All the tickets I have seen (sporting events and concerts) say if you do something to get kicked out, you don't get anything back.
And if the President only makes himself available at private functions - he's not representing all the citizens of this country.
He's not "making himself available". He has a speaking engagement. It's pretty much expected to be a one-way communication.
You may not like it. I may not like it. But that's how the current system works. And, before you say it, voting for Kerry, Nader, Badnarik, etc, will not change this situation at all. If you went to any of their speaking engagements and did something the organizers did not like, you would be asked to leave just the same.
My taxes pay his salary, I should be allowed to visit and voice my dissent. So give me a federal tax refund or fire him for incompetence and failure to take responsibility for his actions.
Your (and my) taxes afford you protection, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nothing in that list says you should be allowed full face-to-face access to the President of the United States. You can contact him via mail and write pretty much anything you want, short of threatening his life, without worrying about some sort of retribution from the government. It is your right to exercise.
I do stand by the idea that the "Hitler" remark was somewhat inflamatory on your part and others seem to agree.
Yeah, it was probably wasn't the best example, but, it was the only one I could come up with that made sense for both the t-shirt wearer and the party goers.
Sure, they have a right to kick someone out of their private party, but the rules change somewhat when a public official enters the equation. Not many private parties can get the Secret Service to shake you down and kick you out.
Not really. The rules only change when the venue is public. The Secret Service does the same job if the President speaks at a private venue or in a public place.
Even if it's okay for all of this, it's also okay for the rest of us to think that the party organizers are narrow minded assholes.
Agreed.
Um, the ideas about rights started with your original post.
The point I was trying to make is that a property owner has the right to decide who is allowed on his or her property. A person on that property has no right to their presence if the owner doesn't want them there.
I agree that private parties have rules, but this is a pseudo-private party.
It's private in that it took place in a private establishment. The owner has rights to decide who can stay and who can't. Just because a public official is the star of the show doesn't mean the owner loses his or her rights.
Not to bother someone is not a reason for cencorship.
If you don't understand your basic rights and how they relate to the government, public locales, and private organizations, then a posting on Slashdot is not going to do anything to help you.
This is not a private function, it is a political function and showing up and stating you opinion serves a purpose.
It's as private as a sporting event or a concert. Just like in those instances, you have to play by the rules of the organizers and the facility owners if you want to be welcome.
For my son's bar mitzvah I would not invite TV crews or sell tickets, if you want public access, you will get public access with all strings attached.
Media coverage and public access are two distinct entities that are not mutually exclusive, especially when dealing with private venues. I hate to keep going back to the concert example, but it works so well:
A TV station might do a live report from a concert, maybe even show a few clips of the performance. This, in no way, give you, a non-ticket holder any right to enter the private establishment, nor does it relinquish the right of the venue owner to throw somebody out.
That isn't what they said. They didn't say "uncomfortable". They said the shirts were OBSCENE.
Since when is "protect civil liberties" *OBSCENE*?!
Can you please point to the location in the quoted article where the organizers call the shirts "obscene"? Actually, can you point to any location in the article where the organizers are actually quoted as to their reasoning?
How is "protect our civil liberties" an anti-republican statement? It should be a pro-every-party statement. That should be a phrase that is appropriate to promote whether you're a republican, democrat, green, socialist or libertarian.
I agree with you.
I am not saying that what was done was right. I am simply saying that the organizers at a private function have the right to ask attendees to leave. I am not posting to justify what the organizers did, but to justify their right to do it.
This whole discussion should fall under the "I don't agree with what you say, but I will fight for the right to let you say it."
Are you seriously suggesting that wearing a t-shirt that says "Protect Our Civil Liberties" is just as offensive to the President of the United States of America......as wearing a "Hitler was right" t-shirt to a Jewish bar mitzvah?
No, it doesn't matter what I think. It matters what the people paying the owners of the establishment think.
This is about what the President and his administration finds offensive.
Why do I think everyone is missing the point of my post?
I made no statement that I agreed with the teachers being removed. I stated that I disagree with their tactics. I stated that I support the fact that the organizers at a private function have the right to ask people to leave. Whether or not the organizers are a political organization or not, they have the same rights as to say who can stay and who can't.
