I have worked in low-paid jobs, some as low as minimum wage. I still performed them well and ethically. There's no automatic connection between wage level and ethics (and maybe no connection at all?). Look at Ken Lay and his cronies. They were millionaires all, as well as scoundrels and thieves who ran Enron into the ground, shafting the regular employees, the stockholders, and the public.
Most people perform their jobs ethically, and among those who don't, I'd be surprised to find any significant link between salary level and ethical level.
(Note: I'm not claiming that most people at any given company perform their jobs ethically; it's possible for a company to attract and/or create bad apples under the sewage-runs-downhill theory, and I would be somewhat less than shocked if I were to learn that Best Buy were such a place. I'm just saying that if you look at workers as a whole, most perform their jobs ethically.)
The waffle-factor of his statement is astonishing. Not only does an average user not practice good device hygiene any more than they follow good email security practices, but he further qualifies it with "...would never see the software loaded..."
I'm sure they wouldn't. That doesn't mean it's not there, just means they'd never see it. This is an average user we're talking about.
IPL, now there's a word that conjures fond memories:-)
Throught the 1980s and into the early nineties I was a mainframer. They were predicting the imminent demise of the mainframe even then. I can't believe anyone is still predicting it now, but some people are just really thick:p
It's true that large amounts of commodity servers and smaller amounts of high-end Sun gear have taken over a good bit of what used to require a mainframe, but as others have said, the things that really need a mainframe *still* really need a mainframe.
And as others in this thread have said, an AS/400 ain't a mainframe. AS/400s are mini-computers (a term not so much in use anymore, but what IBM called them back in the day, and what things like MicroVAXes were also known as - dang, that reminds me how much I hate VAXes:p) AS/400s aren't even as big as a decent mainframe printer:)
I really liked the pizza when I worked there. The coffee was just nasty, though. I tried it two or three times, then always brought my own from home. I know they say the brew with Starbucks, but I don't know what they do to it to make it taste that way. Bury it in a composter for a week, maybe?:p
Hey, with Linux you get two standard GUIs, not just one, and a whole bunch of less standard ones, too. Such a deal
Seriously, though, if you want to develop a desktop Linux app, you can choose Gnome or you can choose KDE. Either one or the other of those is the out-of-the-box default on most distros, and even if it's not the default, a KDE app will still run on a Gnome system. If I'm running, say, Ubuntu and want to use Kmail for my mail client, installing Kmail will also cause any dependencies it has to be installed with it.
Conversely, if I'm using Kubuntu but want to use Evolution for my mail client, installing it will pull in its Gnome dependencies along with it.
So while the lack of a single standard GUI might appear to be a problem to some extent, it's not nearly as big a one as it appears, and has actually been more of an asset than a liability to Linux and other free platforms, since you can make it be however you want it to be. I have KDE set up to vear a striking resemblance to my Mac:)
But, if your goal is to sell proprietary software, I fully agree that OS X was a better choice, just because Linux users aren't used to paying for software and most of them don't want to use proprietary software if there is a Free alternative. I've been using Linux for ten years and in that time I have only ever bought one commercial Linux app: Atok for Linux, because it was way, way better than any [Ff]ree Japanese input method that was available in the late nineties. It was as good as its Mac and Linux counterparts, and it ran under (at least) Red Hat. But I wouldn't but it today.
Which brings me to the other reason why proprietary software for Linux is a hard sell, especially on the desktop: if you come out with something so good that Linux users will pay for it over the [Ff]ree alternatives and put up with the relative hassle of installing proprietary software (compared to, for example, doing an apt-get install on any package in the distro repositories and having it all Just Work), somebody will be out there working very heard to duplicate the feature set in a GPLed product. I don't know if Just Systems still actively develops Atok for Linux or not; the latest pages on it are dated from 2004. If they do, I bet they sell a lot less of it than they used to, because the GPLed alternatives have caught up. Scim + Anthy is a better than the Atok for Linux I bought in the late nineties. I wouldn't be surprised if it gives no quarter to the most current version of Atok, either.
So if you want to sell software for Linux, you're far better off with some server-side application that does one or both of the following:
-Occupies a niche significantly held by proprietary software, even on Linux -Doesn't occupy such a niche, but blows away every other product available, Free or not
Even then, you'd be constantly looking over your shoulder at the cloners. The landscape is littered with proprietary software for Linux, much of it later becoming a success under the GPL after failing as a proprietary product. If you want to sell software, by all means develop for OS X. I would. It's just too hard to make a sale to Linux users.
OK, that argument about the iPods looks like it holds a little water at first, but if you stand there for a minute, it turns out to be a sieve (disclosure: I have both a Mac and iPod; the Mac is company-issue and the iPod was a gift.
What makes it a sieve rather than a bucket is the fact the people are a lot freer to choose their MP3 player than they are to choose their OS. No computer comes with a bundled MP3 player (although I'm sure if Microsoft could find a way to force the major PC vendors to bundle Zunes, it would do it like a shot ). Whichever MP3 player you want, you have to go out and buy it (or someone does, if it's a gift). The MP3 player market was once a pretty level playing field. Then Apple came out with the iPod and the market said that it was good. Very good. It became the top-selling player, and I wouldn't be surprised if over half the players sold are some flavor of iPod. While the iPod line has a level of market dominance similar to that of the Windows product line, it doesn't have the level of lock-in that the Windows and Office product lines have.
If Apple crashed and burned with the next iPod and it sucked, people would stop buying it pretty quickly and their market share would go in the toilet. If somebody came out with a player that was as far above the iPod as the iPod is above everything else currently on the market, the iPod's market share would go in the toilet. Quickly. In that situation, people upgrading from an old iPod would probably buy the hot new player instead.
"What about all their existing songs?" you might ask. My entire iTunes library was ripped from my CD collection as high bit-rate MP3, so no problem. I just load it in the new player. If they bought a lot of stuff from the iTunes store, people would have to go to some greater effort and transcode the stuff to MP3 and burn it to a CD, then load it back in, or so. I haven't tried that, but where there's a DRM, there's always a way around it, too.
Finally, while the iPod is clearly the dominant player in the market, I can go down to Fry's and find a number of competing MP3 players on the shelves. If you walk over to the software section, you're not going to find nearly as much in the way of competing PC operating systems or software for them. If you find any at all, it will take up less than a shelf. Way less. (I'm excluding Mac here because it's also a competing hardware platform, not a PC OS.)
That said, I would agree that the iPod line could conceivably become a de facto monopoly just because it's so much better than everything else and has such a wide range of third-party accessories, and that the Windows line, while still a de facto monopoly, is much less of one that it used to be. It has real competition now and is starting to lose ground; ou couldn't say that 10 years ago when Microsoft was at the peak of its power.
I also completely agree with you about that "taking hold of their dreams" thing. I've been a Linux user and supporter for ten years, but that was embarassing.
Can't blame the editors. The claim regarding resistance to EMP is a direct quote from (the ad copy embedded in the middle of) TFA. Morever, what TFA has to say about the film and EMP is that it is "capable of minimizing radio interference and even...EMP." They don't say block it, they say minimize it. The effective frequency range of the film is 10 Hz. up to "just shy of visible light" so I'd say they at least have a shot at it.
Now, EMP is what, again? Oh, yeah, Electro-Magnetic Pulse. Put another way, a really, really strong blast of RF interference. Anything that can completely block cell phone and wifi signals will at least somewhat hold back EMP. TFA goes on to say that one of the things that makes the film so effective is that it's part of a completely package. The film is only one component of what you're buying. Sounds like they probably retrofit the building with some kind of Faraday cage-like gear.
EMP doesn't melt plastic, it fry's electronics. Well, if you were so close to the hypocenter that the EMP could melt a 2 mm plastic film on the window, that would be the least of your problems, because if you didn't get vaporized at about the same time, the shockwave that arrived shortly thereafter would blow you, the window, and maybe the wall to the other side of the room.
