Oh, so I'm an idiot is the best you can come up with? Sheesh!
They wouldn't sell it to their competitors, because they're using it themselves to increase their advantage over their competitors.
Once they sell it to one competitor at a reduced rate, that competitor can do the same ad infinitum. Soon, everyone has it, for much less, and their competitive advantage disappears completely, so their initial investment is now a total write-off.
Do you really believe that if a business approaches its competitor and says "I hear you've got a nice piece of custom software. Wanna sell me a copy?" that they'll just sell it to them, even for the full price they paid for it? They'd say "Take a hike." Same as you would. Businesses are about profit. Part of profit is maintaining strategic advantages.
If they know that their competitors will have the same barrier to entry (the same price) as they're paying, why should they go and make it cheaper for their competitors? Why should they lower the barrier to entry for a competitor? Presumably, they bought it because its worth more to them than the money they exchanged to buy it in the first place.
So what? They're selling an older version for $10k a pop. You've already made your money, and there's nothing to stop you from continuing to sell newer versions at whatever price you want, AS WELL AS selling the older version for $10k a pop.
Or, if they're going to dispose of it in a bankruptcy for $10k, why don't YOU buy it back at that price and preserve your $100k-a-pop market?
The gp poster also overlooked something that, in retrospect, is very obvious.
He used the example of selling a program for $100 - what's to prevent them from giving it away?
For a $100 program, not much.
Change that to a $100,000.00 program. You write a program under the gpl, and charge your client $100,000.00 for it. sure, they can now give the source away - but they won't. It's worth $100,000.00 to them.
so you're free to sell it again, still under the gpl, still with all the source, to the next customer, again for $100,000.00. And THEY won't give it away, either.
You went to school to have "a career developing software - not providing tech support". How nice. But if you want to sell your software, you're going to have to support it at the code level. Custom modifications, new features, etc. That's more than just "tech support."
Businesses pay for these things all the time. Ask any IBM customer.
Besides, that has nothing to do with the main thread - Stallman's free to charge whatever the market will bear for his autograph. You're free to charge whatever the market will bear for your autograph.
After all, why should they buy Stallman's autograph for $5 when they can get yours for $1?
My bet - Stallman will sell more autographs at $5 than you will at $1.
He'll also sell more autographs at $5 than you will for free.
The point? - Value is in the eye of the buyer, not the seller. If you can create value to the buyer, they will buy. If not, it doesn't matter that you spent 1,000 hours working on a piece of code - they won't take it even for free.
The CCTV cameras are more sensitive to IR than to visible light, and a lot of them come with IR LEDs so that they can "see" at night.
A laser pointer blinds them quite effectively. I've tested it with a CCTV camera when we got into an online debate, and its quite easy.
You don't have to hit the lens dead-on to cause the image to flare into uselessness.
I can see the next step - people protesting by putting laser pointers into their baseball caps, so all they have to do to neutralize a camera is look in its direction. Fit it with a mercury switch, so that its only powered when you look up beyond a certain angle, and you can walk around the city all day, flaring cameras without worrying about accidently "painting" someone.
So if they charge you, they would have to give UNblurred video to show that nobody else is doing it... but laser light being the way it is, they can't unless its a foggy night.
It IS sad. The most effective way to find terrorists is with what they call HUMINT - human intelligence.
Not spying on everyone, everywhere. All you'll be able to do, in most cases, is spot them too late.
The real problem is its easier to look like you're "doing something" by spending money on surveillance hardware and infrastructure, than properly-trained operatives. So the politicians spend the money where it will polish their image, by investing in such things as Echelon.
Of course, an even more effective way would be not to be so bellicose on the world stage, but again, the current crop of politicians find it more important to polish their image than to actually achieve anything.
Feel free to substitute "support their hidden agenda" for "polish their image":-)
I wondered about the 68x series myself. It was a great chip to program for. I would have been quite willing to sacrifice (apparent) speed for all those extra registers, no segmented memory architecture, and more addressing modes.
You ought to read the GPL. You can charge whatever price you want for any GPL'd software. That's one of the freedoms. You're also free to dual-license it if you're the creator - another freedom. It works for Trolltech (Qt), MySQL, etc.
