Maybe I don't understand but why would someone take a class where they had to right a paper on Joyce? What purpose would the paper have?
You seem to believe that the purpose of education is to enable the student to get a good job and earn more money.
For some people, that is not the main purpose of education. Some people take courses about writers like James Joyce because they are interested in the work of writers like James Joyce. Naturally, they are then happy to write papers about what they have read because these lead to feedback from a teacher, and further understanding of Joyce's work.
In some universities, particularly in the USA, students who want to study (for example) chemistry or computer science are compelled to take courses about subjects in which they have no interest, in the name of a "rounded education" or some such concept. In my view, this has nothing to do with education. Nobody can really teach you to appreciate James Joyce, or Jane Austen; or to understand quantum mechanics or relativity (I happen to be a physicist). All a good teacher can do is guide you in the path of study, and provide feedback to clear up misconceptions or explain difficult points. The thinking and the studying can only be done by the student.
Of course, these comments apply only to university-level education. At a more elementary level (the level at which one learns the difference between the words "right" and "write", for example), the student lacks the maturity to make sensible choices.
The "software factory" analogy has been around before. It's nonsense, of course. The software analogy of a "factory" is the plant that presses CD-ROMs. Pressing the 10,000th CD-ROM of a software product is the software equivalent of building the 10,000th Nissan Maxima on a production line.
But writing the software which will go on that CD-ROM is the software analogy of designing the 2005 model of the Nissan Maxima. Now, some software development is not very creative. Just as tweaking the design of a car model that's been around for 10 years, to get something a little bit new for a new model year, is not very creative mech engineering. But it's still design, not assembly-line production. A competent software engineer will be able to do it better and faster than a bad one. And a factory worker will not be able to do it at all.
I get MS Office attachments that do not format correct in OpenOffice
And I bet you get MS Office attachments that do not format correctly in MS Office. The problem with MS Office is that version N has incompatibilities with version M. And because the file formats are partly secret, you can't convert from one to the other.
I get to visit webpages that do not format correctly in Firefox
I've yet to see such a page. I think you mean, "webpages that do not format identically in Firefox to MSIE 6.0". In which case you will be very unhappy with MSIE 7.0 when it comes out, because it will fix some of the bugs in MSIE 6.0 that you think define "correct" behavior.
There is no such thing as an "international patent".
There is a procedure called an "International Patent Application", governed by a treaty called the Patent Cooperation Treaty, but it's just a way of applying for a bunch of national patents at once. The national patent offices still apply their own rules, both to the application and to what they grant (Article 27 para 5 of the treaty says: "Nothing in this Treaty and the Regulations is intended to be construed as prescribing anything that would limit the freedom of each Contracting State to prescribe such substantive conditions of patentability as it desires.").
Your conclusion is probably right, but for the wrong reasons.
And, like it or not, the world uses MS Office formats. OO.o isn't good enough.
That comment is a joke. There is no such thing as "MS Office formats". There are as many de-facto Word formats as there are versions of Word, and as many Excel formats as there are versions of Excel. Moreover, if you want to know exactly what these formats are, the best source I know of isn't Microsoft, it's OpenOffice.
The real reason LM will not run OpenOffice is that their MS Office users will not want to change from what they know, and there are plenty of little problems with OO that they can use as ammunition to reject it. The fact that there are about as many little problems with MS Office (plus the big problem that if your data is in a Microsoft format, you really don't own it anymore) will not be mentioned.
Linux must find a next-generation filesystem to keep pace with Microsoft and Apple,
This whole article is based on nonsense. Microsoft has a long way to go before it catches up with Linux in the filesystem area. There is no realistic prospect of Microsoft keeping pace with Linux filesystems in the foreseeable future.
(Before dismissing me a Linux fanboy, note that the above applies only to filesystems. When it comes to understanding of GUI issues, I'd make a similar statement but with Linux and Microsoft swapped. But that would be off-topic.)
Yea, because no one is going to buy a low cost Linux computer at Walmart and slap a pirate version of Windows on it. Nope. Never gona happen.
I've never seen a PC with Linux preinstalled in any store. I live in Switzerland, where Walmart does not operate AFAIK. There are dozens of stores which sell computers. They all have Windows preinstalled. It is difficult to avoid paying Microsoft when you buy a computer here.