The EMP they are trying to guard against is the high air burst kind (think huge warhead detonated in LEO over the US east coast) which is intended to take down electrical grids, telephone networks, and as much of everything else electronic as it can. A lot of Soviet (and presumably now Russian) scenarios included such an air burst as an early shot. Get one of those in position undetected and detonate it and you're then in a position to do a couple of things, such as:
Get the other side on the hot line (if it still works, anyway) and tell them "We know we blew your comm capability and you have two minutes to decide to surrender or not
As soon as it detonates, launch a first strike to make sure. If you sufficiently damaged their command and control systems, they won't get many, if any, shots off before your warheads hit their ground-based nuclear assets at the same time your hunter-killer subs are engaging their boomers wherever they can find them
If you have your buildings protected to the best possible extent by EMP shielding such as that stuff, it might allow you to launch in such a scenario before the other side does. You'd pretty much have to, because the EMP would fry the recon sats that would normally tell you if they were launching or not. You'd have to assume they were.
No, you might not have been in a position to start 'bucking your employment over a political cause' but it sure sounds like you were a victim of political oppression
I'm as anti-Microsoft as anybody (well, as most people). However, being anti-Microsoft is not a political affiliation. For some, it's personal. For some, it's business. For some, it's religious. For some, it's >= 2 of those. Some people are so pro-Microsoft they bleed blue when they cut themselves. But no matter where you fall on that spectrum, Microsoft is not a political party. It's a company. A big, anti-competitive company with a big patent portfolio, but a company nonetheless (the market leader with a big patent portfolio is always anti-competitive, though; some people here are doubtless familiar with the refrain "I BM, You BM, we all BM for IBM" and the word to the wise that "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." When IBM was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the computer business, they were at least as anti-competitive as Microsoft, and they invented FUD).
Now, if he were put under pressure for being a Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Communist, Nazi, or whatever, that would be political, and he might have a case (IANAL). However, the situation was that his employer was a direct partner of Microsoft and they felt that his running an anti-MS site cast them in a bad light with Microsoft. Did MS put pressure on them, that his site was problematic and it could have financial repercussions if he kept at it? We'll never know, but I'd be very surprised if they didn't. Does that suck? Yes. Is it fair? Maybe. Maybe not. If we look at things from management's point of view, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make money, and are answerable to the board if they fail. If an employee's anti-MS site is going to make them fail to make money, or at least as much money, they are going to request that he make a choice between running the site or working there. They pretty much have to.
Now, I could probably run an anti-MS site and even if my employer were to become aware of it, I doubt that would be a problem. However, you never know how a site might snowball out of control and become a lightning rod, or where you might want to work in the future where it might be an issue. I have a family to support, and my obligation to my wife and kids outweighs any obligation that I may or may not have (just for the record, I have none), to publicly oppose Microsoft. But, I do other things. I have a Mac. I have an iPod, not a Zune. I run Linux and FreeBSD on several machines. My kids' computers are Linux boxes. I work for a Microsoft competitor. I subscribe to a couple of Linux magazines. If people ask me for computer advice, I steer them toward Mac or Linux, whichever I think might be best for them. And not just to be anti-MS, but because I consider the Mac platform to be better than Windows at pretty much everything, and the better Linux distros to be better than Windows at most things (and gaining ground all the time; it took about five years to grind out Vista; if they take five years to grind out the successor to Vista, will anyone still want it? Apple on one side and Linux on the other will eat their desktop lunch in those five years.
So, I think you should cut the showusthecode.com guy some slack. You're not walking in his shoes and don't have his obligations. Or if you do have his obligations and would put hatred of Microsoft ahead of your family, I think now would be a good time to reassess your priorities. He did what he could, which was to call attention to the issue, and later he voted with his feet and left that employer. If he's still not in a position to run that site and others have to pick up the torch now, I have nothing to criticize him for. He's done more than me, and I'd be very, very surprised if he hasn't done more than you. You sound like you're nothing but a mouth, without even the guts to post logged in.
YMMV, of course, but my own experience has been that the only company that even cared about my degree was my first post-college employer, and they didn't seem to care about my GPA (it was good - almost made honors - but they didn't even ask about my grades), just that I had a degree. They didn't seem to care that it was from a reasonably good school, either. The only thing that seemed to matter was that I had one. No employer after that has even seemed to care much whether I even had a degree or not, it was all about what I could do.
That isn't to say there weren't advertised jobs that specifically mentioned a degree; the funny thing is, no place that required a bachelor's degree ever called me, while almost every place that didn't say anything about degrees called, and almost all of those offered me a job. What do I draw from this? That places that don't place much emphasis on your degree have more clue than places that do. If what a prospective employer cares about is who you are and what you can do, it's much more likely to be a satisfying experience than if they're too hung up on the paper. Having direct experience as a hiring manager myself, I'm not likely to care much about the degree, or even if you have one, unless I'm looking for PHD-level candidates. Heck, the best programmer I ever hired had neither a degree nor formal training in CS. He was a self-taught natural, and I knew what I was looking at when I interviewed him. And he was young, too. If he'd gone to college he would've still been there instead of interviewing with me.
That said, what kind of company you're interested in is going to matter a lot in your decision. If you're looking to join a large, well-established company, they're more likely to care about your degree, and what your GPA was. If start-ups are what float your boat (that's where I've spent the last five years), they're much less likely to care about your GPA, or even your degree, b/c they're not using an HR buzzword formula to see whose resume even gets passed on to the hiring manager. However, if you get an interview, be prepared to code on the whiteboard, or they may hand you a laptop in the interview and ask you to do something there. That happened with my current job. One of my interviewers walked in with a laptop, sshed into one of the dev hosts and asked me to do some stuff.
So, if your goal is ${big_famous_company}, consider staying on for the extra time and boosting your grades. If small companies or startups are your interest, maybe just go for it.
One other thing to consider is the opportunity cost. Figure out roughly what you would make in your first two years out of college if you just go ahead and graduate with the grades you have. Then figure what you'd get if you stay in a year or two and get better grades. The opportunity cost is what you would make if you graduated now minus the add-on you would get if you stayed in for a year or two. In concrete terms, if your first job paid $35K right now and $37K in the second year, Vs. if you wait two years and get a job that pays $40K in the first year and $45K in the second, the opportunity cost is $72K - $13K = $59K.
I think the opportunity cost calculation is a pretty good metric, because no employer beyond your first post-college employer is likely to care about your grades at all, so whether you graduated with a C-average or Summa Cum Laude is unlikely to make much difference in your second job.
WRT point 5, what the bill outlaws is "to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller ID information." If a company has its PBX configured so that it sends a salesperson's name rather than the company's name when she makes a call, I think a lawyer would have no problem deflecting an attempt to prosecute. After all, the name displayed *was* the name of the person making the call, so none of the information was false or misleading.
For the person who wondered if having his caller ID say "Harry Potter" could get him in trouble, it sounds like it could, although in practical terms I think someone would have to actually complain about that for him to get in trouble. I think how this law will be used in practice is for "piling on" charges when arresting scammers on other charges. The more you can charge them with, the more expensive it is for them to defend it and the more jail time and fines you can get on them.
Still, as others have suggested, I believe congress is approaching this from the wrong angle. It is certainly possible for the Telcos to solve this problem by preventing spoofing in the first place, but they don't because they have no incentive to do so. They also have some disincentive to do so: there are people who want to spoof, for good reasons or bad, and these people are telco customers. If the major telcos all blocked spoofing, they'd take their business to someone who didn't. However, congress can give telcos incentive to block spoofing by requiring them to do so and levying hefty fines if they don't.
They'll whine, sure. Companies that don't want to do something always whine. Look at the auto industry. Going back to the first legislation requiring emission controls, and later, CAFE imposing mileage standards, there was much lobbying, whining, wringing of hands, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and protestations that it was too difficult, to expensive, or both. Yet, lo and behold, they've done a pretty fine job of meeting these requirements. In doing so, they illustrated very well the difference between "can't' and "don't want to." The telcos would be no different. They'd gripe about it, but they'd get it done.
