And I wonder if this is actually good for business.
An Agilent product intended to speed the design process for electronic equipment was among the software illegally copied by the couple, according to the indictment. The SystemVue 2009 program sells for $45,000.
The government will be keeping this man in a cage (possibly a rape-cage) for the next dozen years on behalf of Agilent, for their vengeance. I know I won't do business with any group of people who behaves this way, no matter what euphemisms they employ to try to justify it. I wonder how much this will help their profits vs. hurting their reputation.
I'm sure there's a lot of people who think so. It is the premise of folk-hero Robin Hood, after all...
That Robin Hood "stole from the rich and gave to the poor" is right up there with "Columbus proved to people that the world wasn't flat" among popularized misconception.
What Robin Hood actually did was to steal back money from the Sheriff, the extant government of the region, which had been extorted from the people at a terribly unjust rate.
They believe they're in business to maximize their profits, not to make customers happy. Now, a good business functioning in a free market would accomplish both at the same time, but the *AA get to rest on copyright instead, effectively calling in the government's guns to enforce their stupid business model.
And guess who's subsidizing that stupid business model by paying for those men in guns? That's right, the same people who are getting hosed at the other end.
We probably either ought to give up our taste for pre-recorded entertainment or our system of government. Or maybe both.
This, I believe, is the first time an acronym has been expanded in a Slashdot summary.
Don't worry - it explained a concept nerds already know and didn't bother to mention what was different in the new version. Since I've already surfed over there:
flac:
Added support for encoding from and decoding to the RF64 format, and a new corresponding option --force-rf64-format. (SF #1762502). --keep-foreign-metadata is also supported.
Added support for encoding from and decoding to the Sony Wave64 format, and a new corresponding option --force-wave64-format. (SF #1769582). --keep-foreign-metadata is also supported.
Added new options --preserve-modtime and --no-preserve-modtime to specify whether or not output files should copy the timestamp and permissions from their input files. The default is --preserve-modtime as in previous versions. (SF #1805428).
Allow MM:SS:FF and MM:SS.SS time formats in non-CD-DA cuesheets. (SF #1947353, SF #2182432)
The --sector-align option of flac has been deprecated and may not exist in future versions. shntool provides similar functionality. (SF #1805946)
Improved error message when user attempts to decode a non-FLAC file (SF #2222789).
Fix bug where flac was disallowing use of --replay-gain when encoding from stdin (SF #1840124).
Fix bug with fractional seconds on some locales (SF #1815517, SF #1858012).
Read and write appropriate channel masks for 6.1 and 7.1 surround input WAV files. Documentation was also updated.
Correct Wave64 GUIDs.
Support 56kHz to 192kHz gain analysis (patch from Earl Chew)
Add ability to handle utf8 filenames on Windows (large set of patches from Janne HyvÃrinen)
Sure, just ignore the technical specs of the drives and claim that it's just "artificial market segmentation", then complain when the vendor wasn't lying.
Are you claiming that technical specs are why vendors make it difficult for OS's to set drive timeouts?
Good drives just aren't that expensive in any case.
The gap has certainly narrowed lately. It used to be 3-4x for an 'enterprise' drive. Now it's 50% or so.
I've sold single systems with over $8000 in 'desktop' hard drives in them (properly selected and configured models of course). If those systems had been $16K more expensive the small-sized businesses I work with would not have been able to afford them in the first place. Meanwhile, some of them have been running for 4 years, only needing the occasional drive replacement. Given that SSD caching is far more effective and energy efficient than slightly faster drives, that doubling of cost would not have gotten them any additional benefit.
Hey - almost forgot - send your kids to the $20K/yr private school or STFU.
My kids' public school costs about $21K/yr per pupil. The really good private schools in this area charge about $12K/yr/pupil. The charitable schools cost about $4500/yr/pupil.
That money doesn't grow on trees just because it's a public school.
If I buy a plot of land next door and build an iron smelting facility that spews so much smoke it blankets your backyard
Then you're violating my property rights. The US just has very weak protections. For the past few weeks I've been going through a new set of contact lenses every week (they usually last six weeks) because of all the smog blowing over from the midwest coal power plants because everybody there was running their AC's and it's been smoggy in the mountains here which wreaks havoc with my eyes. How do I recover my damages from their actions? Answer: I don't, my loss is "socialized". How about all the radioactivity in that coal soot? Can't talk about that.
The easy answer to the problem of the soot-belching coal plants is strong property rights. Real environmentalists get this but the existing governments protect the corporate interests and privatize their profits.
"You're welcome to live here as long as we like the way you live."
