Linux and a lot of GNU software can an surely have been used to enable the killing of thousands, but we will not be blaming Stallman and Torvalds for that.
Yes, but how much money have oppressive regimes put directly into the pockets of Stallman and Torvalds?
I've gotten several notices from Charter regarding my supposed sharing of stuff using the eDonkey network. The notice in part looks like this:
Dear Charter Communications:
The Entertainment Software Association ("ESA") is a U.S. trade association that represents the intellectual property interests of numerous companies that publish interactive games for video game consoles, personal computers, handheld devices and the Internet (hereinafter collectively referred to as "ESA members"). ESA is authorized to act on behalf of ESA members whose copyright and other intellectual property rights it believes to be infringed as described herein.
ESA is providing this notice pursuant to the Section 512 of Title 17 of the U.S. Code (as enacted by the 'Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act') to make Charter Communications aware that the IP Address identified below is using the services and systems of Charter Communications to infringe the exclusive copyright and other rights of one or more ESA members. This notice is addressed to you as the agent designated by Charter Communications to receive notifications of claimed infringement.
Based on the information at its disposal on 24 Feb 2009 08:13:42 GMT, ESA has a good faith belief that the subscriber using the IP address 66.XXX.XXX.XXX is infringing the copyright rights of one or more ESA members by copying and distributing unauthorized copies of game products (through peer-to-peer or similar software/services), in violation of applicable copyright laws, through internet access that Charter Communications provides directly to the 66.XXX.XXX.XXX or through a downstream provider that purchases this access for 66.XXX.XXX.XXX. The copyrighted works that have been infringed include but are not limited to:
Title: WWE Smackdown! vs. RAW
Notice ID: 825XXXXX
Infringement Source: eDonkey
Infringement Timestamp: 24 Feb 2009 04:16:42 GMT
Infringement Last Documented: 24 Feb 2009 04:16:42 GMT
Infringer Username: 31765E8B8C0E5B88C60C1837A54XXXXX
Infringing Filename: WWE Smackdown VS Raw 2009.cso
Infringing Filesize: 974144108
Infringer IP Address: 66.XXX.XXX.XXX
Infringer DNS Name: XX-XXX-XXX-XXX.dhcp.bycy.mi.charter.com
Infringer Port ID: 35986
Infringer URL: ed2k://|file|WWE Smackdown VS Raw 2009.cso|974144108|6D85B916A468073D52EC11168C7XXXXX|/
The only thing I've ever used eDonkey for was acquiring pr0n. I've never transferred or shared any type of executable. And my wifi network is secured with WPA2 with a strong, 10 character preshared-key. I've gotten two or three of these types of notices so obviously there's something really wrong with how they're determining who the "bad guys" are.
now you can disagree with me that sony products are usually better, but you can't ignore them.
Er, why not? I've ignored Sony for years and I still buy a fair share of electronics. I would strongly disagree with you that they make the best of anything (except maybe gaming console, but I've still never owned a PS of any kind). 20 years ago, they used to make the best TV's. That's not the case anymore. And they've never made the best MP3 player, audio equipment, photography gear, or PCs.
I'm not sure how any reasonably well-informed person could swallow Sony's marketing angle. What they're really good at is projecting the image that you've bought into.
netcat ("nc" on most Linux distros) provides the same functionality. However, it's also more flexible in that it allows you to test UDP ports and you can easily set it up to listen for incoming connections on an arbitrary port. It's a great tool for troubleshooting firewall issues.
I work for a small start-up. We have something like 2,500 square feet of office space, including private offices for most of six people there. We also have no servers (everything is cloud-based) and everyone uses a notebook, wifi, and cell/cordless phones. What tends to happen is that 2/3rd of the floorspace is empty at any given time. We all tend to congregate in the centrally-located conference room. If people need to make a private call or really concentrate on something, they'll steal away to an office and then return later.
This behavior isn't dictated by management, it just happens. I've found out that if I sit in my office for most of the day, I feel out of the loop (even with constant email exchanges). There are some downsides to being constantly plugged-in to everything like that, but overall, I feel it's a net-positive. A great amount of collaboration just emerges.
Using front companies that present themselves as marketing or advertising agencies, Choicepoint (since purchased by LexisNexis) buys data from pizza delivery places. Apparently it's a great way to be able to correlate unpublished or cellular phone numbers to a particular address.
Kinda useless to give them all cell phones without first beefing up the wireless and Internet infrastructure. That part might be a bit more difficult and time-consuming.
I use both Rackspace and EC2 for different applications. One big advantage of Rackspace (Slicehost) for smaller projects is the ability to assign multiple public IPs to a single instance. This comes in handy when running multiple SSL websites without needing to spin up an additional instance.
