One huge problem with the Western calendrical meausurement of time since the Gregorian reform is the year it begins with.
First of all, it is prejudicial. A.D. or Anno Domini literally means "the year of the lord." Most Christians say it means "in the year of our Lord." That is only our if you are a Christian, though. What if you are a Buddhist, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, etc.? The Christians will still claim Jesus is the lord of whichever practitioner of whichever religion, but it is hard to imagine that that practitioner would see it that way. Well, the masters of political correctness have come up with a solution for us: the Common Era. It has the same start date (which is still supposed to be Jesus' birthday), but it is the beginning of time when Christians inhabit the Earth with the the believers of other religions. Translation: Let's pretend this is not Jesus' birthday when everybody knows full well that it is.
However, this calendar is not good for Christians, either. The start date is off by four years one way or the other (I am not going to check which way because I do not want to find out that Nostradamus' prediction of the "fire in the sky over the new city" -- or something like that -- for 1997 was actually more correctly placed in 2001. Would that mean that George Bush or Bill Gates was the anti-christ?).
In any case, while this time reform is being done, the initial date for the calendar should be fixed to a date less culturally biased. That would, at the very least, alleviate the problem of opening a history book and having to see 1066 C.E. (excuse me while I vomit). Ending another politically correct "band-aid on a broken arm" would definitely be benificial for the intellectual progress of mankind.:)
I used to always say this about the metric system when those elitist French and German bastards (am I being prejudiced?) would say, "Zee zystem international is zuperior to zee American ztandard zystem..."
Of course, the "Amercian Standard System" is just a standardization of the English Imperial System which is very similar to all the continental European systems of measurement. This is to say they are all based on odd (odd as in "weird" not "not even") numbers. This is not at all surprising coming from a civilization that did not discover the zero until they were at war (the Crusades) with someone who had it.
Anyway, my criticism was always that the International System (SI) was incomplete. It was created without any modification of time measure. Everything is based on 10... but time. Time is still in the cumbersome Sumerian notation. If that is not outdated, I have no idea what could be. These are people that could not even tell the difference between 360 and 365 (much less the 365.2422 of the Gregorian calendar), so why do Western countries still use this system? And why did Western countries export this stupidity to other cultures?
There is an ancient 10 based system that works, though. It comes from the culture that originally based everything on 10. This is the Chinese bai3 ke4 100 Ke system. In this system a 24 hour period is divided into 100 periods called ke4 starting at midnight. Each Ke works out to exactly 864 seconds in Sumerian measure.
I would not hold my breath for any sort of solution, though. I do not imagine people suddently getting comfortable with a 33.33 Ke workday. Lunch time would be interesting, too. Imagine your boss saying, "Take 3 Ke."
Does anyone have any advice on things I can do to get these tele-marketers to stop calling on my cellphone?
Move to Taiwan. In Taiwan the caller pays all of the charges incurred by the call including the airtime. All calls to cellphones are technically long distance (as all cellphones have their own area code). If you do not call anyone on your cellphone the charges will be under US$10 per month in most cases.
Cellphone service in the US is a rip-off. Prices are too high and service is terrible. And still the cellphone industry is whining about why they do not have enough customers. Go figure.
It seems that under circumstances like these, the online community often coughs up quite a bit of cash. Why not ask for donations?
If the online community gave him this money, he would be obligated to act in good faith and open source the entire thing (including the commandline wrapper if Network Associates is truly selling PGP).
Sorry, I'm not actually living in the real world. My imagination tends to get the better of me...
I really cannot understand why these articles keep popping up saying, "Why are cell phones so popular in Japan and Europe when they are not in the US?"
The reason I am so sick of this is that the reasons are basically obvious to anybody that does not have a business degree. There are two main categories for this problem: Greed and marketing stupidity. And these problems are also pervasive in the US broadband market.
The first problem, greed, should be obvious to any customer or individual who has even inquired about cellphones at any store. Every company has their own proprietary cell phones and will not allow customers to use their service without buying a new phone. This was covered in
this slashdot article.