Actually that's the status quo. The idea of liberty is, "You're welcome to live here however you like as long as you don't aggress against us." That's the founding concept of America. "Don't tread on me" and all that - peace and tolerance.
Do you know he's actually over a reasonable budget
There's the key assumption. Verify that his budget is being spent poorly. If the staff is abusing their manager, then the manager may be competent except for knowing that he needs help. I do this kind of work sometimes - it's often that staff is just listening to vendors and over-buying on everything.
If the budget is really half waste then the CFO can tell the manager that he's getting half his budget next year and see if he can do it. But a cooperative approach is much better.
but that's a contention you have to make before the Supreme Court if you want to legally revert an unconstitutional law passed by Congress that they don't want to repeal on their own.
That's a misunderstanding of the system. Illegal laws are not legal until their status is changed by judicial review. If SCOUTS declares a law to be unconstitutional, it was always unconstitutional, and its effects are rewound to the extent possible.
Laws can only be assumed to be legal if they are in accordance with the enumerated powers of the Constitution, and that was written in plain language for every man to understand. That's not to say that the government, SCOUTS included, hasn't perverted the law to its extreme, but that's how the system was designed. And that's how it will be as long as people let them get away with it. And they probably will as long as they're uneducated (by whom?) and food is available at the grocery store.
And doesn't the constitution trump whatever snoopers' charter they were operating under?
The Constitution trumps all Federal law and all State law as related to the specifically enumerated powers in the Constitution.
The folly is going to the corrupt government to seek a change in the corrupt government (notably the Supreme Court which uses prior infringements to justify further ones). Back when States had some control of the Federal government (pre 17th Amendment) there was at least a negative feedback cycle (the States are the parties to the Constitution, despite the preamble) but now it's just a positive feedback cycle cranked up to 11. Results are predictable.
The FSP's president is a political refugee from South Africa. It's still in the US, so you have to take your chances with the work visa lottery, but give it a shot! The potential downside is wasting time with some paperwork.
WTF does that even mean? That could be anything from Libertarians who don't want to pay taxes to hippies wanting to set up a socialist utopia.
Liberty means that both of those groups should be able to do those things that they want, short of hurting others.
I'm a long-time NH resident, and have met several of the FSP early movers. That pretty well fits each one of them - let people do what they want, short of hurting others (oh, the horror). They're almost all strong on property rights (except for the odd Georgist or two) and favor peace and tolerance as the prevailing basis for society. Most favor sound money and work hard for private charity. There are already a few that live in something like a commune and the ones that are pro-markets and free enterprise are completely down with that - they think it's silly, but the commune-ists pose no threat to them.
It's probably a safe bet that none favor Greek-style central control, central banking, and a pervasive regulatory environment, or the US-style warfare/welfare state (corporate welfare being tops among them). Their statement of intent says, "the maximum role of civil government is the protection of life, liberty, and property."
I've worked with some of them at the State house on issues like the right to record public officials in their official duty, the prosecution of victimless crimes, and legalizing industrial hemp. The Earth is "full" as there are no unclaimed jurisdictions, so the new reality of the past century is that one cannot simply move to settle a new area with like-minded friends (e.g. Utah) - the only option left is to move en masse and gentrify an existing area.
It's certainly not for everybody - those who would rather be kept as pets should not move here, and that's the beauty of political migration - those who do wish to "Live Free or Die" can move here with the FSP and work to make this one beautiful spot of nine-thousand square miles the freest place on Earth.
You are confused about his oath to support and defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. Also about the lessons of Nuremberg.
Going to Dianne Feinstein's office would have just landed him in jail. Yeah, maybe Rand Paul's office would have helped out, but still there's a non-zero chance of just landing in jail instead of getting word out about these enemies who have infiltrated the government.
My first Presidential vote was for neither Republican nor Democrat. I think that left a lasting impression on me. I still vote for neither, though I've had lapses of judgment in between.
Flip the situation around, you had this dude come into your office pretending he'd written some software but it had someone else's name on it and you let him smooth talk you into thinking it must be the new maintainer that had copy&replaced his name instead?
Well, I probably wouldn't hire somebody who nobody in my network had never worked with before, and this site was one item in his portfolio, not his only accomplishment, so yeah, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and not accuse him of being a dishonest thief.
I'd also structure the contract with a reasonable spec, milestone payments, incentives and penalties on delivery times, and a cancellation clause for failure to perform, so on the 3% chance he was a shyster who slipped through all the other filters, the most he could cost me was a little time. But being trusting is generally good for business, and a good contract will just be codified expectations that everybody can enthusiastically support and nobody should ever need to consult.