GPL:
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)
Population of 300 million, at least 200,000 slashdot users (allowing for multiple nics, dead accounts,etc), 3500 subpoenas
multiply by 2 to allow an average of 2 users per computer in family situations (because it may be the spouse or child of a user who is being directly monitored, and the slashdot user is just a collateral intercept).
= 400,000 people
300,000,000 population / 3,500 subpoenas = 1 out of every 85,714 people.
400,000/85714 = 4.6 people.
In other words, we should expect at least 4 people on slashdot to be the subject, either directly, or indirectly, of one of the subpoenas.
Now keep in mind that they don't have to request even a "secret" subpoena if its classified as "training" - so we can safely multiply that 4.6 by some factor...
Although guideline No. 2 says, "No living person shall be honored by portrayal on U.S. postage," (the key word is "honored") occasionally, postage stamps have depicted living people -- either through the use of a photograph or illustration -- as design elements that commemorate a theme rather than an individual.
... they produced a copy of an "executive privilege finding" from Alberto Gonzales, that it was okay because the stamp was to be part of the "Heroes of the Modernization of the Constitution". The postmaster then shot himself in shame.
How would they feel if we re-framed it like this: "If you're not doing anything wrong in the bathroom, you shouldn't be worried about the government videotaping you there."... or... "If you're not doing anything illegal in the bedroom, you shouldn't be worried about the government recording your sex life."
Its the people who see nothing wrong with this (wholesale invasion of privacy) that should be kept an eye on - they're obviously anti-social psycho exhibitionists:-)
Point noted, but I'm sure in the course of a year you come into contact with a lot more than 20 people. 30 years ago, the US was criticizing other governments for wholesale spying on their own people... now they're killing freedom to preserve it ("We liberated the village by destroying it.")
During the three hour interrogation, the secret service asked my pilot buddy "So Mr. So and So, just exactly what is up with you exploring the George Bush bobble-head doll website on so and so date". My buddy replied, "Oh, that had to have been my ultra-liberal wife looking at those websites". Which is 100 percent the case given I know what a fan of GWB my friend is and how his wife doesn't particularly care for GWB.
Gee, if the government is afraid of people who look at George Bush Bobble-head dolls, I can imagine the treatment they'll give for people selling them. I guess its true that people who've abused cocaine for a long time have paranoid delusions over the weirdest things...
You unsolder it, clean up the leads, and plug into the socket:-) When I replaced the cpu, I thought about soldering a socket to the motherboard and seating the chip into it, but it was just as easy to solder a new cpu directly to it.
If each of the 3000 people who was secretly spied on had contact with only 20 people, that's a pool of 60,000 additional people whose privacy was "incidently" violated.
So now they've got, not 3,000, but 63,000 "names of interest."
Take it one level further for each of the additional 60,000... 60,000 x 20 = 1,200,000.
It grows pretty fast. The danger is these secret searches escalating into their version of the Kevin Bacon game.
Just a quick point - unsoldering a ROM is no big deal. Heck, when the cpu blew on my first computer, I had to unsolder it and solder in a new one. I guess that's becoming one of the "lost arts."
So your dead mac is worth money. Pull the roms, send the rest back.
10 years ago that was true. Now it's cheaper to buy a used G3 or G4 Mac entire than screw around with clones or emulation (if any of these are still sold at all) of an obsolete OS.
Depends on what you want to do. Having a legit copy of the roms means being able to legitimately run emulators on todays hardware - a lot faster than a G3.
Maybe they don't want a repeat of the old Mac Clone - where people cold take the custom bios chips out of a defunct mac and use it to legally run a clone made by Franklin Computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clones
a large amount of this system software was included in the Macintosh's ROM chips. Hence any competitor who attempted to create a Macintosh clone would have to either illegally duplicate all the copyrighted code in the ROMs -- in which case Apple could legally quash the manufacturer -- or reverse-engineer the ROMs, which would have been an enormous and costly process without certainty of success.
The strategy of suppressing clone development was successful; from 1986 to 1991, several manufacturers created Macintosh clones, obtaining their ROMs by actually purchasing one of Apple's Macintosh computers and removing from it the required parts, then installing those parts in the clone's case.
...
