Yep, Richard Dawkins foaming at the mouth as usual whenever someone says there is evidence for telepathy (which there is - the chance explanation just doesn't cut it).
The current trend of running everything over port 80 is due to laziness
No, it's also partly due to commercial imperatives. Your marketshare will be reduced if you make software which requires firewalls to be opened up (or at least fiddling with the configuration at the client end) in order to function. The logical conclusion is where every new service runs on port 80 outbound.
It's the trend of relying on firewalls which is truly lazy - and dangerously complacent.
You have misunderstood the fact about American lifestyles, which is entirely correct. It is not about living space (well, unless you include all the indirect space needed for food growing in living space).
Five billion people need food. Since the typical North American lifestyle involves eating large amounts of meat every week, if 5 billion people had a North American lifestyle, you would need to raise enough cattle or pigs or whatever to feed them all meat. Moreover, all those cattle and pigs would need to be fed enough until they were ready for slaughter. (This is why meat-eating takes an unfair share of the world's food supply.) There is not enough arable land in the entire world to achieve that. QED.
Many more arguments could be advanced, see for example www.worldwatch.org
No way. Chain letters are liable to turn into a flood. They can end up hurting people worse than spam. And they have a credibility only slightly higher than that of spam.
Google occassionally serves up pages which check what links you click on (not using Javascript), presumably to improve its rankings. Of course the difference there is you can hover your mouse over the links and if you have a decent browser see where they point, so it's not disguised.
Patents, in the final analysis, give the corporation power over the people.
That is simply absurd. The whole point of patents is to give people power over corporations. How do you think it's possible for an inventor to invent something without a big company just stealing it and "cutting out the middleman"?
This FUD about patents really needs to be brought under control. Patents are the friend of the little guy. Just because big entities have the same rights as little entities doesn't mean the rights are bad.
I notice you don't distinguish between moronic software patents and rather more innovative non-software patents. However, even quite innovative software ideas are dubious candidates for patenting. The idea of a spreadsheet wasn't patented, and as a result we have many free and cheap spreadsheet applications, and competition encourages innovation (although the situation is not so rosy now with the increased dominance of Office). If there was only one spreadsheet company for 20 years, we'd have to like it or lump it (including their legalised monopoly pricing).
The answer to the innovation argument is simple (at least in the software arena). Companies already fund research which they expect their competitors to be able to capitalise on. (Haven't you ever heard of patent cross-licensing agreements? Now how can you argue this isn't ganging up on the little guy?) Where no company is willing to do research, the government can do it - if it's that important.
And by the way, no-one has a moral right to make a profit via a government-mandated artificial monopoly. The idea that copying someone's idea is depriving them of their "rightful" profits is nonsense. No-one has a right to unlimited profits.
How utterly crazy, considerring that most of these guys make more money than ordinary Americans like you and I could ever think about.
You're the one who's crazy. Do you think that Ballmer says to himself, "Oh, I've made enough money to last a lifetime, I'll let Microsoft tank now - no need to worry about small upstarts cutting into our profits". No. CEOs always want to make more money, however much they've already made. If they get all Kumbaya-ish they'll be deposed by the shareholders.
You simply could not spend billions of dollars to develop 1 successful drug and 100 failures if Joe's Drugs down the street could simply copy your research and cut out your ability to make a profit.
Er, yes you could. It's called government funded research. Which, incidentally, is what produced the Internet - and what underwrote much of the basic and long-term research that many corporations profit from today.
That's not paranoid at all. It is quite common for a program a.exe to use a different executable for updating itself. Not surprising really because it's not in general terms a good idea to overwrite an open file (in this case a.exe).
Sensing you are losing the argument, you resort to a childish postmodernist absurd conceit involving putting right and wrong in quote marks. Wouldn't it be nice if we could dismiss all arguments by saying "You are trying to tell me what's RIGHT and WRONG?!? How DARE YOU?!?! You EVIL, EVIL, EVIL, FASCIST, BASTARD!!!!!!!!!"
Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work that way. The "saying something is wrong is wrong" argument cannot even be taken seriously because it disappears up its own ass in a puff of contradiction.
