they have bigger guns":)
Like the B-52 though, the Army will probably continue using the system (and thus maintaining the OS) 'til God only knows when. If they field with the 2.4 kernel, that version (or whatever version the system gets fielded on) will be supported for at least the following ten years.
The requirement to have something supportable for 10 years should make COTS systems very uncommon. Simply because a lot of commercial software would be end of lifed long before a decade was up.
You can't sue someone for perjury. You'd have to convince the US Justice Dept. to prosecute them for it.
Are private prosecutions not possible in the US? Under any jurisdiction... Anyway the accused is in Germany, so they'd presumably use an appropriate German statute.
No, not Joe Bob, they say they represent the specific copyright holder of OpenOffice. But they don't really have that right, do they. There ought to be some legal repercussions to alleging some legal authority when there isn't any, or for being negligent in their accusations.
It's possibly "copyright fraud", which is claiming to hold a copyright when you are not the copyright holder (including cases where the work is public domain). Thing is that the penalties for copyright fraud are a lot less than those for copyright infringement. Alternativly it's plain standard "fraud", which can be serious. But as usual criminal law often can't handle the situation where the accused is a corporation very well.
The problem is that it's cheaper to send out a threatening letter than to check carefully and THEN send letters only to true offenders.
Especially when their are no negative consequences to them.
You just bet that 99% of recipients will stop doing whatever it is you suspect them of - which makes it a cost-effective way to work. The BSA doesn't have these people as customers - so what does it care if it pisses them off?
Their basis is more getting money for their "members". Using an "innocent until proven guilty" approach where they set the standard of "proof". To the extent that it may cost someone less to pay for their software again than do an "audit".
I suppose, what the world needs is a law to say that if you send someone a letter threatening legal action if they don't do something - then if they don't do it, you should be REQUIRED to take them to court - and to be liable for their costs, pain & suffering, mental anguish, etc, etc if they turn out to be innocent.
The last place the BSA would want their claims examined would be in a court. Since they would be required to prove the "guilt" of the person or corporation they were accusing. As well as the risk that a judge might start taking a pen to various EULAs.
Threatinging someone doesn't constitute extortion. You have to threaten to take illegal action. So "pay for your software or we will contact the FBI" isn't extortion while "pay for your softweare or we will burn down your building" is extortion.
The former is probably a more serious threat to someone's business. In the latter case you can set the cops on them even if they do carry out their threat there is always insurance. But their dosn't appear to be an obvious way in which the average business can defend against the former kind of threat. (Other than getting a military contract PDQ.)
As far as I'm concerned, the "primary parties responsible" for Buffy are not named Gellar, Hannigan, Head & Brendan. They are named Whedon, Noxon, Espinson, Fury, and Greenwaldt. As long as the Mutant Enemy writing crew remains intact, whatever it produces is bound to be good. Whedon's people seem to have a knack for finding good actors, too. Every major actor added to the show over the years (to play Anya, Dawn, Tara, Robin Wood, etc.) has been fantastic.
But can Mutant Enemy find a broadcaster who will not try and interfere. Otherwise you could end up with another "Firefly".
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Who has ever shown that capitalism is a self-correcting system? Under specific assumptions, a competitive, free market system will self-correct. But capitalism does not necessarily meet those assumptions.
One reason it dosn't tend to work is that companies who get in a nice powerful position tend to lobby for laws to keep them there.
There is nothing wrong with BIG corporations, as long as they are BIG corporations in competition with each other. There is everything wrong with having one company (or even a handful of companies) dominate one sector of the market. Like Microsoft does.
Hence laws giving special treatment to monopolies and cartels.
Forgive me if I sound a little odd here, but why is it good to hate Microsoft and not Sony? I mean, both are large corporations motivated to make as much money as possible. Both screw the customer the same way.
Really if a retailer wants to sell Sony's products will they go out of their way to make it more difficult/expensive for the same retailer to sell similar products from Nintendo, Toshiba, Panasonic, etc?
Face it, the shuttle's design has been so badly compromised by decades of financial finagling that it is nothing like the "reusable" craft, launched from the back of a mother-craft, that it was first designed as (originally the fuel-tank-plus-boosters design was supposed to be a temporary solution until the launch craft was designed). We're about to spend $100M on occupying Iraq. How much would it have cost to develop a decent shuttle?
Probably not that much, considering the USSR already did most of the work.