Before true clones were available, the Atari ST could be converted into a Mac by adding the third-party Spectre GCR emulator (which required that the user purchase a set of Mac ROMs). The Amiga could also be converted into a Mac with similar emulators. Since Apple Computer never manufactured a 68060 based Mac, the fastest way to run native 68000 MacOS applications on real hardware was to run it on an Atari or Amiga.
So your dead mac is worth money. Pull the roms, send the rest back.
Instead, I'll mention you cannot store shit for power in a file cabinet
Tht's what I thought too, so I went to their site (not the article). The $10,000 unit has a capacity of 1 kw for 10 hours, but only if you buy some batteries for it. That's right - for $10,000 BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED, you can run 2 pcs all day and charge them up at off-peak rates at night. BFD.
The database in question was a composite made from all the government databases. While it was legal for each department ot have a database with contents relevant to the administration of its' programs,it wasn't legal for HRDC to collect all the other departments' data and create an uber-database.
With the way the department began leaking information like a seive once this (and an accounting scandal) broke out, you can be fairly sure that it was destroyed. It would have been too politically risky to have kept it around in any form, or looked the other way while another department snagged a copy, which would have started getting out-of-date immediatly anyway.
They were expecting only a couple of requests a year, at most. Because the law also allowed people to file requests for revision of wrong information, it would have been a budget-breaking nightmare, just in terms of hiring more people to handle all the paperwork.
They would have had to charge several hundred a head, at which point there would have been a court challenge to the fee structure AND the existence of the database itself, which, btw, went WAY beyond the departments legal mandate.
Then there was the scandal where millions went missing from the department. Quicker and easier to just wipe the database than face the voters' wrath (we don't have fixed terms here).
You'd think people would be blogging about it, or emailing each other. Or something. Its not illegal (yet).
Its as dumb as the idea that big databases and constant surveillance will increase security, when it really means there are now more ways to game the system and throw people off track than ever before. Real security comes from people. In the case of multiple cards, each one for access to different services, the loss or compromise of one isn't a total disaster. A single identity card gives a single point of failure.
Consumption is not trending down, so no matter what you do, the average consumption is going to go up. What that means is that the higher-cost sources (like gas turbines) that are online now for peak periods will be on for longer and longer duty cycles. Then they'll be online permanently, so where is your buffer now?
Besides, this device is a scam. If you go to their site, you'll see it only supplies enough power to run two computers for the day (1,000 watts for 10 hours), and only if you spend some money on batteries. That's right, for $10,000, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. And you need a LOT of batteries.
It looks more like an investor scam - they're hyping the tax credit of between $500 and $2500 if you connect it to a solar cell grid - also not included. This product, without the solar cells, is about as "green" as black paint. Even with the solar cells, you can't run either your business or your home off this. It can't power an electric stove, electric hot water heater, or an electric clothes dryer for even a second.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, so I'm an idiot is the best you can come up with? Sheesh!
Do you really believe that if a business approaches its competitor and says "I hear you've got a nice piece of custom software. Wanna sell me a copy?" that they'll just sell it to them, even for the full price they paid for it? They'd say "Take a hike." Same as you would. Businesses are about profit. Part of profit is maintaining strategic advantages.
If they know that their competitors will have the same barrier to entry (the same price) as they're paying, why should they go and make it cheaper for their competitors? Why should they lower the barrier to entry for a competitor? Presumably, they bought it because its worth more to them than the money they exchanged to buy it in the first place.
They would know that the first copy they sold at $10k would ruin THEIR market, so they wouldn't make the initial $100K investment in the first place.
Outlay of $100k - revenue of $10k = loss of $90k. Not a very good business plan.
So the only people who are going to lay out the $100k in the first place are those who are going to keep it to themselves.
So what? They're selling an older version for $10k a pop. You've already made your money, and there's nothing to stop you from continuing to sell newer versions at whatever price you want, AS WELL AS selling the older version for $10k a pop.
Or, if they're going to dispose of it in a bankruptcy for $10k, why don't YOU buy it back at that price and preserve your $100k-a-pop market?
He used the example of selling a program for $100 - what's to prevent them from giving it away?
For a $100 program, not much.