Think of it this way. You pay $300 to get a front row, center seat to your favorite band. The person next to you pays the same amount. During the show the person next to you starts heckling the band and making a scene. Do you or do you not agree that the venue owner has the right to remove this person?
I realize that in this politically charged season, it is hard to remove politics from certain discussions, but that is exactly what I am asking you to do:
Organizer pays Private Venue for user of their facilities. Organizer has the right to ask any attendee to leave for most any reason (exceptions to race, religion, probably). Failure to do so, will result in the Owner of the Private Venue saying you are no longer welcome and failure to leave would be equivalent to trespassing.
Whether the organizer is, be it the Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, support group for people abducted by aliens, border collie owners, private citizen, they have rights to say who can stay at their private party.
Wow. You must have some wicked cool browser that can see the text on the back on a ticket when only the front was scanned.
"Hitler was right" is far more offensive than what these teachers wore - I don't even thik the shirts the teachers wore could be really considered anti-Bush.
My definition is not that it needs to be anti-Bush. It just needs to give the organizer's pause enough to consider the feelings and attitudes of the other people at the event.
The shirts were a simple statement that I'd gladly make to ANY public official regardless of party affiliation.
I agree with you.
As to your third point, I don't think feeling good and getting rah-rah is a constitutional right.
This has nothing to do with Rights or the Constitution. Any private establishment has the right to toss you out, so long as they don't base it on race, religion, etc. You do not have any "right" to be there.
As an example, next time you have a party at your house, give me a yell. I am going to come over, find out exactly what you and your friends don't like and do it. Loudly. Repeatedly. By your reasoning, you have no recourse but to let me do it.
Finally, public protestors were arrested en masse in New York during the RNC. Consider these recent arrests follow-ups.
Let's stick to this event, ok? I don't want to try to hammer out who's right and who's wrong at every event this year. Let's focus on the facts: Three people purchased tickets and went to a private party. They proceeded to do something that the organizers felt was inappropriate. The organizers asked these people to leave. When they refused, the owners of the establishment, under the authority of the organizers, can say "You are no longer welcome. Leave our property or you will be considered a trespasser."
Every private function has the same rules: concerts, sporting events, museum showings. Why is it suddenly evil when the political people do it?
Let's say I come to your family's bah mitzvah wearing a shirt that says "Hilter was right." What would you do? Probably exactly what the event organizers did.
It's their party and they only want guests that agree with them. Is that so hard to understand?
"What about the rights of these three teachers?", you ask.
First of all, this is not a "rights" issue. It is a private function - the owners of the establishment and the people paying them (not the ticket holders, see below) have final say a to who can come in and who can't.
Second, I guarantee you that the back of the ticket says, "This is a pro-Bush, pro-Republican rally. You presence is contingent upon not pissing in our Cheerios" or, something to that effect.
Third, what about the rights of other 99.9% to gather peacefully and have a feel-good, rah-rah session without having to deal with Captain Bringdown and the Buzzkills?
Now, do not take this as pro-Bush - I would be posting the same thing if it were a Kerry rally and three Bush-heads did the same thing.
Also, this does not mean I think the rights of a public protester should be curtailed or trodden on. However, going to a pro-candidate event and doing something decidedly anti-candidate serves no real purpose but to generate ill-will. Is there a snowball's chance in hell of changing anyone's mind at that gathering? No.
Honestly, if you can't convince a person with simple point-by-point arguments and feel the need to "trick" people into your plight by becoming a down-trodden news-byte, then, frankly, you get what you deserve.
As for the AP story linked above, I have no comment because I haven't RTFA yet.
If I had a lot of money - enough that $1 or $2 million wouldn't mean much - I would hire a small team of developers to take the OpenOffice code and work on it full time for a year. Make it 100% compatible with MS Office (well, maybe no flight sim in Excel), but also make it better and faster.
Then, I would release it saying "Here is a free replacement for Office that is 100% compatible with Office and also better because X, Y, Z. If you are a company and wish to have support, we have packages that are 1/10th the cost of Microsoft's offering."
