If I can upgrade the software (firmware) with free software to make a $50 router act like a $200 router, then we aren't talking about "top of the line" vs "low end" in any real, practical terms. People who try to cheat the market deserve the market to take a bite out of them. Whatever happened to earning rewards based on value?
"You may have the right to try, but the company that created the hardware "damn well" has the right to use technology to stop you if they want to."
Actually this is the heart of the conflict. There is no moral or ethical reason, and there should be no legal right, for the company which created a piece of hardware to try to stop the legitimate use of that hardware. There really should be laws to make such an obvious violation criminal. That anyone thinks they "damn well" have such a right is repugnant and at odds with the fundamental principles of property rights. Attempts to sell a product, and still own its usage, are diametrically opposed to what it means to have something that is yours because you earned the money to buy it. Your perverted sense of property rights would lead to a world where no one owns anything, but "owns" a lease to use an object in only proscribed manners. This isn't just ugly and wrong, it is approaching evil. Your use of the term "damn" is perhaps more appropriate than it was meant to be.
"end of child labour" that was indeed gained by the labour unions
Actually, it was the SPCA, not the Unions, and not the courts (in the name of children), who first effectively combated child labour practices.
While there were attempts at times, there werent consistent legal limits placed upon the way a child could be treated, until 1875. At that time, Mary Ellen, a very abused child who had been beaten and chained in a room by the couple who took her from a charitable institution, was discovered by a church visitor. To her dismay, the worker found that the police were helpless to intervene. As a last resort, the worker made a plea to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, stating that Mary Ellen was an animal in need of protection. The SPCA investigated, and took the case to court. The guardian was sentenced to jail and the child was removed. With this, the New York SPCA incorporated child protective services. Other SPCAs followed suit, and yet other communities formed separate Societies for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Laws were written to protect children from abuse and neglect.
Child abuse as we know it today wasn't illegal. It was only because we had laws that said, "you can't treat an animal that way", and the creative presentation of the case as a type of animal abuse, that allowed the courts to even hear the case. Funny what you pick up in an HR class...
Using this data, I summed the categories and plotted the totals. I see noise around a constant value from 1979 thru 1982 with a modest decrease for one year in 1983 that doesn't look like noise, followed by a *large* increase starting in 1984 and which peaks in 1994. The Clinton violent crime decline is significant through 2000, but then the slope flattens (but still declines.) The radical decrease during the Clinton administration is pretty amazing. It was during the time when the slope had begun to flatten that this trend came up in class. Without doubt the Clinton years where atypical, and to suggest that the crime rate has been declining since the 1980s is contrary to fact.
I am willing to qualify my statement this far, though: It would appear that my country is the most violent, per capita, of any industrialized nation on earth.
If by "online help" you are referring to the fact that MS help now wants to show you www links which aren't relevant, this is part of the problem. If by "online" you mean locally online, then almost everything I've used has better help than the current MS help. I always click on Help, first, but it is just a waste of time. I can find answers that are relevant using google. In terms of decent help systems, Mathematica is excellent. Eclipse is fantastic. The octave info files are extraordinarily informative, although their are better info browsers than info. KDE has a nice help system. I tend to work with Kile (LaTeX to PDF) which has very good help, including a LaTeX reference, or Quanta (for HTML). I can find the information I need with these systems.
I agree to not count clippy against MS help because he really doesn't count. I also admit that back around Office 95 MS Help wasn't so frustrating, and the early days of Linux help (man pages? but all I want is to know how the hell I change the margins!) wasn't what I needed. These days it seems that even as Linux has adapted the GUI feel of modern help systems (JHelp looks just like WinHelp, for instance, which incidently looks like the KDE Help Center), the difference is compounded by *content*. Either MS Help files are no longer indexed in a way that I can find what I need, or it just isn't there. KDE help, during the period of MS's decline, has radically improved.
Now if by "online help" you mean the Microsoft Developer's Network, I have to admit there is a lot of information there. This isn't really what most people mean, though, regarding an application's Help button. The allegation I heard on my way to my CS degree was that MS's documentation was so sorry because they didn't want to step on the toes of third party howto book writers. This might be cynical but it would explain the situation:-)
"it is most reasonable to assume the "rights of the people" is refering to the rights of US citizens/residents on US soil, not just anyone in particular."
