if you knowingly allow your patent to be infringed apon for 3 years and never so much as mention it to the infringer, why should you have the right to sue?
I'm not sure why Estoppel By Silence isn't invoked in such cases.
What is Estoppel by Silence? Let me consult the Great Lazyweb for a good explanation:
From nolo.com
Estoppel by Silence is a "type of estoppel that prevents a person from asserting something when she had both the duty and the opportunity to speak up earlier, and her silence put another person at a disadvantage. For example, Edwards' Roofing Company has the wrong address and begins ripping the roof from Betty's house by mistake. If Betty sees this but remains silent, she cannot wait until the new roof is installed and then refuse to pay, asserting that the work was done without her agreement."
I don't see a difference between this and what these submarine patents are doing. But IANAL and this is./, so I'm sure some other IANAL poster is gonna come along and explain why I'm daft and my post has killed a kitten somewhere.
Re:Vonage is in a dead-end business.
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Skype is already a better deal than Vonage, and without one-year lock-in contracts. Skype's costs are likely lower too.
Skype and Vonage are not competitors. They have products that serve different needs. For example, Skype's own web site says:
"Skype is not a telephony replacement service and cannot be used for emergency dialing."
Not so with Vonage. This is a pretty big deal. Furthermore, Skype doesn't allow me to buy an off the shelf VOIP router, plug it into my hub and a phone jack and serve a dial tone to every phone in the house as I have done with Vonage.
I agree with you the Vonage has an "if it works, great, if not, move on" attitude about customer service, but that's partly becuase the cases where it doesn't work, the problems are not resolvable by Vonage. I get that. If your ISP isn't providing substandard service, and if you know how to properly set up Vonage, you are good to go, otherwise you aren't and there isn't really much Vonage can do about that.
I now pay over $40 a month for a Verizon landline, rather than a Vonage phone, and I'd much rather give my money to Verizon.
I have nothing against Verizon, per se, and they are my local telco as well, but my bill hovered around $50 a month, whereas with Vonage the bill is $25. It could be less if I switched to the $15 metered plan (something I've thought about). The $25 per month I'm saving was well worth figuring out how to set up Vonage to work through my existing home phone wiring.
Already Vonage is not the price leader in this arena, so people looking for a bargain will go cheaper.
Very true. I've considered this, but was a bit uneasy trusting phone service to a company I haven't heard of. Anybody out there have any experience with the cheaper alternatives? I'm comfortable with Vonage, but always looking to save 50 cents where I can.
However there are probably investors dumb enough to buy Vonage IPO stock.
Investors looking to buy long term stock would be crazy to invest in any IPO, but I think for short term and even mid term investments, Vonage might be a solid choice. There are market pressures that will require Vonage to change the way they do business eventually, but for the foreseeable future they have a place in the telco ecosystem. That makes them a pretty solid bet, I'd say.
Not to mention the Bells and cable companies' ability to do underhanded things with QoS and whatnot.
This is the real crux of the problem! The ISP can try to cut Vonage off at the knees. I have confidence that they'd get slapped back by consumers and the gov.
Besides, the ISP's that threaten Vonage also have an inevitaby failing business model. WiFi mesh networks have the potential to make ISP's worthless. All it will take is one company putting out a Mesh router that auto configures itself as part of the local mesh via some standard protocol. Make it cheap and get everyone to buy one (just make it a standard in all WiFi routers), suddenly the global Internet infrastructure is provided at the consumer and business level instead of at the telco level. But this is really a different conversation.:)
You want life fullfillment, do it after work. Don't buy into that "enriching career" crap. The employment contract is a simple one: You are trading time for money. The more you can get that ratio to favor you, the better.
If you want to have an life that is more enriching, fullfilling, rewarding, interesting, or actualizing, volunteer somewhere after work with a group that really needs you, like a homeless shelter, a food bank, or hell even an open source software project. Don't spend yourself on Corporate America. I promise you that it will never pay you back!
Never.
Do your job, do it well, but just do it and go home to your family and friends where life really matters.
And to answer to obvious next question, yes, my clients love my work. I'm not preaching laziness or sabotage, just perspective. You can write the best code on the planet, with the least bugs, that runs the fastest, the the users adore and cheer, and in the end what happens? A couple of corporate fatcats are a little richer this year than they were last year. w00t? No.
A lot of your comment boils down to the idea that the tax structure should be used to further certain societal goals. [...] Nothing wrong with that, but I don't know if it's an "objective" viewpoint.
Congress could theoretically eliminate personal deductions while still only taxing your profit.
Yeah, but the line isn't so clear cut as we might think. For instance, an individual can write off business expenses as well (taking the troops out to an unreimbursed lunch, for instance). Also, the real concern I have is that without charitable deductions charity will drop. It's a big issue. The government has to step in and take over when charity falters. This means that the government can encourage charities to do the work more efficiently by allowing for charitable tax deductions and 503b exemptions, which costs it very little when compared to what it would cost them if they had to step in and do the same work. The government tends toward inefficiency, and thank God they know it!:)
Also, what about deductions for things like adoption? Currently, adoptions garner a $10k tax credit, to offset the fact that natural child birth is covered by health insurance, but adoptions (something everyone wants to see strongly encouraged!) have no such support structure in place, but cost as much. Even with the tax credit an adoption will run upwards of $10k after applying the credit! Pretty steep, but not preventive in the way that it would be in the amount were doubled (which is what happens without the tax credit). Same with hybrid cars. We all want to encourage alternative fuels, but without the tax subsidy, not as many people will spend the extra money to buy one. Same for so many things that are not charity, but are important.
I used to be a strong flat tax / no deductions kinda guy, but as I got older and as I started looking further into it, I saw these and other serious problems with that solution.
Further, taxes should be collected at transaction time (payment, sell investment), and the rate ought to be flat and without deductions.
I used to agree with you, but I've since found the that picture isn't so simple.
Taking taxes at transaction time means pushing a situational-tax only system. In other words, pay tax on a sale of goods or services or the such, which pushes a larger percentage of the tax burden farther down the economic ladder (remember that everyone has to eat and buy things). The richer you are, the lower the percentage of situational tax with respect to your income/net worth. That's not good. Thus, income and estate taxes are pushed as a way to readjust the percentages to make the wealthy pay a larger percentage of their net worth than the poor per annum. Additionally, speaking as someone who was there, taking even 15% of my income when I only make $10k or $20k is pretty onerous, if not simply not possible. But taking even 30% of my income now that I make six figures would pinch, but is far more doable. Speaking as the hypothetical Bill Gates, taking as much as 45% of my $50B, leaves me with enough cash on hand to own a small nation and still manages to do an amazing amount of collective good for the nation.