First, we have the inevitable piracy argument, that you can rip the movie fairly easily to a computer for all others to see, especially since there's no protection like a DVD could possible give.
Umm... how it is any different than Netflix today? I know people with Netflix accounts and all they do is order DVDs, copy them (removing Macrovision and Region in the process), and then send them back. These people have huge DVD collections and it really only cost them the media and a few months of Netflix.
If you take your example and add 5 more states to it: Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, New Jersey, and North Carolina you can make the same statement about the electoral college.
Except, in the case of the EC, at least 271 of the electorate would also have to agree to this knowingly outlandish plan for the candidate to be elected.
The EC puts in one more check-and-balance in the system to ensure something like this shouldn't happen.
Apples and Oranges... Since when is an election a game?
That's not the comparison that's important. Both the "game" and the "election" have rules laid on how the winner is determined.
The determination is fairly similar - the team with the most "votes" (runs) wins the "state" (game). When you win a majority of "states", you've won the contest. The team with the most number of "votes" is not necessarily the winner.
The statement I made is that many people think we need to get rid of the EC because it is a strange way of doing things, when, in fact, it should not be so strange to them after all.
Is it too much to ask of our technology/math skills to award electorial votes in proportion to the popular vote?
It's amazing how the general populous has no problem with the idea of the Electoral College in other forms.
For example, let's say you have two baseball teams playing a "best of seven" series.
The games end up with the following scores:
Game Team A Team B 1 4 6 2 16 3 3 10 0 4 2 3 5 2 5 6 12 0 7 9 10
Who should be considered the "winner" of the series? Everybody will say "Team B". When asked "why?", they will say they won four games. "Even though Team A scored twice as many runs, you think that Team B should be the winner?" "Yes, those are the rules of the game".
But, as soon as you substitute "states" for "games" and "votes" for "runs" people have a hard time understanding why the EC works.
BTW, the results above are for the 1960 World Series in which the Pirates beat the Yankees in 7 games, but only scored 27 runs versus the Yanks 55. Incidentally, the 1960 also had the winner (JFK) lose the popular vote (to Nixon), but win the EC.
One of the major benefits of the EC is to make sure that the candidate is selected by a "geographic" majority, not a simple majority. I am not sure, but I can only imagine that the Framers wanted to protect, say, the North, from deciding alone who the President would be. The EC guarantees that the selected candidate have support across a large portion of the Union, not just in one area.
Ok, how hard can it really be to just do away with the whole electoral college thing?
If you honestly believe this would be better, then you have NO IDEA what the electoral college does.
Basically, the EC adds a geographic element to the election to ensure that there is general support across the country for the candidate.
This way, the candidate can't just focus on one area to get enough votes - ignoring the will of the people in the other areas.
For example, let's say I run for President. If elected, I promise to abolish all taxes for the residents of CA, TX, NY, FL, IL, and PA. I will pay for this by raising taxes in the other states. By promising something to the most populous states, I can swing the vote and win by only catering to their needs. Not very fair to the other states, is it?
Now, this does happen somewhat now with the big states, but, since a candidate cannot win based on the big states alone, they can't just ignore the rest of the country.
I just hope that Jobs starts putting comercial realities ahead of his personal ipod manic agenda and starts putting the boot into Gates at long last.
If Jobs wanted to "put the boot into Gates", he has a much less expensive option at his disposal than developing new hardware:
Hire a small team of developer and set them loose on OpenOffice. Make it a cross-platform, better-than-Office option (with full Office compatibility, of course) and then submit the code back to the project.
Have a big PR event to show it off, making sure that everyone knows that you can download it for free or buy it (w/ support) for something like $49 / year / seat. Make site licenses even cheaper ($200 / 5 seats support, $500 / 25 seats, etc, etc).
Now, that would give Microsoft a good kick in the teeth.
When the contributor doesn't specify a license, it should be obvious that they are implicitly agreeing to the license terms they recieved the software under (IE: GPL.)
Actually, in absence of a specific license, the code would simply fall under copyright laws, meaning that no one would have any rights to use it (except the original author, of course).