Change that to a $100,000.00 program. You write a program under the gpl, and charge your client $100,000.00 for it. sure, they can now give the source away - but they won't. It's worth $100,000.00 to them.
so you're free to sell it again, still under the gpl, still with all the source, to the next customer, again for $100,000.00. And THEY won't give it away, either.
You went to school to have "a career developing software - not providing tech support". How nice. But if you want to sell your software, you're going to have to support it at the code level. Custom modifications, new features, etc. That's more than just "tech support."
Businesses pay for these things all the time. Ask any IBM customer.
Besides, that has nothing to do with the main thread - Stallman's free to charge whatever the market will bear for his autograph. You're free to charge whatever the market will bear for your autograph.
After all, why should they buy Stallman's autograph for $5 when they can get yours for $1?
My bet - Stallman will sell more autographs at $5 than you will at $1.
He'll also sell more autographs at $5 than you will for free.
The point? - Value is in the eye of the buyer, not the seller. If you can create value to the buyer, they will buy. If not, it doesn't matter that you spent 1,000 hours working on a piece of code - they won't take it even for free.
The CCTV cameras are more sensitive to IR than to visible light, and a lot of them come with IR LEDs so that they can "see" at night.
A laser pointer blinds them quite effectively. I've tested it with a CCTV camera when we got into an online debate, and its quite easy.
You don't have to hit the lens dead-on to cause the image to flare into uselessness.
I can see the next step - people protesting by putting laser pointers into their baseball caps, so all they have to do to neutralize a camera is look in its direction. Fit it with a mercury switch, so that its only powered when you look up beyond a certain angle, and you can walk around the city all day, flaring cameras without worrying about accidently "painting" someone.
So if they charge you, they would have to give UNblurred video to show that nobody else is doing it ... but laser light being the way it is, they can't unless its a foggy night.
It IS sad. The most effective way to find terrorists is with what they call HUMINT - human intelligence.
Not spying on everyone, everywhere. All you'll be able to do, in most cases, is spot them too late.
The real problem is its easier to look like you're "doing something" by spending money on surveillance hardware and infrastructure, than properly-trained operatives. So the politicians spend the money where it will polish their image, by investing in such things as Echelon.
Of course, an even more effective way would be not to be so bellicose on the world stage, but again, the current crop of politicians find it more important to polish their image than to actually achieve anything.
Feel free to substitute "support their hidden agenda" for "polish their image" :-)
I wondered about the 68x series myself. It was a great chip to program for. I would have been quite willing to sacrifice (apparent) speed for all those extra registers, no segmented memory architecture, and more addressing modes.
Poster sayeth:
You ought to read the GPL. You can charge whatever price you want for any GPL'd software. That's one of the freedoms. You're also free to dual-license it if you're the creator - another freedom. It works for Trolltech (Qt), MySQL, etc.
GPL:
I figured as much.
What are the odds?
Population of 300 million, at least 200,000 slashdot users (allowing for multiple nics, dead accounts,etc), 3500 subpoenas
multiply by 2 to allow an average of 2 users per computer in family situations (because it may be the spouse or child of a user who is being directly monitored, and the slashdot user is just a collateral intercept). = 400,000 people
300,000,000 population / 3,500 subpoenas = 1 out of every 85,714 people.
400,000/85714 = 4.6 people.
In other words, we should expect at least 4 people on slashdot to be the subject, either directly, or indirectly, of one of the subpoenas.
Now keep in mind that they don't have to request even a "secret" subpoena if its classified as "training" - so we can safely multiply that 4.6 by some factor ...
So it may not be BS.
Speaking of jokes ...
Q: How can you tell Cheney is lying?
A: Bush's lips are moving.
Q: Why doesn't the Bush cabinet use condoms?
A: There's no end to those pricks.
Q: Why aren't there more sex scandals in the Bush cabinet?
A: They're too busy f*cking the rest of the country.
Top reasons why the post office had to recall the GWB/Cheney Freedom stamp?