I suspect this is the case. Among power users, my engineering dept. may or not be typical. There are 100 or so people in engineering, the majority of whom (including myself) are using Macs. FreeBSD is number 2, and Windows a distant 3rd. Mac seems to be gaining further ground, as almost everyone who is eligible for a hardware upgrade chooses a Mac, even if they had something else before (mostly Windows users; BSD users seem less likely to switch).
I use Dock-on-Bottom w/auto-hide; this seems about even with Dock-on-Left auto-hide, and most people seem to use Dock-on-Bottom without auto-hide. If even most power users are using the default, it would be really unusual for most average users to be different.
You sound like a person who doesn't live in the areas you're suggesting we have so much land, and doesn't know much about the other issues, either. I think immigration is great. My wife is an immigrant (and non-white, thank you, so don't even think of trying to pull a race card). Speaking of which, the years of effort it took to get her green card when I returned from my years of living abroad, as well as the 18 months of living apart that the process required, leaves me with little sympathy for people who can't follow the rules.
WRT our nation being a nation of immigrants, that is correct. I, myself, am a descendant of immigrants. Legal immigrants. Maybe you are, too. That's no argument for illegal immigration.
The 12-20 million illegals currently in the country is well beyond our carrying capacity. Have you ever visited a California school? The burden placed on our school system here by illegals is huge, and is lowering the quality of education for everyone? The number reason California schools are doing so badly? Illegal aliens. Not immigrants, aliens. An immigrant is legal by definition, and people dignifying them by calling them illegal aliens are deliberately obscuring the issue.
Do we need to raise immigration quotas? Yes, I think so. But not for people from the bottom of the heap, who come here and displace our own poor from their jobs. It is in our own national and economic interest to recruit mostly from the top of the stack, not from the bottom. For example, I have a colleague who came here to get his master's degree. Having completed that, he has a year during which he can work. At the end of that time, he'll probably have to go back to his country. That's not unjust - it's what the terms of his visa spelled out in advance, no problem - but it would be in our national interest to give him a green card and let him stay. He's very smart, well-educated, fits in well with our culture, multi-lingual, etc. He would be a net gain for our society.
Taking in 12 - 20 million of the poor, on the other hand, isn't. It's well-documented that the poor consume more social services than they consume, in a liberal-socialist democracy such as ours, Canada's, our western Europe's (granted, it's worse in those other places). That's fine for our own poor; they are Americans and have a right to whatever we as a country have decided to do to help our poor. However, the poor of are not our problem; they are that country's problem. Should we help them out with solving the problem, if they really want to do it. Yes, absolutely. But that obligation does not extend to solving the problem by offloading their poor into our country. 10%, give or take, of Mexicans are now in the US. You can bet it's not the richest 10%.
The fundamental problems with illegal immigration - apart from being illegal - is that it harms our own poor, and the current volume is well beyond our carrying capacity to absorb poor immigrants. Should we have larger quotas? Yes, I think so. Should some of them be for poor immigrants? Yes, I think so. But not so many they displace our own poor from jobs by driving down wages until the jobs become ones that Americans won't do. Would this result in higher food prices if growers had to pay Americans to do farm work? Probably. I'm fine with that. It's called taking care of our own.
So where do we start? Step one - secure the border. Lock it down so tight a bug would have trouble getting across without being caught. Once that's done, I'd be happy to talk about immigration reform. Next step: work really hard to get the criminal illegals out - those who come here to commit crimes or have a criminal record back home. Having a felony conviction is normally a bar to immigration. We shouldn't be making exceptions to that under the name of immgration reform. Period.
What do we do with the ones who snuck in here? The 12-20 million? They can apply for a visa, but they have to get out first.
And one more thing: the law regarding citizenship needs to be brought into line with intern
Is this really the same Sweden that hosts Pirate Bay? Something seems really wrong with this picture: PB can thumbs its nose/flip the bird/gesture of your choice at copyright, and pretty much get away with it, because of Swedish law. And they're looking at prosecuting someone because of a comment posted on his blog site by someone else? Whether you think PB is doing anything wrong or not, there's something rotten in s/Denmark/Sweden/ if the law there says PB is OK but a blogger is criminally liable for anything unsavory posted on his blog by a third party.
Laser is absolutely the way to go. My side-gig (real estate) is one that uses an astonishing amount of paper, and I would highly recommend a laser all-in-one to anyone whose printing needs are high enough that the cost of ink is killing them. The high up-front cost of the laser will be recovered soon enough by low per-page costs.
Or if they're like you, and the cartridges dry up. I've found that HP are very good about not drying up, but Lexmark/Dell is terrible. Someone gave my wife a free Dell all-in-one after getting a new one. It needed cartridges and seemed like a good one for her to use as a spare at home. A few months of very light user later, the cartridges have both dried up. I think I now have a pretty good idea of why the previous owner upgraded (to a different brand) and why this nearly-new Dell all-in-one was given away for free:p
Congratulations, that's the best change of topic I've seen all day. Whether there would be a nuclear winter or not has nothing to do with who would come out worst in the exchange. But since we're on the topic, nuclear winter is pretty debatable. Modern nuclear weapons don't produce a lot of fallout and are mostly set as airbursts that wouldn't kick up all that much dust. The economic chaos caused by a nuclear exchange between any of Chinak, Russia, and the United States would most likely be a far worse problem than whatever level of global cooling might or might not happen from that exchange. The world economy would be screwed if the exchange were between China and Russia and completely shattered if it were between China and the US.
Fortunately, that's not very likely to happen. The Middle East is the place most likely to have a nuclear exchange. It would be smaller, but still pretty bad for the global economy. We'd better get drilling more in Alaska and California and anywhere else we've got oil, so when the Iranians get nukes and the Israelis vaporize them in self-defense, we'll still have enough oil to get along on until we're really up to speed on non-oil energy sources.
But I digress. Nuclear winter or no nuclear winter, anyone who thinks the Chinese couldn't tell the difference on radar between a high-altitude spy plane and a re-entering MIRV is still a tool:)
Whether or not it would be allowed to happen is another question altogether. But if it did happen, China would come out on the worst end of it. They have enough nuclear capacity to act as an effective deterrent, but not enough to make an offensive attack and succeed.
Fortunately, the major nuclear powers have reached a point where they are all pretty against having war with each other. Unfortunately, we have guys like Ahmahdinejad in Iran, steadfastly denying the Holocaust while at the same time working their butts off to make deliverable nuclear weapons as part of their planning for the next Holocaust.
While that is unlikely to trigger a confrontation between the major nuclear powers, it is likely to trigger an Iranian attempt to nuke Israel, and whether it's successful or not, retaliation in kind by the Israelis. I think there is no doubt that the Israel response would be successful and devastating. Sometime between now and when Iran can actually build nuclear weapons, that building needs to be prevented. By peaceful means if possible, but by any means necessary if peaceful means don't work.
That was the point (although China Vs. the US or Russia in a nuclear shootout would not result in MAD, it would results in the US or Russia being mauled and China being utterly destroyed), but the AC was a complete tool, and so were those who modded him Insightful. The only kind of missile with a similar flight trajectory would be operating at a much lower altitude - say, 50 - 100 feet - and at subsonic speeds.
An ICBM, unlike a cruise missile or an SR-71, has a very steep angle of ascent, and comes down pretty steeply, too, doesn't have much of a heat signature on the way down, and since most (or all?) of those held by the US and Russia have MIRV warheads, the things coming down will also be far, far smaller than an aircraft. A spy plane looks nothing like a missile on radar.
That is indeed an interesting stat, thanks for posting that. I think a reasonable conclusion we can draw here is that Windows power users are overwhelmingly more likely to chuck IE and use Firefox.
I'm a Mac and Linux (KDE) user and I chucked Safari on Mac and Konqueror on KDE and use Firefox instead, and both of those are better than IE in most respects, so I know where those Windows users are coming from.