Corporations don't like that idea, though, and that is one reason why Bill Gates has been so successful in convincing them that the GPL is viral [com.com] and evil. Gates often spreads misdirection (the word "viral" is inaccurate), but he can speak the truth too: when he tells CEOs that if their programmers modify GPLed code, the corporation might not be able to keep the changes from escaping to the public, he's right.
From Microsoft's point of view software is intrinsically highly valuable. So "escaping to the public" is something very bad.
To people who actually use the software it's simply a tool.
What he doesn't tell them, of course, is that public release will usually be non-harmful or even beneficial. (Letting that slip undermines his business model)
If people strongly believed in supporting Microsoft's business model there wouldn't be so much "piracy" of their software...
If the enemy can look through your entire source, then they know what your maximum capabilities are, even if it is 100% secure.
Actually they don't know that much, since they don't have access to the (most likely very secret) data the system processes.
Is this a good thing?
If it means that the war is over without any shots being fired then it probably is a good thing.
Boeing would write a GPL program for the DOD? Just because a program runs on top of Linux doesn't mean it has to be GPL'd.
Because if it isn't they cannot use any GPL code in their program. Which means that writing the program is more expensive and takes longer.
Most people starving in the world today don't starve because of resource problems. They starve because of their own wars, not our wars.
Depends who's providing the guns and the money to buy the guns.
They starve because some communist crackpot gets into power and gives the ministry of agriculture to some guru who thinks you can plant according to chicken entrails.
As if it matters if a dictator left wing or right wing. The US has it it's time backed plenty of the latter.
They starve because somebody gets the idea that it would be a good idea to take farms away from farmers and give them to members of the "correct" race.
Not every dictator is Robert Mugabe. Especially when you look on the other side of the Atlantic.
We could give NK all the money in the world to help their agriculture, they'd just build more missiles. How do you suggest solving a problem like that?
You could start by asking the Koreans.
So if you where to look at the EU vs the US in terms of money spent on developing nations, you'll find that they spend roughly equal amounts (with a roughly equal amount of inhabitant.
It's probably more important exactly how money is spent than the actual amount.
Part of our war on drugs in central america is destroying fields of suspected drug cultivation. Rather then try to control our country's appetite for drugs
Or even simply admitting that the policy of prohibition dosn't work any better than when the US tried the same thing with alcohol.
As soon as an informant tips off the US that a certain valley is farming pot, we go in and defoliate the entire valley. It doesn't matter that were destroying entire villages that are doing legitimate sustinance farming... we just took out a cartel! We pat ourselves on the back, the dealers find another valley to grow thier pot
Assuming they even were growing anything there in the first place.
If they were all they need do is find somewhere a rival dealer is growing stuff and tip off the DEA. Why bother to risk their own people in a dispute with rivals when the US will do the job for them.
and the legitimate villagers slowly starve or go crowd some other village
Assuming another village will have them.
I hadn't heard that the Middle East had any issues regarding money to buy food. In fact, don't some Middle Eastern countries have a higher per capita income than the US?
This number isn't much good without knowing the distribution of the income. Whilst places such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have some very rich people that does not stop them also having poor people.
They could use more water from what I've heard. But they have plenty of oil.
Look what happened to Iran when they attempted to nationalise their oil industry. The oil isn't owned by the bulk of the people in the Middle East.
Iraq's economy has been crappy since Saddam came around. When Saddam took office in 1979, Iraq had a good economy and a bright future, but the Iran/Iraq war starting in 1980 pretty much ruined them.
When he came to power he was supported by the US. The US government was hardly unhappy with Iraq attacking Iran. Remember that Iran had just booted out a US backed Tyrant. (Which the US and Britain had installed in the 1950's because they didn't want to deal with a nationalist democratic Iranian government.)
1) How the hell did the flights get DOWN once the radar died? It said they disappeared from radar, and you don't keep radar on the planes that are on the ground, so....?
They still had working primary RADAR and radios. Aircraft on the ground are managed by controllers at the airport itself.
2) Whose bright idea was it to do a "systems upgrade" while there were large, flying metal objects carrying many people still in the air?!?!
They did it on a Saturday.
The problem with software development is that it's so damn easy to ship a product, let hundreds (thousands? tens of thousands?) of users test the product for you, then release appropriate bug fixes.
In the case of some proprietary software either charging for the bug fixes or intermingling them with new "features" (which may very well contain their own bugs). That's assuming they don't insist on playing "it's a feature not a bug".
People don't design a new bridge and let thousands of people try it out before declaring it safe,
There is a story that in the USSR once a bridge was completed the designers and archiects had to stand underneath whilst the Red Army drove a column of tanks across.