Slashdot Mirror
And I wonder if this is actually good for business.
The government will be keeping this man in a cage (possibly a rape-cage) for the next dozen years on behalf of Agilent, for their vengeance. I know I won't do business with any group of people who behaves this way, no matter what euphemisms they employ to try to justify it. I wonder how much this will help their profits vs. hurting their reputation.
By that standard, Jeffrey Skilling (Enron) should get off because he was *only* decreasing someone else's retirement account.
Skilling stole money though a shell corporation scheme. This guy copied software.
Let this be the 47,895th time on Slashdot that somebody has written, "theft and duplication are not the same thing."
I'm sure there's a lot of people who think so. It is the premise of folk-hero Robin Hood, after all...
That Robin Hood "stole from the rich and gave to the poor" is right up there with "Columbus proved to people that the world wasn't flat" among popularized misconception.
What Robin Hood actually did was to steal back money from the Sheriff, the extant government of the region, which had been extorted from the people at a terribly unjust rate.
I guess the answer is the studios dont want to.
correct.
Then WTF are you in the business for?
They believe they're in business to maximize their profits, not to make customers happy. Now, a good business functioning in a free market would accomplish both at the same time, but the *AA get to rest on copyright instead, effectively calling in the government's guns to enforce their stupid business model.
And guess who's subsidizing that stupid business model by paying for those men in guns? That's right, the same people who are getting hosed at the other end.
We probably either ought to give up our taste for pre-recorded entertainment or our system of government. Or maybe both.
But look at the repo definition:
This isn't redistribution.
Apparently, there is a sea-level discrepancy of ~20cm between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal.
Are you accounting for the curvature of the Earth? It's about 13cm per km.
Yes, but on the upside, you've got golden balls now.
Marketing will try to get them to make the process work with brass.
Do they just not like debian? On my laptop:
This, I believe, is the first time an acronym has been expanded in a Slashdot summary.
Don't worry - it explained a concept nerds already know and didn't bother to mention what was different in the new version. Since I've already surfed over there:
Sure, just ignore the technical specs of the drives and claim that it's just "artificial market segmentation", then complain when the vendor wasn't lying.
Are you claiming that technical specs are why vendors make it difficult for OS's to set drive timeouts?
Good drives just aren't that expensive in any case.
The gap has certainly narrowed lately. It used to be 3-4x for an 'enterprise' drive. Now it's 50% or so.
I've sold single systems with over $8000 in 'desktop' hard drives in them (properly selected and configured models of course). If those systems had been $16K more expensive the small-sized businesses I work with would not have been able to afford them in the first place. Meanwhile, some of them have been running for 4 years, only needing the occasional drive replacement. Given that SSD caching is far more effective and energy efficient than slightly faster drives, that doubling of cost would not have gotten them any additional benefit.
Hey - almost forgot - send your kids to the $20K/yr private school or STFU.
My kids' public school costs about $21K/yr per pupil. The really good private schools in this area charge about $12K/yr/pupil. The charitable schools cost about $4500/yr/pupil.
That money doesn't grow on trees just because it's a public school.
If I buy a plot of land next door and build an iron smelting facility that spews so much smoke it blankets your backyard
Then you're violating my property rights. The US just has very weak protections. For the past few weeks I've been going through a new set of contact lenses every week (they usually last six weeks) because of all the smog blowing over from the midwest coal power plants because everybody there was running their AC's and it's been smoggy in the mountains here which wreaks havoc with my eyes. How do I recover my damages from their actions? Answer: I don't, my loss is "socialized". How about all the radioactivity in that coal soot? Can't talk about that.
The easy answer to the problem of the soot-belching coal plants is strong property rights. Real environmentalists get this but the existing governments protect the corporate interests and privatize their profits.
"You're welcome to live here as long as we like the way you live."
Actually that's the status quo. The idea of liberty is, "You're welcome to live here however you like as long as you don't aggress against us." That's the founding concept of America. "Don't tread on me" and all that - peace and tolerance.
Do you know he's actually over a reasonable budget
There's the key assumption. Verify that his budget is being spent poorly. If the staff is abusing their manager, then the manager may be competent except for knowing that he needs help. I do this kind of work sometimes - it's often that staff is just listening to vendors and over-buying on everything.
If the budget is really half waste then the CFO can tell the manager that he's getting half his budget next year and see if he can do it. But a cooperative approach is much better.
Diane Feinstein, for starters.
Please, Snowden should have gone straight to Feinstein's office with his complaints, and she would have made things right.