This practice essentially creates a monopoly where the customer must deal with a large expense to switch service providers. Companies might think this is good for business because it protects their customer base, but it, in fact, harms their business because people do not like to commit like that. In this case, the cellphone becomes disposable, and who is going to shell out 300+ bucks for a disposable phone?
The other aspect to this greed was pointed out by Linus himself in his book
Just for Fun . He said the fact that all of the service providers had proprietary systems instead of agreeing on a standard, like GSM, caused the market to be stagnant. I agree with this point. In addition to the fact that it would alleviate the problem stated above, it would also have avoided a lot of the other problems encountered by the cell phone industry. The biggest of these problems was the problem of building cell towers. Without a common standard, the companies all had to build their own system of cell towers, so the service varied greatly from place to place. Service was bad, so customers were annoyed.
In a common system where companies would be using compatable equipment, they could just pay eachother for bandwidth usage and compete on price and service. However, they wanted to spend all that extra money to attempt to create monopolies. I really do not see the point of having a monopoly over a small number of customers, though.
The other aspect was stupid marketing. This article talks about what American consumers are doing in their cars. It says that they might want a wireless app to give them a traffic report. This is typical of the marketing decision that was made by some brainiac way back in the early days. Some genius thought that the people who would use cellphones the most would be businessmen. The cellphone industry should find and castrate this guy. He has not only made cellphones bad for business but for the consumer as well.
Why was this guy stupid? Because businessmen know how much work they do for their dollar. They are not going to spend one more second on the phone than is necessary. They also do not care about aesthetics (unless they are in sales, but even then, most business men have notoriously bad taste, and it is often quite entertaining to watch yuppies feign artistic appreciation). Therefore, businessmen are not going to use their cellphones excessively, and neither are they going to pay top dollar for the prettiest phone on the market.
Who is going use their phones a lot and pay for the most expensive ones, then? The
article has a clue. It says:
Japan's use of wireless phones has frequently been dismissed as superficial fun, a phenomenon driven by teenage girls, Hello Kitty screensavers and an endless variety of ring tones.
The author (obviously someone who has been in the business world too long) talks about "a phenomenon driven by teenage girls." This is not phenomenon. Think back to when you were a teenager and dating. How many times did you get into a serious fight with a sibling over phone usage? How many times did you get into a fight with your parents restrictions on the phone? How many times did you stay up most or all of the night whispering into the phone so that your parents would not hear?
Teenagers are the key to cellphone market. They always have been. Teenagers will talk until the battery dies. Teenages will carry an extra battery. Teenagers will buy extra accessories for their phones. Teenagers will use their phones as status symbols to their friends.
But who pays for these cell phones? Well, the parents, of course. The parents will buy cellphones for their teenagers because they want their kid to be safe. They will want to check up on the kid now and then.
Now, we have a responsible group (the parents: those businessmen whose money everyone wanted) funding the excesses of an irresposible group (the teenagers who have a hormonal imperative to generate big bills). A phenomenon? I think not.
As obvious as this may sound, it did not occur to the author of
the article or the businessmen she interviewed. Cell phones have always been ugly in the US. I will not buy Motorola products because they always released ugly products to the US market (although their cellphones are quite pretty in Asia). I think this attitude that Americans have no aesthetic taste is quite insulting.
In any case, I am sick of this whining about the consequences of stupid business decisions. It sounds like GM in the late 70's blaming Japan because American consumers did not want the big cars that GM could make greater profits on. Did any of these people read Adam Smith? The market cannot be forced to accept a product (unless of course you are Microsoft).
Boy, those greedy
Authors Guild
bastards are going to love this one. Just imagine a whole world of people reading used books...... And not paying for them!!
I wonder how long it will be before these
bookcrossing
people are accused of piracy for their philanthropy...
It is also interesting to note that the greedy people in this case have a.org URL, while the philanthropists have a.com URL.