That's a double standard, bordering on racism. Yes, racism. If hypothetical corp McProfitInc beats up white US workers to get them to stay in line you don't blame consumers for not caring - you prosecute the people responsible for assault.
Yet if McProfitInc commit "human rights abuses" (e.g. hiring thugs to beat up troublemakers) in farawar poor countries with non-white workers, you would have us blame the consumers for not caring. When it would be actually more accurate to say 99% of consumers don't know about it.
Yes, QuickTime Player 4.0 was not only gratuitously non-conformant, but an all-round atrocious design. One of the worst ever examples of gloss winning over usability. And Apple still doesn't seem to have admitted its gross errors.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's also partly due to commercial imperatives. Your marketshare will be reduced if you make software which requires firewalls to be opened up (or at least fiddling with the configuration at the client end) in order to function. The logical conclusion is where every new service runs on port 80 outbound.
It's the trend of relying on firewalls which is truly lazy - and dangerously complacent.
Check out the RFC on IP-over-IP. It's hilarious.
You have misunderstood the fact about American lifestyles, which is entirely correct. It is not about living space (well, unless you include all the indirect space needed for food growing in living space).
Five billion people need food. Since the typical North American lifestyle involves eating large amounts of meat every week, if 5 billion people had a North American lifestyle, you would need to raise enough cattle or pigs or whatever to feed them all meat. Moreover, all those cattle and pigs would need to be fed enough until they were ready for slaughter. (This is why meat-eating takes an unfair share of the world's food supply.) There is not enough arable land in the entire world to achieve that. QED.
Many more arguments could be advanced, see for example www.worldwatch.org
Which studies would they be?
It's notoriously hard to prove things like that. Perhaps because they're not true?
That is simply absurd. The whole point of patents is to give people power over corporations. How do you think it's possible for an inventor to invent something without a big company just stealing it and "cutting out the middleman"?
This FUD about patents really needs to be brought under control. Patents are the friend of the little guy. Just because big entities have the same rights as little entities doesn't mean the rights are bad.
I notice you don't distinguish between moronic software patents and rather more innovative non-software patents. However, even quite innovative software ideas are dubious candidates for patenting. The idea of a spreadsheet wasn't patented, and as a result we have many free and cheap spreadsheet applications, and competition encourages innovation (although the situation is not so rosy now with the increased dominance of Office). If there was only one spreadsheet company for 20 years, we'd have to like it or lump it (including their legalised monopoly pricing).
The answer to the innovation argument is simple (at least in the software arena). Companies already fund research which they expect their competitors to be able to capitalise on. (Haven't you ever heard of patent cross-licensing agreements? Now how can you argue this isn't ganging up on the little guy?) Where no company is willing to do research, the government can do it - if it's that important.
And by the way, no-one has a moral right to make a profit via a government-mandated artificial monopoly. The idea that copying someone's idea is depriving them of their "rightful" profits is nonsense. No-one has a right to unlimited profits.
You're the one who's crazy. Do you think that Ballmer says to himself, "Oh, I've made enough money to last a lifetime, I'll let Microsoft tank now - no need to worry about small upstarts cutting into our profits". No. CEOs always want to make more money, however much they've already made. If they get all Kumbaya-ish they'll be deposed by the shareholders.
Er, yes you could. It's called government funded research. Which, incidentally, is what produced the Internet - and what underwrote much of the basic and long-term research that many corporations profit from today.
It's not an entire Linux distribution in the Red Hat sense. What's so hard about configure; make; make install?
Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work that way. The "saying something is wrong is wrong" argument cannot even be taken seriously because it disappears up its own ass in a puff of contradiction.
What??
[root@ega051000009 jpack]# ls /usr/lib|wc -l
1868
So-called "free market" arguments which are completely out of touch with reality mean absolutely nothing.
Yet if McProfitInc commit "human rights abuses" (e.g. hiring thugs to beat up troublemakers) in farawar poor countries with non-white workers, you would have us blame the consumers for not caring. When it would be actually more accurate to say 99% of consumers don't know about it.