When I buy a computer, I go to a store which will sell me the case, motherboard, disk etc separately, I assemble them, then I install Debian from an old set of CDs, then I connect to the internet and do the apt-get update/apt-get upgrade thing. Frankly, it would be more cost-effective to buy a machine with Windows preinstalled, and install Debian on that. For me, avoiding paying the Microsoft tax is a point of principle, for which I'm willing give some of my time. Most people here who want Linux will do the easiest and most cost-effective thing - pay for Windows, then throw it away.
There are mail-order companies which will sell you a Linux PC, but mail-order is not a big slice of the market here.
ZDNet finds it strange that no one seems to have anything against this company.
What ZDNet is implying is this: "People don't like Microsoft because it's a monopoly. But they don't dislike ARM, which is also a monopoly. That's inconsistent and illogical."
Firstly, it's highly questionable whether ARM can be called a monopoly in the sense that MSFT is, because ARM has only about 80% of its market, vs over 90% in the case of MSFT. ARM's competitors have more than twice as much market share as MSFT's competitors.
But, much more to the point, ARM has not engaged in illegal practices to bankrupt its competitors. Remember, for example, Microsoft's piracy of Stacker's technology. Remember how they broke Netscape, by reducing the price of their own browser to zero by cross-subsidizing its development. Today, MSFT is trying to strangle Linux by concluding agreements with PC vendors which prohibit sales of dual-boot systems. These agreements, forced on PC vendors by MSFT's enormous market power, are almost certainly illegal, but taking MSFT to court would cost many millions of dollars and the case would last for years. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
MSFT's attitude is, it's OK to break the law if you can get away with it or if the benefit exceeds the costs. That's why Microsoft is widely (and correctly) perceived as evil, not because it has a large market share.
I was surprised to learn that Java is used more than Perl or C++ in projects listed on freshmeat.net.
It isn't. More projects list Java as an implementation language than list C++ or Perl (by a very small margin, see below). But this includes projects largely written in C++ or Perl, which have a small piece written in Java. Number of mentions does not correspond with amount of use.
The most-frequently-mentioned languages on that Freshmeat page are as follows.
Language, # mentions
C, 6334
Java, 3126
Perl, 3076
C++, 3027
PHP, 2572
Nothing else is over 2000.
http://jakarta.apache.org . All of projects are under Java
Well, duh. That's what Jakarta means within Apache. But the stuff under jakarta.apache.org is a tiny part of what the Apache organisation does. You get a better perspective if you look at their main site, http://www.apache.org , where Jakarta is just one menu item out of 23.
When I saw this news, my reaction was that it's great and I want to support it. Verisign et al have been too greedy for too long.
But we have to be careful that we don't let our "wish to believe" blind us to the need for some caution here. Take at look at CACert's site. You'll find carelessness, spelling mistakes, pieces that have not been thought out. Running a CA properly requires meticulous attention to detail, and their site shows the opposite. On the very first page when you sign up, it asks for your name, date of birth, and "country". Is that country of citizenship, or country of residence?
Then there's the reliance on "government ID". If somebody presents Nigerian ID, or Dominican Republic ID, what exactly is that worth? It's not worth anything, you can bribe officials in those countries (and many others) to issue whatever official document you want. Does that mean that citizens of Nigeria can never be trusted? That's well over 100 million people in just that one country, most of whom are honest and trustworthy. It's ridiculous to exclude so many people from receiving certificates just because their bureaucrats are corrupt, and it's completely contrary to the transnational spirit of the Internet.
In conclusion, the idea behind CACert is a good one, but the people running it don't seem to be doing a good job. I hope that somebody else takes up the idea and does it better. There is no reason why there should not be more than one volunteer-based CA.
I think this is one place where the goverment could actually do some good.(...) offically accepted picture IDs to individuals
There are two problems with this. As another message pointed out, not all governments are equally trustworthy. Would you trust an ID issued by Nigeria? Or would you wonder how easy it is to bribe a Nigerian official to issue one in any name you wanted?
Now look at it from the viewpoint of a Nigerian citizen. How can he/she get acceptable ID? Clearly, not from the government.