Also, deductions are an absolutely necessity of the system. Let me explain by example:
If I own a business and that business brings in $100k in gross profit, without deductions, I pay tax on $100k. However, looking at the bigger picture, If my business is anything like the norm, only about 30% of that gross stays in my pocket. That means, I had to pay employees (who are taxed on that pay), advertising (which is taxed on the service provider), and office supplies (which were already taxed at the OfficeMax counter). I have to be able to deduct business expenses otherwise the remainder of the gross that I hold in my hand after business expenses will go, in total, the IRS and I end up having run a business that did $100k in profit and I, as the owner, have exact $0 to show for it (if I don't end up oweing.
Deductions of the other sort exist to encourage charity. There are those who would give to charity out of kindness, but to the same extent? As frequently? What about the rest. We can't forget that charity write-offs really work. Americans give a tremendous amount to charity every year. How much who those charities get if there were zero benefit to the giving? Not nearly as much. Sure, those who give anonymously would still give, but as for the rest, the numbers would drop drastically.
Al Gore---not my favorite guy in the world---had a great idea. Tax breaks for people who make beneficial environmental choices (buy hybrids, use solar, etc...) to encourage people to lessen our dependence on foreign fuels. His ideas never came to full fruition (a real shame, regardless of whether I like him or not), but they would only work if the tax base can claim deductions as incentive.
Brevity is not my strong suit, so sorry for the long ramble, but you get the idea.:)
"Check again Mr. I say-stupid-shit-without verifying. YOU brought up reporters. Check it, then come back and apologiize. I was discussing "reports" originally"
OK. Looking back in the thread I see that the reporter thread got started when you said, "there is a good bit of biased reporting" and "how does that bias change the credibility of the reporting?"
A reporter is one who reports. I'm sure you can see how I made the incredible leap from you talking about biased reporting to me referring to the biases of reporters.
why are you assuming an air of superiority when I'm the one still asking questions, and you're the one drawing conclusions
Some conclusions you drew in the first post of this thread:
* Kyoto did not do this and that invalidates it.
* Blaming the issue of non-compliance on oil and republicans is just playing stupid politics.
* You want to find the worst abuses of the environment go look towards former Soviet states.
* I fully expect within a month or two if not sooner to have another report laying the blame on some new man made source we "just noticed".
* All the world done in the US and elsewhere over the last 30 years fixing the enviornment are going to be lost as long as China and the East are ignored.
Not every conclusion you drew in that post is listed here. For the record though, I don't even disagree with/all/ those conclusions, but don't strut around like you've been applying the Socratic method here. You've been drawing as many conclusions as the rest of us. Get over yourself there.
Oh, and you didn't deny it either, and we both know why. Because it's true, and you can't.
lol. Yeah. Solid logic prevails. I feel shamed through all my core to have been found out by your clear deductive perspecacity.
But what else should be expected from you.
Sarcasm. It's one of the many gifts I offer freely. Thanks for asking.
NO, you're just lying about what they said.
You should be careful about calling people liars. Unless you have some solid evidence to back the claim, it often just makes you look foolish. Just a bit of advice. On the subject, you should subscribe to those two journals. They could use the cash and you could use the perspective they offer. And yes, within those journals, there is no discussion of whether or not there exists a GW phenomenon, only what its cause may be and how long it will take to make its effects known.
All you've done is repeat [...] that Global Warming will be unequivocally catastrophic and destructive, with little or no positive repurcussions
Actually, what I said was that it will be a net negative. I didn't really comment on the nature of the "upside" of global warming. I also tend not to comment about the upside of murder (population control) or divorce (the misery is finally over). There's an upside to most anything if you look hard enough. that isnt' really the point. The point is that right now, it appears as though we are looking at a net negative effect on the human race. Even if the answer were "we don't know" it'd be retarded to close our eyes and hope for the best. Better the devil you know....
Lastly, you've demonstrated quite clearly that you're incapable of the necessary level of reading comprehension to continue this discussion.
Just a quick writing lesson: When you use the word "lastly", you should put it in your last paragraph. Otherwise you're just giving me premature hope that you're done ranting.;-)
This has been a great distraction for an otherwise dull day. Thanks for the rant. I look forward to your next opportunity to call me a stupid liar.
That's just a lie, and why you think you could pawn it off is beyond me.
Then the respected and peeer reviewed journals Science and Nature are also lying.
you're so arrogantly convinced of the superiority of your sources
Yes. I am arrogantly convinced that the above mentioned journals are a superior to your slashdot rant as sources of scientific information. Guilty as charged.
that's what you really mean, and you're too much of a coward to say it.
That's an impressive logical leap. Is that the sort of logic you used to come up with your views on GW in the first place? I'm just asking becuase it would explain a lot.
You've allowed your petty concerns to be influenced by the apocalyptic reporting.
You mean to tell me that you are gonna say that my desire to not see the coastline change is a petty concern? Do you have any clue how many people will be made homeless? How much our country's GDP will be affected by the problems it will create in port services? These aren't petty concerns, whatever else you may have read into my comment.
Why you don't is a result of your ignorance to human behavior I guess.
Why I don't care about reporters is because I'm not trying to make a public case via a media campaign about GW. I'm talking to one guy in an internet forum. Our discussion is limited to whether or not GW is real and whether or not it's bad. Reporters have nothing to add to either of those questions. Your preoccupation with reporters and people attacking republicans and people who don't know what causes GW and all the rest is a distraction from the real meat of this discussion.
Global warming is neither good nor bad, it simply IS.
More chaff to obscure the wheat.
We aren't talking about the existential state of GW. We are talking about its effects on us. You knew that. Don't dance around the point. My wording didn't confuse you. Or did you really think I was saying that GW is somehow evil and a plot of Satan? wtf? It's bad...for us.
Some of the consequences are bad
Yes, like how it will cause exinctions that will skew the food chain. Like how it will cause sea levels to rise. Like how all this and more mean serious trouble for humanity. Will we go extinct? I doubt it. Like roaches, we will survive. But will we be better off with GW or without it? Without, of course.
ANY positive outcomes?
Because no one cares that the sea life might thrive in the new order or that we might have much better tans. We only care about how it will affect us on the whole. That effect on us is a net negative. Ask a real climatologist and he will explain it to you. There is remarkable agreement on this one point in the field. The only serious disagreement is on the cause. As I said before: who cares about that? Not me.
so at the very least there is a good bit of biased reporting
More blame game. Who give a crap what the reporters say? I don't. I care about the human race. I care that people will die. Hell, I'd care if people were just inconvenienced en masse! Why are you so concerned with the bias of reporters. I agree that reporters are biased toward sensationalism. So what? How does that matter to what you and I are discussing. Are you a reporter? I'm not. I'm a guy who doesn't want to see his coastal home (Virginia Beach) flooded out as the coastline changes to give the human race less rookm in which to live on this already overcrowded globe. Reporters may be arguing for a "Day After" scenario, but I'm not. For all I know it's a slow degradation over 200 years. It's still a problem that needs to be fixed, regardless of how the media sensationalizes it.
how does that bias change the credibility of the reporting?
Dude, telling me that the reporters have it all wrong doesn't change the underlying reality. GW exists. GW is a net negative for the human race. The rest is spin. Ignore the spin and let's try to solve this problem.