Is it just me, or does it surpise anyone else that derivatives of the word "pirate" appear no less than 12 times in this article. I think it is kind of odd that they refer to the kiosks as "CD-pirating kiosks," as well. Who said the CDs had to be pirated. It could be a photo CD of someone's last vacation for all anybody knows.
It's nice to see that the news agencies in Austrailia are just as "objective" as those in the US.
It appears that there is a mistake in this article. The mile (mi)
nautical mile (nmi) seem to be treated as the same distance.
However, one mile is 5280 feet, and one nautical mile
is 6076.1 feet by
this definition, or 6080.27 feet in the definition given in
GDict. This means that the estimated altitude of the rocket
will be approximately 71.35 standard miles (mi) or 71.40
standard miles (mi) (respectively).
It also appears according to
this NASA page
that 50 miles is the altitude one has to achieve to be
called an astronaut in the USA. However, the atmosphere's
friction boundary is 75.76 miles, according to
the same page. So the rocket will be
approximately 4.41 to 4.36 miles short of the friction
boundary, but any lifeforms (bacteria, etc.) that survive
the journey will be astronauts in the USA.
Since this Wireless Consumer's Alliance is giving these wireless providers some static, why don't we have a Literature Consumer's Alliance to protect the public domain from these monopolistic publishers?
To keep this very simple, copyright was provided in the Constitution to promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving its creators financial rights to their works. In short, to encourage people to produce work for the benefit of the public.
"...To promote the Progress of Science and
useful Arts..." is what the Constitution says.
But why? What is the purpose of this
"Progress"? As Mr. Stroligo states, it
is to "encourage people to produce work for
the benefit of the public."
That means that
the public or citizenry of the USA in general
is the intended recipient of this content.
It also means that every individual in the US
is a member of the group of intended recipients
of this information.
Therefore, every US citizen has a right,
delayed or immediate, to this information.
(The Constitution then goes on to state
that this right is delayed for the purposes
of these incentives.)
In other words, all content created in
the US is the rightful property of the
public of the US.
So, at some point or another, people in the
US have a right to use and disseminate this
information as they see fit. It has been
created for them.
The answer is unambiguous both in theory and practice.
Is there anything in law that is truly unambiguous?
What would lawyers do for a living if it were not for the amibguity of the law?
All work covered under your employment terms belongs to your employer. In the case of professional employees, this is everything. If you go home and write something on the weekend, you do not own it. You might be unaware of this issue and naively put a copyright notice on it, then distribute it. That was your mistake.
What if you have two employers simultaneously?
Do they each get 12/4.5?
Is charity covered in this?
How does the law stand on donating work to charity?
Are you telling me that if write you write a pamphlet for your church or synagogue or whatever, that charitable organization will not own that material?
In that case, it would also follow that your employer could take a tax writeoff for the value of any commmunity service you do.
In any case, you seem to have donated your programming efforts to charity. Can any lawyer claim that donating your efforts to the opensource community, indeed society in general, is not charity?
Whatever may be said, the situation is far from unambiuous.
If it's GPL'd, can't YOU distribute it?
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This code is under the GPL, and therefore technically, all of it is now free software, so why doesn't this annoymous reader distribute it himself?
It can't be a corporate secret: It's GPL'd
It is not the company's IP: It's GPL'd
Even employees who contributed to the code don't have rights over the GPL'd parts you adopted. They only have rights to the parts they wrote. However, any code they contributed to the complete project comes under the GPL if it's distributed together with the GPL'd code.
In other words, it's all free software, so why not beat them to the punch. Then their obfuscated garbage code would be just a waste of time and money.
Anyway, though, I'm not a lawyer, so don't listen to me if you value your job and don't plan on getting sued. I guess whether they would win or lose is irrelevant when all your paychecks are going for legal fees...
what happened to the code posting? i accessed the posting a couple of hours ago and started a download... i had been downloading for around 2.5 hours, and the transfer stalled... i decided to check the website, and -- ITS GONE!
does anyone know what happened? i keep getting a 404... its still stalling frequently, as well... perhaps getting slashdotted was more than they bargained for... in any case, id like to know the story behind it...
