The interesting thing is that IBM managed to make Lotus Notes portable by leveraging the open source Eclipse RCP platform. So, technically, Lotus Notes built on top of an open source core. However, IBM wrote and open sourced the vast majority of what is in Eclipse and is by far the largest contributor to that open source project -- thus making the circle of irony complete.
You make some excellent points. However, there's a few places where the pieces don't quite fit together.
The winning vendor (the contract holder), is still responsible for the all the terms of the contract, even if the work is outsourced. Besides, there was no mention in the TFA of the contract terms being broken and all the players involved are large vendors to the government on their own, even without these alliances. IBM, Oracle, etc don't need a proxy to work for the government. They are already there. If this was some po-dunk ma'n'pa or some firm from Outer Offshoristan, you may well have a point here, but that's not the case here.
Also, nearly all federal government contracts are fixed price. If a subcontractor raises the price after the bid is won, it's the winning vendor who gets hurt, not the government, since they get paid the same no matter how much it actually costs.
However, you are absolutely RIGHT when we slightly rearrange the order of events as you presented them. Let's say the subcontractor contracted with the (soon-to-be) winning vendor DURING the bidding process. The supplier says "it'll cost us $X to do this" and the vendor puts that down on the contract as part of the overall cost, THEN the contract is signed, and THEN the rebate occurs. _That's_ a kickback and quite illegal. The bid was _artificially_ inflated before the contract was signed.
The legality of this all boils down to where in the process the subcontractor was engaged and when this "rebate" occurred. That's what the DOJ wants to find out. It's a shame that the article was not more clear on this all-important detail.
Nowhere in the TFA does it say that these alliances were secretly agreeing on anything or even bidding on the same contracts. If that were the case, I would think that that would be very prominent in the article, but its not. I read into it the same as the previous posts. The article said quite plainly that the contract winners outsourced to their strategic partners (at a reduced rate, which is true on government and non-government contracts alike) and they weren't passing the rebate onto the government. There was no mention of bidding ethics at all.
Here's the rub. Nearly all government contracts are fixed price. They quote the job ahead of time and if they come in under budget, that's extra profit. If they come in over budget, the vendor loses money. If the vendor is taking a risk at losing money on a contract if it runs over, why should they have to compound that risk by having to return any extra profits to the government? IMHO, if a vendor says they'll do it for $X and the government agrees, then it shouldn't matter HOW much the vendor actually spends to get the job done as long as the job gets done -- as long as there was not a collusion in the bidding process.
You are dead wrong. Cancer is really caused by subluxations in the spine, restricting the flow of the body's energies. The cure, of course, is a series simple manual adjustments that allow the body's energies to properly flow and cure the disease. It's as simple as that. Your nutritionist quackery is an obvious attempt to make money while ignoring that has been known all along by chiropractors!
I think you being a mite unfair. There's a LOT more business in this world than General Motors and Bank of America.
Fortune 1000 companties with armies of IT folks are not the focus for GAFYD. Google is targetting Bob's Discount Auto Service, West Poughdunk Flowers, and the millions of other Ma'n'Pa small and medium businesses out there who can't afford massive IT expendatures, but still want the some of the same benefits that they provide. A flower shop isn't going to have mounds of confidential, ITAR-controlled information that have to be kept under tight security wraps.
YOU might have only worked in large enterprises, but those are the vast minority of businesses in the world. I'm sure that a LOT of these organizations have jumped on the Google offering. Hell, even the free version is pretty nice.
> I've had a fun install where Swing didn't like something about my GTK+ theme
Bull. Swing implements its own 100% Java widget toolkit with various custom "look and feel" hooks. It cares not-a-bit what GTK+ theme you are using. It doesn't even know what GTK+ is.
> As for Eclipse, you can tell it's intended to be a Windows app, because it tries to write to its install directory.
Poppycock. I have Eclipse 3.2 installed into/usr/local/eclipse3.2 and I have no problems. Eclipse, by design, does not write ANYTHING to its install directory. Not even in Windows.
Eclipse writes everything to a workspace, which the user chooses on startup and can exist anywhere on the file system. The default is ~/workspace, but this can be changed by the user to whatever is more desired.
You can even install new plug-ins and features in your home area and tie them into your workspace, so each user can have their own custom features without sudo'ing up and adding them into the base install.