The second problem is that some people are stateless, i.e. no government acknowledges them as its citizens. There are many countries which do not grant automatic citizenship to persons born there (Germany is one). And there are a few governments which give themselves the right to cancel the citizenship of one of their own citizens.
If Internet Explorer doesn't support it's unfortunately not very useful.
Translation: You still use Microsoft Internet Explorer.
People who use MSIE obviously are not concerned about privacy or security, so CAs are irrelevant to them.
Consequently, people who still use MSIE are irrelevant to those of us who are concerned about privacy and security. People who are concerned about privacy and security are a small minority of Internet users. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get the privacy and security we want.
It's not $34 million. It's vouchers which can be used to buy hardware, Microsoft software, and non-Microsoft software.
More than half the lifetime capital cost of a typical working PC is the software. And, because Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems and on the most profitable applications (Microsoft Office), a good chunk of the software expenditure will go straight back to Microsoft. The total cost of this settlement to Microsoft is considerably less than $34 million. It's like a cheap promotion for them. That's why this is a really poor settlement. A fair settlement would have required Microsoft to pay in cash, not vouchers. That's the only fair way to compensate people who were forced to buy bundled software, when they really didn't need to pay for any software at all.
Who cannot live an excellent lifestyle on the interest alone on a million dollars? No one.
You can't. The current risk-free short-term interest rate is about 1.1%, which is less than the rate of consumer-price inflation.(Federal Reserve Statistics). There are various measures of consumer price inflation varying from 1.7% to 3.1% but they're all bigger than the risk-free interest rate.
You can get more interest by taking risks, notably by buying long-term instruments. Part of the risk in a 10-year bond is the possibility that inflation and interest rates will rise in tandem, as they did in the 1970s, reducing both the value of your interest and the value of your capital.
You can buy inflation-indexed US Treasury bonds. But, first, they cost more than the price at which they were issued (and at which they will be redeemed), and secondly, the money which is supposed to compensate for inflation is taxable - so it won't fully compensate for inflation.
The bottom line is that nobody can live on the interest on $1,000,000, because after you eliminate risk and allow for inflation, there isn't any interest.
Or maybe we should just mandate that CEOs can't make more than, say 1000 times what their lowest paid employee makes.
In the so-called "robber baron" era of raw, unfettered capitalism, the late 19th century, when people like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller amassed huge fortunes, a CEO typically was paid about 40 times as much as the median employee. (It makes more sense to use the median as the benchmark instead of the lowest-paid because it's a more stable number).
A CEO who pays himself more than 40 times the median salary at his company is basically stealing. I see no problem with a law which says that "compensation" in excess of 40x the median salary is prima facie evidence of theft. Mr Grasso comes to mind.
Of course, a CEO could rebut the presumption of theft by showing that he had increased company profits commensurately with his salary. But, studies seem to show that a company's change in profitability is not significantly correlated with the CEO's salary.
The bitterest pill to swallow is that for a brief moment, say from about 1968 (when civil rights started to mean something in the South) until about 1989 (when Bush I started to shred the Constitution in the name of the 'War on Drugs'), the United States of America really was 'the land of the free'.
Why is loss of freedom on-topic? Because it has the same cause as the privacy violations. As you wrote, "people continue to look the other way." Having freedom, or privacy, is an unstable condition. Either you're willing to fight to keep it, or somebody (usually politicians, sometimes powerful corporations) will take it away from you.
Trashing Shatner's and Nimoy's acting shows you're really sophisticated, one of the in-crowd. Like EVERYbody agrees they can't act, right?
Stop being a mindless sheep. There is nothing wrong with Nimoy's acting, and little to complain about in Shatner's. They're not Alec Guinness, but their performances in the original Startrek were perfectly adequate.
Because the support you get from a software company like Sun is no better than the free support you can get from the community.
Note, I'm not saying that support isn't worth paying for; it can be; I'm saying that Sun's support (like Microsoft's) isn't worth paying for.
Perhaps you would like to see development in OOo slow down, because if SO does not make Sun money, that's exactly what will happen. It does not make money right now. The free software community has an excellent track record of continuous improvement of software; why should OpenOffice be different?