Slashdot Mirror
One huge problem with the Western calendrical meausurement of time since the Gregorian reform is the year it begins with.
First of all, it is prejudicial. A.D. or Anno Domini literally means "the year of the lord." Most Christians say it means "in the year of our Lord." That is only our if you are a Christian, though. What if you are a Buddhist, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, etc.? The Christians will still claim Jesus is the lord of whichever practitioner of whichever religion, but it is hard to imagine that that practitioner would see it that way. Well, the masters of political correctness have come up with a solution for us: the Common Era. It has the same start date (which is still supposed to be Jesus' birthday), but it is the beginning of time when Christians inhabit the Earth with the the believers of other religions. Translation: Let's pretend this is not Jesus' birthday when everybody knows full well that it is.
However, this calendar is not good for Christians, either. The start date is off by four years one way or the other (I am not going to check which way because I do not want to find out that Nostradamus' prediction of the "fire in the sky over the new city" -- or something like that -- for 1997 was actually more correctly placed in 2001. Would that mean that George Bush or Bill Gates was the anti-christ?).
In any case, while this time reform is being done, the initial date for the calendar should be fixed to a date less culturally biased. That would, at the very least, alleviate the problem of opening a history book and having to see 1066 C.E. (excuse me while I vomit). Ending another politically correct "band-aid on a broken arm" would definitely be benificial for the intellectual progress of mankind. :)
I used to always say this about the metric system when those elitist French and German bastards (am I being prejudiced?) would say, "Zee zystem international is zuperior to zee American ztandard zystem..."
Of course, the "Amercian Standard System" is just a standardization of the English Imperial System which is very similar to all the continental European systems of measurement. This is to say they are all based on odd (odd as in "weird" not "not even") numbers. This is not at all surprising coming from a civilization that did not discover the zero until they were at war (the Crusades) with someone who had it.
Anyway, my criticism was always that the International System (SI) was incomplete. It was created without any modification of time measure. Everything is based on 10... but time. Time is still in the cumbersome Sumerian notation. If that is not outdated, I have no idea what could be. These are people that could not even tell the difference between 360 and 365 (much less the 365.2422 of the Gregorian calendar), so why do Western countries still use this system? And why did Western countries export this stupidity to other cultures?
There is an ancient 10 based system that works, though. It comes from the culture that originally based everything on 10. This is the Chinese bai3 ke4 100 Ke system. In this system a 24 hour period is divided into 100 periods called ke4 starting at midnight. Each Ke works out to exactly 864 seconds in Sumerian measure.
I would not hold my breath for any sort of solution, though. I do not imagine people suddently getting comfortable with a 33.33 Ke workday. Lunch time would be interesting, too. Imagine your boss saying, "Take 3 Ke."
Does anyone have any advice on things I can do to get these tele-marketers to stop calling on my cellphone?
Move to Taiwan. In Taiwan the caller pays all of the charges incurred by the call including the airtime. All calls to cellphones are technically long distance (as all cellphones have their own area code). If you do not call anyone on your cellphone the charges will be under US$10 per month in most cases.
Cellphone service in the US is a rip-off. Prices are too high and service is terrible. And still the cellphone industry is whining about why they do not have enough customers. Go figure.
It seems that under circumstances like these, the online community often coughs up quite a bit of cash. Why not ask for donations?
If the online community gave him this money, he would be obligated to act in good faith and open source the entire thing (including the commandline wrapper if Network Associates is truly selling PGP).
Sorry, I'm not actually living in the real world. My imagination tends to get the better of me...
I really cannot understand why these articles keep popping up saying, "Why are cell phones so popular in Japan and Europe when they are not in the US?"
The reason I am so sick of this is that the reasons are basically obvious to anybody that does not have a business degree. There are two main categories for this problem: Greed and marketing stupidity. And these problems are also pervasive in the US broadband market.
The first problem, greed, should be obvious to any customer or individual who has even inquired about cellphones at any store. Every company has their own proprietary cell phones and will not allow customers to use their service without buying a new phone. This was covered in this slashdot article.