Why did I chuck Safari? It doesn't (in my experience) render quite as well as Firefox, but it's mostly about control. Through a few choice plug-ins like Noscript, plus FF's better control of cookies, my security control is much more fine-grained than it is in Safari. And the amount of nice plug-ins for FF seems to soundly best Safari, too.
Why did I chuck Konqueror? I like it in a lot of ways: it's very fast, and it has the most fine-grained out of the box security controls I've seen on any browser. However, I went with FF because its rendering is now quite a bit better than Konqueror's, and through the use of plug-ins I can get control over security that's almost as fine-grained as that of Konqueror, and more convenient (I can't overstate how good Noscript is). Add to that the huge amount of plug-ins available for FF and it turned even this KDE user into a Firefox user in KDE.
And if I weren't already settled on FF as my all-platform browser, the Google Browser Sync plug-in that I just discovered for FF would have been the tipping point. I can sync everything - browsing history, bookmarks, cookies, the lot - between my MacBook Pro, my Linus desktop, and the one Windows system we have in our house (I don't use it much, it's mostly my wife's Yahoo Messenger machine, but once in a while). FF is a good browser, and the great array of great plug-ins for it make it IMO the best browser available.
Since someone will probably jump in here and mention Opera, I'll address that, too. I try Opera about once a year just to see what's new, but since it's inception, the UI of Opera has just bugged me. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Opera - it's a fine browser, and it's the fastest one I've ever used, easily - but UI is a matter of taste and Opera just doesn't suit my taste and likely never will. But if it works for others, cool. I encourage its use if it's what works for you.
Last comment first, "therefore stopping the development of Linux in general" is overbroad to the point of being not even remotely accurate. I've been using Linux for ten years, and as anyone who has been doing so (or even five years) can attest, a very great deal of development of Linux in general has happened during that time, both at the kernel level and at the application level.
Are there a lot of games for Linux? No. Or commercial applications in general for Linux? No. The reasons why have very little to do with the GPL, however, and a very great deal to do with economics. The fact is, it's really hard to sell proprietary software for Linux, especially in the user application space. Take a look at the proprietary software for Linux market; it's mostly stuff aimed at developers and other IT professionals. Take a look at the failed commercial Linux applications for end users, such as . All end-user stuff. The stuff aimed at professionals is either occupying some small (and maybe difficult) niche, or is so much better than any Free solution in its space that some people are willing to pay for it.
Why is it so hard to sell proprietary software to Linux users? First of all, we are predisposed to not use proprietary software on Linux. It just bothers most of us. Second, for most proprietary apps that you might want to sell on Linux, there are typically one or more Free ones that will be almost as good, just as good, or maybe even better than your proprietary one. This means that even for the percentage of Linux users who might need or want your proprietary product, most of them are going to find a Free alternative that meets their needs well enough to keep them from buying yours.
Finally, even if there is no free alternative that can hold a candle to your proprietary product, there will be. If it's actually popular (or maybe even if its not), at least one Free product in the same space will meet or exceed its features after a while, leaving people with no reason to continue buying it. This may eventually happen to even the successful (if small) categories of proprietary software for Linux that I mention above.
One of the few areas where this doesn't hold very well is gaming. With games, the main issue is purely one of sales volume and potential profit. I know there are other issues, such as hardware-accelerated 3D, but volume is the big one. Being cloned by a Free product is not much of a worry; making a play-alike game and doing it well is difficult and time consuming, and by the time someone got it done, you'd already have your next new game out. It's really just economics.
Let's say you write a fantastic FPS that is way ahead of any other FPS on the market. The game play, the graphics, the sound, the weapons, the story, everything kills (so to speak) the competition. However, you decide to write it for Linux, and it's so good, so amazing, that every Linux user who likes the FPS genre goes out and buys it, and buys a suitable video card with good accelerated 3D support if (s)he doesn't already have one, just to play your game.
Just one little problem: you've sold your game to probably fewer people than if 1% of Windows users who like FPS games were to buy it. You do the math and realize that even though you'd rather do the game on Linux, if you want to be able to afford some cool games of your own and some cool hardware to run them on, you'd better write it for Windows, and maybe do a Linux port later as a labor of love. This is, by the way, the reason that there aren't so many Mac games, either (not to knock Macs; I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro and love Macs, it's just economics). Macs have decent accelerated 3D support, but again, if every Mac user who likes FPS games buys a given title, that's still not very many people compared to what you could sell in the Windows market.
That's why there's not much proprietary development for Linux, in the game space or any other space. The GPL, although no doubt designed and intended to make
I usually don't bother replying to AC posts, but I need to comment on this.
While I do not claim to be in a position to definitely answer the question, "Does Microsoft have any misappropriated code anywhere in any of its products?" I am a former Microsoft employee (but not a Microsoft apologist; I didn't much care for it there, would not work there again, and am a Linux and Mac user, not a Windows user), and I would be pretty surprised if there is an misappropriated code.
To know why I think so, you have to understand that Microsoft lives in fear of the GPL. LCA (Legal and Corporate Affairs) has very strict rules about touching open source code, and Microsoft developers are not supposed to even download or look at code under the GPL or similar licenses, not even on their own time, for fear of liability if any similar-looking code should subsequently get into any MSFT product. They are very serious about that. I'm sure anyone caught incorporating anything under a GPL-like license into a Microsoft product would be escorted to the door by security.
Microsoft may be guilty of a multitude of sins, but I'm quite sure that secretly using GPLed code is not among them. Both its fear and loathing of the GPL and the potential losses - in terms of face and code, as well as money - should it be caught doing so are simply to great.
Microsoft has another option here: modify the EULA going forward (and retroactively, if they can get away with it; EULAs tend to let you do almost anything, at least if you're the vendor) banning third-party patches to any Microsoft product.
Once that's in place, if there's a big vulnerability and they try to put a fix out and patent it, MSFT pounds them over the head with the DMCA, sends a C&D for violation of the EULA, and anything else they can come up with.
No matter how sovereign you are, you can't charge a levy on airspace. Down here along the southern border of the United States, there are a lot of Mexican radio stations that broadcast into the United States. Some in English, some in Spanish. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't collect a toll on the radio waves for travceling through US airspace, things just don't work that way.
Plus, there are are few things they need to consider:
1) Will cell phone companies just route their towers somewhere else (a one-time sunk cost) to avoid the running cost of a levy, should this action be successful? Quite possibly. Businesses will make one-time expenditures that that improve their cash flow.
2) If they're really pissed, will they remove any towers that provide service to the reservations? Probably not, but who knows? Make people mad enough and they might.
3) How much money is really going to be in this? If the demographics support it, they might want to consider casinos instead. It's worked out well for them here in the US, and I know some people in Winnipeg who I think would go.
4) Canadian law may differ on this point, of course, but most nations hold that the airspace is the property of the national government and only of the national government, regardless of what other sovereignty indigenous groups may have.
1) A booming economy, brought about in part by Republican-sponsored tax cuts
2) A House and Senate both controlled by the opposition, which forced him to do things that he otherwise would not be inclined to do, such as be relatively fiscally responsible.
That last one, especially, was key. Clinton would have been a flop as president if not for a hostile congress. Even with one, he still wasn't very good. The current Bush would be a flop as president with out an external enemy. Even with one, he's still not very good in most areas. His one saving grace is that he's a relatively effective war leader. I say relatively because while he has shown he has the moxie to take the fight to the enemy, he doesn't have the moxie (or the correct advice, maybe) to take the fight to the enemy in the way that FDR, and Truman after him, did. That is the kind of war leader we really need.
That said, you're mostly right about Republicans and fiscal conservatism. The only thing almost as bad as a Democrat is a typical Republican:(
I live in California, and the governator may call himself a Republican, but he acts far more like a Democrat. Liberal Republicans are nearly indistinguishable from Democrats. I've had it with both of them.
Among the current crop of candidates, I have no real confidence that any of them are cut from that bolt of cloth, with the possible exception of Rudy G.