Everybody is praising the tips in the linked article. I think some of them are rubbish. it is surprising how few subjects are suited by the height of a human standing at their full five to six feet, a maxim which is illustrated by a really terrible photograph of a building in Oxford taken from 2 inches above the road surface. Don't confuse "eye-catching" with "good". This building would have been better photographed from the photographer's normal standing height. Good places to put things; third of the way up, third of the way in from the left , you get the idea. Duff places to put things; right in the middle
It depends. If you're composing a landscape shot, there should be interesting material off-center and you need to think about balance. But if you're taking a picture of some specific object, "right in the middle" is far from a duff place.
The best way to improve the quality of your pictures is to throw away 90% of them and just keep the best 10%. With a digital camera, that doesn't cost anything. That's by far the best tip you can give any digital photographer, and it didn't get a mention.
in Saudi Arabia... I need only to register my fingerprint with the bank and then swipe it at the ATM to do my banking
So all a mugger who steals your card has to do, to get access to all the money in your account, is: cut your finger off and take the finger to the ATM?
And you like this system?
... and some brain-damaged moderator modded your post up?
one-time passwords for online banking are a must and where my current bank(ZKB) is one of the 'crappy' ones with a little card with one-time passwords like mentioned in the CNN Story. The nicer ones (UBS) even give you credit-card-size RSA password generator which is combined with a calculator
But is the one-time pad (plus fixed password) used by ZKB really any less secure than the UBS calculator? The one-time pad sheet is easier to carry around than the calculator.
By the way, the bank you call 'crappy' (ZKB) pays twice as much interest on current accounts as the bank (UBS) you call 'nice'. (Neither pay much, but we're talking about accounts in Swiss francs, which is probably the world's hardest currency over long periods.) (There are other differences - the UBS web site is available in English, French and Italian as well as German, while the ZKB site is German-only.)
Personally I would not call any Swiss bank 'crappy', because then you need another word to describe American banks.
You have understood nothing. The phenomenon is real and one of the strangest and most spooky things in physics
The poster to whom you are replying phrased his comment flippantly, but his criticism is correct. Deutsch's argument is, "I can't explain this, therefore it is inexplicable without introducing parallel universes". The conclusion simply does not follow from the premise. Compare, "I can't think of any way in which you could build a ship out of materials that are heavier than water, therefore ships made of iron are impossible". An argument that was taken seriously once. Or Kant's argument that space and time were both (separately) absolute, because he couldn't imagine otherwise.
not recognising software patents in the EU whilst they are being handed out like hot cakes in the US is the quickest way to destroy software development within the EU
Rubbish. European companies can (and do) get patents in the US, just as US companies get patents in Europe. The international environment is the same for every company.
What probably would happen, is that the market for software in a patent-free Europe would be more competitive than in a patent-encumbered USA, because software could be sold in Europe which could not be sold in the USA. Both US and European companies would probably participate in the more competitive European market. The people who'd benefit most would be European software consumers, i.e. all companies except software developers. More competition in the European region would lower their software costs.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to believe that the purpose of education is to enable the student to get a good job and earn more money.
For some people, that is not the main purpose of education. Some people take courses about writers like James Joyce because they are interested in the work of writers like James Joyce. Naturally, they are then happy to write papers about what they have read because these lead to feedback from a teacher, and further understanding of Joyce's work.
In some universities, particularly in the USA, students who want to study (for example) chemistry or computer science are compelled to take courses about subjects in which they have no interest, in the name of a "rounded education" or some such concept. In my view, this has nothing to do with education. Nobody can really teach you to appreciate James Joyce, or Jane Austen; or to understand quantum mechanics or relativity (I happen to be a physicist). All a good teacher can do is guide you in the path of study, and provide feedback to clear up misconceptions or explain difficult points. The thinking and the studying can only be done by the student.
Of course, these comments apply only to university-level education. At a more elementary level (the level at which one learns the difference between the words "right" and "write", for example), the student lacks the maturity to make sensible choices.
The "software factory" analogy has been around before. It's nonsense, of course. The software analogy of a "factory" is the plant that presses CD-ROMs. Pressing the 10,000th CD-ROM of a software product is the software equivalent of building the 10,000th Nissan Maxima on a production line.
But writing the software which will go on that CD-ROM is the software analogy of designing the 2005 model of the Nissan Maxima. Now, some software development is not very creative. Just as tweaking the design of a car model that's been around for 10 years, to get something a little bit new for a new model year, is not very creative mech engineering. But it's still design, not assembly-line production. A competent software engineer will be able to do it better and faster than a bad one. And a factory worker will not be able to do it at all.