He's not using their roads, emergency services, etc.
Well, if you had read the FA, he was physically in NY 25% of the year. That's 3 solid months. I think he probably made use of a few roads and a lot more of NY's fine infrastructure while he was there.
I do a lot of extended work in states other than the one I live in. If I work more than 30 days (or 60 in some cases) in another state, whammo -- I pay their state taxes on everything I earned while I worked in that state. However, I also STOP paying them in my state of residence (usually done via deductions). He worked in NY about 90 days. In every state in the union that has income tax, that made him eligible to pay local taxes.
They do make more money per song, but not per sale.
Take your typical album of 12 songs with 2 ones you like on them and 10 others you couldn't care less about.
If you are buying from iTMS, you would buy those two songs and the label would get about $1.20 from the sale. If you buy from the store, you have to pay $20 for the whole album, of which about $5-6 goes to the label. So, over the long haul, the labels are making less money because they no longer are able to force you to buy the bad with the good.
The place where people ignore the the main point ($250 bucks is not cheap and 4GB of music wouldn't come close to being filled by the vast majority of the population anyway) and instead nitpick and correct people over obvious hyperbole.
First, to all you Slashdotters out there - I'm not trying to feed the trolls - this post looks legit to me
Of course its not legit! Ask yourself why someone claiming to be who she is would post that in a trademark in Austrailia thread on Slashdot, of all places. It was originally posted on Joel on Software, as a quick Google search discovered:
I did... and I again say.. what they said was "the crime didn't fit a particular clause of a specific law on the books". They made no moral judgments on the definition of "theft". They interpretted a single law.
The problem here is that there is the legal definition of "theft", as defined by laws and lawyers and judges and then there's the moral definition of theft. You, not the rest of us, are confusing them. I'll admit right here and now that copyright infringement doesn't meet the legal definition of theft as defined by the law of the land. The Supreme Court agrees with me and you at that. All settled.
The "identity thieves" aren't copying your identity, they are taking yours.
Let's assume I'm a victim of identity theft. I'm still me. I still have my SSN, my credit cards, my driver's license, my name, my identity. However, someone else has those same things now. That person has created a copy of my identity and is using it. I haven't been deprived of my identity, but I have been deprived of exclusive use of my identity.
However, thank you for making my point for me. At least you admit that depriving someone of exclusive use of their property (including their identity or intellectual property) against their consent is "taking something", which made your whole argument that copyright infringement isn't "taking anything" completely moot.
You are confusing the words "theft" and "misappropriation".
Am I? Since you love dictionaries, let's take a thesarus for a spin: Theft-- larceny, robbery, stealing, thievery, burglary, housebreaking; embezzlement, embezzling, graft, misappropriation; filching, pilfering, purloining, shoplifting.... Oopsie!
Give it up, already. Your house of cards has fallen in. Several people have made reasoned, well thought-out counterpoints, all as "factual" as yours and using the same sources you used (such as the OED and court case citations). You can mince words (or disregard words like 'just' in 'not just run-of-the-mill theft') all day long to make your case, but your primary point was that anyone who says copyright infringement is theft must be either a "moron" or a "troll". If you are wrong about nothing else, you were certainly wrong about that.
Dowling vs US, 1985, even the Supreme Court says that it isn't theft.
Actually, what the Court ruled was that copyright infringement didn't meet the "taking" clause of the National Stolen Property Act. That's a far cry from saying that it isn't theft at all.
Or try looking in a dictionary
I did, and I found an interesting, relatively new entry: "identity theft". Now, I've never heard any argument saying that "Identity theft isn't theft, its identity infringement! I'm not depriving anyone of their identity, I'm just using someone else's identity for my own personal gain!" An identity thief might not be violating the National Stolen Property Act, but that doesn't mean its not theft.
The fact is that the word "theft" has connotations beyond the law and beyond the dictionary. To the person on the street, it means having something that doesn't belong to them and that they have no right to have, whether it be a nicked candy bar, a downloaded song that wasn't paid for, or someone else's identity.
You are definately right on all counts. There was an article written by Ebert in 1999 for Variety that basically says: "Valenti -- you really screwed this up and you should have listed to us 10 years ago!"