It is interesting to note that "We, the people..." began the Declaration of Independence. Yes, they where residing together. But people are the alpha and omega of democratic forms of govenment. Consider:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
and notice the switch from "citizens" to "any person". I think it is fairly obvious that the "rights of the people" thus have to refer to "anyone in particular" who is indeed within the reach of the power of the government of the United States of America.
"Military tribunals ARE due process. They aren't a civilian court, but they would satisfy due process requirements."
And yet the US federal supreme court, the highest court in the land, disagrees...perhaps there are details of which you are unaware, or are discarding?
So you are both right. It does use the word "citizen", and then it specificly switches to "person" when it states: "nor shall any State deprive any person of life , liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So apparently our US law applies to people and not just citizens.
"I dunno. Life is tough, and life is not fair, but..."
You speak of rights in the same sentence that you stipulate that life is unjust. Life is unjust, but don't move against the (unfair) system. Victim's of injustice must remain a victim, because that's just the way it is...life is unfair. But is it *supposed* to be unfair?
I suspect invoking genetics as a cause is likewise an attempt to believe that "that's just the way it is." Social systems evolve at far faster rates than genetic systems. We can, and do, modify our institutions over time. We should. Rule of Law is one of the greatest (and worst) of human achievements, depending of the system of law implemented. At the very heart of this, my rant, is a belief that when discretionary powers come to mean whim, when "you are either for me or against me", when it is "my country, right or wrong", then evil has taken control.
Which raises an interesting question: why do canadians prefer rifles, and why does the US prefer handguns? I would suggest that rather than "stupid people with guns kill", it is perhaps more a matter of "violent people prefer handguns and are more likely to kill". It would appear that my country is the most violent, per capita, on the face of the planet. Except during the Clinton administration, when the FBI's list tracking violent crimes showed a decline, the level of violence has increased every year since my birth. And this is the true, central, core question: why?
Lt. Col. Filiol notes that the problems are conceptual, rather than due to sloppy coding. "We did not exploit security holes," he said.
Unfortunately the report is classified, so all we know are rumors regarding the allegations. It appears that
In some instances, malevolent macros were considered to be secure by the open-source package, and as a result, users were not informed when they were executed.
Does this relate to trusting a URL? Or all the macros in a directory, perhaps?
When I went back for my MBA I found that there were issues using Calc while the textbooks were all Excel based. Gnumeric, on the other hand, never once failed. (It also exports to LaTeX.) There were no financial nor statistical formulas that I found missing, and Gnumeric's solver kicked ass for optimizations. The python interface also kicks ass, as does the R interface if you ever get serious about statistics. Excel is certainly miles ahead in terms of secretary adoption, but I doubt any serious analyst or accuary would consider Excel "miles ahead" of Gnumeric. I sure don't:-)
Actually Microsoft has the worst help system I've had to deal with, and it seems to be getting worse rather than better. I don't know what sort of users they are targeting, but the usability was better in Office 97 than 2000, and Office XP just totally sucks. I feel I'm wasting time, since I can google answers that are actually relevant.
I was a computer lab monitor at my school when most students had office 2000 or XP, and we were still running office 97. If you don't have problems, more power to you. We sure as hell did. Likewise, after we upgraded, there were difficulties with students bringing in office 95-97 files. Compound documents were the worst. Our oncampus quickprint also had these difficulties.
Actually, there was, way before C (let alone Java or C#.)
"Lisp is very old language, second only to Fortran in the family tree of high level languages." A Little history
Whereas C (rather like Fortran) wanted to stay "close to the metal", Lisp wanted to transcend metal to get closer to the math. Hence, innante elegance:-)
Towards the end of the initial period, it became clear that this combination of ideas made an elegant mathematical system as well as a practical programming language. Then mathematical neatness became a goal and led to pruning some features from the core of the language. This was partly motivated by esthetic reasons and partly by the belief that it would be easier to devise techniques for proving programs correct if the semantics were compact and without exceptions. The results of (Cartwright 1976) and (Cartwright and McCarthy 1978), which show that LISP programs can be interpreted as sentences and schemata of first order logic, provide new confirmation of the original intuition that logical neatness would pay off.
It is true that Lisp ran inside an interpreter rather than a VM. Still, garbage collection is *old*, and memory management techniques from the 1950s/60s shouldn't be considered a new thing.