This practice essentially creates a monopoly where the customer must deal with a large expense to switch service providers. Companies might think this is good for business because it protects their customer base, but it, in fact, harms their business because people do not like to commit like that. In this case, the cellphone becomes disposable, and who is going to shell out 300+ bucks for a disposable phone?
The other aspect to this greed was pointed out by Linus himself in his book Just for Fun . He said the fact that all of the service providers had proprietary systems instead of agreeing on a standard, like GSM, caused the market to be stagnant. I agree with this point. In addition to the fact that it would alleviate the problem stated above, it would also have avoided a lot of the other problems encountered by the cell phone industry. The biggest of these problems was the problem of building cell towers. Without a common standard, the companies all had to build their own system of cell towers, so the service varied greatly from place to place. Service was bad, so customers were annoyed.
In a common system where companies would be using compatable equipment, they could just pay eachother for bandwidth usage and compete on price and service. However, they wanted to spend all that extra money to attempt to create monopolies. I really do not see the point of having a monopoly over a small number of customers, though.
The other aspect was stupid marketing. This article talks about what American consumers are doing in their cars. It says that they might want a wireless app to give them a traffic report. This is typical of the marketing decision that was made by some brainiac way back in the early days. Some genius thought that the people who would use cellphones the most would be businessmen. The cellphone industry should find and castrate this guy. He has not only made cellphones bad for business but for the consumer as well.
Why was this guy stupid? Because businessmen know how much work they do for their dollar. They are not going to spend one more second on the phone than is necessary. They also do not care about aesthetics (unless they are in sales, but even then, most business men have notoriously bad taste, and it is often quite entertaining to watch yuppies feign artistic appreciation). Therefore, businessmen are not going to use their cellphones excessively, and neither are they going to pay top dollar for the prettiest phone on the market.
Who is going use their phones a lot and pay for the most expensive ones, then? The article has a clue. It says:
The author (obviously someone who has been in the business world too long) talks about "a phenomenon driven by teenage girls." This is not phenomenon. Think back to when you were a teenager and dating. How many times did you get into a serious fight with a sibling over phone usage? How many times did you get into a fight with your parents restrictions on the phone? How many times did you stay up most or all of the night whispering into the phone so that your parents would not hear?Teenagers are the key to cellphone market. They always have been. Teenagers will talk until the battery dies. Teenages will carry an extra battery. Teenagers will buy extra accessories for their phones. Teenagers will use their phones as status symbols to their friends.
But who pays for these cell phones? Well, the parents, of course. The parents will buy cellphones for their teenagers because they want their kid to be safe. They will want to check up on the kid now and then.
Now, we have a responsible group (the parents: those businessmen whose money everyone wanted) funding the excesses of an irresposible group (the teenagers who have a hormonal imperative to generate big bills). A phenomenon? I think not.
As obvious as this may sound, it did not occur to the author of the article or the businessmen she interviewed. Cell phones have always been ugly in the US. I will not buy Motorola products because they always released ugly products to the US market (although their cellphones are quite pretty in Asia). I think this attitude that Americans have no aesthetic taste is quite insulting.
In any case, I am sick of this whining about the consequences of stupid business decisions. It sounds like GM in the late 70's blaming Japan because American consumers did not want the big cars that GM could make greater profits on. Did any of these people read Adam Smith? The market cannot be forced to accept a product (unless of course you are Microsoft).
Boy, those greedy Authors Guild bastards are going to love this one. Just imagine a whole world of people reading used books...... And not paying for them!!
I wonder how long it will be before these bookcrossing people are accused of piracy for their philanthropy...
It is also interesting to note that the greedy people in this case have a .org URL, while the philanthropists have a .com URL.
Is it just me, or does it surpise anyone else that derivatives of the word "pirate" appear no less than 12 times in this article. I think it is kind of odd that they refer to the kiosks as "CD-pirating kiosks," as well. Who said the CDs had to be pirated. It could be a photo CD of someone's last vacation for all anybody knows.
