That clause was a clear shot at people trying to get away from paying for Qt. Without the clause, one could basically develop commercial applications without paying for Qt licenses, then cough up only when caught, claiming previous development followed the open-source license and "just so happens nobody asked us for the source code".
Trolltech used to depend entirely on revenue coming from Qt licenses, so obviously they wanted to minimize this sort of loopholes.
yeah but their margins are thin and getting thinner by the day. They currently rely on third-world consumers not being able to afford Android or Apple phones, but cheap 'droids are less than a year away...
Ouch. I didn't think Nokia would ever muster the balls to kill off Symbian (which was clearly the only logical move after the iPhone ate its lunch, even more so after Android started making inroads). I guess the majority of those 1800 redundancies will be Symbian geeks, to be replaced by Linux ninjas working on MeeGo (here's hope).
It's a shame it took so long for them to understand. They should have ditched Symbian right after the N97 disaster, pushing hard on shipping great Maemo products. Instead, Maemo was the unloved stepchild and was basically ditched for Moblin, losing another year of development... They are at least two years behind Android and need to catch up fast, to have a chance to stay relevant in the next decade. That MeeGo phone has to come out in Q12011 and blow Android out of the waters. Anything less than that, and they're toast.
Between this, the Piratebay farce and the victories for far-right parties, it's now clear that Sweden is not the "neutral" political paradise it once was.
It's a shame that the current crop of politicians haven't got the guts to stand up the bullies of the world; their predecessors worked hard and bravely during the Cold War, risking total annihilation, and I'm sure they'd be ashamed to know that their spineless children are frightened by their own shadows.
If a majority of the population decided bank robbery was okay, does that mean we should re-evaluate if robbing banks is really a bad thing? Of course not!
Of course yes. This is exactly what happens in most impoverished countries, by the way. If the only way to survive for a good part of the population is to steal and to rob, then stealing and robbing become commonplace and the population's own intolerance towards these acts naturally diminishes, or even results in anti-hero figures (see Jamaican gansters, for example). At that point, people in charge often concentrate on stopping the crimes rather than addressing the cause of it (i.e. scarcity of alternatives to survive), and the country falls even further in a downward spiral.
Does that remind us of something?:)
Ultimately, copying someone else's IP, to which you have no rights, means someone didn't get paid. Period.
Er, no. It results in me enjoying IP that otherwise I wouldn't have had a chance to. If I don't have the money to go see a movie then I don't pay for the movie, and somebody doesn't get paid (a percentage of the original sum). So hey, in both cases (me copying or me not going) have the same effect on the producer. Should we then be forced by law to go to the movies, because otherwise "somebody will not get paid"?
And if you copied it, you have assigned some value to it
Even if I did, it might not be economic value, and it might not coincide with what the producer wants me to pay; hence, in different circumstances the deal simply wouldn't have happened, so the producer wouldn't have gained any of "my value" anyway.
At best, it means you've inflicted direct financial harm by devaluing of the product in question.
Not really. Look at the record profits being posted recently by entertainment industries.
The product has NOT been devalued. The distribution chain has been devalued; which is why music stores are closing, but record companies are making more money than ever before.
if you pirate IP, you absolutely are harming the IP owners.
Except that you aren't. They still have their music, their artists (hell, even *more* artists and *cheaper* than ever before, thanks to reality shows), their tours, their merchandising, their advertisement deals, their followers ready to depart from cash... etc etc. This is what they're telling their shareholders, by publishing record profits, so I guess that's what they believe.
IP owners are not being "harmed"; IP resellers are suffering, yes, because they've been made technologically redundant.
Either that, or *everything* published on economics is wrong.
Either that, or you didn't read a lot of stuff published on economics. Which I guess is the most likely option, here.
If you worked and didn't get paid time and time again, you'd be begging for help and relief with the law too.
Or maybe you'd look for another job? You know, that's what happens IRL, when you care to join the adult population.
Let me preamble this by pointing out how infantile and ad-hominem your response is. You do your cause a disservice.
Bullshit. First of all, there are some moral standards throughout the centuries and cultures, and one of them is that theft is not ok
"Theft" means I deprive you of an object; "illegal duplication" doesn't deprive you of the duplicated object. Whatever "moral standard" you're appealing to, it simply doesn't apply here.
I'm sure you already know this, since you feel you are well-versed in the circumstances of this debate, but nonetheless you keep pushing regurgitated talking points, decorated with profanities. That doesn't reflect well on you, you know.