Fire hydrants put out about 5000 gallons per minute. A gallon of water weighs 8.345 lbs and 150 tons is 300,000 lbs. Therefore, the airship could carry 35,949 gallons, or enough for 7 minutes of fire fighting.
I'm sure there's more to the story than that. Did the musician assign the copyright of his songs to a recording company? If so, then I'm sure he was monetarily compensated for doing so when he signed that agreement and understood that they were no longer "his" songs. And did the ASCAP have some sort of agreement with the bar that the owners were to ensure that no unauthorized performances were conducted?
I'm not saying that these terms weren't laughably restrictive and counter to free culture. But the situation likely boils down a contract dispute--one that was entered into freely by all parties involved. If that's the case, there's enough blame to be spread around for agreeing to such terms. The ASCAP would not have had standing to sue if some random songwriter was performing in some random bar.
See, government contracting works like this. You create a company, hire some folk to work on a contract. Whatever their salary is, you charge the government +50% or more, so essentially the government is not only flat out paying your salary but also the company for your services. If the contract ends, so does your job as the company may not want to charge overhead. In contrast to other business sectors, employment typically isn't grounded so harshly on the existence of a contract, which is where cost of business and business management can keep workers afloat even during down times (think department store).
I do a lot of business with both the federal gov't and private sector businesses on IT projects. You've over-simplified things to the point of painting an inaccurate picture. Federal contracting is extremely complex and there are myriad types of contracts that can be awarded, each with different terms. It sounds like what you're describing is a labor-hour contract. The contractor bills the gov't for the "fully burdened cost" of putting a warm butt in a seat. This includes the worker's salary, overhead, G&A (general & administrative), and profit. All together, it's typically a lot more than a 50% markup of the staff's straight salary.
Unlike most private sector contracts, when doing a fully burdened labor hour contract with the feds, the contractor will spell out exactly what their profit margin is. Generally this is only 6-10%, which is considerably lower than the private sector. Despite what everyone thinks, doing business with the gov't isn't all that lucrative. It's an extremely competitive market in which the bottom-line cost is almost always the most important factor. Contracting officers are even prohibited by law to give preferential treatment to companies that have previously done a great job.
I can't really comment on forced furloughs, because I'm not familiar with how Northrup operates. But just because they do "government contracts" doesn't necessarily mean they can afford to keep highly-skilled staff on the payroll until they find a new project for them. Federal contracts can really help with sales revenue because they can be large awards and the government *always* pays. However, the trade off is all the red tape (which increases G&A costs) and the low profit margins. Next time you hear about Company X getting a $10M contract, don't just roll your eyes. Get a hold of their proposal and the contract and see what their actual profit is on the contract. Both documents are public property and available upon request from the federal contracting officer that made the award. (Defense related contracts might need to be pried from gov't with a FOIA request though)
Python and Ruby are in no way similar, other than the fact that they're both open-source OOP languages. They have completely opposing design philosophies: Python's "one right way to do it" vs. Ruby's "give the developer enough rope to hang himself."
No. The start of the "Tea Party" occurred during the grassroots movement to get Ron Paul the '08 Republican nomination for president. It grew out of the series of "money bombs" that were organized for his campaign. Fox News then hijacked the concept after the election because it was an existing vehicle of disaffected voters. Nowadays, the "Tea Party" has no coherent platform, it's just a bunch of soundbites used to whip the throng of useful idiots into a froth. And it has no actual leadership because everyone is too busy knifing each other in the back, trying to make themselves relevant in the current power vacuum of the Republican party.
So you take them to small claims court, where in many jurisdictions lawyers are not permitted. Motorola will have to send a corporate officer to represent the company. A much more likely outcome is that they'll settle with you prior to the hearing. All it takes is a few people to do this, and then blog about it and/or post info on social networking sites. Suddenly, Motorola is facing hundreds of small claims suits. They're still likely to settle them all out of court for the cost of the phone, but perhaps the next time they make a phone someone in the initial design meeting says "Ya know, the fuse function really seemed to piss off a lot of people, people who are now likely buying phones from our competitors. Maybe we shouldn't take that route again."
+5 Insightful?
The world does not exist in black and white. You know those chip fabs that Intel and AMD uses to make the processor in your computer? They typically cost anywhere from $1-4 billion dollars to build. Some things simply cannot be accomplished by small businesses and require the resources of large corporations.
I just wanted to add my two cents... A month or so ago, I filed my first FOIA request. I requested some non-sensitive statistical data from an office associated with the Dept of Defense. Despite the banality of the data I was requesting, because it was related to the military and the shear volume of it (over 10M records), I was expecting some foot dragging. However, I was very pleasantly surprised. The very next day, the FOIA officer emailed me and then followed up with a phone call. She kept me apprised of the status of my request and about three weeks later, the data was FTPed to me. She even found someone to answer some questions I had about the formatting of the files.