Slashdot Mirror
I have worked in low-paid jobs, some as low as minimum wage. I still performed them well and ethically. There's no automatic connection between wage level and ethics (and maybe no connection at all?). Look at Ken Lay and his cronies. They were millionaires all, as well as scoundrels and thieves who ran Enron into the ground, shafting the regular employees, the stockholders, and the public.
Most people perform their jobs ethically, and among those who don't, I'd be surprised to find any significant link between salary level and ethical level.
(Note: I'm not claiming that most people at any given company perform their jobs ethically; it's possible for a company to attract and/or create bad apples under the sewage-runs-downhill theory, and I would be somewhat less than shocked if I were to learn that Best Buy were such a place. I'm just saying that if you look at workers as a whole, most perform their jobs ethically.)
The waffle-factor of his statement is astonishing. Not only does an average user not practice good device hygiene any more than they follow good email security practices, but he further qualifies it with "...would never see the software loaded..."
I'm sure they wouldn't. That doesn't mean it's not there, just means they'd never see it. This is an average user we're talking about.
IPL, now there's a word that conjures fond memories :-)
:p
:p) AS/400s aren't even as big as a decent mainframe printer :)
Throught the 1980s and into the early nineties I was a mainframer. They were predicting the imminent demise of the mainframe even then. I can't believe anyone is still predicting it now, but some people are just really thick
It's true that large amounts of commodity servers and smaller amounts of high-end Sun gear have taken over a good bit of what used to require a mainframe, but as others have said, the things that really need a mainframe *still* really need a mainframe.
And as others in this thread have said, an AS/400 ain't a mainframe. AS/400s are mini-computers (a term not so much in use anymore, but what IBM called them back in the day, and what things like MicroVAXes were also known as - dang, that reminds me how much I hate VAXes
I really liked the pizza when I worked there. The coffee was just nasty, though. I tried it two or three times, then always brought my own from home. I know they say the brew with Starbucks, but I don't know what they do to it to make it taste that way. Bury it in a composter for a week, maybe? :p
Hey, with Linux you get two standard GUIs, not just one, and a whole bunch of less standard ones, too. Such a deal
:)
Seriously, though, if you want to develop a desktop Linux app, you can choose Gnome or you can choose KDE. Either one or the other of those is the out-of-the-box default on most distros, and even if it's not the default, a KDE app will still run on a Gnome system. If I'm running, say, Ubuntu and want to use Kmail for my mail client, installing Kmail will also cause any dependencies it has to be installed with it.
Conversely, if I'm using Kubuntu but want to use Evolution for my mail client, installing it will pull in its Gnome dependencies along with it.
So while the lack of a single standard GUI might appear to be a problem to some extent, it's not nearly as big a one as it appears, and has actually been more of an asset than a liability to Linux and other free platforms, since you can make it be however you want it to be. I have KDE set up to vear a striking resemblance to my Mac
But, if your goal is to sell proprietary software, I fully agree that OS X was a better choice, just because Linux users aren't used to paying for software and most of them don't want to use proprietary software if there is a Free alternative. I've been using Linux for ten years and in that time I have only ever bought one commercial Linux app: Atok for Linux, because it was way, way better than any [Ff]ree Japanese input method that was available in the late nineties. It was as good as its Mac and Linux counterparts, and it ran under (at least) Red Hat. But I wouldn't but it today.
Which brings me to the other reason why proprietary software for Linux is a hard sell, especially on the desktop: if you come out with something so good that Linux users will pay for it over the [Ff]ree alternatives and put up with the relative hassle of installing proprietary software (compared to, for example, doing an apt-get install on any package in the distro repositories and having it all Just Work), somebody will be out there working very heard to duplicate the feature set in a GPLed product. I don't know if Just Systems still actively develops Atok for Linux or not; the latest pages on it are dated from 2004. If they do, I bet they sell a lot less of it than they used to, because the GPLed alternatives have caught up. Scim + Anthy is a better than the Atok for Linux I bought in the late nineties. I wouldn't be surprised if it gives no quarter to the most current version of Atok, either.
So if you want to sell software for Linux, you're far better off with some server-side application that does one or both of the following:
-Occupies a niche significantly held by proprietary software, even on Linux
-Doesn't occupy such a niche, but blows away every other product available, Free or not
Even then, you'd be constantly looking over your shoulder at the cloners. The landscape is littered with proprietary software for Linux, much of it later becoming a success under the GPL after failing as a proprietary product. If you want to sell software, by all means develop for OS X. I would. It's just too hard to make a sale to Linux users.
OK, that argument about the iPods looks like it holds a little water at first, but if you stand there for a minute, it turns out to be a sieve (disclosure: I have both a Mac and iPod; the Mac is company-issue and the iPod was a gift.
What makes it a sieve rather than a bucket is the fact the people are a lot freer to choose their MP3 player than they are to choose their OS. No computer comes with a bundled MP3 player (although I'm sure if Microsoft could find a way to force the major PC vendors to bundle Zunes, it would do it like a shot ). Whichever MP3 player you want, you have to go out and buy it (or someone does, if it's a gift). The MP3 player market was once a pretty level playing field. Then Apple came out with the iPod and the market said that it was good. Very good. It became the top-selling player, and I wouldn't be surprised if over half the players sold are some flavor of iPod. While the iPod line has a level of market dominance similar to that of the Windows product line, it doesn't have the level of lock-in that the Windows and Office product lines have.
If Apple crashed and burned with the next iPod and it sucked, people would stop buying it pretty quickly and their market share would go in the toilet. If somebody came out with a player that was as far above the iPod as the iPod is above everything else currently on the market, the iPod's market share would go in the toilet. Quickly. In that situation, people upgrading from an old iPod would probably buy the hot new player instead.
"What about all their existing songs?" you might ask. My entire iTunes library was ripped from my CD collection as high bit-rate MP3, so no problem. I just load it in the new player. If they bought a lot of stuff from the iTunes store, people would have to go to some greater effort and transcode the stuff to MP3 and burn it to a CD, then load it back in, or so. I haven't tried that, but where there's a DRM, there's always a way around it, too.
Finally, while the iPod is clearly the dominant player in the market, I can go down to Fry's and find a number of competing MP3 players on the shelves. If you walk over to the software section, you're not going to find nearly as much in the way of competing PC operating systems or software for them. If you find any at all, it will take up less than a shelf. Way less. (I'm excluding Mac here because it's also a competing hardware platform, not a PC OS.)
That said, I would agree that the iPod line could conceivably become a de facto monopoly just because it's so much better than everything else and has such a wide range of third-party accessories, and that the Windows line, while still a de facto monopoly, is much less of one that it used to be. It has real competition now and is starting to lose ground; ou couldn't say that 10 years ago when Microsoft was at the peak of its power.
I also completely agree with you about that "taking hold of their dreams" thing. I've been a Linux user and supporter for ten years, but that was embarassing.
I used to work at Microsoft, too. All I can say is that having an @exmsft.com instead of an @microsoft.com email address is a wonderful thing :-)
RTFA, it's a film of plastic with metal in it. A mostly transparent Faraday cage for your window.
Can't blame the editors. The claim regarding resistance to EMP is a direct quote from (the ad copy embedded in the middle of) TFA. Morever, what TFA has to say about the film and EMP is that it is "capable of minimizing radio interference and even...EMP." They don't say block it, they say minimize it. The effective frequency range of the film is 10 Hz. up to "just shy of visible light" so I'd say they at least have a shot at it.
Now, EMP is what, again? Oh, yeah, Electro-Magnetic Pulse. Put another way, a really, really strong blast of RF interference. Anything that can completely block cell phone and wifi signals will at least somewhat hold back EMP. TFA goes on to say that one of the things that makes the film so effective is that it's part of a completely package. The film is only one component of what you're buying. Sounds like they probably retrofit the building with some kind of Faraday cage-like gear.