Secondly, the current moral values of society may be wrong. Remember Galileo?
Galileo wasn't condemned by the people or by any "moral value"; he wasn't despised or burnt at the stakes. He was condemned by a (relatively small) organization with an interest in maintaining a certain set of assumptions about the world in order not to lose power. So again, your point is moot.
Maybe not all movie downloads are lost sales
if not all movie copies are lost sales, therefore 1 copy != 1 lost sale, which is what the parent post says. Some downloads are lost sales? Maybe. Unfortunately, there's no proof of that, so it looks like you're basing your assumptions on pure faith. Hello, Believer in the Holy Crusade for the Enrichment of Entertainment Enterprises.
You are not a serious person, are you?
if being "serious" means attacking the messenger rather than the argument and using a lot of cussing, then I guess you're right. If it means knowing what he's talking about, then I'm afraid the definition of "serious person" might apply to him rather than to you. The definition of "troll" seems better suited to you, at the moment.
The value you assign to the movie is not the actual economic value of the movie.
That seems to imply a confused definition of value, and it looks like you're the only one holding it here. The concept of "Economic value", which is what the OP (I think) was referring to, is indeed flexible and subjective. I'm perfectly free to assign an economic value of 0$ to "all the work that has been done to produce the movie"; movie producers would disagree, and we *might* end up haggling until we reach a "market value". then again, we might not: I could just tell the producer to go away and not buy his overpriced goods.
You see, this is what entertainment executives don't get: all of a sudden, the distribution price of their goods went down to 0$. Distribution price is the most obvious parameter on which a buyer can base his evaluation (because he doesn't know anything about the production cost), and has been such since markets were "invented". This means that the common man now "naturally" values their goods at 0$, and it's the trader's own job to persuade him that the good has, in fact, a higher value. They don't want to do that, unfortunately. A distribution price of 0$ is a fantastic opportunity for all sort of new economic tricks, but clearly entertainment moguls aren't interested in finding them out, i.e. in doing their job.
No. A lower valuation does not directly relate to financial harm.
Bullshit. So, if I can valuate your house at 1 dollar, am I entitled to take it?
The house is a physical item, that only one person can own at any given time. A digital copy is a virtual item, that can be duplicated to infinity. If you can perfectly copy my house for $1, i don't see why you should pay me; indeed, I would say "more power to you!"
No. The net effect may be neutral or even possitive given an increase in popularity. i.e. MS-DOS.
Bullshit. Yes, it may be neutral, or even positive, but it is usually negative. But it doesn't matter if it's not negative or not.
No, they are among the very few labels that decided to legally go after small-time "pirates", and certainly the most famous one.
I know one person IRL who was targeted by Gallant-Macmillian on behalf of MoS. He denied and refused to pay, and they seem to have given up, but this friend is obviously quite wary of p2p now. The chilling effect is, undeniably, working.
Hell, i was targeted by US copyright lawyers myself: I'm in the UK and I laughed it off, but my ISP didn't and cut the connection (only to re-establish it after a few days). I haven't touched an illegal torrent since then, trying to figure out the best solution for my needs (mixed Linux/Windows environment here, low budget, and I'd like to "get out" in a low-profile country like Russia or similar).
Q2 2011? Seriously? By that time Apple will have released yet another OS update, and the market will be flooded by Android devices. All my friends, even the hardcore long-time Nokia fanatics, this year have moved on -- tired of waiting for a decent OS after the terrible N97 experience.
Nokia should have released a super-device *this year* and instead they wasted months on the move to MeeGo. As someone who wanted to profit from the platform, I feel badly let down. The N900 with a polished OS would have rocked, instead we got another year of "just wait, it'll be worth it!". Yeah, we wait, and meanwhile Apple and (especially) Google are eating our lunch.
That is, an easy to access, distributed, bulletproof solution to bypass the proposed filter. A network of proxies in different countries, using a constantly self-updating list of peer nodes in a P2P way (like Gnutella/eMule do). Make it extremely easy to get (firefox addons etc).
Make the filter irrelevant even before it's implemented, and show Conroy for the tool he is.
(Besides, such a project would also turn out to be invaluable for activists in places like Iran.)
That's not a benefit, because that 20% time must be employed on projects that will, indirectly or directly, eventually benefit Google itself. I.E. you can't just play with your Spaceballs dolls.
Chrome is largely a tool to get other browser manufacturers to adopt features that make it attractive for content developers to use formats and protocols that are conducive to Google's business.