And I bet you get MS Office attachments that do not format correctly in MS Office. The problem with MS Office is that version N has incompatibilities with version M. And because the file formats are partly secret, you can't convert from one to the other.
I get to visit webpages that do not format correctly in Firefox
I've yet to see such a page. I think you mean, "webpages that do not format identically in Firefox to MSIE 6.0". In which case you will be very unhappy with MSIE 7.0 when it comes out, because it will fix some of the bugs in MSIE 6.0 that you think define "correct" behavior.
There is no such thing as an "international patent".
There is a procedure called an "International Patent Application", governed by a treaty called the Patent Cooperation Treaty, but it's just a way of applying for a bunch of national patents at once. The national patent offices still apply their own rules, both to the application and to what they grant (Article 27 para 5 of the treaty says: "Nothing in this Treaty and the Regulations is intended to be construed as prescribing anything that would limit the freedom of each Contracting State to prescribe such substantive conditions of patentability as it desires.").
And, like it or not, the world uses MS Office formats. OO.o isn't good enough.
That comment is a joke. There is no such thing as "MS Office formats". There are as many de-facto Word formats as there are versions of Word, and as many Excel formats as there are versions of Excel. Moreover, if you want to know exactly what these formats are, the best source I know of isn't Microsoft, it's OpenOffice.
The real reason LM will not run OpenOffice is that their MS Office users will not want to change from what they know, and there are plenty of little problems with OO that they can use as ammunition to reject it. The fact that there are about as many little problems with MS Office (plus the big problem that if your data is in a Microsoft format, you really don't own it anymore) will not be mentioned.
This whole article is based on nonsense. Microsoft has a long way to go before it catches up with Linux in the filesystem area. There is no realistic prospect of Microsoft keeping pace with Linux filesystems in the foreseeable future.
(Before dismissing me a Linux fanboy, note that the above applies only to filesystems. When it comes to understanding of GUI issues, I'd make a similar statement but with Linux and Microsoft swapped. But that would be off-topic.)
I've never seen a PC with Linux preinstalled in any store. I live in Switzerland, where Walmart does not operate AFAIK. There are dozens of stores which sell computers. They all have Windows preinstalled. It is difficult to avoid paying Microsoft when you buy a computer here.
When I buy a computer, I go to a store which will sell me the case, motherboard, disk etc separately, I assemble them, then I install Debian from an old set of CDs, then I connect to the internet and do the apt-get update/apt-get upgrade thing. Frankly, it would be more cost-effective to buy a machine with Windows preinstalled, and install Debian on that. For me, avoiding paying the Microsoft tax is a point of principle, for which I'm willing give some of my time. Most people here who want Linux will do the easiest and most cost-effective thing - pay for Windows, then throw it away.
There are mail-order companies which will sell you a Linux PC, but mail-order is not a big slice of the market here.
What ZDNet is implying is this: "People don't like Microsoft because it's a monopoly. But they don't dislike ARM, which is also a monopoly. That's inconsistent and illogical."
Firstly, it's highly questionable whether ARM can be called a monopoly in the sense that MSFT is, because ARM has only about 80% of its market, vs over 90% in the case of MSFT. ARM's competitors have more than twice as much market share as MSFT's competitors.
But, much more to the point, ARM has not engaged in illegal practices to bankrupt its competitors. Remember, for example, Microsoft's piracy of Stacker's technology. Remember how they broke Netscape, by reducing the price of their own browser to zero by cross-subsidizing its development. Today, MSFT is trying to strangle Linux by concluding agreements with PC vendors which prohibit sales of dual-boot systems. These agreements, forced on PC vendors by MSFT's enormous market power, are almost certainly illegal, but taking MSFT to court would cost many millions of dollars and the case would last for years. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
MSFT's attitude is, it's OK to break the law if you can get away with it or if the benefit exceeds the costs. That's why Microsoft is widely (and correctly) perceived as evil, not because it has a large market share.
It isn't. More projects list Java as an implementation language than list C++ or Perl (by a very small margin, see below). But this includes projects largely written in C++ or Perl, which have a small piece written in Java. Number of mentions does not correspond with amount of use.