We have NASA ice cores that show more wild swings in our temperatures and more extremes than we see now. [...] We constantly get contradicting reports about [...] the cause of Global Warming [...] What sinks the Global Warming cause more than anything is that even the GW side cannot agree on all the causes
So what? We can't figure out what's causing it so we are gonna ignore it? Stop throwing this "we don't even know what causes it" smokescreen around and spend some time thinking about what we do agree on. It is happening and no matter what else, that is NOT a good thing!
Perhaps a report claiming even more dire issues or a faster occurence of them?
Don't even start with that "we don't agree on the effects" bullshit either. We all agree that it ain't good for us. The specifics of our troubles are not important. This is a boondoggle that does nothing but obscure the real point. We are in trouble and we need to start fixing it.
China is coming up like the old Eastern Soviet states did, ramping up without regard for the environment or people around them.
China has just recently begun correcting many of their environmental policies. They spent the better part of 3 decades ramping up industry without concern for the environment, but the government is trying to fix the problem. The people are even rioting over the pollution issue now. They are trying, which is more than I can say for us in the U.S.
Kyoto did not do this and that invalidates it.
I agree, but it's retarded to walk away from the table as Bush did over the problems with Kyoto. It suggests that he doesn't want to see the problem addressed. If you have a problem with a treaty, you don't say "Fuck it, that sucks so I'm outta here". You say "That sucks. Let's try this instead." You negotiate a better treaty. The fact that he walked away without so much as trying that speaks volumes about his underlying intent and motives.
Blaming the issue of non-compliance on oil and republicans is just playing stupid politics.
No one is playing politics here but you. I voted for Bush in 2000. I have no agenda against him or his party. But he has screwed up and he is playing fast-and-loose with our environment in a dangerous way. It's just "playing politics" to ignore that and throw up obfusticating arguments to the contrary.
FYI, I did not vote for him in 2004. I don't like being lied to and I don't hold any allegiance to any political party.
The 'net makes it easier for developments to procreate throughout the globe in many areas, for example business pratices, innovation culture, etc; which don't attribute them to a geographic reigion.
I agree. That's one of the reasons why I'm not willing to say others can't catch up, just that they will have a great deal harder time than is normally suggested. Indeed, even with the globalization effect of the Internet, I'm not sure anyone could catch up at this point.
Set aside all the media hype about fundamentalists running the country and just look at the numbers: The heaps of money we in the U.S. spend on research. The amount is truly staggering. According to UNESCO's 2005 Report on Science and Technology Statistics, China spends about 1.23% of it's GDP on R&D. In the US, we spend 2.67% of ours on R&D and we have a a much higher GDP. Put in apples-to-apples comparison: China spends $72,014,408 in adjusted (ie standardized) currency on R&D. A lot? To be sure, but in the U.S. we spend $275,095,956. If we rounded down to the nearest 100 million dollars the rounded amount we drop would be more than China spends in total. That's not including U.S. and Chinese Defense budget spending, granted, but the amount of money the U.S. throws at military R&D is legendary and those numbers would only server to widen the gap. And it's a sort of snowball effect, too. We make these advances in-house (so to speak) and those advances bring us both profit and more advances more quickly. It's very hard to compete with that. China (a country I have a great affection for!) can't just throw bodies at that problem to see it solved. They simply cannot muster the technological resources to stand toe-to-toe with us in that way, and by the time they get to where we are now, we will have advanced significantly.
Please don't take this as some sort of Pro-USA chest pounding. I am one fo the few people in my field here who sees outsourcing as a good thing (for the world if not for me) and, again, China has a special place in my heart, but unless and until the nature of our situation as a species changes drastically it's unlikley that countries like China or India will ever catch up.
Seriously though. While that link is a bit tongue-in-cheek, the reality is that while it seems logical on the surface to assume that China and India will take the technological lead, reality is likeely to prove counter-intuitive.
It may be non-PC to point this out, but China and India are incredibly backwards countries by Western standards. You think America has problems because some vocal minority wants to rant about evolution? Remind yourself that America spend more money on research than any other country on the planet...bar none...and by a VERY wide margin. Much of that research money gos into military research, which again might suggest to you that we will lose the edge elsewhere, but you should not underestimate the usefulness of military research to the civilian world (the Internet being the most common example) and you should not underestimate the power of a nation whose biggest advances come from the military sector in terms of world power.
It's cool lately to compare America to decaying Rome, but the fact is that the world is a different place than it was during the Roman Empire and our lead is enrenched in a way the Romans could not conceive.
The problem for other countries is essentialy that while they are making advances, we are too and we are starting from a position that all but ensures victory. It is possible but unlikely that anyone could not only overtake us. We aren't a sitting target, regardless of what you may have heard in the media (that sells more papers with prophecies of doom that visions of a bright future).
Sorry, but the best we can all hope for is that America grows into a leader that respects other nations fully and seeks to lift them up rather than knock them down.
The world is not fair. We are in the lead and right or wrong, China and India will have to do A LOT more than they are currently if they hope to compete. As I said, not impossible, just highly improbable.
he instead suggests communities plan for survival in a Mad Max type world with limited resources ruled by violent warlords.
Since I was a kid being told the Russians would nuke us back to the stone age, since I grew up playing Wolfenstein3d, since I watched Red Dawn and Mad Max, I've been expecting this!
Hey, this may scare the younger generation who thought they were born in a brave new world of progress and technology, but for those of us just a few years older, who believed (I mean really believed it!) that we'd either die in a nuclear holocaust or survive to fight for oil and drinking water in the post-apocolyptic aftermath of the inevitable, this don't scare me.
Bring it on! Hell, that's what Doom and Quake and the rest were for, I thought. To prepare me for when it was time to grab a shotgun and roam the halls scavenging for medpacks.
Does Windows work as well on older hardware as Linux?
To quote an old SCotUS Justice, "Common sense revolts at the idea."
I am running several domains on an old Toshiba laptop with a 233 PII and 96MB RAM. Specifically, I am running the most recent version of Ubuntu Linux (Ubuntu Server Edition 5.10). It handles 4 web domains, 5 mailing lists, dns, and a horde of other responsibilties.
My challenge to Microsoft? Do the same thing on the same hardware with their latest OS. I'm waiting.
Science can't stop when it steps in the toes of religion, that would be a dereliction of duty.
I hope that nothing I said led you to believe I thought otherwise. I agree that Science should continue to do what it does best, uncover and quantify the mechanisms of nature.
By explaining how, in many ocassions science is implicitly explaining the why and religious people are not finding comfort in the answers.
Science doesn't answer questions of "Why". I'm not sure what you mean here. The very question implies intent. I don't know any reputable scientists who are trying to discover the "intent" of the universe. As for the comfort of religious people with the answers that science is providing, I agree that many people aren't comforted by them. For biblical literalists, the bible explains "how" the universe was created (or at least on what timetable and some other details. Those stories weren't written to be taken literally, however, so I'm pretty pleased that people are finally being forced to re-read them in a different light. Maybe this time they'll interpret things in a more accurate manner (as in, more in line with the intent of the authors of the original works).