The author of the shareware seems to equate distribution of code with donation of code into the public domain, which is totally incorrect.
Well, it's not really a bad idea considering that your landline is the most reliable.
The absolute minimum I can pay Verizon for a line is $12.87 + tax + fees per month (which means it's actually over $15 / mo).
Frankly, it doesn't seem right have to pay $180 / yr for a residential line that I would only use in an emergency. And, no, there is no such thing as a "911-only" line - at least that's what the Verizon salesperson told me.
On the other hand, in an emergency, $180 probably wouldn't seem like much...
If the "firewall" silently drops messages it classifies as spam, then you have a case where the sender doesn't know there was a problem and the receiver doesn't know a message was sent.
If, on the other hand, the firewall issues a "550 This message appears to be spam" (for example) instead of "250 OK", then servers that actually care about result codes (eg - not spammers) would then issue an error message back to the sender. At least the sender would know there is a problem.
Of course, there are down sides, but, aren't there always?
If Pete Goglia signed a non-compete agreement with Seagate then it has stipulations preventing him from working at a competitor for a specified time.
Step 1. Quit job at Company A Step 2. Spend $100, incorporate "Your Name Technology Consultants, Inc" (YNTCI) Step 3. Have Company B (competitor to Company A) sign contract with YNTCI Step 4. Profit !
Probably wouldn't work, but it would let you fly under the radar a little better... "I'd like to go out on my own and I have a few clients lined up" is a much less likely to raise eyebrows at your soon-to-be former employer than "I'm going to work for Competitor A".
So? I would be willing to wager that a higher percentage of cars are used to do something illegal (speeding)....and no one was ever killed by someone using a P2P app "illegally".
Slashdot Mirror
So when did they get their refund?
All the tickets I have seen (sporting events and concerts) say if you do something to get kicked out, you don't get anything back.
And if the President only makes himself available at private functions - he's not representing all the citizens of this country.
He's not "making himself available". He has a speaking engagement. It's pretty much expected to be a one-way communication.
You may not like it. I may not like it. But that's how the current system works. And, before you say it, voting for Kerry, Nader, Badnarik, etc, will not change this situation at all. If you went to any of their speaking engagements and did something the organizers did not like, you would be asked to leave just the same.
My taxes pay his salary, I should be allowed to visit and voice my dissent. So give me a federal tax refund or fire him for incompetence and failure to take responsibility for his actions.
Your (and my) taxes afford you protection, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nothing in that list says you should be allowed full face-to-face access to the President of the United States. You can contact him via mail and write pretty much anything you want, short of threatening his life, without worrying about some sort of retribution from the government. It is your right to exercise.
- Tony
I do stand by the idea that the "Hitler" remark was somewhat inflamatory on your part and others seem to agree.
Yeah, it was probably wasn't the best example, but, it was the only one I could come up with that made sense for both the t-shirt wearer and the party goers.
Sure, they have a right to kick someone out of their private party, but the rules change somewhat when a public official enters the equation. Not many private parties can get the Secret Service to shake you down and kick you out.
Not really. The rules only change when the venue is public. The Secret Service does the same job if the President speaks at a private venue or in a public place.
Even if it's okay for all of this, it's also okay for the rest of us to think that the party organizers are narrow minded assholes.
Agreed.
Um, the ideas about rights started with your original post.
The point I was trying to make is that a property owner has the right to decide who is allowed on his or her property. A person on that property has no right to their presence if the owner doesn't want them there.
I agree that private parties have rules, but this is a pseudo-private party.
It's private in that it took place in a private establishment. The owner has rights to decide who can stay and who can't. Just because a public official is the star of the show doesn't mean the owner loses his or her rights.
- Tony
Not to bother someone is not a reason for cencorship.
If you don't understand your basic rights and how they relate to the government, public locales, and private organizations, then a posting on Slashdot is not going to do anything to help you.
This is not a private function, it is a political function and showing up and stating you opinion serves a purpose.
It's as private as a sporting event or a concert. Just like in those instances, you have to play by the rules of the organizers and the facility owners if you want to be welcome.
For my son's bar mitzvah I would not invite TV crews or sell tickets, if you want public access, you will get public access with all strings attached.
