Right now, it's money for nothing and the stock market is way down. Buy stocks with cheap money, and a year from now the ROI is great.
Of course, they may also be starting their business model conversion, a la Control Data Corporation. The software monopoly may not last forever, after all, and this is a cheap way to hedge their bets.
... are destined for greatness, because their bullshit is not burdened by reality.
I've heard from several ex-Softies that the company inculates its recruits with a serious dose of übermensch mentality: "those rumors about history and 'best practices' are for lesser beings who don't have the talent that we require of our programmers." "We don't need no steenking documentation," in witness whereof their network wireline protocols had to be reverse-engineered from code by what Brad Smith called 300 of their best people working for half a year.
However, I'll note that they were right: anyone who wants to say that they did it wrong should prove it by making more money.
it effectively rewards those who failed in the marketplace, punishes those who innovated and sets up a huge, inefficient and unnecessary bureaucracy.... So, why stymie that process with a new bureaucracy that simply funds the big record labels?"
Because you stand a good chance of building an empire out of that new bureaucracy and/or are invested in one of those big record labels who failed in the marketplace (or their allies?)
Had the federal government responded initially by cutting taxes and spending, lowering trade barriers and streamlining regulation, it probably would have been just a very bad recession.
You do realize, I hope, that you are citing the conclusion of your hypothesis as proof of it?
As long as we're on speculative economics in an alternate history, would you care to address the events of 1937-1938?
While some people have argued that the depeering is reason for more government regulation [CC], the Forbes story makes the case that details of the recent Cogent vs. Sprint fight argue for exactly the opposite: keeping the Internet backbones free of government meddling."
This is Forbes, after all. According to Forbes, the Great Depression was proof of the need for less government regulation.
TFA says the disabling is handled in the BIOS - so it would be independent of the OS.
The "I'm dead" bit is in the BIOS, but the trigger is in the operating system. For many good and sufficient reasons, they can't have the BIOS hogging the wireless 100% of the time.
is standard advice from Corporate legal departments. As in, I've lived under the exact same policy in every company I've worked for in more than 35 years as an engineer.
I have something like 20 patents in my own name, and if they could I think that our Legal department would have me forget them too.
One does wonder, though, how they are supposed to "advance science and the useful arts" by publication if the publication is supposed to be write-only.
Well, there's a bit of a gap between 16 years and the tens of thousands needed to reach even near stars.
Seems to me we'd be better off recording the genome in something with serious ECC and system redundancy so there's some reasonable chance that when it arrives it might actually be possible to produce something viable.
The question I've been posing the last few days is, "what happens to the Republican Party?"
The knives were already sharpening before the election, and you can bet that they're going to be sliding between ribs and across throats in the next several months. The teams I call "the Goldwater conservatives" and the "theocrats" are tooling up for a showdown, and I'm loading up the popcorn machine.
The theocrats seem to be able to deliver about 25% of the vote nationally, and they can be counted on to show up for their hot-button issues. Trouble is, that's enough to make a primary win impossible without them and not enough to deliver a national win. Which we've just seen: McCain had to kiss Falwell's ring to get a shot at the nomination, and that's a big part of what cost the election last night.
So -- will team Goldwater leave the party? Quite a few Libertarian-leaning former Republicans voted for Obama over civil liberties. Strange to see the Democrats becoming the party of small government; I can't see that as stable. Will team Falwell bolt to form the Jeebus Party? They could stand for secret police, wiretapping, and the full might of the State to pass judgment on our sex lives.
In the too-unlikely-to-take-seriously department: what if a critical mass of leaders in Team Goldwater decided to bolt en masse for the Libertarians? They'd have the numbers to take over an existing party structure, and they'd have what the Libertarians never had: actual power in Congress. The USA would have a viable third party for the first time in more than a century.
were commodities readily available elsewhere but restricted, like standard cryptographic algorithms, from export from the USA -- even if they were originally imported?
If plaintiffs were to succeed in an appeal after the termination of the first trial, unlikely as that may be, a new trial could have to happen. To prevent that possibility an Appeals Court might agree to rule now.
Except that the current trial is scheduled for a jury, at which point it can all go to appeal together. Since the first jury trial (that the RIAA wants to stand) is already done, all that the appellate court would have to do after both are done is choose:-) It's called judicial efficiency, and in practice it means "don't make multiple passes through the system if you can avoid it."
Perhaps more to the point, the Appeals Court doesn't get a vote in the matter -- the permission for an interlocutory appeal has to come from the District Court.
Interlocutory appeals are indeed rarely granted; IIRC it's usually when the rest of the case hinges on a point of law and there will be a boatload of work down the drain if the case goes down the wrong track. In this case, the Plaintiffs are going to try to convince the Court that it made an error of discretion in deciding that they (plaintiffs) had played fast and loose with their pleadings.
Run that by again: they're going to persuade the Court that the Court was not only wrong, but waaaay wrong (abuse of discretion) when the Court decided it had made an error by trusting them.