I was fully expecting a more adversarial process considering the reputations of FOIA requests. But I learned that FOIA officers seem to care a great deal about facilitating requests. Just wanted to give kudos here where some is due.
I once wrote a post on my blog that got frontpaged on/. and I had zero problems coping with the traffic. This was using Wordpress with the WP-Cache plugin on a modestly-powered server in a datacenter. I'm not really sure why so many people have issues (unless they aren't running WP-Cache, of course).
You should look into Stardock. They're an independent studio/publisher based in Michigan that have some pretty top-notch games. They're also widely known to have a very pro-gamer stance on DRM.
I personally implemented a Flash tracking cookie for an e-commerce site I developed back in 2002. The only thing it did was store a GUID. I was using it to track user metrics and remember shopping cart contents. I did it because back then cookie paranoia was much more widespread and people more routinely blocked them. These days, most web users don't seem to care. Perhaps because so many sites nowadays require cookies for basic functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but how much money have oppressive regimes put directly into the pockets of Stallman and Torvalds?
I've gotten several notices from Charter regarding my supposed sharing of stuff using the eDonkey network. The notice in part looks like this:
The only thing I've ever used eDonkey for was acquiring pr0n. I've never transferred or shared any type of executable. And my wifi network is secured with WPA2 with a strong, 10 character preshared-key. I've gotten two or three of these types of notices so obviously there's something really wrong with how they're determining who the "bad guys" are.
Ever use one of these cards in conjunction with a credit card? They have your real info now.
Er, why not? I've ignored Sony for years and I still buy a fair share of electronics. I would strongly disagree with you that they make the best of anything (except maybe gaming console, but I've still never owned a PS of any kind). 20 years ago, they used to make the best TV's. That's not the case anymore. And they've never made the best MP3 player, audio equipment, photography gear, or PCs.
I'm not sure how any reasonably well-informed person could swallow Sony's marketing angle. What they're really good at is projecting the image that you've bought into.
Uh, that's the purpose of the judge. To, well, judge was is relevant and what is not.
netcat ("nc" on most Linux distros) provides the same functionality. However, it's also more flexible in that it allows you to test UDP ports and you can easily set it up to listen for incoming connections on an arbitrary port. It's a great tool for troubleshooting firewall issues.
Slashdot is open source. Gawker's code is not.
I work for a small start-up. We have something like 2,500 square feet of office space, including private offices for most of six people there. We also have no servers (everything is cloud-based) and everyone uses a notebook, wifi, and cell/cordless phones. What tends to happen is that 2/3rd of the floorspace is empty at any given time. We all tend to congregate in the centrally-located conference room. If people need to make a private call or really concentrate on something, they'll steal away to an office and then return later.
This behavior isn't dictated by management, it just happens. I've found out that if I sit in my office for most of the day, I feel out of the loop (even with constant email exchanges). There are some downsides to being constantly plugged-in to everything like that, but overall, I feel it's a net-positive. A great amount of collaboration just emerges.
Using front companies that present themselves as marketing or advertising agencies, Choicepoint (since purchased by LexisNexis) buys data from pizza delivery places. Apparently it's a great way to be able to correlate unpublished or cellular phone numbers to a particular address.
Kinda useless to give them all cell phones without first beefing up the wireless and Internet infrastructure. That part might be a bit more difficult and time-consuming.
I use both Rackspace and EC2 for different applications. One big advantage of Rackspace (Slicehost) for smaller projects is the ability to assign multiple public IPs to a single instance. This comes in handy when running multiple SSL websites without needing to spin up an additional instance.
Fire hydrants put out about 5000 gallons per minute. A gallon of water weighs 8.345 lbs and 150 tons is 300,000 lbs. Therefore, the airship could carry 35,949 gallons, or enough for 7 minutes of fire fighting.
I'm sure there's more to the story than that. Did the musician assign the copyright of his songs to a recording company? If so, then I'm sure he was monetarily compensated for doing so when he signed that agreement and understood that they were no longer "his" songs. And did the ASCAP have some sort of agreement with the bar that the owners were to ensure that no unauthorized performances were conducted?
I'm not saying that these terms weren't laughably restrictive and counter to free culture. But the situation likely boils down a contract dispute--one that was entered into freely by all parties involved. If that's the case, there's enough blame to be spread around for agreeing to such terms. The ASCAP would not have had standing to sue if some random songwriter was performing in some random bar.