EMP doesn't melt plastic, it fry's electronics. Well, if you were so close to the hypocenter that the EMP could melt a 2 mm plastic film on the window, that would be the least of your problems, because if you didn't get vaporized at about the same time, the shockwave that arrived shortly thereafter would blow you, the window, and maybe the wall to the other side of the room.
The EMP they are trying to guard against is the high air burst kind (think huge warhead detonated in LEO over the US east coast) which is intended to take down electrical grids, telephone networks, and as much of everything else electronic as it can. A lot of Soviet (and presumably now Russian) scenarios included such an air burst as an early shot. Get one of those in position undetected and detonate it and you're then in a position to do a couple of things, such as:
If you have your buildings protected to the best possible extent by EMP shielding such as that stuff, it might allow you to launch in such a scenario before the other side does. You'd pretty much have to, because the EMP would fry the recon sats that would normally tell you if they were launching or not. You'd have to assume they were.
You must be a student.
No, you might not have been in a position to start 'bucking your employment over a political cause' but it sure sounds like you were a victim of political oppression
I'm as anti-Microsoft as anybody (well, as most people). However, being anti-Microsoft is not a political affiliation. For some, it's personal. For some, it's business. For some, it's religious. For some, it's >= 2 of those. Some people are so pro-Microsoft they bleed blue when they cut themselves. But no matter where you fall on that spectrum, Microsoft is not a political party. It's a company. A big, anti-competitive company with a big patent portfolio, but a company nonetheless (the market leader with a big patent portfolio is always anti-competitive, though; some people here are doubtless familiar with the refrain "I BM, You BM, we all BM for IBM" and the word to the wise that "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." When IBM was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the computer business, they were at least as anti-competitive as Microsoft, and they invented FUD).
Now, if he were put under pressure for being a Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Communist, Nazi, or whatever, that would be political, and he might have a case (IANAL). However, the situation was that his employer was a direct partner of Microsoft and they felt that his running an anti-MS site cast them in a bad light with Microsoft. Did MS put pressure on them, that his site was problematic and it could have financial repercussions if he kept at it? We'll never know, but I'd be very surprised if they didn't. Does that suck? Yes. Is it fair? Maybe. Maybe not. If we look at things from management's point of view, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make money, and are answerable to the board if they fail. If an employee's anti-MS site is going to make them fail to make money, or at least as much money, they are going to request that he make a choice between running the site or working there. They pretty much have to.
Now, I could probably run an anti-MS site and even if my employer were to become aware of it, I doubt that would be a problem. However, you never know how a site might snowball out of control and become a lightning rod, or where you might want to work in the future where it might be an issue. I have a family to support, and my obligation to my wife and kids outweighs any obligation that I may or may not have (just for the record, I have none), to publicly oppose Microsoft. But, I do other things. I have a Mac. I have an iPod, not a Zune. I run Linux and FreeBSD on several machines. My kids' computers are Linux boxes. I work for a Microsoft competitor. I subscribe to a couple of Linux magazines. If people ask me for computer advice, I steer them toward Mac or Linux, whichever I think might be best for them. And not just to be anti-MS, but because I consider the Mac platform to be better than Windows at pretty much everything, and the better Linux distros to be better than Windows at most things (and gaining ground all the time; it took about five years to grind out Vista; if they take five years to grind out the successor to Vista, will anyone still want it? Apple on one side and Linux on the other will eat their desktop lunch in those five years.
So, I think you should cut the showusthecode.com guy some slack. You're not walking in his shoes and don't have his obligations. Or if you do have his obligations and would put hatred of Microsoft ahead of your family, I think now would be a good time to reassess your priorities. He did what he could, which was to call attention to the issue, and later he voted with his feet and left that employer. If he's still not in a position to run that site and others have to pick up the torch now, I have nothing to criticize him for. He's done more than me, and I'd be very, very surprised if he hasn't done more than you. You sound like you're nothing but a mouth, without even the guts to post logged in.
YMMV, of course, but my own experience has been that the only company that even cared about my degree was my first post-college employer, and they didn't seem to care about my GPA (it was good - almost made honors - but they didn't even ask about my grades), just that I had a degree. They didn't seem to care that it was from a reasonably good school, either. The only thing that seemed to matter was that I had one. No employer after that has even seemed to care much whether I even had a degree or not, it was all about what I could do.
That isn't to say there weren't advertised jobs that specifically mentioned a degree; the funny thing is, no place that required a bachelor's degree ever called me, while almost every place that didn't say anything about degrees called, and almost all of those offered me a job. What do I draw from this? That places that don't place much emphasis on your degree have more clue than places that do. If what a prospective employer cares about is who you are and what you can do, it's much more likely to be a satisfying experience than if they're too hung up on the paper. Having direct experience as a hiring manager myself, I'm not likely to care much about the degree, or even if you have one, unless I'm looking for PHD-level candidates. Heck, the best programmer I ever hired had neither a degree nor formal training in CS. He was a self-taught natural, and I knew what I was looking at when I interviewed him. And he was young, too. If he'd gone to college he would've still been there instead of interviewing with me.
That said, what kind of company you're interested in is going to matter a lot in your decision. If you're looking to join a large, well-established company, they're more likely to care about your degree, and what your GPA was. If start-ups are what float your boat (that's where I've spent the last five years), they're much less likely to care about your GPA, or even your degree, b/c they're not using an HR buzzword formula to see whose resume even gets passed on to the hiring manager. However, if you get an interview, be prepared to code on the whiteboard, or they may hand you a laptop in the interview and ask you to do something there. That happened with my current job. One of my interviewers walked in with a laptop, sshed into one of the dev hosts and asked me to do some stuff.
So, if your goal is ${big_famous_company}, consider staying on for the extra time and boosting your grades. If small companies or startups are your interest, maybe just go for it.
One other thing to consider is the opportunity cost. Figure out roughly what you would make in your first two years out of college if you just go ahead and graduate with the grades you have. Then figure what you'd get if you stay in a year or two and get better grades. The opportunity cost is what you would make if you graduated now minus the add-on you would get if you stayed in for a year or two. In concrete terms, if your first job paid $35K right now and $37K in the second year, Vs. if you wait two years and get a job that pays $40K in the first year and $45K in the second, the opportunity cost is $72K - $13K = $59K.
I think the opportunity cost calculation is a pretty good metric, because no employer beyond your first post-college employer is likely to care about your grades at all, so whether you graduated with a C-average or Summa Cum Laude is unlikely to make much difference in your second job.
WRT point 5, what the bill outlaws is "to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller ID information." If a company has its PBX configured so that it sends a salesperson's name rather than the company's name when she makes a call, I think a lawyer would have no problem deflecting an attempt to prosecute. After all, the name displayed *was* the name of the person making the call, so none of the information was false or misleading.
For the person who wondered if having his caller ID say "Harry Potter" could get him in trouble, it sounds like it could, although in practical terms I think someone would have to actually complain about that for him to get in trouble. I think how this law will be used in practice is for "piling on" charges when arresting scammers on other charges. The more you can charge them with, the more expensive it is for them to defend it and the more jail time and fines you can get on them.
Still, as others have suggested, I believe congress is approaching this from the wrong angle. It is certainly possible for the Telcos to solve this problem by preventing spoofing in the first place, but they don't because they have no incentive to do so. They also have some disincentive to do so: there are people who want to spoof, for good reasons or bad, and these people are telco customers. If the major telcos all blocked spoofing, they'd take their business to someone who didn't. However, congress can give telcos incentive to block spoofing by requiring them to do so and levying hefty fines if they don't.
They'll whine, sure. Companies that don't want to do something always whine. Look at the auto industry. Going back to the first legislation requiring emission controls, and later, CAFE imposing mileage standards, there was much lobbying, whining, wringing of hands, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and protestations that it was too difficult, to expensive, or both. Yet, lo and behold, they've done a pretty fine job of meeting these requirements. In doing so, they illustrated very well the difference between "can't' and "don't want to." The telcos would be no different. They'd gripe about it, but they'd get it done.