Still waiting for the Visual.Lisp.Net, though:-) When UML and visual design paradims are finally swallowed by Lisp, oh what fun times we'll have!;-)
In a disappointment to the scientific community, the National Science Foundation (NSF) budget will decline by $105 million or 1.9 percent to $5.47 billion under the FY 2005 omnibus appropriations bill.
But aren't we on track to double the NSF budget over ten years?
Fiscal Year 2006 Budget For Office Of Science Technology Policy And The National Science Foundation
The proposed budget for NSF is just 2.4% above last year for a total of $5.6 billion. This barely keeps pace with inflation. Most disturbing is the cut to education programs. This budget actually cuts education programs by 12%. Research is increased by just over 2% - which barely keeps pace with inflation. Yet, salaries and expenses goes up by 22%, and Major equipment goes up by 44%.
Actually even the US courts found MS guilty of abusing their monopolistic position. Do valid, usable alternatives exist? YES. Are they technically superior? Some would say yes. Do people use them? Very very few. Did MS forcibly prevent people from being able to purchase computers w/o MS products? Yes, according to US courts. If you purchased a computer w/o MS, odds were that you still paid for the MS product because of the OEM's contract. The power to force OEMs into those contracts is not illegal, but to actually use the power to force them is.
Agreed. I think a problem is that the concept of law and property where once based on general principles. In order to foster a prefered enviornment artifical psuedo-property laws were passed that are arbitrary. The conflict arises when people want to assume that these arbitrary, one might say whimsical, laws represent general principles and should thus be the same everywhere, universally. They aren't. This seems "unfair".
Actually, no, they got it right. You are confusing income with net income (which is profit).
"The income statement adds up all of the company's revenue, subtracts its expenses and gives you the bottom line -- a.k.a. net income."
I don't know how much profit they make per day, but it is way less than 26 million euros.
For the last three years, MSFT has shown a net income of $12,254,000,000 (2005), $8,168,000,000 (2004), $9,993,000,000 (2003), which when divided by 365 gives $33,572,602.74/day (2005), $22378082.19/day (2004), $27,378,082.19/day (2003)
and at 1 U.S. dollar = 0.783024039 Euro, this converts to
26,288,155.00/day (2005), 17,522,576.30/day (2004), 21,437,696.50/day (2003)
which is *not* "way less than 26 million euros" per day.
One problem with allowing criminals to keep their loot, if they would just promise to be good from now on, is that the financial leverage their ill gotten gains provides them is in itself an unfair advantage.
If I steal from you, driving you into bankruptcy so that your children become beggars, and then 40 years later give back exactly the same amount I stole, is this fair? Or do I also owe for the interest? And what about pain and suffering?
Yes, agreed that VisiCalc changed the way business did calculations. You say Lotus 123, but that was later. PCs became cheap when IBM let Phoneix reverse engineer their bios w/o lawsuit, and clones sprang up. Actual IBM PCs were not cheap (compared to Apple's of similar power) but they had the magic letters on them: "IBM". Even still, PCs were for secretaries. If you needed to crunch numbers and couldn't afford an HP 9000 (with dual 68040s and HP-UX), for a whole lot less you had a MacIntosh.
But the thread started with: "Speak for yourself. With no big business to pay an IT department, you're relegated to programming after your pizza delivery job. Actually, without big business, there wouldn't even be PC's."
There were personal computers before big business, and they even developed the first spreadsheets. My real point is that there is more to computing than working in a Fortune 500 IT department, besides diddling for fun after your pizza delivery job.
I got a dose of it in a Programming Languages class that compared and contrasted categories of language design decisions. ADA wasn't my favorite...but it was suggested that the DoD (still) requires it of contractors.
Slashdot Mirror
If I can upgrade the software (firmware) with free software to make a $50 router act like a $200 router, then we aren't talking about "top of the line" vs "low end" in any real, practical terms. People who try to cheat the market deserve the market to take a bite out of them. Whatever happened to earning rewards based on value?
"You may have the right to try, but the company that created the hardware "damn well" has the right to use technology to stop you if they want to."
Actually this is the heart of the conflict. There is no moral or ethical reason, and there should be no legal right, for the company which created a piece of hardware to try to stop the legitimate use of that hardware. There really should be laws to make such an obvious violation criminal. That anyone thinks they "damn well" have such a right is repugnant and at odds with the fundamental principles of property rights. Attempts to sell a product, and still own its usage, are diametrically opposed to what it means to have something that is yours because you earned the money to buy it. Your perverted sense of property rights would lead to a world where no one owns anything, but "owns" a lease to use an object in only proscribed manners. This isn't just ugly and wrong, it is approaching evil. Your use of the term "damn" is perhaps more appropriate than it was meant to be.