... and to enable Google's customers to use Google revenue-generating services (like GApps) if other browsers fail, which is why they also developed the IE engine replacement.
No. VB complements the Xen/OracleVM offer. I know for a fact that it's extensively used inside Oracle itself. They'll just add features to facilitate integration between VB and OVM (i.e. develop on VB, deploy on OVM).
Dunno about NYC, but European coin-op distributors have always been controlled by mafia cartel, and they still are (although videogames have been replaced by videopoker, slots and partygames). They make for excellent money-laundering devices: low profile, wildly different volumes of income depending on location, very distributed, loose accounting. Many large arcades also doubled up as drug markets in the early 90s (dark, full of youngsters...), before the authorities started to crack down on the practice. Nowadays, you can still find very small arcades on small streets far from the city centre, but you wouldn't dream of actually enter the place unless you're somehow affiliated with the mob.
No it's not. It's called "Oracle Enterprise Linux", which gets updates from the "Oracle Unbreakable Network" as part of "Oracle Unbreakable Support" contracts.
Check what happened in the two years of the Prodi government before him, and you'll see a good example.
Yeah, Italy won the FIFA World Cup (after finding out its best football clubs were corrupting referees, including one club owned by a certain Mr. Berlusconi). Some people were forced to (gosh!) pay taxes or (damn!) face competition in the market.
First: even "the newspaper of the brother's premier" has voiced concerns over the law - the decision not to go on strike was a move by its chief, Vittorio Feltri
Feltri is known for never, ever allowing strikes. Even when his workforce goes on strike (which happened a few times) he still prints the paper. He's just a scab.
It was not the only newspaper who didn't go on strike. Others, such as "Libero", "Il Foglio", "Italia Oggi"
All papers supporting the government. "Libero" is controlled by one of the political parties in government.
The "Legal scandals" ended up with exonerations (more than once), there is not a single case that has been proven in tribunal. Show me a single case that has merit.
Actually, no. He was convicted for corrupting the judges in the Mondadori case, but saved by the Italian equivalent of the "Statute of Limitations", i.e. after stalling the trial as long as he could, eventually we reached the stage where facts were too old to be considered. Same for illegal party funding in the first All-Iberian case, and illegal funds used to buy a footballer. He was also convicted of lying to judges and using illegal funds to buy land, but was saved by generalized amnesty. A couple of other trials were nullified by laws he passed (All-Iberian 2, SME-Ariosto 2). He's still awaiting judgement on a trial where his then-lawyer was convicted of corruption, again coming out of All-Iberian.
It's all on Wikipedia, among other places, but you're probably not interested in facts. Keep voting whatever you want, I've left the country for good, only come back every few years to be a tourist -- lovely food, shame for people constantly complaining about the shit economy and crap society.
A Booker prize winning book requires one guy to spend his evenings for a year writing.
... plus a few millions to print, distribute and sell the thing, plus marketing, plus lobbying the Booker jury, plus plus plus...
And this if we assume the author was not paid some sort of advance, which is not going to be the case. That's quite a few thousand pounds right there (up to a few cool millions if you happen to be a public figure like Tony Blair or Peter Andre).
Nice little bit of Tory propaganda there. I doubt "ousting Labour" would magically solve all problems with the UK parliamentary system... especially if it means voting in the British equivalent of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism", a bunch of aristocrats bankrolled by a millionaire living abroad (i.e. the Tories).
Did you consider concentrating efforts in one or two "marginal" constituencies in order to "spoil it" for one of the major parties ? It might end up doing more for the debate than a simple (unwinnable) nationwide challenge, don't you think?
Er, the original Maemo was in fact based on an old Ubuntu AFAIK.
But it's irrelevant anyway, considering that Maemo doesn't exist anymore: it's been merged with Moblin to create the new "MeeGo" distribution, which will be RPM-based and completely independent from any "parent" distro.
Maemo is suffering from the US-centric view of the average IT media. It's simply the best smartphone OS... because it's not a phone OS, it's a full desktop OS with a phone-friendly UI, more or less like the iPhone. But differently from the iPhone, it's a standard Linux, it's open to all sorts of hacks, and you don't have to pay rent to develop for it (at least not yet). I have one, and it's mind-blowing. I can run anything I want without worrying about "jailbreaking" and other absurd locks. Once the price goes down a little, it will become the perfect device for, well, almost anything. (Yeah, the screen is resistive, but the quality and resolution... man, the iPhone looks very cheap in comparison).