Well, the reason that NC-17 was created was to separate the "X-rated" (i.e. p0rn) from the "adult only" films ("Angel Heart", "The Doom Generation"). Believe it or not, this change was actually made after a lot of pressure from, of all people, Siskel and Ebert, who dedicated several whole shows and columns in support of what they called the "A" rating.
More to the point, though, I think the original poster was saying: M would be like "NC-17" (adult but not necessarily pr0n) and AO would be the traditional idea of "X-rated".
Well, in all fairness, in my current job I filled out the application AFTER I was hired (in fact, it was the first thing I did at orientation). I wasn't singled out -- this was standard practice for people in my position. The idea was that the company recruited you then you and the company mutually decided it was a good fit for all parties, then did all the formalities (such as an application) after the fact. I could see that this might have been the case here.
Well, since "right to work state" is a US concept and Mr. Hanff is in the UK, this is a rather bogus argument.
For the sake of discussion though, you are in fact wrong. There's this little thing called Title VII that rather blows away your "any reason or no reason" argument.
I'm not certain that they keep track of who buys what, be certain that if you use plastic, they are more than capable of doing so.
They could, but they don't. To be honest, the cost/benefit on it just isn't worth it. The challenge of correlating purchases with individuals is so low-fidelity and ultimately so worthless (to them) that it just doesn't make sense to do it.
Wal-Mart deals in macro trend analysis. They record every single purchase made at any of their stores. Specifically, they not only record what was bought, but most importantly, what else what bought with it.
The actions of individual customers mean absolutely nothing to them. They simply do not work at that level. What Wal-Mart is interested in is the collective actions of thousands and millions of customers as a whole and they have a data warehouse that the Pentagon would be proud of to mine that information from.
Slashdot Mirror
The interesting thing is that IBM managed to make Lotus Notes portable by leveraging the open source Eclipse RCP platform. So, technically, Lotus Notes built on top of an open source core. However, IBM wrote and open sourced the vast majority of what is in Eclipse and is by far the largest contributor to that open source project -- thus making the circle of irony complete.
You make some excellent points. However, there's a few places where the pieces don't quite fit together.
The winning vendor (the contract holder), is still responsible for the all the terms of the contract, even if the work is outsourced. Besides, there was no mention in the TFA of the contract terms being broken and all the players involved are large vendors to the government on their own, even without these alliances. IBM, Oracle, etc don't need a proxy to work for the government. They are already there. If this was some po-dunk ma'n'pa or some firm from Outer Offshoristan, you may well have a point here, but that's not the case here.
Also, nearly all federal government contracts are fixed price. If a subcontractor raises the price after the bid is won, it's the winning vendor who gets hurt, not the government, since they get paid the same no matter how much it actually costs.
However, you are absolutely RIGHT when we slightly rearrange the order of events as you presented them. Let's say the subcontractor contracted with the (soon-to-be) winning vendor DURING the bidding process. The supplier says "it'll cost us $X to do this" and the vendor puts that down on the contract as part of the overall cost, THEN the contract is signed, and THEN the rebate occurs. _That's_ a kickback and quite illegal. The bid was _artificially_ inflated before the contract was signed.
The legality of this all boils down to where in the process the subcontractor was engaged and when this "rebate" occurred. That's what the DOJ wants to find out. It's a shame that the article was not more clear on this all-important detail.
Nowhere in the TFA does it say that these alliances were secretly agreeing on anything or even bidding on the same contracts. If that were the case, I would think that that would be very prominent in the article, but its not. I read into it the same as the previous posts. The article said quite plainly that the contract winners outsourced to their strategic partners (at a reduced rate, which is true on government and non-government contracts alike) and they weren't passing the rebate onto the government. There was no mention of bidding ethics at all.
Here's the rub. Nearly all government contracts are fixed price. They quote the job ahead of time and if they come in under budget, that's extra profit. If they come in over budget, the vendor loses money. If the vendor is taking a risk at losing money on a contract if it runs over, why should they have to compound that risk by having to return any extra profits to the government? IMHO, if a vendor says they'll do it for $X and the government agrees, then it shouldn't matter HOW much the vendor actually spends to get the job done as long as the job gets done -- as long as there was not a collusion in the bidding process.
Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E9MZli4qeU
On Google's own YouTube, no less!