- people were spitting on the wrong side
- they're so sleezy that even the glue won't stick
- in tests, postal workers would insist on hand-cancelling each one, over and over and over
- any mail with one would automatically be classified as "suspicious" or "junk"
- nobody would pay 33 cents for it
When it was pointed out that normally, you can't "honor" a living personhttp://www.usps.com/news/online/02_0314_2.htm
How would they feel if we re-framed it like this: "If you're not doing anything wrong in the bathroom, you shouldn't be worried about the government videotaping you there." ... or ... "If you're not doing anything illegal in the bedroom, you shouldn't be worried about the government recording your sex life."
Its the people who see nothing wrong with this (wholesale invasion of privacy) that should be kept an eye on - they're obviously anti-social psycho exhibitionists :-)
Point noted, but I'm sure in the course of a year you come into contact with a lot more than 20 people. 30 years ago, the US was criticizing other governments for wholesale spying on their own people ... now they're killing freedom to preserve it ("We liberated the village by destroying it.")
Gee, if the government is afraid of people who look at George Bush Bobble-head dolls, I can imagine the treatment they'll give for people selling them. I guess its true that people who've abused cocaine for a long time have paranoid delusions over the weirdest things ...
You unsolder it, clean up the leads, and plug into the socket :-) When I replaced the cpu, I thought about soldering a socket to the motherboard and seating the chip into it, but it was just as easy to solder a new cpu directly to it.
You're fogetting a few things ...
If each of the 3000 people who was secretly spied on had contact with only 20 people, that's a pool of 60,000 additional people whose privacy was "incidently" violated.
So now they've got, not 3,000, but 63,000 "names of interest."
Take it one level further for each of the additional 60,000 ... 60,000 x 20 = 1,200,000.
It grows pretty fast. The danger is these secret searches escalating into their version of the Kevin Bacon game.
Just a quick point - unsoldering a ROM is no big deal. Heck, when the cpu blew on my first computer, I had to unsolder it and solder in a new one. I guess that's becoming one of the "lost arts."
So your dead mac is worth money. Pull the roms, send the rest back.
Tht's what I thought too, so I went to their site (not the article). The $10,000 unit has a capacity of 1 kw for 10 hours, but only if you buy some batteries for it. That's right - for $10,000 BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED, you can run 2 pcs all day and charge them up at off-peak rates at night. BFD.
It looks like a scam to hook investors.
The database in question was a composite made from all the government databases. While it was legal for each department ot have a database with contents relevant to the administration of its' programs,it wasn't legal for HRDC to collect all the other departments' data and create an uber-database.
With the way the department began leaking information like a seive once this (and an accounting scandal) broke out, you can be fairly sure that it was destroyed. It would have been too politically risky to have kept it around in any form, or looked the other way while another department snagged a copy, which would have started getting out-of-date immediatly anyway.
They were expecting only a couple of requests a year, at most. Because the law also allowed people to file requests for revision of wrong information, it would have been a budget-breaking nightmare, just in terms of hiring more people to handle all the paperwork.
They would have had to charge several hundred a head, at which point there would have been a court challenge to the fee structure AND the existence of the database itself, which, btw, went WAY beyond the departments legal mandate.
Then there was the scandal where millions went missing from the department. Quicker and easier to just wipe the database than face the voters' wrath (we don't have fixed terms here).
You'd think people would be blogging about it, or emailing each other. Or something. Its not illegal (yet).
Its as dumb as the idea that big databases and constant surveillance will increase security, when it really means there are now more ways to game the system and throw people off track than ever before. Real security comes from people. In the case of multiple cards, each one for access to different services, the loss or compromise of one isn't a total disaster. A single identity card gives a single point of failure.
Consumption is not trending down, so no matter what you do, the average consumption is going to go up. What that means is that the higher-cost sources (like gas turbines) that are online now for peak periods will be on for longer and longer duty cycles. Then they'll be online permanently, so where is your buffer now?
Besides, this device is a scam. If you go to their site, you'll see it only supplies enough power to run two computers for the day (1,000 watts for 10 hours), and only if you spend some money on batteries. That's right, for $10,000, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. And you need a LOT of batteries.
It looks more like an investor scam - they're hyping the tax credit of between $500 and $2500 if you connect it to a solar cell grid - also not included. This product, without the solar cells, is about as "green" as black paint. Even with the solar cells, you can't run either your business or your home off this. It can't power an electric stove, electric hot water heater, or an electric clothes dryer for even a second.