It's nice to see that the news agencies in Austrailia are just as "objective" as those in the US.
It appears that there is a mistake in this article. The mile (mi) nautical mile (nmi) seem to be treated as the same distance. However, one mile is 5280 feet, and one nautical mile is 6076.1 feet by this definition, or 6080.27 feet in the definition given in GDict. This means that the estimated altitude of the rocket will be approximately 71.35 standard miles (mi) or 71.40 standard miles (mi) (respectively).
It also appears according to this NASA page that 50 miles is the altitude one has to achieve to be called an astronaut in the USA. However, the atmosphere's friction boundary is 75.76 miles, according to the same page. So the rocket will be approximately 4.41 to 4.36 miles short of the friction boundary, but any lifeforms (bacteria, etc.) that survive the journey will be astronauts in the USA.
Since this Wireless Consumer's Alliance is giving these wireless providers some static, why don't we have a Literature Consumer's Alliance to protect the public domain from these monopolistic publishers?
While were at it, why not:
Movie Viewer's Alliance
and
Music Listener's Alliance
All this talk seems to be centered around CBS, ABC, and NBC and when they are going to go digital.
I am confused.
Wasn't the purpose of paying for cable TV to be able NOT to watch those networks? Why would people pay to watch their mind numbing garbage, anyway?
Also, what advantage would there be in watching Friends or the news or some other ordinary content in digital resolution?
Good point... But as Mr. Stroligo says:
"...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts..." is what the Constitution says. But why? What is the purpose of this "Progress"? As Mr. Stroligo states, it is to "encourage people to produce work for the benefit of the public."
That means that the public or citizenry of the USA in general is the intended recipient of this content.
It also means that every individual in the US is a member of the group of intended recipients of this information.
Therefore, every US citizen has a right, delayed or immediate, to this information. (The Constitution then goes on to state that this right is delayed for the purposes of these incentives.)
In other words, all content created in the US is the rightful property of the public of the US.
So, at some point or another, people in the US have a right to use and disseminate this information as they see fit. It has been created for them.
The answer is unambiguous both in theory and practice.
Is there anything in law that is truly unambiguous?
What would lawyers do for a living if it were not for the amibguity of the law?
All work covered under your employment terms belongs to your employer. In the case of professional employees, this is everything. If you go home and write something on the weekend, you do not own it. You might be unaware of this issue and naively put a copyright notice on it, then distribute it. That was your mistake.
What if you have two employers simultaneously?
Do they each get 12/4.5?
Is charity covered in this?
How does the law stand on donating work to charity?
Are you telling me that if write you write a pamphlet for your church or synagogue or whatever, that charitable organization will not own that material?
In that case, it would also follow that your employer could take a tax writeoff for the value of any commmunity service you do.
In any case, you seem to have donated your programming efforts to charity. Can any lawyer claim that donating your efforts to the opensource community, indeed society in general, is not charity?
Whatever may be said, the situation is far from unambiuous.
This code is under the GPL, and therefore technically, all of it is now free software, so why doesn't this annoymous reader distribute it himself? It can't be a corporate secret: It's GPL'd It is not the company's IP: It's GPL'd Even employees who contributed to the code don't have rights over the GPL'd parts you adopted. They only have rights to the parts they wrote. However, any code they contributed to the complete project comes under the GPL if it's distributed together with the GPL'd code. In other words, it's all free software, so why not beat them to the punch. Then their obfuscated garbage code would be just a waste of time and money. Anyway, though, I'm not a lawyer, so don't listen to me if you value your job and don't plan on getting sued. I guess whether they would win or lose is irrelevant when all your paychecks are going for legal fees...
weird... now its back... did anyone else have this problem?
what happened to the code posting? i accessed the posting a couple of hours ago and started a download... i had been downloading for around 2.5 hours, and the transfer stalled... i decided to check the website, and -- ITS GONE!
does anyone know what happened? i keep getting a 404... its still stalling frequently, as well... perhaps getting slashdotted was more than they bargained for... in any case, id like to know the story behind it...