Biblical literalism is almost singlehandedly responsible for stripping intellectualism out of Christianity. That's a shame and I'll be quite please to see science help me to correct that problem.
There's as much legitimacy in focusing on God's Rightous Wrath as there is in focusing on Jesus Forgiving.
Sure./God's/ wrath, not Man's. What happened here was a group of guys, with no authority outside a whiskey bottle deciding to beat the crap out of a guy who was acting like a jerk. Jerk don't deserve to be punished beyond the normal censure they get from people not wanting to be friends with them. And/if/ there were a punishment to dole out, the Old Testament is pretty clear that it's God's to dole, not ours.
The shift from wrath to forgiveness in the bible is a shift in God's actions not in ours. I just wanted to point that out.
That said, if you are a Christian you take the books of the New Testament to be just as important as those of the old and in at least one fairly important speech (some sort of impromptu speech Jesus kicked out from the top of a hill) it was said that though you've heard it said in older biblical works that you should take an eye for an eye, but Jesus, the new Mac Daddy of the oppressed and disregarded says that if you are struck on one cheek you should just turn the other to the striker. A pretty significant and clear message. One that more Christian's should pay attention to.
My disclaimer: My degree is in Religious Studies and I'm a Christian. I think Intelligent Design has hijacked a perfected good theological term and twisted it's meaning. I think Evolutionists have a pretty good running theory. I don't see any issue whatsoever with accepting the tenets of both science and religion as they seem to be trying to answer different questions. When they try to step on each other's toes, I get wary of the stepper. Science has nothing to add to the true study of religion, nor does religion have anything to offer to true science. A Rabbi, Iman, or Pastor is not qualified to tell you how the world was created, or when, only why and what it means relationally to its inhabitants. Likewise, a physicist, chemist, or botanist is not qualified to tell you what it really/means/ to say that God created the heavens and the host of them, or that God created man and woman.
OK, I just looked back and saw that I've moved from a small clarification of your point to standing on a soapbox of my own. Oh well. I'll end it here, I suppose.:)
these are exactly the type of strategies that Microsoft used to get their desktop dominance.
Those are the things MS did to/maintain/ dominance. To/get/ dominance, they did things like allow us to tweak the system (anyone else remember the joy of eeking another 3k on bootup in MSDOS?), being freindly to programmers (OSS will get no mainstream developers as long as they continue to beleive that Glade is the end-all-be-all GUI designer...Visual Studio has THE BEST in the biz. Deal with it), and all around nicer to their customers and programmers. After they got on top, they bent us over and screwed us square in the ass. Totally uncool.
But for the records, I really dif your idea of getting Firefox to read OpenOffice docs out of the box. A plugin for IE wouldn't be a bad thing either! I also think a stand alone converter is a great idea. If you are a developer, you should consider writing such a thing.
how is it allowable for a city government to basically destroy the market for local Internet access?
There exists no law or convention that forbids a government from entering a previously private market. Indeed, there exists a long history of the government taking control of markets that are deemed to be signifigant infrastructure points. That's why roads and schools are government owned and operated. That's why telecoms and power companies are so stringently leashed. Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for the government to start waking up to the fact that we rely HEAVILY on the Internet as an infrastructure. You can expect increasingly strong government involvement in the control and deployment of the Internet going forward. Really, I can't argue the logic. If the Internet goes black, we are all screwed at this point, just as if the power or telephone system goes black. Business relies on the Internet far too much to ignore it.
It does take away any motive to pay for Internet access, right?
It does, yes. But there will be a market for premium internet service. I mean, if the local municipal maintains a 512k up/down pipe to each home or a WiMax blanket over the city, there will still be people who are willing to pay for more bandwidth. In fact, most businesses would still HAVE to pay for higher bandwidth. A company with even a moderately consistent bandwidth usage would want and need a thicker pipe. Some home users would want it as well. For the rest, yes, they could get by just fine on the 512k they are handed for free. That will shrink the market, or more specifically, it will tier the market. I don't see that as a bad thing. There are many people now who can't afford their own food, and therefore obviously have no Internet access, yet those same families suffer generationally because without the advantage of the Internet, they are finding it increasingly difficult to academically compete with those who are online...which makes the next generation more likely to be in the same economically disadvantaged position. This helps alleviate that inequity.
how can they afford the infrastructure necessary to provide wi-fi in the first place?
Taxes. Yeah, poorer municipalities won't be able to do it for a while, but richer ones will enter quicker becuase they have a stronger tax base. Those early adopters, just as with any market, will drive the price down by economies of scale. This will allow the poorer localities to enter the market sooner. And yes, the answer no politician will give you is that it's your taxes that will pay for it. Deal. Our taxes pay for all sorts of stuff, and as the economy rises overall (this is what it does in the U.S.) we will be able to do more with less. At first, the burden will be noticable, but over time it will not. The costs will decline, the infrastructure will be in place, the system will be simplified. This is the way of progress. No big deal. Municipal Internet will seem like a pain to us the first few years as kinks are worked out and costs slowly lower, but inside a decade it will be considered blunderingly obvious that we should have done it sooner. Think of what can be done with a TRULY ubiquitous network that everyone in the U.S. can access at will from anywhere. The uses are mindblowingly numerous. This is one of those things that can be a sea change if we let it.
What is the main purpose of a city going through all the trouble and expense of offering free wi-fi? What is the benefit to the city as a whole?
There is no one reason. There are so many that the real question is why would the citizenry fight it? For a tourist town, the early adopters can tout it as a way to boost touring revenue. "Come lounge on our sandy shores and SMS your friends back home from the comfort of your beach chair" More tourists means more tax revenue means less tax bruden on the locals means WiMax pays for itself and then some early on. For a business town it means touting a way t
But seriously, why do people criticize Microsoft so much for requiring occasional reboots when a much simpler application, Firefox, requires a restart every time an extension is installed.
Because when I am asked to restart firefox I don't have to send a company-wide memo that all employees accessing server X will be unable to from 12:00AM to 12:05AM---assuming no problems otherwise it's 12:00AM to when the hell ever we figure out what went wrong on reboot of a production server.
But I agree that having the restart firefox is a pain when I'm just trying to surf the web.
Slashdot Mirror
if you knowingly allow your patent to be infringed apon for 3 years and never so much as mention it to the infringer, why should you have the right to sue?
./, so I'm sure some other IANAL poster is gonna come along and explain why I'm daft and my post has killed a kitten somewhere.
I'm not sure why Estoppel By Silence isn't invoked in such cases.
What is Estoppel by Silence? Let me consult the Great Lazyweb for a good explanation:
From nolo.com
Estoppel by Silence is a "type of estoppel that prevents a person from asserting something when she had both the duty and the opportunity to speak up earlier, and her silence put another person at a disadvantage. For example, Edwards' Roofing Company has the wrong address and begins ripping the roof from Betty's house by mistake. If Betty sees this but remains silent, she cannot wait until the new roof is installed and then refuse to pay, asserting that the work was done without her agreement."