You are dead wrong. Cancer is really caused by subluxations in the spine, restricting the flow of the body's energies. The cure, of course, is a series simple manual adjustments that allow the body's energies to properly flow and cure the disease. It's as simple as that. Your nutritionist quackery is an obvious attempt to make money while ignoring that has been known all along by chiropractors!
So a open source package won against three commercial packages at a decidedly pro-open source conference. Amazing that.
I bet that Microsoft products also fare very well at the PDC too.
I think he meant rip his DVDs to a memory stick, rather than burn.
I think you being a mite unfair. There's a LOT more business in this world than General Motors and Bank of America.
Fortune 1000 companties with armies of IT folks are not the focus for GAFYD. Google is targetting Bob's Discount Auto Service, West Poughdunk Flowers, and the millions of other Ma'n'Pa small and medium businesses out there who can't afford massive IT expendatures, but still want the some of the same benefits that they provide. A flower shop isn't going to have mounds of confidential, ITAR-controlled information that have to be kept under tight security wraps.
YOU might have only worked in large enterprises, but those are the vast minority of businesses in the world. I'm sure that a LOT of these organizations have jumped on the Google offering. Hell, even the free version is pretty nice.
> it's the second biggest pain in the ass that I have to deal with
What's the first?
> I've had a fun install where Swing didn't like something about my GTK+ theme
/usr/local/eclipse3.2 and I have no problems. Eclipse, by design, does not write ANYTHING to its install directory. Not even in Windows.
Bull. Swing implements its own 100% Java widget toolkit with various custom "look and feel" hooks. It cares not-a-bit what GTK+ theme you are using. It doesn't even know what GTK+ is.
> As for Eclipse, you can tell it's intended to be a Windows app, because it tries to write to its install directory.
Poppycock. I have Eclipse 3.2 installed into
Eclipse writes everything to a workspace, which the user chooses on startup and can exist anywhere on the file system. The default is ~/workspace, but this can be changed by the user to whatever is more desired.
You can even install new plug-ins and features in your home area and tie them into your workspace, so each user can have their own custom features without sudo'ing up and adding them into the base install.
Gmail still says "beta" for me... *shrug*
> bet they made friends at Boeing at any rate and kept a few ordinary workers gainfully employed.
Not really. They bought a used 767 (not 747) from Qantas Airlines. Oh yeah, and they are in a massive lawsuit with the refurbishers to boot.
He's not using their roads, emergency services, etc.
Well, if you had read the FA, he was physically in NY 25% of the year. That's 3 solid months. I think he probably made use of a few roads and a lot more of NY's fine infrastructure while he was there.
I do a lot of extended work in states other than the one I live in. If I work more than 30 days (or 60 in some cases) in another state, whammo -- I pay their state taxes on everything I earned while I worked in that state. However, I also STOP paying them in my state of residence (usually done via deductions). He worked in NY about 90 days. In every state in the union that has income tax, that made him eligible to pay local taxes.
They do make more money per song, but not per sale.
Take your typical album of 12 songs with 2 ones you like on them and 10 others you couldn't care less about.
If you are buying from iTMS, you would buy those two songs and the label would get about $1.20 from the sale. If you buy from the store, you have to pay $20 for the whole album, of which about $5-6 goes to the label. So, over the long haul, the labels are making less money because they no longer are able to force you to buy the bad with the good.
Time to go back to grade school.
Ahhh... Slashdot.
The place where people ignore the the main point ($250 bucks is not cheap and 4GB of music wouldn't come close to being filled by the vast majority of the population anyway) and instead nitpick and correct people over obvious hyperbole.
First, to all you Slashdotters out there - I'm not trying to feed the trolls - this post looks legit to me
l .3.178798.3
Of course its not legit! Ask yourself why someone claiming to be who she is would post that in a trademark in Austrailia thread on Slashdot, of all places. It was originally posted on Joel on Software, as a quick Google search discovered:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joe
The trolls thank you for the free meal.
I did... and I again say.. what they said was "the crime didn't fit a particular clause of a specific law on the books". They made no moral judgments on the definition of "theft". They interpretted a single law.
The problem here is that there is the legal definition of "theft", as defined by laws and lawyers and judges and then there's the moral definition of theft. You, not the rest of us, are confusing them. I'll admit right here and now that copyright infringement doesn't meet the legal definition of theft as defined by the law of the land. The Supreme Court agrees with me and you at that. All settled.
