Its not about money with me, maybe I'm pessimistic, but I am ashamed of what society has become, what my generation has failed to do to improve the global community and the lack of political will to correct the wrongs of our generation. While I'd love that kid and strive to do the very best for him, every single day I look at him I would ask him to forgive me for bringing him into this world. I think the responsible, conscious adult chooses not to have a child for many reasons, and I think economics probably is a big factor, but for me it's my child's future and what his generation will be left to face.
I think the more modern a country is, the more the citizens are connected and the more messaging they are subject to and influenced by. We are inundated every day with hate, disaster, climate calamity, politics, etc. Someone living in a place disconnected from global affairs will have an entirely different outlook on the future - their world won't know about the big trash area in the pacific, or the growing CO2 issue, or trashing the rain forests, war in Afghanistan, nuke bombs in north korea, NAFTA, gas prices, how you need crippling debt to afford a quality education that everyone must get etc.etc.. It'd be interesting to know what the birthrate in rural america is vs. urban america.
IMHO you should only be able to sell a copy or "license" to use your DNA sequence, but that "license" should not be transferable to the next buyer.
Its odd that people blindly accept contracts without reading them or negotiating the terms. When submitting data like this to a database held by a third party, you'd better make damn sure there are stipulations in the contract to protect YOUR data! otherwise DON'T DO IT.
One more thing, if you give anyone any iota of information, expect that information to never again be private.
It has to be prior art, take a look at sites like altavista.com which were around long before google. Granted the two buttons are not there, but if you count links as buttons then certainly it's similar. What is a button used in this context btw? you could argue that it's a stylized link.
This leads you to (worst case) having every site on the net patient their design. Doesn't copyright cover this already? IANL
Problem with the bonus is it's taxable. And you paid for the laptop with your cash after tax. You are out the taxed amount of money if they treat it as a bonus because it has to show up on their books. Bonuses in Canada are taxable as far as I know, but I am not an accountant.
In reality, I would keep the laptop for my own personal use or take it back to the store and say to the company if they would like to reemburse me, to have them buy me a work laptop instead.
Regarding personal data.. Its a bad idea to use company equipment for personal reasons.
1) backups are taken of all the data on the machine, so you can't know who is looking at your personal data. This is true of your encription methods. Maybe the company can't crack that partition, it doesn't change the fact that maybe some time in the future a method would be available. If the data is personal and important it doesn't belong on company equipment. It's just a bad idea.
Often it is sufficient in canada to use a credit card to apply for those things that require trivial amounts of credit. It can be considered proof of established credit to have one and usually there is some insurance protection that the credit card companies offer the business to protect them.
In my opinion it is rediculous to demand a credit check for anything other than loans, mortgages, lines of credit or financing through xyz company. Since internet service is not one of these things and since the amount per month is trivial what you have to ask is why do they need the SSN? Further, in Canada if you no longer do business with company X there is (as far as I know, and I am not a lawyer) some legal recourse to get this information removed.
You have to expect now days that once you give out your SSN (and any other personal information) to any company, it is now in the public domain. Although there are laws to prosecute companies and individuals that divuldge this information to others, it still doesn't change the fact that the information is out there. These laws deal with the problem after the irreparable damage is done.
I would go without internet service/phone service etc before I gave any of this kind of information up.
humm... so if I walk into a music store and walk out without paying for my copy of xyz music - I am stealing from the retailer since the retailer has already paid for the music from the distributer.
If I download said music from a P2P network - I am not stealing from anyone?
Just because one of the two examples was a physical tangable item has no bearing on the legality of the situation. You could say the same about a book. I argue that the majority of the value of a book is in the words and concepts in the book, not the physical paper it is written on eventhough the physical material has some value.
The item that is taken from the corporation is the value (read $) of the licence to use the work (in the case of music as ownership of the music is not transfered). I would say that the victim of copyright infringment's loss is concrete/real because the victim spent actual dollars creating (or purchasing licenses to use) the work.
Get a kid a pc give him a unprivileged account on it and disable the NIC. Let the kid do his book reports and homework wordprocessing on it.
When the kid needs internet access to do research, enable the NIC and monitor his use. Give him a 1/2 hr or 1 hr per day for recreational use of the net while being monitored and afterwords disable the NIC. I remember growing up, my parents allotted me 1 hour of tv per day until I was in jr. high school, the internet is no different. There is no reason a child of 10 years old should need to be on the net, or carry a cell phone etc. We all got by without it.
I realized very early in life after cleaning out PC's at work that I didn't want to waste my personal time doing the same thing to my own machine.
Also just to add, a lot of people have less than perfect eyesight and yet don't wear glasses. In some cases their eyesight is borderline on requiring vision correction. In this case these people will take no benefit, nor will they percieve any sharper picture than standard definition. Assuming of course a reasonably sized TV at a reasonable viewing distance.