I don't see a difference between this and what these submarine patents are doing. But IANAL and this is
Skype is already a better deal than Vonage, and without one-year lock-in contracts. Skype's costs are likely lower too.
:)
Skype and Vonage are not competitors. They have products that serve different needs. For example, Skype's own web site says:
"Skype is not a telephony replacement service and cannot be used for emergency dialing."
Not so with Vonage. This is a pretty big deal. Furthermore, Skype doesn't allow me to buy an off the shelf VOIP router, plug it into my hub and a phone jack and serve a dial tone to every phone in the house as I have done with Vonage.
I agree with you the Vonage has an "if it works, great, if not, move on" attitude about customer service, but that's partly becuase the cases where it doesn't work, the problems are not resolvable by Vonage. I get that. If your ISP isn't providing substandard service, and if you know how to properly set up Vonage, you are good to go, otherwise you aren't and there isn't really much Vonage can do about that.
I now pay over $40 a month for a Verizon landline, rather than a Vonage phone, and I'd much rather give my money to Verizon.
I have nothing against Verizon, per se, and they are my local telco as well, but my bill hovered around $50 a month, whereas with Vonage the bill is $25. It could be less if I switched to the $15 metered plan (something I've thought about). The $25 per month I'm saving was well worth figuring out how to set up Vonage to work through my existing home phone wiring.
Already Vonage is not the price leader in this arena, so people looking for a bargain will go cheaper.
Very true. I've considered this, but was a bit uneasy trusting phone service to a company I haven't heard of. Anybody out there have any experience with the cheaper alternatives? I'm comfortable with Vonage, but always looking to save 50 cents where I can.
However there are probably investors dumb enough to buy Vonage IPO stock.
Investors looking to buy long term stock would be crazy to invest in any IPO, but I think for short term and even mid term investments, Vonage might be a solid choice. There are market pressures that will require Vonage to change the way they do business eventually, but for the foreseeable future they have a place in the telco ecosystem. That makes them a pretty solid bet, I'd say.
Not to mention the Bells and cable companies' ability to do underhanded things with QoS and whatnot.
This is the real crux of the problem! The ISP can try to cut Vonage off at the knees. I have confidence that they'd get slapped back by consumers and the gov.
Besides, the ISP's that threaten Vonage also have an inevitaby failing business model. WiFi mesh networks have the potential to make ISP's worthless. All it will take is one company putting out a Mesh router that auto configures itself as part of the local mesh via some standard protocol. Make it cheap and get everyone to buy one (just make it a standard in all WiFi routers), suddenly the global Internet infrastructure is provided at the consumer and business level instead of at the telco level. But this is really a different conversation.
...No
t ml
In a blog entry: http://tom.digitalelite.com/2005_08_11_08_02_00.h
You want life fullfillment, do it after work. Don't buy into that "enriching career" crap. The employment contract is a simple one: You are trading time for money. The more you can get that ratio to favor you, the better.
If you want to have an life that is more enriching, fullfilling, rewarding, interesting, or actualizing, volunteer somewhere after work with a group that really needs you, like a homeless shelter, a food bank, or hell even an open source software project. Don't spend yourself on Corporate America. I promise you that it will never pay you back!
Never.
Do your job, do it well, but just do it and go home to your family and friends where life really matters.
And to answer to obvious next question, yes, my clients love my work. I'm not preaching laziness or sabotage, just perspective. You can write the best code on the planet, with the least bugs, that runs the fastest, the the users adore and cheer, and in the end what happens? A couple of corporate fatcats are a little richer this year than they were last year. w00t? No.
A lot of your comment boils down to the idea that the tax structure should be used to further certain societal goals. [...] Nothing wrong with that, but I don't know if it's an "objective" viewpoint.
:)
I totally agree with your assessment.
Viva la Visual Basic 6.0!
Don't you mean the GNU/Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
Congress could theoretically eliminate personal deductions while still only taxing your profit.
:)
:(
Yeah, but the line isn't so clear cut as we might think. For instance, an individual can write off business expenses as well (taking the troops out to an unreimbursed lunch, for instance). Also, the real concern I have is that without charitable deductions charity will drop. It's a big issue. The government has to step in and take over when charity falters. This means that the government can encourage charities to do the work more efficiently by allowing for charitable tax deductions and 503b exemptions, which costs it very little when compared to what it would cost them if they had to step in and do the same work. The government tends toward inefficiency, and thank God they know it!
Also, what about deductions for things like adoption? Currently, adoptions garner a $10k tax credit, to offset the fact that natural child birth is covered by health insurance, but adoptions (something everyone wants to see strongly encouraged!) have no such support structure in place, but cost as much. Even with the tax credit an adoption will run upwards of $10k after applying the credit! Pretty steep, but not preventive in the way that it would be in the amount were doubled (which is what happens without the tax credit). Same with hybrid cars. We all want to encourage alternative fuels, but without the tax subsidy, not as many people will spend the extra money to buy one. Same for so many things that are not charity, but are important.
I used to be a strong flat tax / no deductions kinda guy, but as I got older and as I started looking further into it, I saw these and other serious problems with that solution.
Sadly, sometimes equity doesn't mean equal.
Further, taxes should be collected at transaction time (payment, sell investment), and the rate ought to be flat and without deductions.
:)
I used to agree with you, but I've since found the that picture isn't so simple.
Taking taxes at transaction time means pushing a situational-tax only system. In other words, pay tax on a sale of goods or services or the such, which pushes a larger percentage of the tax burden farther down the economic ladder (remember that everyone has to eat and buy things). The richer you are, the lower the percentage of situational tax with respect to your income/net worth. That's not good. Thus, income and estate taxes are pushed as a way to readjust the percentages to make the wealthy pay a larger percentage of their net worth than the poor per annum. Additionally, speaking as someone who was there, taking even 15% of my income when I only make $10k or $20k is pretty onerous, if not simply not possible. But taking even 30% of my income now that I make six figures would pinch, but is far more doable. Speaking as the hypothetical Bill Gates, taking as much as 45% of my $50B, leaves me with enough cash on hand to own a small nation and still manages to do an amazing amount of collective good for the nation.
Also, deductions are an absolutely necessity of the system. Let me explain by example:
If I own a business and that business brings in $100k in gross profit, without deductions, I pay tax on $100k. However, looking at the bigger picture, If my business is anything like the norm, only about 30% of that gross stays in my pocket. That means, I had to pay employees (who are taxed on that pay), advertising (which is taxed on the service provider), and office supplies (which were already taxed at the OfficeMax counter). I have to be able to deduct business expenses otherwise the remainder of the gross that I hold in my hand after business expenses will go, in total, the IRS and I end up having run a business that did $100k in profit and I, as the owner, have exact $0 to show for it (if I don't end up oweing.