I suspect this is the case. Among power users, my engineering dept. may or not be typical. There are 100 or so people in engineering, the majority of whom (including myself) are using Macs. FreeBSD is number 2, and Windows a distant 3rd. Mac seems to be gaining further ground, as almost everyone who is eligible for a hardware upgrade chooses a Mac, even if they had something else before (mostly Windows users; BSD users seem less likely to switch).
I use Dock-on-Bottom w/auto-hide; this seems about even with Dock-on-Left auto-hide, and most people seem to use Dock-on-Bottom without auto-hide. If even most power users are using the default, it would be really unusual for most average users to be different.
You sound like a person who doesn't live in the areas you're suggesting we have so much land, and doesn't know much about the other issues, either. I think immigration is great. My wife is an immigrant (and non-white, thank you, so don't even think of trying to pull a race card). Speaking of which, the years of effort it took to get her green card when I returned from my years of living abroad, as well as the 18 months of living apart that the process required, leaves me with little sympathy for people who can't follow the rules.
WRT our nation being a nation of immigrants, that is correct. I, myself, am a descendant of immigrants. Legal immigrants. Maybe you are, too. That's no argument for illegal immigration.
The 12-20 million illegals currently in the country is well beyond our carrying capacity. Have you ever visited a California school? The burden placed on our school system here by illegals is huge, and is lowering the quality of education for everyone? The number reason California schools are doing so badly? Illegal aliens. Not immigrants, aliens. An immigrant is legal by definition, and people dignifying them by calling them illegal aliens are deliberately obscuring the issue.
Do we need to raise immigration quotas? Yes, I think so. But not for people from the bottom of the heap, who come here and displace our own poor from their jobs. It is in our own national and economic interest to recruit mostly from the top of the stack, not from the bottom. For example, I have a colleague who came here to get his master's degree. Having completed that, he has a year during which he can work. At the end of that time, he'll probably have to go back to his country. That's not unjust - it's what the terms of his visa spelled out in advance, no problem - but it would be in our national interest to give him a green card and let him stay. He's very smart, well-educated, fits in well with our culture, multi-lingual, etc. He would be a net gain for our society.
Taking in 12 - 20 million of the poor, on the other hand, isn't. It's well-documented that the poor consume more social services than they consume, in a liberal-socialist democracy such as ours, Canada's, our western Europe's (granted, it's worse in those other places). That's fine for our own poor; they are Americans and have a right to whatever we as a country have decided to do to help our poor. However, the poor of are not our problem; they are that country's problem. Should we help them out with solving the problem, if they really want to do it. Yes, absolutely. But that obligation does not extend to solving the problem by offloading their poor into our country. 10%, give or take, of Mexicans are now in the US. You can bet it's not the richest 10%.
The fundamental problems with illegal immigration - apart from being illegal - is that it harms our own poor, and the current volume is well beyond our carrying capacity to absorb poor immigrants. Should we have larger quotas? Yes, I think so. Should some of them be for poor immigrants? Yes, I think so. But not so many they displace our own poor from jobs by driving down wages until the jobs become ones that Americans won't do. Would this result in higher food prices if growers had to pay Americans to do farm work? Probably. I'm fine with that. It's called taking care of our own.
So where do we start? Step one - secure the border. Lock it down so tight a bug would have trouble getting across without being caught. Once that's done, I'd be happy to talk about immigration reform. Next step: work really hard to get the criminal illegals out - those who come here to commit crimes or have a criminal record back home. Having a felony conviction is normally a bar to immigration. We shouldn't be making exceptions to that under the name of immgration reform. Period.
What do we do with the ones who snuck in here? The 12-20 million? They can apply for a visa, but they have to get out first.
And one more thing: the law regarding citizenship needs to be brought into line with intern
Is this really the same Sweden that hosts Pirate Bay? Something seems really wrong with this picture: PB can thumbs its nose/flip the bird/gesture of your choice at copyright, and pretty much get away with it, because of Swedish law. And they're looking at prosecuting someone because of a comment posted on his blog site by someone else? Whether you think PB is doing anything wrong or not, there's something rotten in s/Denmark/Sweden/ if the law there says PB is OK but a blogger is criminally liable for anything unsavory posted on his blog by a third party.
Laser is absolutely the way to go. My side-gig (real estate) is one that uses an astonishing amount of paper, and I would highly recommend a laser all-in-one to anyone whose printing needs are high enough that the cost of ink is killing them. The high up-front cost of the laser will be recovered soon enough by low per-page costs.
:p
Or if they're like you, and the cartridges dry up. I've found that HP are very good about not drying up, but Lexmark/Dell is terrible. Someone gave my wife a free Dell all-in-one after getting a new one. It needed cartridges and seemed like a good one for her to use as a spare at home. A few months of very light user later, the cartridges have both dried up. I think I now have a pretty good idea of why the previous owner upgraded (to a different brand) and why this nearly-new Dell all-in-one was given away for free
Congratulations, that's the best change of topic I've seen all day. Whether there would be a nuclear winter or not has nothing to do with who would come out worst in the exchange. But since we're on the topic, nuclear winter is pretty debatable. Modern nuclear weapons don't produce a lot of fallout and are mostly set as airbursts that wouldn't kick up all that much dust. The economic chaos caused by a nuclear exchange between any of Chinak, Russia, and the United States would most likely be a far worse problem than whatever level of global cooling might or might not happen from that exchange. The world economy would be screwed if the exchange were between China and Russia and completely shattered if it were between China and the US.
:)
Fortunately, that's not very likely to happen. The Middle East is the place most likely to have a nuclear exchange. It would be smaller, but still pretty bad for the global economy. We'd better get drilling more in Alaska and California and anywhere else we've got oil, so when the Iranians get nukes and the Israelis vaporize them in self-defense, we'll still have enough oil to get along on until we're really up to speed on non-oil energy sources.
But I digress. Nuclear winter or no nuclear winter, anyone who thinks the Chinese couldn't tell the difference on radar between a high-altitude spy plane and a re-entering MIRV is still a tool
Whether or not it would be allowed to happen is another question altogether. But if it did happen, China would come out on the worst end of it. They have enough nuclear capacity to act as an effective deterrent, but not enough to make an offensive attack and succeed.
Fortunately, the major nuclear powers have reached a point where they are all pretty against having war with each other. Unfortunately, we have guys like Ahmahdinejad in Iran, steadfastly denying the Holocaust while at the same time working their butts off to make deliverable nuclear weapons as part of their planning for the next Holocaust.
While that is unlikely to trigger a confrontation between the major nuclear powers, it is likely to trigger an Iranian attempt to nuke Israel, and
whether it's successful or not, retaliation in kind by the Israelis. I think there is no doubt that the Israel response would be successful and devastating. Sometime between now and when Iran can actually build nuclear weapons, that building needs to be prevented. By peaceful means if possible, but by any means necessary if peaceful means don't work.
That was the point (although China Vs. the US or Russia in a nuclear shootout would not result in MAD, it would results in the US or Russia being mauled and China being utterly destroyed), but the AC was a complete tool, and so were those who modded him Insightful. The only kind of missile with a similar flight trajectory would be operating at a much lower altitude - say, 50 - 100 feet - and at subsonic speeds.
An ICBM, unlike a cruise missile or an SR-71, has a very steep angle of ascent, and comes down pretty steeply, too, doesn't have much of a heat signature on the way down, and since most (or all?) of those held by the US and Russia have MIRV warheads, the things coming down will also be far, far smaller than an aircraft. A spy plane looks nothing like a missile on radar.
That is indeed an interesting stat, thanks for posting that. I think a reasonable conclusion we can draw here is that Windows power users are overwhelmingly more likely to chuck IE and use Firefox.
I'm a Mac and Linux (KDE) user and I chucked Safari on Mac and Konqueror on KDE and use Firefox instead, and both of those are better than IE in most respects, so I know where those Windows users are coming from.