Media coverage and public access are two distinct entities that are not mutually exclusive, especially when dealing with private venues. I hate to keep going back to the concert example, but it works so well:
A TV station might do a live report from a concert, maybe even show a few clips of the performance. This, in no way, give you, a non-ticket holder any right to enter the private establishment, nor does it relinquish the right of the venue owner to throw somebody out.
- Tony
That isn't what they said. They didn't say "uncomfortable". They said the shirts were OBSCENE.
Since when is "protect civil liberties" *OBSCENE*?!
Can you please point to the location in the quoted article where the organizers call the shirts "obscene"? Actually, can you point to any location in the article where the organizers are actually quoted as to their reasoning?
- Tony
How is "protect our civil liberties" an anti-republican statement? It should be a pro-every-party statement. That should be a phrase that is appropriate to promote whether you're a republican, democrat, green, socialist or libertarian.
I agree with you.
I am not saying that what was done was right. I am simply saying that the organizers at a private function have the right to ask attendees to leave. I am not posting to justify what the organizers did, but to justify their right to do it.
This whole discussion should fall under the "I don't agree with what you say, but I will fight for the right to let you say it."
Are you seriously suggesting that wearing a t-shirt that says "Protect Our Civil Liberties" is just as offensive to the President of the United States of America... ...as wearing a "Hitler was right" t-shirt to a Jewish bar mitzvah?
No, it doesn't matter what I think. It matters what the people paying the owners of the establishment think.
This is about what the President and his administration finds offensive.
Why do I think everyone is missing the point of my post?
I made no statement that I agreed with the teachers being removed. I stated that I disagree with their tactics. I stated that I support the fact that the organizers at a private function have the right to ask people to leave. Whether or not the organizers are a political organization or not, they have the same rights as to say who can stay and who can't.
Think of it this way. You pay $300 to get a front row, center seat to your favorite band. The person next to you pays the same amount. During the show the person next to you starts heckling the band and making a scene. Do you or do you not agree that the venue owner has the right to remove this person?
I realize that in this politically charged season, it is hard to remove politics from certain discussions, but that is exactly what I am asking you to do:
Organizer pays Private Venue for user of their facilities. Organizer has the right to ask any attendee to leave for most any reason (exceptions to race, religion, probably). Failure to do so, will result in the Owner of the Private Venue saying you are no longer welcome and failure to leave would be equivalent to trespassing.
Whether the organizer is, be it the Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, support group for people abducted by aliens, border collie owners, private citizen, they have rights to say who can stay at their private party.
They say nothing of the sort.
Wow. You must have some wicked cool browser that can see the text on the back on a ticket when only the front was scanned.
"Hitler was right" is far more offensive than what these teachers wore - I don't even thik the shirts the teachers wore could be really considered anti-Bush.
My definition is not that it needs to be anti-Bush. It just needs to give the organizer's pause enough to consider the feelings and attitudes of the other people at the event.
The shirts were a simple statement that I'd gladly make to ANY public official regardless of party affiliation.
I agree with you.
As to your third point, I don't think feeling good and getting rah-rah is a constitutional right.
This has nothing to do with Rights or the Constitution. Any private establishment has the right to toss you out, so long as they don't base it on race, religion, etc. You do not have any "right" to be there.
As an example, next time you have a party at your house, give me a yell. I am going to come over, find out exactly what you and your friends don't like and do it. Loudly. Repeatedly. By your reasoning, you have no recourse but to let me do it.
Finally, public protestors were arrested en masse in New York during the RNC. Consider these recent arrests follow-ups.
Let's stick to this event, ok? I don't want to try to hammer out who's right and who's wrong at every event this year. Let's focus on the facts: Three people purchased tickets and went to a private party. They proceeded to do something that the organizers felt was inappropriate. The organizers asked these people to leave. When they refused, the owners of the establishment, under the authority of the organizers, can say "You are no longer welcome. Leave our property or you will be considered a trespasser."
Every private function has the same rules: concerts, sporting events, museum showings. Why is it suddenly evil when the political people do it?
- Tony
Your argument is only valid if the Bush gathering found the phrase "Protect our civil liberties" repugnant.