Eventually everyone will require glasses or other vision correction, and for most people in the 30-50 age group they are in a borderline group. Which is why IMHO people can't percieve a difference or that difference between DVD and HDDVD is marginally noticeable to them.
Also when BluRay is priced at $32 per movie, and DVD is priced at $22 per movie for the same film why would people who can barely tell the difference spend 33% more?
The article is not taking into account those owners of PS3 systems that use the PS3 exclusively for blue ray content. Or alternatively the owners of an XBox 360 with HDDVD.
If you account for this and for the rate of adoption the articles conclusion is incorrect.
I would use it for my netbook that I use for my GPS and mobile internet browser. Run the GPS software while traveling. Bring up the browser to check email. Bring up word to type a letter.. etc. It's only a problem for those who are doing a lot of background processing tasks and really, you wouldn't want to do that on a netbook anyway. I rarely have more than one or two 'applications' open at a time. Everyone here seems to be focusing on the fact that you can't leave your applications idling in the background while working with another one. The more applications that I am working with at once, the less productive I become.
However, that being said, constantly opening and closing applications will have an impact on battery life. MS has done so much work with power management and hybernation tech lately, I can't help but think they are going to hurt the power consumption of the netbooks this way. So for those of you who think MS is doing this for power conservation, IMHO you are wrong.
The largest cost to any computer is the software. Hardware is dirt cheap, and really, if you are buying a specific piece of hardware for a specific purpose (read: not general use) this makes absolutely 100% sense. In the end you are getting all the advantages of closed-source without the cost. And I can live with the one disadvantage.
As usual we get Tech-speak here and not economics. Who cares if it is more expensive to put it in space? as long as the funding is available and the company can prove it can make a profit (profit meaning expenses less than revenue) it will work.
For all of those who are doubting the costs/benefits, keep one thing in mind... How much money has the company that launched "spaceship one" burned through, and is continuing to burn through just to make space flight commercially viable? Or NASA burned through to get a human to the moon? Once it has been done, and proven to be a source of revenue, all sorts of companies will want to also participate in that market space, thus driving down the costs of all of the required prerequisites.
One more thing, once the solution is in place, all they would have to do is maintain it. If the company makes a small profit after all expenses are paid (including debt payments on the upfront capital costs), the original upfront cost really is meaningless. Example: say it costs 100,000,000,000 to finance the original project, and all maintainance costs (including financing the debt/labor/parts/etc) is 1,000,000,000/yr, as long as the company makes 1,000,000,001/yr it is a worthwhile venture. This is how not-for-profit organizations stay afloat. It's just carrying a debt several orders of magnitude larger than normal.
I'll pick Windows any day. I don't have to spend weeks trying to get my hardware working with it. I don't need to find some obscure driver, or sudo apt-get some library that only exists in Peru to make my tv-capture card work.
I am encouraged by the strides that these modern distros have made and I would use linux as my desktop machine if only (and I wish so much) that they would work without making a colossal waste of my time to set up.
I'll put up with the parasitic seconds of waiting in windows, for the hours of time it takes me to configure my system correctly in linux.
I don't think that Microsoft can be held liable for more money than what they _earned_ from the sale of the computer with the vista capable sticker. The limit of their liability should be the value of the operating system. The class action should be collecting the hardware replacement from the manufacturers.
HP/Toshiba/Sony etc. are not in the business of selling Vista, but they knew that sticker would drive sales from people who otherwise would have waited to purchase their new hardware.
Forcing a company to disclose how a device operates does not automatically open source the code. Even if you had the source code, you couldn't use it otherwise you would face conviction. Just because a judge orders the source to be disseminated doesn't allow everyone to use it. It is still propriatary technology and is likely protected by patients. I don't see them GPL'ing the source for the product, or licensing it for use in any way. So great, you know how someone built the breathalizer, and have seen the source, but now because you were part of the team evaluating the source for it, you'll never be able to work on one yourself because it will forever be scrutinized for containing competitors ideas.
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Its not about money with me, maybe I'm pessimistic, but I am ashamed of what society has become, what my generation has failed to do to improve the global community and the lack of political will to correct the wrongs of our generation. While I'd love that kid and strive to do the very best for him, every single day I look at him I would ask him to forgive me for bringing him into this world. I think the responsible, conscious adult chooses not to have a child for many reasons, and I think economics probably is a big factor, but for me it's my child's future and what his generation will be left to face.