Using this data, I summed the categories and plotted the totals. I see noise around a constant value from 1979 thru 1982 with a modest decrease for one year in 1983 that doesn't look like noise, followed by a *large* increase starting in 1984 and which peaks in 1994. The Clinton violent crime decline is significant through 2000, but then the slope flattens (but still declines.) The radical decrease during the Clinton administration is pretty amazing. It was during the time when the slope had begun to flatten that this trend came up in class. Without doubt the Clinton years where atypical, and to suggest that the crime rate has been declining since the 1980s is contrary to fact.
I am willing to qualify my statement this far, though: It would appear that my country is the most violent, per capita, of any industrialized nation on earth.
If by "online help" you are referring to the fact that MS help now wants to show you www links which aren't relevant, this is part of the problem. If by "online" you mean locally online, then almost everything I've used has better help than the current MS help. I always click on Help, first, but it is just a waste of time. I can find answers that are relevant using google. In terms of decent help systems, Mathematica is excellent. Eclipse is fantastic. The octave info files are extraordinarily informative, although their are better info browsers than info. KDE has a nice help system. I tend to work with Kile (LaTeX to PDF) which has very good help, including a LaTeX reference, or Quanta (for HTML). I can find the information I need with these systems.
:-)
I agree to not count clippy against MS help because he really doesn't count. I also admit that back around Office 95 MS Help wasn't so frustrating, and the early days of Linux help (man pages? but all I want is to know how the hell I change the margins!) wasn't what I needed. These days it seems that even as Linux has adapted the GUI feel of modern help systems (JHelp looks just like WinHelp, for instance, which incidently looks like the KDE Help Center), the difference is compounded by *content*. Either MS Help files are no longer indexed in a way that I can find what I need, or it just isn't there. KDE help, during the period of MS's decline, has radically improved.
Now if by "online help" you mean the Microsoft Developer's Network, I have to admit there is a lot of information there. This isn't really what most people mean, though, regarding an application's Help button. The allegation I heard on my way to my CS degree was that MS's documentation was so sorry because they didn't want to step on the toes of third party howto book writers. This might be cynical but it would explain the situation
It is interesting to note that "We, the people..." began the Declaration of Independence. Yes, they where residing together. But people are the alpha and omega of democratic forms of govenment. Consider: and notice the switch from "citizens" to "any person". I think it is fairly obvious that the "rights of the people" thus have to refer to "anyone in particular" who is indeed within the reach of the power of the government of the United States of America.
"Military tribunals ARE due process. They aren't a civilian court, but they would satisfy due process requirements."
And yet the US federal supreme court, the highest court in the land, disagrees...perhaps there are details of which you are unaware, or are discarding?
So you are both right. It does use the word "citizen", and then it specificly switches to "person" when it states: "nor shall any State deprive any person of life , liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So apparently our US law applies to people and not just citizens.
"I dunno. Life is tough, and life is not fair, but..."
You speak of rights in the same sentence that you stipulate that life is unjust. Life is unjust, but don't move against the (unfair) system. Victim's of injustice must remain a victim, because that's just the way it is...life is unfair. But is it *supposed* to be unfair?
I suspect invoking genetics as a cause is likewise an attempt to believe that "that's just the way it is." Social systems evolve at far faster rates than genetic systems. We can, and do, modify our institutions over time. We should. Rule of Law is one of the greatest (and worst) of human achievements, depending of the system of law implemented. At the very heart of this, my rant, is a belief that when discretionary powers come to mean whim, when "you are either for me or against me", when it is "my country, right or wrong", then evil has taken control.
Which raises an interesting question: why do canadians prefer rifles, and why does the US prefer handguns? I would suggest that rather than "stupid people with guns kill", it is perhaps more a matter of "violent people prefer handguns and are more likely to kill". It would appear that my country is the most violent, per capita, on the face of the planet. Except during the Clinton administration, when the FBI's list tracking violent crimes showed a decline, the level of violence has increased every year since my birth. And this is the true, central, core question: why?