I do a lot of business with both the federal gov't and private sector businesses on IT projects. You've over-simplified things to the point of painting an inaccurate picture. Federal contracting is extremely complex and there are myriad types of contracts that can be awarded, each with different terms. It sounds like what you're describing is a labor-hour contract. The contractor bills the gov't for the "fully burdened cost" of putting a warm butt in a seat. This includes the worker's salary, overhead, G&A (general & administrative), and profit. All together, it's typically a lot more than a 50% markup of the staff's straight salary.
Unlike most private sector contracts, when doing a fully burdened labor hour contract with the feds, the contractor will spell out exactly what their profit margin is. Generally this is only 6-10%, which is considerably lower than the private sector. Despite what everyone thinks, doing business with the gov't isn't all that lucrative. It's an extremely competitive market in which the bottom-line cost is almost always the most important factor. Contracting officers are even prohibited by law to give preferential treatment to companies that have previously done a great job.
I can't really comment on forced furloughs, because I'm not familiar with how Northrup operates. But just because they do "government contracts" doesn't necessarily mean they can afford to keep highly-skilled staff on the payroll until they find a new project for them. Federal contracts can really help with sales revenue because they can be large awards and the government *always* pays. However, the trade off is all the red tape (which increases G&A costs) and the low profit margins. Next time you hear about Company X getting a $10M contract, don't just roll your eyes. Get a hold of their proposal and the contract and see what their actual profit is on the contract. Both documents are public property and available upon request from the federal contracting officer that made the award. (Defense related contracts might need to be pried from gov't with a FOIA request though)
Python and Ruby are in no way similar, other than the fact that they're both open-source OOP languages. They have completely opposing design philosophies: Python's "one right way to do it" vs. Ruby's "give the developer enough rope to hang himself."
No. The start of the "Tea Party" occurred during the grassroots movement to get Ron Paul the '08 Republican nomination for president. It grew out of the series of "money bombs" that were organized for his campaign. Fox News then hijacked the concept after the election because it was an existing vehicle of disaffected voters. Nowadays, the "Tea Party" has no coherent platform, it's just a bunch of soundbites used to whip the throng of useful idiots into a froth. And it has no actual leadership because everyone is too busy knifing each other in the back, trying to make themselves relevant in the current power vacuum of the Republican party.
So you take them to small claims court, where in many jurisdictions lawyers are not permitted. Motorola will have to send a corporate officer to represent the company. A much more likely outcome is that they'll settle with you prior to the hearing. All it takes is a few people to do this, and then blog about it and/or post info on social networking sites. Suddenly, Motorola is facing hundreds of small claims suits. They're still likely to settle them all out of court for the cost of the phone, but perhaps the next time they make a phone someone in the initial design meeting says "Ya know, the fuse function really seemed to piss off a lot of people, people who are now likely buying phones from our competitors. Maybe we shouldn't take that route again."
+5 Insightful? The world does not exist in black and white. You know those chip fabs that Intel and AMD uses to make the processor in your computer? They typically cost anywhere from $1-4 billion dollars to build. Some things simply cannot be accomplished by small businesses and require the resources of large corporations.
You can set a daily spend limit, but the ads aren't prepaid. Google charges your credit card at the end of the month.
Ultima reference?
I just wanted to add my two cents... A month or so ago, I filed my first FOIA request. I requested some non-sensitive statistical data from an office associated with the Dept of Defense. Despite the banality of the data I was requesting, because it was related to the military and the shear volume of it (over 10M records), I was expecting some foot dragging. However, I was very pleasantly surprised. The very next day, the FOIA officer emailed me and then followed up with a phone call. She kept me apprised of the status of my request and about three weeks later, the data was FTPed to me. She even found someone to answer some questions I had about the formatting of the files.
I was fully expecting a more adversarial process considering the reputations of FOIA requests. But I learned that FOIA officers seem to care a great deal about facilitating requests. Just wanted to give kudos here where some is due.
I believe everyone here is talking about prescription drugs, not vitamins or OTC meds.
I once wrote a post on my blog that got frontpaged on /. and I had zero problems coping with the traffic. This was using Wordpress with the WP-Cache plugin on a modestly-powered server in a datacenter. I'm not really sure why so many people have issues (unless they aren't running WP-Cache, of course).
You should look into Stardock. They're an independent studio/publisher based in Michigan that have some pretty top-notch games. They're also widely known to have a very pro-gamer stance on DRM.
I personally implemented a Flash tracking cookie for an e-commerce site I developed back in 2002. The only thing it did was store a GUID. I was using it to track user metrics and remember shopping cart contents. I did it because back then cookie paranoia was much more widespread and people more routinely blocked them. These days, most web users don't seem to care. Perhaps because so many sites nowadays require cookies for basic functionality.