I think the more modern a country is, the more the citizens are connected and the more messaging they are subject to and influenced by. We are inundated every day with hate, disaster, climate calamity, politics, etc. Someone living in a place disconnected from global affairs will have an entirely different outlook on the future - their world won't know about the big trash area in the pacific, or the growing CO2 issue, or trashing the rain forests, war in Afghanistan, nuke bombs in north korea, NAFTA, gas prices, how you need crippling debt to afford a quality education that everyone must get etc.etc.. It'd be interesting to know what the birthrate in rural america is vs. urban america.
I second this
IMHO you should only be able to sell a copy or "license" to use your DNA sequence, but that "license" should not be transferable to the next buyer.
Its odd that people blindly accept contracts without reading them or negotiating the terms. When submitting data like this to a database held by a third party, you'd better make damn sure there are stipulations in the contract to protect YOUR data! otherwise DON'T DO IT.
One more thing, if you give anyone any iota of information, expect that information to never again be private.
if i were firefox I would check to make sure Microsoft hasn't pattented this.
do the same to a linux box, and guess what?! its more secure than the windows one!
It has to be prior art, take a look at sites like altavista.com which were around long before google. Granted the two buttons are not there, but if you count links as buttons then certainly it's similar. What is a button used in this context btw? you could argue that it's a stylized link.
This leads you to (worst case) having every site on the net patient their design. Doesn't copyright cover this already? IANL
Universe series season 3 episode 4 takes a look at this topic. Was made in 2007.
Problem with the bonus is it's taxable. And you paid for the laptop with your cash after tax. You are out the taxed amount of money if they treat it as a bonus because it has to show up on their books. Bonuses in Canada are taxable as far as I know, but I am not an accountant.
In reality, I would keep the laptop for my own personal use or take it back to the store and say to the company if they would like to reemburse me, to have them buy me a work laptop instead.
Regarding personal data.. Its a bad idea to use company equipment for personal reasons.
1) backups are taken of all the data on the machine, so you can't know who is looking at your personal data. This is true of your encription methods. Maybe the company can't crack that partition, it doesn't change the fact that maybe some time in the future a method would be available. If the data is personal and important it doesn't belong on company equipment. It's just a bad idea.
Not too sure about this one anymore. Back in the day certainly.
me either
Often it is sufficient in canada to use a credit card to apply for those things that require trivial amounts of credit. It can be considered proof of established credit to have one and usually there is some insurance protection that the credit card companies offer the business to protect them.
In my opinion it is rediculous to demand a credit check for anything other than loans, mortgages, lines of credit or financing through xyz company. Since internet service is not one of these things and since the amount per month is trivial what you have to ask is why do they need the SSN? Further, in Canada if you no longer do business with company X there is (as far as I know, and I am not a lawyer) some legal recourse to get this information removed.
You have to expect now days that once you give out your SSN (and any other personal information) to any company, it is now in the public domain. Although there are laws to prosecute companies and individuals that divuldge this information to others, it still doesn't change the fact that the information is out there. These laws deal with the problem after the irreparable damage is done.
I would go without internet service/phone service etc before I gave any of this kind of information up.
I agree the parents are 100% responsible for the child until that child is considered an Adult by whatever region governing body.
humm...
so if I walk into a music store and walk out without paying for my copy of xyz music - I am stealing from the retailer since the retailer has already paid for the music from the distributer.
If I download said music from a P2P network - I am not stealing from anyone?
Just because one of the two examples was a physical tangable item has no bearing on the legality of the situation. You could say the same about a book. I argue that the majority of the value of a book is in the words and concepts in the book, not the physical paper it is written on eventhough the physical material has some value.
The item that is taken from the corporation is the value (read $) of the licence to use the work (in the case of music as ownership of the music is not transfered). I would say that the victim of copyright infringment's loss is concrete/real because the victim spent actual dollars creating (or purchasing licenses to use) the work.
I would agree with this.
Get a kid a pc give him a unprivileged account on it and disable the NIC. Let the kid do his book reports and homework wordprocessing on it.
When the kid needs internet access to do research, enable the NIC and monitor his use. Give him a 1/2 hr or 1 hr per day for recreational use of the net while being monitored and afterwords disable the NIC. I remember growing up, my parents allotted me 1 hour of tv per day until I was in jr. high school, the internet is no different. There is no reason a child of 10 years old should need to be on the net, or carry a cell phone etc. We all got by without it.
I realized very early in life after cleaning out PC's at work that I didn't want to waste my personal time doing the same thing to my own machine.
You are still responsible for your sons use of his computer....
Also just to add, a lot of people have less than perfect eyesight and yet don't wear glasses. In some cases their eyesight is borderline on requiring vision correction. In this case these people will take no benefit, nor will they percieve any sharper picture than standard definition. Assuming of course a reasonably sized TV at a reasonable viewing distance.