When I went back for my MBA I found that there were issues using Calc while the textbooks were all Excel based. Gnumeric, on the other hand, never once failed. (It also exports to LaTeX.) There were no financial nor statistical formulas that I found missing, and Gnumeric's solver kicked ass for optimizations. The python interface also kicks ass, as does the R interface if you ever get serious about statistics. Excel is certainly miles ahead in terms of secretary adoption, but I doubt any serious analyst or accuary would consider Excel "miles ahead" of Gnumeric. I sure don't :-)
Actually Microsoft has the worst help system I've had to deal with, and it seems to be getting worse rather than better. I don't know what sort of users they are targeting, but the usability was better in Office 97 than 2000, and Office XP just totally sucks. I feel I'm wasting time, since I can google answers that are actually relevant.
I was a computer lab monitor at my school when most students had office 2000 or XP, and we were still running office 97. If you don't have problems, more power to you. We sure as hell did. Likewise, after we upgraded, there were difficulties with students bringing in office 95-97 files. Compound documents were the worst. Our oncampus quickprint also had these difficulties.
"Lisp is very old language, second only to Fortran in the family tree of high level languages." A Little history
Whereas C (rather like Fortran) wanted to stay "close to the metal", Lisp wanted to transcend metal to get closer to the math. Hence, innante elegance
Still waiting for the Visual.Lisp.Net, though
So then what matters is whether new code is being written? Would this, by your definition, include maintence, or just new application development?
Wouldn't that be 100 GB per server? The 100gig sata drive can be seen by each VM instance (if you want it to be seen.)
This schedule sounds *much* more reasonable than the "tell vendor and then wait 90 days" version.
Actually even the US courts found MS guilty of abusing their monopolistic position. Do valid, usable alternatives exist? YES. Are they technically superior? Some would say yes. Do people use them? Very very few. Did MS forcibly prevent people from being able to purchase computers w/o MS products? Yes, according to US courts. If you purchased a computer w/o MS, odds were that you still paid for the MS product because of the OEM's contract. The power to force OEMs into those contracts is not illegal, but to actually use the power to force them is.
Agreed. I think a problem is that the concept of law and property where once based on general principles. In order to foster a prefered enviornment artifical psuedo-property laws were passed that are arbitrary. The conflict arises when people want to assume that these arbitrary, one might say whimsical, laws represent general principles and should thus be the same everywhere, universally. They aren't. This seems "unfair".
And you're confusing income with profit.
Actually, no, they got it right. You are confusing income with net income (which is profit).
"The income statement adds up all of the company's revenue, subtracts its expenses and gives you the bottom line -- a.k.a. net income."
I don't know how much profit they make per day, but it is way less than 26 million euros.
For the last three years, MSFT has shown a net income of
$12,254,000,000 (2005), $8,168,000,000 (2004), $9,993,000,000 (2003),
which when divided by 365 gives
$33,572,602.74/day (2005), $22378082.19/day (2004), $27,378,082.19/day (2003)
and at 1 U.S. dollar = 0.783024039 Euro, this converts to
26,288,155.00/day (2005), 17,522,576.30/day (2004), 21,437,696.50/day (2003)
which is *not* "way less than 26 million euros" per day.
One problem with allowing criminals to keep their loot, if they would just promise to be good from now on, is that the financial leverage their ill gotten gains provides them is in itself an unfair advantage.
If I steal from you, driving you into bankruptcy so that your children become beggars, and then 40 years later give back exactly the same amount I stole, is this fair? Or do I also owe for the interest? And what about pain and suffering?
Yes, agreed that VisiCalc changed the way business did calculations. You say Lotus 123, but that was later. PCs became cheap when IBM let Phoneix reverse engineer their bios w/o lawsuit, and clones sprang up. Actual IBM PCs were not cheap (compared to Apple's of similar power) but they had the magic letters on them: "IBM". Even still, PCs were for secretaries. If you needed to crunch numbers and couldn't afford an HP 9000 (with dual 68040s and HP-UX), for a whole lot less you had a MacIntosh.
But the thread started with: "Speak for yourself. With no big business to pay an IT department, you're relegated to programming after your pizza delivery job. Actually, without big business, there wouldn't even be PC's."
There were personal computers before big business, and they even developed the first spreadsheets. My real point is that there is more to computing than working in a Fortune 500 IT department, besides diddling for fun after your pizza delivery job.
I got a dose of it in a Programming Languages class that compared and contrasted categories of language design decisions. ADA wasn't my favorite...but it was suggested that the DoD (still) requires it of contractors.