I bet they literally wouldn't be able to afford to use M$ alternatives - just think the same project could easily cost $26 billion a year for M$ licences alone given the number of users! You can just bet that M$ will class robots as users too in their license agreements.
:)
What could Microsoft do, it's not like they can send the BSA after the US army. Even if they tried bringing along the FBI it would be a case of "we're not going in there they have bigger guns"
Surely firing a missile with GPL-ed code inside it at someone counts as distribution
Only if they manage to recover it in one piece. Otherwise they don't get the binary anyway...
Like the B-52 though, the Army will probably continue using the system (and thus maintaining the OS) 'til God only knows when. If they field with the 2.4 kernel, that version (or whatever version the system gets fielded on) will be supported for at least the following ten years.
The requirement to have something supportable for 10 years should make COTS systems very uncommon. Simply because a lot of commercial software would be end of lifed long before a decade was up.
So, if they use Linux for the guidance system in a cruise missle, do they have to tape a source floppy to it before they launch?
It means that if you manage to recover the missile intact then they are obliged to supply you with the source.
You can't sue someone for perjury. You'd have to convince the US Justice Dept. to prosecute them for it.
Are private prosecutions not possible in the US? Under any jurisdiction...
Anyway the accused is in Germany, so they'd presumably use an appropriate German statute.
No, not Joe Bob, they say they represent the specific copyright holder of OpenOffice. But they don't really have that right, do they. There ought to be some legal repercussions to alleging some legal authority when there isn't any, or for being negligent in their accusations.
It's possibly "copyright fraud", which is claiming to hold a copyright when you are not the copyright holder (including cases where the work is public domain). Thing is that the penalties for copyright fraud are a lot less than those for copyright infringement. Alternativly it's plain standard "fraud", which can be serious. But as usual criminal law often can't handle the situation where the accused is a corporation very well.
The problem is that it's cheaper to send out a threatening letter than to check carefully and THEN send letters only to true offenders.
Especially when their are no negative consequences to them.
You just bet that 99% of recipients will stop doing whatever it is you suspect them of - which makes it a cost-effective way to work. The BSA doesn't have these people as customers - so what does it care if it pisses them off?
Their basis is more getting money for their "members". Using an "innocent until proven guilty" approach where they set the standard of "proof". To the extent that it may cost someone less to pay for their software again than do an "audit".
I suppose, what the world needs is a law to say that if you send someone a letter threatening legal action if they don't do something - then if they don't do it, you should be REQUIRED to take them to court - and to be liable for their costs, pain & suffering, mental anguish, etc, etc if they turn out to be innocent.
The last place the BSA would want their claims examined would be in a court. Since they would be required to prove the "guilt" of the person or corporation they were accusing. As well as the risk that a judge might start taking a pen to various EULAs.
Microsoft founded the BSA, and represents an overwhelming majority of the software they check in thier jackbooted raids.
Maybe the idea is to protect their assets if/when the BSA gets prosecuted or sued out of existance...
Threatinging someone doesn't constitute extortion. You have to threaten to take illegal action. So "pay for your software or we will contact the FBI" isn't extortion while "pay for your softweare or we will burn down your building" is extortion.
The former is probably a more serious threat to someone's business. In the latter case you can set the cops on them even if they do carry out their threat there is always insurance.
But their dosn't appear to be an obvious way in which the average business can defend against the former kind of threat. (Other than getting a military contract PDQ.)
Many of the tactics that BSA employs would actually be illegal if the law was applied in an even-handed approach.
e.g. RICO...
BSA operates be threats and false premises. The problem is that they have the backing of our current admin (Clinton's admin was not much better).
One of the ways in which the US "two party system" in practice acts more like a one party setup.
As far as I'm concerned, the "primary parties responsible" for Buffy are not named Gellar, Hannigan, Head & Brendan. They are named Whedon, Noxon, Espinson, Fury, and Greenwaldt. As long as the Mutant Enemy writing crew remains intact, whatever it produces is bound to be good. Whedon's people seem to have a knack for finding good actors, too. Every major actor added to the show over the years (to play Anya, Dawn, Tara, Robin Wood, etc.) has been fantastic.
But can Mutant Enemy find a broadcaster who will not try and interfere. Otherwise you could end up with another "Firefly".
Perhaps a more '2000' reality based vampire show is in order, where the vampires vote each other off the show :)
Shouldn't that read "stake each other off the show"...