Deductions of the other sort exist to encourage charity. There are those who would give to charity out of kindness, but to the same extent? As frequently? What about the rest. We can't forget that charity write-offs really work. Americans give a tremendous amount to charity every year. How much who those charities get if there were zero benefit to the giving? Not nearly as much. Sure, those who give anonymously would still give, but as for the rest, the numbers would drop drastically.
Al Gore---not my favorite guy in the world---had a great idea. Tax breaks for people who make beneficial environmental choices (buy hybrids, use solar, etc...) to encourage people to lessen our dependence on foreign fuels. His ideas never came to full fruition (a real shame, regardless of whether I like him or not), but they would only work if the tax base can claim deductions as incentive.
Brevity is not my strong suit, so sorry for the long ramble, but you get the idea.
Chinese people speaking the same broken Engrish
:)
Now now. Everyone knows that only Japanese speak Engrish. The Chinese speak Chenglish.
(yes, I was actually corrected recently by a chinese american).
"Check again Mr. I say-stupid-shit-without verifying. YOU brought up reporters. Check it, then come back and apologiize. I was discussing "reports" originally"
/all/ those conclusions, but don't strut around like you've been applying the Socratic method here. You've been drawing as many conclusions as the rest of us. Get over yourself there.
;-)
OK. Looking back in the thread I see that the reporter thread got started when you said, "there is a good bit of biased reporting" and "how does that bias change the credibility of the reporting?"
A reporter is one who reports. I'm sure you can see how I made the incredible leap from you talking about biased reporting to me referring to the biases of reporters.
why are you assuming an air of superiority when I'm the one still asking questions, and you're the one drawing conclusions
Some conclusions you drew in the first post of this thread:
* Kyoto did not do this and that invalidates it.
* Blaming the issue of non-compliance on oil and republicans is just playing stupid politics.
* You want to find the worst abuses of the environment go look towards former Soviet states.
* I fully expect within a month or two if not sooner to have another report laying the blame on some new man made source we "just noticed".
* All the world done in the US and elsewhere over the last 30 years fixing the enviornment are going to be lost as long as China and the East are ignored.
Not every conclusion you drew in that post is listed here. For the record though, I don't even disagree with
Oh, and you didn't deny it either, and we both know why. Because it's true, and you can't.
lol. Yeah. Solid logic prevails. I feel shamed through all my core to have been found out by your clear deductive perspecacity.
But what else should be expected from you.
Sarcasm. It's one of the many gifts I offer freely. Thanks for asking.
NO, you're just lying about what they said.
You should be careful about calling people liars. Unless you have some solid evidence to back the claim, it often just makes you look foolish. Just a bit of advice. On the subject, you should subscribe to those two journals. They could use the cash and you could use the perspective they offer. And yes, within those journals, there is no discussion of whether or not there exists a GW phenomenon, only what its cause may be and how long it will take to make its effects known.
All you've done is repeat [...] that Global Warming will be unequivocally catastrophic and destructive, with little or no positive repurcussions
Actually, what I said was that it will be a net negative. I didn't really comment on the nature of the "upside" of global warming. I also tend not to comment about the upside of murder (population control) or divorce (the misery is finally over). There's an upside to most anything if you look hard enough. that isnt' really the point. The point is that right now, it appears as though we are looking at a net negative effect on the human race. Even if the answer were "we don't know" it'd be retarded to close our eyes and hope for the best. Better the devil you know....
Lastly, you've demonstrated quite clearly that you're incapable of the necessary level of reading comprehension to continue this discussion.
Just a quick writing lesson: When you use the word "lastly", you should put it in your last paragraph. Otherwise you're just giving me premature hope that you're done ranting.
This has been a great distraction for an otherwise dull day. Thanks for the rant. I look forward to your next opportunity to call me a stupid liar.
That's just a lie, and why you think you could pawn it off is beyond me.
Then the respected and peeer reviewed journals Science and Nature are also lying.
you're so arrogantly convinced of the superiority of your sources
Yes. I am arrogantly convinced that the above mentioned journals are a superior to your slashdot rant as sources of scientific information. Guilty as charged.
that's what you really mean, and you're too much of a coward to say it.
That's an impressive logical leap. Is that the sort of logic you used to come up with your views on GW in the first place? I'm just asking becuase it would explain a lot.
You've allowed your petty concerns to be influenced by the apocalyptic reporting.
You mean to tell me that you are gonna say that my desire to not see the coastline change is a petty concern? Do you have any clue how many people will be made homeless? How much our country's GDP will be affected by the problems it will create in port services? These aren't petty concerns, whatever else you may have read into my comment.
Why you don't is a result of your ignorance to human behavior I guess.
Why I don't care about reporters is because I'm not trying to make a public case via a media campaign about GW. I'm talking to one guy in an internet forum. Our discussion is limited to whether or not GW is real and whether or not it's bad. Reporters have nothing to add to either of those questions. Your preoccupation with reporters and people attacking republicans and people who don't know what causes GW and all the rest is a distraction from the real meat of this discussion.
Global warming is neither good nor bad, it simply IS.
More chaff to obscure the wheat.
We aren't talking about the existential state of GW. We are talking about its effects on us. You knew that. Don't dance around the point. My wording didn't confuse you. Or did you really think I was saying that GW is somehow evil and a plot of Satan? wtf? It's bad...for us.
Some of the consequences are bad
Yes, like how it will cause exinctions that will skew the food chain. Like how it will cause sea levels to rise. Like how all this and more mean serious trouble for humanity. Will we go extinct? I doubt it. Like roaches, we will survive. But will we be better off with GW or without it? Without, of course.
ANY positive outcomes?
Because no one cares that the sea life might thrive in the new order or that we might have much better tans. We only care about how it will affect us on the whole. That effect on us is a net negative. Ask a real climatologist and he will explain it to you. There is remarkable agreement on this one point in the field. The only serious disagreement is on the cause. As I said before: who cares about that? Not me.
so at the very least there is a good bit of biased reporting
More blame game. Who give a crap what the reporters say? I don't. I care about the human race. I care that people will die. Hell, I'd care if people were just inconvenienced en masse! Why are you so concerned with the bias of reporters. I agree that reporters are biased toward sensationalism. So what? How does that matter to what you and I are discussing. Are you a reporter? I'm not. I'm a guy who doesn't want to see his coastal home (Virginia Beach) flooded out as the coastline changes to give the human race less rookm in which to live on this already overcrowded globe. Reporters may be arguing for a "Day After" scenario, but I'm not. For all I know it's a slow degradation over 200 years. It's still a problem that needs to be fixed, regardless of how the media sensationalizes it.
how does that bias change the credibility of the reporting?
Dude, telling me that the reporters have it all wrong doesn't change the underlying reality. GW exists. GW is a net negative for the human race. The rest is spin. Ignore the spin and let's try to solve this problem.