What is holding Maemo back, at the moment is: - the above-mentioned US-centric attitude - fear. Many in Nokia are scared of dropping their old Symbian workhorse, which is still immensely profitable even if it managed to irritate almost every single user it ever had, and never managed to establish a decent ecosystem of third-party developers. They are afraid that Maemo (an untested platform in the wider market) might fail, so they don't allocate enough resources to it, which leads to unpolished releases, which in turn means they don't feel confident enough to push Maemo-based devices as hard as they should... - internal politics. In Nokia, Symbian is the establishment, the cash-cow, the power, the suits, the veteran developers; Maemo is the skunkwork geek project, youthful and technically light-years ahead, but bringing a revolution in how things are done, with an unclear business model... not everyone is on board yet. Sometimes the friction shows.
Icons have a big advantage you don't mention: they don't need to be translated (in most cases). I'm currently developing a program for mobile phones, and by using icons almost exclusively, I have almost-zero translation costs, and can sell it to a few billion non-English-speakers without worrying too much.
(as usual, there are exceptions -- some icons simply don't work outside their cultural context, but that's a problem that good icon-makers know they should avoid. For example, showing a stylized European medieval helmet to mean "history" would work wonders in Italy or France, but would result in problems with Chinese and African audiences; which is why most browsers use more universal time-related images like clocks)
Slashdot Mirror
That clause was a clear shot at people trying to get away from paying for Qt. Without the clause, one could basically develop commercial applications without paying for Qt licenses, then cough up only when caught, claiming previous development followed the open-source license and "just so happens nobody asked us for the source code".
Trolltech used to depend entirely on revenue coming from Qt licenses, so obviously they wanted to minimize this sort of loopholes.
yeah but their margins are thin and getting thinner by the day. They currently rely on third-world consumers not being able to afford Android or Apple phones, but cheap 'droids are less than a year away...
Ouch. I didn't think Nokia would ever muster the balls to kill off Symbian (which was clearly the only logical move after the iPhone ate its lunch, even more so after Android started making inroads). I guess the majority of those 1800 redundancies will be Symbian geeks, to be replaced by Linux ninjas working on MeeGo (here's hope).
It's a shame it took so long for them to understand. They should have ditched Symbian right after the N97 disaster, pushing hard on shipping great Maemo products. Instead, Maemo was the unloved stepchild and was basically ditched for Moblin, losing another year of development... They are at least two years behind Android and need to catch up fast, to have a chance to stay relevant in the next decade. That MeeGo phone has to come out in Q12011 and blow Android out of the waters. Anything less than that, and they're toast.
Between this, the Piratebay farce and the victories for far-right parties, it's now clear that Sweden is not the "neutral" political paradise it once was.
It's a shame that the current crop of politicians haven't got the guts to stand up the bullies of the world; their predecessors worked hard and bravely during the Cold War, risking total annihilation, and I'm sure they'd be ashamed to know that their spineless children are frightened by their own shadows.
If a majority of the population decided bank robbery was okay, does that mean we should re-evaluate if robbing banks is really a bad thing? Of course not!
Of course yes. This is exactly what happens in most impoverished countries, by the way. If the only way to survive for a good part of the population is to steal and to rob, then stealing and robbing become commonplace and the population's own intolerance towards these acts naturally diminishes, or even results in anti-hero figures (see Jamaican gansters, for example). At that point, people in charge often concentrate on stopping the crimes rather than addressing the cause of it (i.e. scarcity of alternatives to survive), and the country falls even further in a downward spiral.
Does that remind us of something? :)
Ultimately, copying someone else's IP, to which you have no rights, means someone didn't get paid. Period.
Er, no. It results in me enjoying IP that otherwise I wouldn't have had a chance to. If I don't have the money to go see a movie then I don't pay for the movie, and somebody doesn't get paid (a percentage of the original sum). So hey, in both cases (me copying or me not going) have the same effect on the producer. Should we then be forced by law to go to the movies, because otherwise "somebody will not get paid"?
And if you copied it, you have assigned some value to it
Even if I did, it might not be economic value, and it might not coincide with what the producer wants me to pay; hence, in different circumstances the deal simply wouldn't have happened, so the producer wouldn't have gained any of "my value" anyway.
At best, it means you've inflicted direct financial harm by devaluing of the product in question.
Not really. Look at the record profits being posted recently by entertainment industries.