The most-frequently-mentioned languages on that Freshmeat page are as follows.
Language, # mentions
C, 6334
Java, 3126
Perl, 3076
C++, 3027
PHP, 2572
Nothing else is over 2000.
http://jakarta.apache.org . All of projects are under Java
Well, duh. That's what Jakarta means within Apache. But the stuff under jakarta.apache.org is a tiny part of what the Apache organisation does. You get a better perspective if you look at their main site, http://www.apache.org , where Jakarta is just one menu item out of 23.
But we have to be careful that we don't let our "wish to believe" blind us to the need for some caution here. Take at look at CACert's site. You'll find carelessness, spelling mistakes, pieces that have not been thought out. Running a CA properly requires meticulous attention to detail, and their site shows the opposite. On the very first page when you sign up, it asks for your name, date of birth, and "country". Is that country of citizenship, or country of residence?
Then there's the reliance on "government ID". If somebody presents Nigerian ID, or Dominican Republic ID, what exactly is that worth? It's not worth anything, you can bribe officials in those countries (and many others) to issue whatever official document you want. Does that mean that citizens of Nigeria can never be trusted? That's well over 100 million people in just that one country, most of whom are honest and trustworthy. It's ridiculous to exclude so many people from receiving certificates just because their bureaucrats are corrupt, and it's completely contrary to the transnational spirit of the Internet.
In conclusion, the idea behind CACert is a good one, but the people running it don't seem to be doing a good job. I hope that somebody else takes up the idea and does it better. There is no reason why there should not be more than one volunteer-based CA.
There are two problems with this. As another message pointed out, not all governments are equally trustworthy. Would you trust an ID issued by Nigeria? Or would you wonder how easy it is to bribe a Nigerian official to issue one in any name you wanted?
Now look at it from the viewpoint of a Nigerian citizen. How can he/she get acceptable ID? Clearly, not from the government.
The second problem is that some people are stateless, i.e. no government acknowledges them as its citizens. There are many countries which do not grant automatic citizenship to persons born there (Germany is one). And there are a few governments which give themselves the right to cancel the citizenship of one of their own citizens.
Translation: You still use Microsoft Internet Explorer.
People who use MSIE obviously are not concerned about privacy or security, so CAs are irrelevant to them.
Consequently, people who still use MSIE are irrelevant to those of us who are concerned about privacy and security. People who are concerned about privacy and security are a small minority of Internet users. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get the privacy and security we want.
More than half the lifetime capital cost of a typical working PC is the software. And, because Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems and on the most profitable applications (Microsoft Office), a good chunk of the software expenditure will go straight back to Microsoft. The total cost of this settlement to Microsoft is considerably less than $34 million. It's like a cheap promotion for them. That's why this is a really poor settlement. A fair settlement would have required Microsoft to pay in cash, not vouchers. That's the only fair way to compensate people who were forced to buy bundled software, when they really didn't need to pay for any software at all.
You can't. The current risk-free short-term interest rate is about 1.1%, which is less than the rate of consumer-price inflation.(Federal Reserve Statistics). There are various measures of consumer price inflation varying from 1.7% to 3.1% but they're all bigger than the risk-free interest rate.
You can get more interest by taking risks, notably by buying long-term instruments. Part of the risk in a 10-year bond is the possibility that inflation and interest rates will rise in tandem, as they did in the 1970s, reducing both the value of your interest and the value of your capital.
You can buy inflation-indexed US Treasury bonds. But, first, they cost more than the price at which they were issued (and at which they will be redeemed), and secondly, the money which is supposed to compensate for inflation is taxable - so it won't fully compensate for inflation.
The bottom line is that nobody can live on the interest on $1,000,000, because after you eliminate risk and allow for inflation, there isn't any interest.
Or maybe we should just mandate that CEOs can't make more than, say 1000 times what their lowest paid employee makes.
In the so-called "robber baron" era of raw, unfettered capitalism, the late 19th century, when people like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller amassed huge fortunes, a CEO typically was paid about 40 times as much as the median employee. (It makes more sense to use the median as the benchmark instead of the lowest-paid because it's a more stable number).
A CEO who pays himself more than 40 times the median salary at his company is basically stealing. I see no problem with a law which says that "compensation" in excess of 40x the median salary is prima facie evidence of theft. Mr Grasso comes to mind.