We have NASA ice cores that show more wild swings in our temperatures and more extremes than we see now. [...] We constantly get contradicting reports about [...] the cause of Global Warming [...] What sinks the Global Warming cause more than anything is that even the GW side cannot agree on all the causes
So what? We can't figure out what's causing it so we are gonna ignore it? Stop throwing this "we don't even know what causes it" smokescreen around and spend some time thinking about what we do agree on. It is happening and no matter what else, that is NOT a good thing!
Perhaps a report claiming even more dire issues or a faster occurence of them?
Don't even start with that "we don't agree on the effects" bullshit either. We all agree that it ain't good for us. The specifics of our troubles are not important. This is a boondoggle that does nothing but obscure the real point. We are in trouble and we need to start fixing it.
China is coming up like the old Eastern Soviet states did, ramping up without regard for the environment or people around them.
China has just recently begun correcting many of their environmental policies. They spent the better part of 3 decades ramping up industry without concern for the environment, but the government is trying to fix the problem. The people are even rioting over the pollution issue now. They are trying, which is more than I can say for us in the U.S.
Kyoto did not do this and that invalidates it.
I agree, but it's retarded to walk away from the table as Bush did over the problems with Kyoto. It suggests that he doesn't want to see the problem addressed. If you have a problem with a treaty, you don't say "Fuck it, that sucks so I'm outta here". You say "That sucks. Let's try this instead." You negotiate a better treaty. The fact that he walked away without so much as trying that speaks volumes about his underlying intent and motives.
Blaming the issue of non-compliance on oil and republicans is just playing stupid politics.
No one is playing politics here but you. I voted for Bush in 2000. I have no agenda against him or his party. But he has screwed up and he is playing fast-and-loose with our environment in a dangerous way. It's just "playing politics" to ignore that and throw up obfusticating arguments to the contrary.
FYI, I did not vote for him in 2004. I don't like being lied to and I don't hold any allegiance to any political party.
The 'net makes it easier for developments to procreate throughout the globe in many areas, for example business pratices, innovation culture, etc; which don't attribute them to a geographic reigion.
I agree. That's one of the reasons why I'm not willing to say others can't catch up, just that they will have a great deal harder time than is normally suggested. Indeed, even with the globalization effect of the Internet, I'm not sure anyone could catch up at this point.
Set aside all the media hype about fundamentalists running the country and just look at the numbers: The heaps of money we in the U.S. spend on research. The amount is truly staggering. According to UNESCO's 2005 Report on Science and Technology Statistics, China spends about 1.23% of it's GDP on R&D. In the US, we spend 2.67% of ours on R&D and we have a a much higher GDP. Put in apples-to-apples comparison: China spends $72,014,408 in adjusted (ie standardized) currency on R&D. A lot? To be sure, but in the U.S. we spend $275,095,956. If we rounded down to the nearest 100 million dollars the rounded amount we drop would be more than China spends in total. That's not including U.S. and Chinese Defense budget spending, granted, but the amount of money the U.S. throws at military R&D is legendary and those numbers would only server to widen the gap. And it's a sort of snowball effect, too. We make these advances in-house (so to speak) and those advances bring us both profit and more advances more quickly. It's very hard to compete with that. China (a country I have a great affection for!) can't just throw bodies at that problem to see it solved. They simply cannot muster the technological resources to stand toe-to-toe with us in that way, and by the time they get to where we are now, we will have advanced significantly.
Please don't take this as some sort of Pro-USA chest pounding. I am one fo the few people in my field here who sees outsourcing as a good thing (for the world if not for me) and, again, China has a special place in my heart, but unless and until the nature of our situation as a species changes drastically it's unlikley that countries like China or India will ever catch up.
Indeed, countries like China and India will be where the 21st century will take place.
Sure it will.
Seriously though. While that link is a bit tongue-in-cheek, the reality is that while it seems logical on the surface to assume that China and India will take the technological lead, reality is likeely to prove counter-intuitive.
It may be non-PC to point this out, but China and India are incredibly backwards countries by Western standards. You think America has problems because some vocal minority wants to rant about evolution? Remind yourself that America spend more money on research than any other country on the planet...bar none...and by a VERY wide margin. Much of that research money gos into military research, which again might suggest to you that we will lose the edge elsewhere, but you should not underestimate the usefulness of military research to the civilian world (the Internet being the most common example) and you should not underestimate the power of a nation whose biggest advances come from the military sector in terms of world power.
It's cool lately to compare America to decaying Rome, but the fact is that the world is a different place than it was during the Roman Empire and our lead is enrenched in a way the Romans could not conceive.
The problem for other countries is essentialy that while they are making advances, we are too and we are starting from a position that all but ensures victory. It is possible but unlikely that anyone could not only overtake us. We aren't a sitting target, regardless of what you may have heard in the media (that sells more papers with prophecies of doom that visions of a bright future).
Sorry, but the best we can all hope for is that America grows into a leader that respects other nations fully and seeks to lift them up rather than knock them down.
The world is not fair. We are in the lead and right or wrong, China and India will have to do A LOT more than they are currently if they hope to compete. As I said, not impossible, just highly improbable.
he instead suggests communities plan for survival in a Mad Max type world with limited resources ruled by violent warlords.
Since I was a kid being told the Russians would nuke us back to the stone age, since I grew up playing Wolfenstein3d, since I watched Red Dawn and Mad Max, I've been expecting this!
Hey, this may scare the younger generation who thought they were born in a brave new world of progress and technology, but for those of us just a few years older, who believed (I mean really believed it!) that we'd either die in a nuclear holocaust or survive to fight for oil and drinking water in the post-apocolyptic aftermath of the inevitable, this don't scare me.
Bring it on! Hell, that's what Doom and Quake and the rest were for, I thought. To prepare me for when it was time to grab a shotgun and roam the halls scavenging for medpacks.
What would Neil say?
/.ers out there do. We One Youngs are everywhere!
Is the answer to your question "Boomshanka"?
What? You don't catch the reference? I'll wager some
Does Windows work as well on older hardware as Linux?
To quote an old SCotUS Justice, "Common sense revolts at the idea."
I am running several domains on an old Toshiba laptop with a 233 PII and 96MB RAM. Specifically, I am running the most recent version of Ubuntu Linux (Ubuntu Server Edition 5.10). It handles 4 web domains, 5 mailing lists, dns, and a horde of other responsibilties.
My challenge to Microsoft? Do the same thing on the same hardware with their latest OS. I'm waiting.
For anyone curious about what is set up and how, you can see my how-to page on the topic of installing these services in Ubuntu on the laptop..
Science can't stop when it steps in the toes of religion, that would be a dereliction of duty.
I hope that nothing I said led you to believe I thought otherwise. I agree that Science should continue to do what it does best, uncover and quantify the mechanisms of nature.
By explaining how, in many ocassions science is implicitly explaining the why and religious people are not finding comfort in the answers.