The product has NOT been devalued. The distribution chain has been devalued; which is why music stores are closing, but record companies are making more money than ever before.
if you pirate IP, you absolutely are harming the IP owners.
Except that you aren't. They still have their music, their artists (hell, even *more* artists and *cheaper* than ever before, thanks to reality shows), their tours, their merchandising, their advertisement deals, their followers ready to depart from cash... etc etc. This is what they're telling their shareholders, by publishing record profits, so I guess that's what they believe.
IP owners are not being "harmed"; IP resellers are suffering, yes, because they've been made technologically redundant.
Either that, or *everything* published on economics is wrong.
Either that, or you didn't read a lot of stuff published on economics. Which I guess is the most likely option, here.
If you worked and didn't get paid time and time again, you'd be begging for help and relief with the law too.
Or maybe you'd look for another job?
You know, that's what happens IRL, when you care to join the adult population.
Let me preamble this by pointing out how infantile and ad-hominem your response is. You do your cause a disservice.
Bullshit. First of all, there are some moral standards throughout the centuries and cultures, and one of them is that theft is not ok
"Theft" means I deprive you of an object; "illegal duplication" doesn't deprive you of the duplicated object. Whatever "moral standard" you're appealing to, it simply doesn't apply here.
I'm sure you already know this, since you feel you are well-versed in the circumstances of this debate, but nonetheless you keep pushing regurgitated talking points, decorated with profanities. That doesn't reflect well on you, you know.
Secondly, the current moral values of society may be wrong. Remember Galileo?
Galileo wasn't condemned by the people or by any "moral value"; he wasn't despised or burnt at the stakes. He was condemned by a (relatively small) organization with an interest in maintaining a certain set of assumptions about the world in order not to lose power. So again, your point is moot.
Maybe not all movie downloads are lost sales
if not all movie copies are lost sales, therefore 1 copy != 1 lost sale, which is what the parent post says. Some downloads are lost sales? Maybe. Unfortunately, there's no proof of that, so it looks like you're basing your assumptions on pure faith. Hello, Believer in the Holy Crusade for the Enrichment of Entertainment Enterprises.
You are not a serious person, are you?
if being "serious" means attacking the messenger rather than the argument and using a lot of cussing, then I guess you're right. If it means knowing what he's talking about, then I'm afraid the definition of "serious person" might apply to him rather than to you. The definition of "troll" seems better suited to you, at the moment.
The value you assign to the movie is not the actual economic value of the movie.
That seems to imply a confused definition of value, and it looks like you're the only one holding it here. The concept of "Economic value", which is what the OP (I think) was referring to, is indeed flexible and subjective. I'm perfectly free to assign an economic value of 0$ to "all the work that has been done to produce the movie"; movie producers would disagree, and we *might* end up haggling until we reach a "market value". then again, we might not: I could just tell the producer to go away and not buy his overpriced goods.
You see, this is what entertainment executives don't get: all of a sudden, the distribution price of their goods went down to 0$. Distribution price is the most obvious parameter on which a buyer can base his evaluation (because he doesn't know anything about the production cost), and has been such since markets were "invented". This means that the common man now "naturally" values their goods at 0$, and it's the trader's own job to persuade him that the good has, in fact, a higher value. They don't want to do that, unfortunately. A distribution price of 0$ is a fantastic opportunity for all sort of new economic tricks, but clearly entertainment moguls aren't interested in finding them out, i.e. in doing their job.
No. A lower valuation does not directly relate to financial harm.
Bullshit. So, if I can valuate your house at 1 dollar, am I entitled to take it?
The house is a physical item, that only one person can own at any given time. A digital copy is a virtual item, that can be duplicated to infinity.
If you can perfectly copy my house for $1, i don't see why you should pay me; indeed, I would say "more power to you!"
No. The net effect may be neutral or even possitive given an increase in popularity. i.e. MS-DOS.
Bullshit. Yes, it may be neutral, or even positive, but it is usually negative. But it doesn't matter if it's not negative or not.
No, they are among the very few labels that decided to legally go after small-time "pirates", and certainly the most famous one.
I know one person IRL who was targeted by Gallant-Macmillian on behalf of MoS. He denied and refused to pay, and they seem to have given up, but this friend is obviously quite wary of p2p now. The chilling effect is, undeniably, working.
Hell, i was targeted by US copyright lawyers myself: I'm in the UK and I laughed it off, but my ISP didn't and cut the connection (only to re-establish it after a few days). I haven't touched an illegal torrent since then, trying to figure out the best solution for my needs (mixed Linux/Windows environment here, low budget, and I'd like to "get out" in a low-profile country like Russia or similar).