Of course, a CEO could rebut the presumption of theft by showing that he had increased company profits commensurately with his salary. But, studies seem to show that a company's change in profitability is not significantly correlated with the CEO's salary.
The bitterest pill to swallow is that for a brief moment, say from about 1968 (when civil rights started to mean something in the South) until about 1989 (when Bush I started to shred the Constitution in the name of the 'War on Drugs'), the United States of America really was 'the land of the free'.
Why is loss of freedom on-topic? Because it has the same cause as the privacy violations. As you wrote, "people continue to look the other way." Having freedom, or privacy, is an unstable condition. Either you're willing to fight to keep it, or somebody (usually politicians, sometimes powerful corporations) will take it away from you.
Trashing Shatner's and Nimoy's acting shows you're really sophisticated, one of the in-crowd. Like EVERYbody agrees they can't act, right?
Stop being a mindless sheep. There is nothing wrong with Nimoy's acting, and little to complain about in Shatner's. They're not Alec Guinness, but their performances in the original Startrek were perfectly adequate.
Because the support you get from a software company like Sun is no better than the free support you can get from the community.
Note, I'm not saying that support isn't worth paying for; it can be; I'm saying that Sun's support (like Microsoft's) isn't worth paying for.
Perhaps you would like to see development in OOo slow down, because if SO does not make Sun money, that's exactly what will happen.
It does not make money right now. The free software community has an excellent track record of continuous improvement of software; why should OpenOffice be different?
Everybody is praising the tips in the linked article. I think some of them are rubbish.
it is surprising how few subjects are suited by the height of a human standing at their full five to six feet, a maxim which is illustrated by a really terrible photograph of a building in Oxford taken from 2 inches above the road surface. Don't confuse "eye-catching" with "good". This building would have been better photographed from the photographer's normal standing height.
Good places to put things; third of the way up, third of the way in from the left , you get the idea. Duff places to put things; right in the middle
It depends. If you're composing a landscape shot, there should be interesting material off-center and you need to think about balance. But if you're taking a picture of some specific object, "right in the middle" is far from a duff place.
The best way to improve the quality of your pictures is to throw away 90% of them and just keep the best 10%. With a digital camera, that doesn't cost anything. That's by far the best tip you can give any digital photographer, and it didn't get a mention.
So all a mugger who steals your card has to do, to get access to all the money in your account, is: cut your finger off and take the finger to the ATM?
And you like this system?
But is the one-time pad (plus fixed password) used by ZKB really any less secure than the UBS calculator? The one-time pad sheet is easier to carry around than the calculator.
By the way, the bank you call 'crappy' (ZKB) pays twice as much interest on current accounts as the bank (UBS) you call 'nice'. (Neither pay much, but we're talking about accounts in Swiss francs, which is probably the world's hardest currency over long periods.) (There are other differences - the UBS web site is available in English, French and Italian as well as German, while the ZKB site is German-only.)
Personally I would not call any Swiss bank 'crappy', because then you need another word to describe American banks.Read the link in the article. Bayesian spam filters were published in the academic literature in 1998.
You have understood nothing. The phenomenon is real and one of the strangest and most spooky things in physics
The poster to whom you are replying phrased his comment flippantly, but his criticism is correct. Deutsch's argument is, "I can't explain this, therefore it is inexplicable without introducing parallel universes". The conclusion simply does not follow from the premise.
Compare, "I can't think of any way in which you could build a ship out of materials that are heavier than water, therefore ships made of iron are impossible". An argument that was taken seriously once. Or Kant's argument that space and time were both (separately) absolute, because he couldn't imagine otherwise.
not recognising software patents in the EU whilst they are being handed out like hot cakes in the US is the quickest way to destroy software development within the EU
Rubbish. European companies can (and do) get patents in the US, just as US companies get patents in Europe. The international environment is the same for every company.
What probably would happen, is that the market for software in a patent-free Europe would be more competitive than in a patent-encumbered USA, because software could be sold in Europe which could not be sold in the USA. Both US and European companies would probably participate in the more competitive European market. The people who'd benefit most would be European software consumers, i.e. all companies except software developers. More competition in the European region would lower their software costs.