Why did I chuck Safari? It doesn't (in my experience) render quite as well as Firefox, but it's mostly about control. Through a few choice plug-ins like Noscript, plus FF's better control of cookies, my security control is much more fine-grained than it is in Safari. And the amount of nice plug-ins for FF seems to soundly best Safari, too.
Why did I chuck Konqueror? I like it in a lot of ways: it's very fast, and it has the most fine-grained out of the box security controls I've seen on any browser. However, I went with FF because its rendering is now quite a bit better than Konqueror's, and through the use of plug-ins I can get control over security that's almost as fine-grained as that of Konqueror, and more convenient (I can't overstate how good Noscript is). Add to that the huge amount of plug-ins available for FF and it turned even this KDE user into a Firefox user in KDE.
And if I weren't already settled on FF as my all-platform browser, the Google Browser Sync plug-in that I just discovered for FF would have been the tipping point. I can sync everything - browsing history, bookmarks, cookies, the lot - between my MacBook Pro, my Linus desktop, and the one Windows system we have in our house (I don't use it much, it's mostly my wife's Yahoo Messenger machine, but once in a while). FF is a good browser, and the great array of great plug-ins for it make it IMO the best browser available.
Since someone will probably jump in here and mention Opera, I'll address that, too. I try Opera about once a year just to see what's new, but since it's inception, the UI of Opera has just bugged me. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Opera - it's a fine browser, and it's the fastest one I've ever used, easily - but UI is a matter of taste and Opera just doesn't suit my taste and likely never will. But if it works for others, cool. I encourage its use if it's what works for you.
That's actually not it at all.
Last comment first, "therefore stopping the development of Linux in general" is overbroad to the point of being not even remotely accurate. I've been using Linux for ten years, and as anyone who has been doing so (or even five years) can attest, a very great deal of development of Linux in general has happened during that time, both at the kernel level and at the application level.
Are there a lot of games for Linux? No. Or commercial applications in general for Linux? No. The reasons why have very little to do with the GPL, however, and a very great deal to do with economics. The fact is, it's really hard to sell proprietary software for Linux, especially in the user application space. Take a look at the proprietary software for Linux market; it's mostly stuff aimed at developers and other IT professionals. Take a look at the failed commercial Linux applications for end users, such as . All end-user stuff. The stuff aimed at professionals is either occupying some small (and maybe difficult) niche, or is so much better than any Free solution in its space that some people are willing to pay for it.
Why is it so hard to sell proprietary software to Linux users? First of all, we are predisposed to not use proprietary software on Linux. It just bothers most of us. Second, for most proprietary apps that you might want to sell on Linux, there are typically one or more Free ones that will be almost as good, just as good, or maybe even better than your proprietary one. This means that even for the percentage of Linux users who might need or want your proprietary product, most of them are going to find a Free alternative that meets their needs well enough to keep them from buying yours.
Finally, even if there is no free alternative that can hold a candle to your proprietary product, there will be. If it's actually popular (or maybe even if its not), at least one Free product in the same space will meet or exceed its features after a while, leaving people with no reason to continue buying it. This may eventually happen to even the successful (if small) categories of proprietary software for Linux that I mention above.
One of the few areas where this doesn't hold very well is gaming. With games, the main issue is purely one of sales volume and potential profit. I know there are other issues, such as hardware-accelerated 3D, but volume is the big one. Being cloned by a Free product is not much of a worry; making a play-alike game and doing it well is difficult and time consuming, and by the time someone got it done, you'd already have your next new game out. It's really just economics.
Let's say you write a fantastic FPS that is way ahead of any other FPS on the market. The game play, the graphics, the sound, the weapons, the story, everything kills (so to speak) the competition. However, you decide to write it for Linux, and it's so good, so amazing, that every Linux user who likes the FPS genre goes out and buys it, and buys a suitable video card with good accelerated 3D support if (s)he doesn't already have one, just to play your game.
Just one little problem: you've sold your game to probably fewer people than if 1% of Windows users who like FPS games were to buy it. You do the math and realize that even though you'd rather do the game on Linux, if you want to be able to afford some cool games of your own and some cool hardware to run them on, you'd better write it for Windows, and maybe do a Linux port later as a labor of love. This is, by the way, the reason that there aren't so many Mac games, either (not to knock Macs; I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro and love Macs, it's just economics). Macs have decent accelerated 3D support, but again, if every Mac user who likes FPS games buys a given title, that's still not very many people compared to what you could sell in the Windows market.
That's why there's not much proprietary development for Linux, in the game space or any other space. The GPL, although no doubt designed and intended to make
I usually don't bother replying to AC posts, but I need to comment on this.
While I do not claim to be in a position to definitely answer the question, "Does Microsoft have any misappropriated code anywhere in any of its products?" I am a former Microsoft employee (but not a Microsoft apologist; I didn't much care for it there, would not work there again, and am a Linux and Mac user, not a Windows user), and I would be pretty surprised if there is an misappropriated code.
To know why I think so, you have to understand that Microsoft lives in fear of the GPL. LCA (Legal and Corporate Affairs) has very strict rules about touching open source code, and Microsoft developers are not supposed to even download or look at code under the GPL or similar licenses, not even on their own time, for fear of liability if any similar-looking code should subsequently get into any MSFT product. They are very serious about that. I'm sure anyone caught incorporating anything under a GPL-like license into a Microsoft product would be escorted to the door by security.
Microsoft may be guilty of a multitude of sins, but I'm quite sure that secretly using GPLed code is not among them. Both its fear and loathing of the GPL and the potential losses - in terms of face and code, as well as money - should it be caught doing so are simply to great.
Microsoft has another option here: modify the EULA going forward (and retroactively, if they can get away with it; EULAs tend to let you do almost anything, at least if you're the vendor) banning third-party patches to any Microsoft product.
Once that's in place, if there's a big vulnerability and they try to put a fix out and patent it, MSFT pounds them over the head with the DMCA, sends a C&D for violation of the EULA, and anything else they can come up with.
No matter how sovereign you are, you can't charge a levy on airspace. Down here along the southern border of the United States, there are a lot of Mexican radio stations that broadcast into the United States. Some in English, some in Spanish. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't collect a toll on the radio waves for travceling through US airspace, things just don't work that way.
Plus, there are are few things they need to consider:
1) Will cell phone companies just route their towers somewhere else (a one-time sunk cost) to avoid the running cost of a levy, should this action be successful? Quite possibly. Businesses will make one-time expenditures that that improve their cash flow.
2) If they're really pissed, will they remove any towers that provide service to the reservations? Probably not, but who knows? Make people mad enough and they might.
3) How much money is really going to be in this? If the demographics support it, they might want to consider casinos instead. It's worked out well for them here in the US, and I know some people in Winnipeg who I think would go.
4) Canadian law may differ on this point, of course, but most nations hold that the airspace is the property of the national government and only of the national government, regardless of what other sovereignty indigenous groups may have.
Debt contracted under Clinton for two reasons:
:(
1) A booming economy, brought about in part by Republican-sponsored tax cuts
2) A House and Senate both controlled by the opposition, which forced him to do things that he otherwise would not be inclined to do, such as be relatively fiscally responsible.
That last one, especially, was key. Clinton would have been a flop as president if not for a hostile congress. Even with one, he still wasn't very good. The current Bush would be a flop as president with out an external enemy. Even with one, he's still not very good in most areas. His one saving grace is that he's a relatively effective war leader. I say relatively because while he has shown he has the moxie to take the fight to the enemy, he doesn't have the moxie (or the correct advice, maybe) to take the fight to the enemy in the way that FDR, and Truman after him, did. That is the kind of war leader we really need.
That said, you're mostly right about Republicans and fiscal conservatism. The only thing almost as bad as a Democrat is a typical Republican
I live in California, and the governator may call himself a Republican, but he acts far more like a Democrat. Liberal Republicans are nearly indistinguishable from Democrats. I've had it with both of them.
Among the current crop of candidates, I have no real confidence that any of them are cut from that bolt of cloth, with the possible exception of Rudy G.