You don't go straight to the press, when we have people like Diane to represent the People's interests and fight for the rights of her constituents.
but that's a contention you have to make before the Supreme Court if you want to legally revert an unconstitutional law passed by Congress that they don't want to repeal on their own.
That's a misunderstanding of the system. Illegal laws are not legal until their status is changed by judicial review. If SCOUTS declares a law to be unconstitutional, it was always unconstitutional, and its effects are rewound to the extent possible.
Laws can only be assumed to be legal if they are in accordance with the enumerated powers of the Constitution, and that was written in plain language for every man to understand. That's not to say that the government, SCOUTS included, hasn't perverted the law to its extreme, but that's how the system was designed. And that's how it will be as long as people let them get away with it. And they probably will as long as they're uneducated (by whom?) and food is available at the grocery store.
What activity by the government, in this case, has been shown to be illegal?
Self-issue of general warrants. You have studied the infringements on rights under the King's governors, yeah?
And doesn't the constitution trump whatever snoopers' charter they were operating under?
The Constitution trumps all Federal law and all State law as related to the specifically enumerated powers in the Constitution.
The folly is going to the corrupt government to seek a change in the corrupt government (notably the Supreme Court which uses prior infringements to justify further ones). Back when States had some control of the Federal government (pre 17th Amendment) there was at least a negative feedback cycle (the States are the parties to the Constitution, despite the preamble) but now it's just a positive feedback cycle cranked up to 11. Results are predictable.
Why would you not have a problem with the US spying without warrants on every US citizen with a phone?
fear and cowardice. These are the true enemies of liberty.
The FSP's president is a political refugee from South Africa. It's still in the US, so you have to take your chances with the work visa lottery, but give it a shot! The potential downside is wasting time with some paperwork.
WTF does that even mean? That could be anything from Libertarians who don't want to pay taxes to hippies wanting to set up a socialist utopia.
Liberty means that both of those groups should be able to do those things that they want, short of hurting others.
I'm a long-time NH resident, and have met several of the FSP early movers. That pretty well fits each one of them - let people do what they want, short of hurting others (oh, the horror). They're almost all strong on property rights (except for the odd Georgist or two) and favor peace and tolerance as the prevailing basis for society. Most favor sound money and work hard for private charity. There are already a few that live in something like a commune and the ones that are pro-markets and free enterprise are completely down with that - they think it's silly, but the commune-ists pose no threat to them.
It's probably a safe bet that none favor Greek-style central control, central banking, and a pervasive regulatory environment, or the US-style warfare/welfare state (corporate welfare being tops among them). Their statement of intent says, "the maximum role of civil government is the protection of life, liberty, and property."
I've worked with some of them at the State house on issues like the right to record public officials in their official duty, the prosecution of victimless crimes, and legalizing industrial hemp. The Earth is "full" as there are no unclaimed jurisdictions, so the new reality of the past century is that one cannot simply move to settle a new area with like-minded friends (e.g. Utah) - the only option left is to move en masse and gentrify an existing area.
It's certainly not for everybody - those who would rather be kept as pets should not move here, and that's the beauty of political migration - those who do wish to "Live Free or Die" can move here with the FSP and work to make this one beautiful spot of nine-thousand square miles the freest place on Earth.
You are confused about integrity.
You are confused about his oath to support and defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. Also about the lessons of Nuremberg.
Going to Dianne Feinstein's office would have just landed him in jail. Yeah, maybe Rand Paul's office would have helped out, but still there's a non-zero chance of just landing in jail instead of getting word out about these enemies who have infiltrated the government.
Uhm what? Why wouldn't they have to answer to everyone and face criminal procedure themselves for extra-legally executing a citizen?
Like when the executed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki for being born to the wrong parent?
Did Ross Perot have any lasting effects?
My first Presidential vote was for neither Republican nor Democrat. I think that left a lasting impression on me. I still vote for neither, though I've had lapses of judgment in between.
Flip the situation around, you had this dude come into your office pretending he'd written some software but it had someone else's name on it and you let him smooth talk you into thinking it must be the new maintainer that had copy&replaced his name instead?
Well, I probably wouldn't hire somebody who nobody in my network had never worked with before, and this site was one item in his portfolio, not his only accomplishment, so yeah, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and not accuse him of being a dishonest thief.
I'd also structure the contract with a reasonable spec, milestone payments, incentives and penalties on delivery times, and a cancellation clause for failure to perform, so on the 3% chance he was a shyster who slipped through all the other filters, the most he could cost me was a little time. But being trusting is generally good for business, and a good contract will just be codified expectations that everybody can enthusiastically support and nobody should ever need to consult.