Science doesn't answer questions of "Why". I'm not sure what you mean here. The very question implies intent. I don't know any reputable scientists who are trying to discover the "intent" of the universe. As for the comfort of religious people with the answers that science is providing, I agree that many people aren't comforted by them. For biblical literalists, the bible explains "how" the universe was created (or at least on what timetable and some other details. Those stories weren't written to be taken literally, however, so I'm pretty pleased that people are finally being forced to re-read them in a different light. Maybe this time they'll interpret things in a more accurate manner (as in, more in line with the intent of the authors of the original works).
Biblical literalism is almost singlehandedly responsible for stripping intellectualism out of Christianity. That's a shame and I'll be quite please to see science help me to correct that problem.
There's as much legitimacy in focusing on God's Rightous Wrath as there is in focusing on Jesus Forgiving.
/God's/ wrath, not Man's. What happened here was a group of guys, with no authority outside a whiskey bottle deciding to beat the crap out of a guy who was acting like a jerk. Jerk don't deserve to be punished beyond the normal censure they get from people not wanting to be friends with them. And /if/ there were a punishment to dole out, the Old Testament is pretty clear that it's God's to dole, not ours.
/means/ to say that God created the heavens and the host of them, or that God created man and woman.
:)
Sure.
The shift from wrath to forgiveness in the bible is a shift in God's actions not in ours. I just wanted to point that out.
That said, if you are a Christian you take the books of the New Testament to be just as important as those of the old and in at least one fairly important speech (some sort of impromptu speech Jesus kicked out from the top of a hill) it was said that though you've heard it said in older biblical works that you should take an eye for an eye, but Jesus, the new Mac Daddy of the oppressed and disregarded says that if you are struck on one cheek you should just turn the other to the striker. A pretty significant and clear message. One that more Christian's should pay attention to.
My disclaimer: My degree is in Religious Studies and I'm a Christian. I think Intelligent Design has hijacked a perfected good theological term and twisted it's meaning. I think Evolutionists have a pretty good running theory. I don't see any issue whatsoever with accepting the tenets of both science and religion as they seem to be trying to answer different questions. When they try to step on each other's toes, I get wary of the stepper. Science has nothing to add to the true study of religion, nor does religion have anything to offer to true science. A Rabbi, Iman, or Pastor is not qualified to tell you how the world was created, or when, only why and what it means relationally to its inhabitants. Likewise, a physicist, chemist, or botanist is not qualified to tell you what it really
OK, I just looked back and saw that I've moved from a small clarification of your point to standing on a soapbox of my own. Oh well. I'll end it here, I suppose.
The study went on to find that those individuals without this gene tend:
/without/ the gene are smarter. The gene has a negative corrolary to intelligence scoring.
;-)
- to respond to articles without reading them.
Note that those
But other than totally screwing up the gist of the article and making a snap comment that, in light of reality, makes no sense, the post was funny.
these are exactly the type of strategies that Microsoft used to get their desktop dominance.
/maintain/ dominance. To /get/ dominance, they did things like allow us to tweak the system (anyone else remember the joy of eeking another 3k on bootup in MSDOS?), being freindly to programmers (OSS will get no mainstream developers as long as they continue to beleive that Glade is the end-all-be-all GUI designer...Visual Studio has THE BEST in the biz. Deal with it), and all around nicer to their customers and programmers. After they got on top, they bent us over and screwed us square in the ass. Totally uncool.
Those are the things MS did to
But for the records, I really dif your idea of getting Firefox to read OpenOffice docs out of the box. A plugin for IE wouldn't be a bad thing either! I also think a stand alone converter is a great idea. If you are a developer, you should consider writing such a thing.
how is it allowable for a city government to basically destroy the market for local Internet access?
There exists no law or convention that forbids a government from entering a previously private market. Indeed, there exists a long history of the government taking control of markets that are deemed to be signifigant infrastructure points. That's why roads and schools are government owned and operated. That's why telecoms and power companies are so stringently leashed. Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for the government to start waking up to the fact that we rely HEAVILY on the Internet as an infrastructure. You can expect increasingly strong government involvement in the control and deployment of the Internet going forward. Really, I can't argue the logic. If the Internet goes black, we are all screwed at this point, just as if the power or telephone system goes black. Business relies on the Internet far too much to ignore it.
It does take away any motive to pay for Internet access, right?
It does, yes. But there will be a market for premium internet service. I mean, if the local municipal maintains a 512k up/down pipe to each home or a WiMax blanket over the city, there will still be people who are willing to pay for more bandwidth. In fact, most businesses would still HAVE to pay for higher bandwidth. A company with even a moderately consistent bandwidth usage would want and need a thicker pipe. Some home users would want it as well. For the rest, yes, they could get by just fine on the 512k they are handed for free. That will shrink the market, or more specifically, it will tier the market. I don't see that as a bad thing. There are many people now who can't afford their own food, and therefore obviously have no Internet access, yet those same families suffer generationally because without the advantage of the Internet, they are finding it increasingly difficult to academically compete with those who are online...which makes the next generation more likely to be in the same economically disadvantaged position. This helps alleviate that inequity.
how can they afford the infrastructure necessary to provide wi-fi in the first place?
Taxes. Yeah, poorer municipalities won't be able to do it for a while, but richer ones will enter quicker becuase they have a stronger tax base. Those early adopters, just as with any market, will drive the price down by economies of scale. This will allow the poorer localities to enter the market sooner. And yes, the answer no politician will give you is that it's your taxes that will pay for it. Deal. Our taxes pay for all sorts of stuff, and as the economy rises overall (this is what it does in the U.S.) we will be able to do more with less. At first, the burden will be noticable, but over time it will not. The costs will decline, the infrastructure will be in place, the system will be simplified. This is the way of progress. No big deal. Municipal Internet will seem like a pain to us the first few years as kinks are worked out and costs slowly lower, but inside a decade it will be considered blunderingly obvious that we should have done it sooner. Think of what can be done with a TRULY ubiquitous network that everyone in the U.S. can access at will from anywhere. The uses are mindblowingly numerous. This is one of those things that can be a sea change if we let it.
What is the main purpose of a city going through all the trouble and expense of offering free wi-fi? What is the benefit to the city as a whole?
There is no one reason. There are so many that the real question is why would the citizenry fight it? For a tourist town, the early adopters can tout it as a way to boost touring revenue. "Come lounge on our sandy shores and SMS your friends back home from the comfort of your beach chair" More tourists means more tax revenue means less tax bruden on the locals means WiMax pays for itself and then some early on. For a business town it means touting a way t
But seriously, why do people criticize Microsoft so much for requiring occasional reboots when a much simpler application, Firefox, requires a restart every time an extension is installed.
Because when I am asked to restart firefox I don't have to send a company-wide memo that all employees accessing server X will be unable to from 12:00AM to 12:05AM---assuming no problems otherwise it's 12:00AM to when the hell ever we figure out what went wrong on reboot of a production server.
But I agree that having the restart firefox is a pain when I'm just trying to surf the web.
B. The first President Bush was an ISTJ and thus an introvert.
And here I thought he was EVIL. Oh well, live and learn. (it's a joke...laugh dammit!)