Boggle.
And what's at stake? A retrial, with most of the motion practice and pretrial preparation already complete. Somehow I don't see the Court agreeing that this is so profound and urgent that it can't wait for the trial to be decided on its merits and a final judgment rendered.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, they may also be starting their business model conversion, a la Control Data Corporation. The software monopoly may not last forever, after all, and this is a cheap way to hedge their bets.
... we really need the <sarcasm> tags.
Here's a feature that Linux will never be able to match!
... only outlaws will have maps. Yeah, I know -- but someone was going to.
Daubert is around one of these corners.
Nice future tense, there. The fact that ISSCC was last week -- ten days ago -- shouldn't be allowed to interfere with anyone's plans to attend.
Well now, that depends on who is being held open now, doesn't it?
I've heard from several ex-Softies that the company inculates its recruits with a serious dose of übermensch mentality: "those rumors about history and 'best practices' are for lesser beings who don't have the talent that we require of our programmers." "We don't need no steenking documentation," in witness whereof their network wireline protocols had to be reverse-engineered from code by what Brad Smith called 300 of their best people working for half a year.
However, I'll note that they were right: anyone who wants to say that they did it wrong should prove it by making more money.
Maybe for tasks that don't require any precision. There are quite a few of those -- but that's not all of them.
Because you stand a good chance of building an empire out of that new bureaucracy and/or are invested in one of those big record labels who failed in the marketplace (or their allies?)
You do realize, I hope, that you are citing the conclusion of your hypothesis as proof of it?
As long as we're on speculative economics in an alternate history, would you care to address the events of 1937-1938?
This is Forbes, after all. According to Forbes, the Great Depression was proof of the need for less government regulation.
The "I'm dead" bit is in the BIOS, but the trigger is in the operating system. For many good and sufficient reasons, they can't have the BIOS hogging the wireless 100% of the time.
It's like the "LoJack for Laptops" that they'll sell you -- strictly part of the installed Microsoft setup.
Both of them.
Linux has come under quite a bit of criticism [1] for Linus' "don't look at patents" advice.
[1] As in, NBMers claiming that this proves that Linus and the gang know they're infringing MS patents.
I have something like 20 patents in my own name, and if they could I think that our Legal department would have me forget them too.
One does wonder, though, how they are supposed to "advance science and the useful arts" by publication if the publication is supposed to be write-only.
Not nearly enough to maintain data integrity over the course of millennia in a high-radiation environment without scrub cycles.
Seems to me we'd be better off recording the genome in something with serious ECC and system redundancy so there's some reasonable chance that when it arrives it might actually be possible to produce something viable.
The knives were already sharpening before the election, and you can bet that they're going to be sliding between ribs and across throats in the next several months. The teams I call "the Goldwater conservatives" and the "theocrats" are tooling up for a showdown, and I'm loading up the popcorn machine.
The theocrats seem to be able to deliver about 25% of the vote nationally, and they can be counted on to show up for their hot-button issues. Trouble is, that's enough to make a primary win impossible without them and not enough to deliver a national win. Which we've just seen: McCain had to kiss Falwell's ring to get a shot at the nomination, and that's a big part of what cost the election last night.
So -- will team Goldwater leave the party? Quite a few Libertarian-leaning former Republicans voted for Obama over civil liberties. Strange to see the Democrats becoming the party of small government; I can't see that as stable. Will team Falwell bolt to form the Jeebus Party? They could stand for secret police, wiretapping, and the full might of the State to pass judgment on our sex lives.
In the too-unlikely-to-take-seriously department: what if a critical mass of leaders in Team Goldwater decided to bolt en masse for the Libertarians? They'd have the numbers to take over an existing party structure, and they'd have what the Libertarians never had: actual power in Congress. The USA would have a viable third party for the first time in more than a century.
Popcorn. That and a fridge full of beer.
This is going to be fun to watch.
were commodities readily available elsewhere but restricted, like standard cryptographic algorithms, from export from the USA -- even if they were originally imported?
How will Microsoft's version be incompatible with the others?
Except that the current trial is scheduled for a jury, at which point it can all go to appeal together. Since the first jury trial (that the RIAA wants to stand) is already done, all that the appellate court would have to do after both are done is choose :-) It's called judicial efficiency, and in practice it means "don't make multiple passes through the system if you can avoid it."
Perhaps more to the point, the Appeals Court doesn't get a vote in the matter -- the permission for an interlocutory appeal has to come from the District Court.
Run that by again: they're going to persuade the Court that the Court was not only wrong, but waaaay wrong (abuse of discretion) when the Court decided it had made an error by trusting them.
Boggle.
And what's at stake? A retrial, with most of the motion practice and pretrial preparation already complete. Somehow I don't see the Court agreeing that this is so profound and urgent that it can't wait for the trial to be decided on its merits and a final judgment rendered.