No, it is only valid if the organizers felt that the shirts would make the attendees uncomfortable.
Bullshit.
Let's say I come to your family's bah mitzvah wearing a shirt that says "Hilter was right." What would you do? Probably exactly what the event organizers did.
It's their party and they only want guests that agree with them. Is that so hard to understand?
"What about the rights of these three teachers?", you ask.
First of all, this is not a "rights" issue. It is a private function - the owners of the establishment and the people paying them (not the ticket holders, see below) have final say a to who can come in and who can't.
Second, I guarantee you that the back of the ticket says, "This is a pro-Bush, pro-Republican rally. You presence is contingent upon not pissing in our Cheerios" or, something to that effect.
Third, what about the rights of other 99.9% to gather peacefully and have a feel-good, rah-rah session without having to deal with Captain Bringdown and the Buzzkills?
Now, do not take this as pro-Bush - I would be posting the same thing if it were a Kerry rally and three Bush-heads did the same thing.
Also, this does not mean I think the rights of a public protester should be curtailed or trodden on. However, going to a pro-candidate event and doing something decidedly anti-candidate serves no real purpose but to generate ill-will. Is there a snowball's chance in hell of changing anyone's mind at that gathering? No.
Honestly, if you can't convince a person with simple point-by-point arguments and feel the need to "trick" people into your plight by becoming a down-trodden news-byte, then, frankly, you get what you deserve.
As for the AP story linked above, I have no comment because I haven't RTFA yet.
- Tony
If I had a lot of money - enough that $1 or $2 million wouldn't mean much - I would hire a small team of developers to take the OpenOffice code and work on it full time for a year. Make it 100% compatible with MS Office (well, maybe no flight sim in Excel), but also make it better and faster.
Then, I would release it saying "Here is a free replacement for Office that is 100% compatible with Office and also better because X, Y, Z. If you are a company and wish to have support, we have packages that are 1/10th the cost of Microsoft's offering."
Are you listening, Steve Jobs? Novell? IBM?
Oh, well, one could hope.
- Tony
First, we have the inevitable piracy argument, that you can rip the movie fairly easily to a computer for all others to see, especially since there's no protection like a DVD could possible give.
Umm... how it is any different than Netflix today? I know people with Netflix accounts and all they do is order DVDs, copy them (removing Macrovision and Region in the process), and then send them back. These people have huge DVD collections and it really only cost them the media and a few months of Netflix.
- Tony
Hello, Otisberg.
Oh, wait... wrong geologic event.
If stadiums are any example, I'm sure another $10 million would allow CMU to call it:
Pepsi Presents the Gates Center for Computer Science
- Tony
If you take your example and add 5 more states to it: Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, New Jersey, and North Carolina you can make the same statement about the electoral college.
Except, in the case of the EC, at least 271 of the electorate would also have to agree to this knowingly outlandish plan for the candidate to be elected.
The EC puts in one more check-and-balance in the system to ensure something like this shouldn't happen.
- Tony
Apples and Oranges... Since when is an election a game?
That's not the comparison that's important. Both the "game" and the "election" have rules laid on how the winner is determined.
The determination is fairly similar - the team with the most "votes" (runs) wins the "state" (game). When you win a majority of "states", you've won the contest. The team with the most number of "votes" is not necessarily the winner.
The statement I made is that many people think we need to get rid of the EC because it is a strange way of doing things, when, in fact, it should not be so strange to them after all.
It's amazing how the general populous has no problem with the idea of the Electoral College in other forms.
For example, let's say you have two baseball teams playing a "best of seven" series.
The games end up with the following scores:Who should be considered the "winner" of the series? Everybody will say "Team B". When asked "why?", they will say they won four games. "Even though Team A scored twice as many runs, you think that Team B should be the winner?" "Yes, those are the rules of the game".
But, as soon as you substitute "states" for "games" and "votes" for "runs" people have a hard time understanding why the EC works.
BTW, the results above are for the 1960 World Series in which the Pirates beat the Yankees in 7 games, but only scored 27 runs versus the Yanks 55. Incidentally, the 1960 also had the winner (JFK) lose the popular vote (to Nixon), but win the EC.