Eventually everyone will require glasses or other vision correction, and for most people in the 30-50 age group they are in a borderline group. Which is why IMHO people can't percieve a difference or that difference between DVD and HDDVD is marginally noticeable to them.
Also when BluRay is priced at $32 per movie, and DVD is priced at $22 per movie for the same film why would people who can barely tell the difference spend 33% more?
The article is not taking into account those owners of PS3 systems that use the PS3 exclusively for blue ray content. Or alternatively the owners of an XBox 360 with HDDVD.
If you account for this and for the rate of adoption the articles conclusion is incorrect.
=16% BluRay vs 14% HDDVD
I disagree, if only it were that simple.
IBM is targeting SUN, they arn't targeting all computer manufacturers.
The equivelent would be: FORD giving everyone a discount on a new vehicle if they traded in a GM. The guy who owned a DODGE would be out of luck.
It's pretty clear here that IBM is trying to scoop SUN's customer base. This could have been the reason they wanted to aquire SUN in the first place.
I would use it for my netbook that I use for my GPS and mobile internet browser. Run the GPS software while traveling. Bring up the browser to check email. Bring up word to type a letter.. etc. It's only a problem for those who are doing a lot of background processing tasks and really, you wouldn't want to do that on a netbook anyway. I rarely have more than one or two 'applications' open at a time. Everyone here seems to be focusing on the fact that you can't leave your applications idling in the background while working with another one. The more applications that I am working with at once, the less productive I become.
However, that being said, constantly opening and closing applications will have an impact on battery life. MS has done so much work with power management and hybernation tech lately, I can't help but think they are going to hurt the power consumption of the netbooks this way. So for those of you who think MS is doing this for power conservation, IMHO you are wrong.
The largest cost to any computer is the software. Hardware is dirt cheap, and really, if you are buying a specific piece of hardware for a specific purpose (read: not general use) this makes absolutely 100% sense. In the end you are getting all the advantages of closed-source without the cost. And I can live with the one disadvantage.
As usual we get Tech-speak here and not economics. Who cares if it is more expensive to put it in space? as long as the funding is available and the company can prove it can make a profit (profit meaning expenses less than revenue) it will work.
For all of those who are doubting the costs/benefits, keep one thing in mind... How much money has the company that launched "spaceship one" burned through, and is continuing to burn through just to make space flight commercially viable? Or NASA burned through to get a human to the moon? Once it has been done, and proven to be a source of revenue, all sorts of companies will want to also participate in that market space, thus driving down the costs of all of the required prerequisites.
One more thing, once the solution is in place, all they would have to do is maintain it. If the company makes a small profit after all expenses are paid (including debt payments on the upfront capital costs), the original upfront cost really is meaningless. Example: say it costs 100,000,000,000 to finance the original project, and all maintainance costs (including financing the debt/labor/parts/etc) is 1,000,000,000/yr, as long as the company makes 1,000,000,001/yr it is a worthwhile venture. This is how not-for-profit organizations stay afloat. It's just carrying a debt several orders of magnitude larger than normal.
Linux - Yay Yay! fast boot, fast shutdown, fast file copy, etc...
Windows - Boo Boo! slow boot, slow use, slow copy etc..
I'll pick Windows any day. I don't have to spend weeks trying to get my hardware working with it. I don't need to find some obscure driver, or sudo apt-get some library that only exists in Peru to make my tv-capture card work.
I am encouraged by the strides that these modern distros have made and I would use linux as my desktop machine if only (and I wish so much) that they would work without making a colossal waste of my time to set up.
I'll put up with the parasitic seconds of waiting in windows, for the hours of time it takes me to configure my system correctly in linux.
How are you screwed in this case? Even though MS pulled the plug on the team, that doesn't mean that your existing copy of FS is useless.
It just means that the next release may/may not happen, and that if it does, it is likely going to be contracted out to another developer house.
I don't think that Microsoft can be held liable for more money than what they _earned_ from the sale of the computer with the vista capable sticker. The limit of their liability should be the value of the operating system. The class action should be collecting the hardware replacement from the manufacturers.
HP/Toshiba/Sony etc. are not in the business of selling Vista, but they knew that sticker would drive sales from people who otherwise would have waited to purchase their new hardware.
Forcing a company to disclose how a device operates does not automatically open source the code. Even if you had the source code, you couldn't use it otherwise you would face conviction. Just because a judge orders the source to be disseminated doesn't allow everyone to use it. It is still propriatary technology and is likely protected by patients. I don't see them GPL'ing the source for the product, or licensing it for use in any way. So great, you know how someone built the breathalizer, and have seen the source, but now because you were part of the team evaluating the source for it, you'll never be able to work on one yourself because it will forever be scrutinized for containing competitors ideas.