However, morally, its still theft.
The "identity thieves" aren't copying your identity, they are taking yours.
.... Oopsie!
Let's assume I'm a victim of identity theft. I'm still me. I still have my SSN, my credit cards, my driver's license, my name, my identity. However, someone else has those same things now. That person has created a copy of my identity and is using it. I haven't been deprived of my identity, but I have been deprived of exclusive use of my identity.
However, thank you for making my point for me. At least you admit that depriving someone of exclusive use of their property (including their identity or intellectual property) against their consent is "taking something", which made your whole argument that copyright infringement isn't "taking anything" completely moot.
You are confusing the words "theft" and "misappropriation".
Am I? Since you love dictionaries, let's take a thesarus for a spin: Theft-- larceny, robbery, stealing, thievery, burglary, housebreaking; embezzlement, embezzling, graft, misappropriation; filching, pilfering, purloining, shoplifting
Give it up, already. Your house of cards has fallen in. Several people have made reasoned, well thought-out counterpoints, all as "factual" as yours and using the same sources you used (such as the OED and court case citations). You can mince words (or disregard words like 'just' in 'not just run-of-the-mill theft') all day long to make your case, but your primary point was that anyone who says copyright infringement is theft must be either a "moron" or a "troll". If you are wrong about nothing else, you were certainly wrong about that.
Dowling vs US, 1985, even the Supreme Court says that it isn't theft.
Actually, what the Court ruled was that copyright infringement didn't meet the "taking" clause of the National Stolen Property Act. That's a far cry from saying that it isn't theft at all.
Or try looking in a dictionary
I did, and I found an interesting, relatively new entry: "identity theft". Now, I've never heard any argument saying that "Identity theft isn't theft, its identity infringement! I'm not depriving anyone of their identity, I'm just using someone else's identity for my own personal gain!" An identity thief might not be violating the National Stolen Property Act, but that doesn't mean its not theft.
The fact is that the word "theft" has connotations beyond the law and beyond the dictionary. To the person on the street, it means having something that doesn't belong to them and that they have no right to have, whether it be a nicked candy bar, a downloaded song that wasn't paid for, or someone else's identity.
You are definately right on all counts. There was an article written by Ebert in 1999 for Variety that basically says: "Valenti -- you really screwed this up and you should have listed to us 10 years ago!"
Well, the reason that NC-17 was created was to separate the "X-rated" (i.e. p0rn) from the "adult only" films ("Angel Heart", "The Doom Generation"). Believe it or not, this change was actually made after a lot of pressure from, of all people, Siskel and Ebert, who dedicated several whole shows and columns in support of what they called the "A" rating.
More to the point, though, I think the original poster was saying: M would be like "NC-17" (adult but not necessarily pr0n) and AO would be the traditional idea of "X-rated".
Well, in all fairness, in my current job I filled out the application AFTER I was hired (in fact, it was the first thing I did at orientation). I wasn't singled out -- this was standard practice for people in my position. The idea was that the company recruited you then you and the company mutually decided it was a good fit for all parties, then did all the formalities (such as an application) after the fact. I could see that this might have been the case here.
Wow, you just repeated EXACTLY what I said (Title VII _is_ the Age, Race, etc).
Your interjection here was entirely irrelevant to the topic (and yet, +5 Insightful). Brilliant!
Gotta love hypocrites.
Well, since "right to work state" is a US concept and Mr. Hanff is in the UK, this is a rather bogus argument.
For the sake of discussion though, you are in fact wrong. There's this little thing called Title VII that rather blows away your "any reason or no reason" argument.
I'm not certain that they keep track of who buys what, be certain that if you use plastic, they are more than capable of doing so.
They could, but they don't. To be honest, the cost/benefit on it just isn't worth it. The challenge of correlating purchases with individuals is so low-fidelity and ultimately so worthless (to them) that it just doesn't make sense to do it.
Wal-Mart deals in macro trend analysis. They record every single purchase made at any of their stores. Specifically, they not only record what was bought, but most importantly, what else what bought with it.
The actions of individual customers mean absolutely nothing to them. They simply do not work at that level. What Wal-Mart is interested in is the collective actions of thousands and millions of customers as a whole and they have a data warehouse that the Pentagon would be proud of to mine that information from.