One of the major benefits of the EC is to make sure that the candidate is selected by a "geographic" majority, not a simple majority. I am not sure, but I can only imagine that the Framers wanted to protect, say, the North, from deciding alone who the President would be. The EC guarantees that the selected candidate have support across a large portion of the Union, not just in one area.
- Tony
Ok, how hard can it really be to just do away with the whole electoral college thing?
If you honestly believe this would be better, then you have NO IDEA what the electoral college does.
Basically, the EC adds a geographic element to the election to ensure that there is general support across the country for the candidate.
This way, the candidate can't just focus on one area to get enough votes - ignoring the will of the people in the other areas.
For example, let's say I run for President. If elected, I promise to abolish all taxes for the residents of CA, TX, NY, FL, IL, and PA. I will pay for this by raising taxes in the other states. By promising something to the most populous states, I can swing the vote and win by only catering to their needs. Not very fair to the other states, is it?
Now, this does happen somewhat now with the big states, but, since a candidate cannot win based on the big states alone, they can't just ignore the rest of the country.
- Tony
I just hope that Jobs starts putting comercial realities ahead of his personal ipod manic agenda and starts putting the boot into Gates at long last.
If Jobs wanted to "put the boot into Gates", he has a much less expensive option at his disposal than developing new hardware:
Hire a small team of developer and set them loose on OpenOffice. Make it a cross-platform, better-than-Office option (with full Office compatibility, of course) and then submit the code back to the project.
Have a big PR event to show it off, making sure that everyone knows that you can download it for free or buy it (w/ support) for something like $49 / year / seat. Make site licenses even cheaper ($200 / 5 seats support, $500 / 25 seats, etc, etc).
Now, that would give Microsoft a good kick in the teeth.
- Tony
When the contributor doesn't specify a license, it should be obvious that they are implicitly agreeing to the license terms they recieved the software under (IE: GPL.)
Actually, in absence of a specific license, the code would simply fall under copyright laws, meaning that no one would have any rights to use it (except the original author, of course).
The author of the shareware seems to equate distribution of code with donation of code into the public domain, which is totally incorrect.
- Tony
Well, it's not really a bad idea considering that your landline is the most reliable.
The absolute minimum I can pay Verizon for a line is $12.87 + tax + fees per month (which means it's actually over $15 / mo).
Frankly, it doesn't seem right have to pay $180 / yr for a residential line that I would only use in an emergency. And, no, there is no such thing as a "911-only" line - at least that's what the Verizon salesperson told me.
On the other hand, in an emergency, $180 probably wouldn't seem like much...
- Tony
Depends on how the server handles the rejection.
If the "firewall" silently drops messages it classifies as spam, then you have a case where the sender doesn't know there was a problem and the receiver doesn't know a message was sent.
If, on the other hand, the firewall issues a "550 This message appears to be spam" (for example) instead of "250 OK", then servers that actually care about result codes (eg - not spammers) would then issue an error message back to the sender. At least the sender would know there is a problem.
Of course, there are down sides, but, aren't there always?
- Tony
OK, I'm curious.
What kinda of deal can you sign with iTMS? As far as I know, there isn't a subscription service associated with iTMS, only a store.
Do you get better prices or something?
- Tony
If Pete Goglia signed a non-compete agreement with Seagate then it has stipulations preventing him from working at a competitor for a specified time.
... "I'd like to go out on my own and I have a few clients lined up" is a much less likely to raise eyebrows at your soon-to-be former employer than "I'm going to work for Competitor A".
Step 1. Quit job at Company A
Step 2. Spend $100, incorporate "Your Name Technology Consultants, Inc" (YNTCI)
Step 3. Have Company B (competitor to Company A) sign contract with YNTCI
Step 4. Profit !
Probably wouldn't work, but it would let you fly under the radar a little better
- Tony
P2P networks are used 99.9% for pirating
...and no one was ever killed by someone using a P2P app "illegally".
So? I would be willing to wager that a higher percentage of cars are used to do something illegal (speeding).
- Tony
...to the term "crash"