Q2 2011? Seriously? By that time Apple will have released yet another OS update, and the market will be flooded by Android devices.
All my friends, even the hardcore long-time Nokia fanatics, this year have moved on -- tired of waiting for a decent OS after the terrible N97 experience.
Nokia should have released a super-device *this year* and instead they wasted months on the move to MeeGo. As someone who wanted to profit from the platform, I feel badly let down. The N900 with a polished OS would have rocked, instead we got another year of "just wait, it'll be worth it!". Yeah, we wait, and meanwhile Apple and (especially) Google are eating our lunch.
That is, an easy to access, distributed, bulletproof solution to bypass the proposed filter. A network of proxies in different countries, using a constantly self-updating list of peer nodes in a P2P way (like Gnutella/eMule do). Make it extremely easy to get (firefox addons etc).
Make the filter irrelevant even before it's implemented, and show Conroy for the tool he is.
(Besides, such a project would also turn out to be invaluable for activists in places like Iran.)
20% time (is that a benefit?)
That's not a benefit, because that 20% time must be employed on projects that will, indirectly or directly, eventually benefit Google itself. I.E. you can't just play with your Spaceballs dolls.
Chrome is largely a tool to get other browser manufacturers to adopt features that make it attractive for content developers to use formats and protocols that are conducive to Google's business.
... and to enable Google's customers to use Google revenue-generating services (like GApps) if other browsers fail, which is why they also developed the IE engine replacement.
No. VB complements the Xen/OracleVM offer. I know for a fact that it's extensively used inside Oracle itself. They'll just add features to facilitate integration between VB and OVM (i.e. develop on VB, deploy on OVM).
Dunno about NYC, but European coin-op distributors have always been controlled by mafia cartel, and they still are (although videogames have been replaced by videopoker, slots and partygames). They make for excellent money-laundering devices: low profile, wildly different volumes of income depending on location, very distributed, loose accounting. Many large arcades also doubled up as drug markets in the early 90s (dark, full of youngsters...), before the authorities started to crack down on the practice. Nowadays, you can still find very small arcades on small streets far from the city centre, but you wouldn't dream of actually enter the place unless you're somehow affiliated with the mob.
Yeah, "The Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program". In the downloads section, it's just "Enterprise Linux".
And your second links is broken :)
No it's not.
It's called "Oracle Enterprise Linux", which gets updates from the "Oracle Unbreakable Network" as part of "Oracle Unbreakable Support" contracts.
Check what happened in the two years of the Prodi government before him, and you'll see a good example.
Yeah, Italy won the FIFA World Cup (after finding out its best football clubs were corrupting referees, including one club owned by a certain Mr. Berlusconi).
Some people were forced to (gosh!) pay taxes or (damn!) face competition in the market.
We couldn't allow that to continue, right?
First: even "the newspaper of the brother's premier" has voiced concerns over the law - the decision not to go on strike was a move by its chief, Vittorio Feltri
Feltri is known for never, ever allowing strikes. Even when his workforce goes on strike (which happened a few times) he still prints the paper. He's just a scab.
It was not the only newspaper who didn't go on strike. Others, such as "Libero", "Il Foglio", "Italia Oggi"
All papers supporting the government. "Libero" is controlled by one of the political parties in government.
The "Legal scandals" ended up with exonerations (more than once), there is not a single case that has been proven in tribunal. Show me a single case that has merit.
Actually, no. He was convicted for corrupting the judges in the Mondadori case, but saved by the Italian equivalent of the "Statute of Limitations", i.e. after stalling the trial as long as he could, eventually we reached the stage where facts were too old to be considered. Same for illegal party funding in the first All-Iberian case, and illegal funds used to buy a footballer.
He was also convicted of lying to judges and using illegal funds to buy land, but was saved by generalized amnesty.
A couple of other trials were nullified by laws he passed (All-Iberian 2, SME-Ariosto 2). He's still awaiting judgement on a trial where his then-lawyer was convicted of corruption, again coming out of All-Iberian.
It's all on Wikipedia, among other places, but you're probably not interested in facts. Keep voting whatever you want, I've left the country for good, only come back every few years to be a tourist -- lovely food, shame for people constantly complaining about the shit economy and crap society.
Where are mods points when I need them? +1 Informative.
A Booker prize winning book requires one guy to spend his evenings for a year writing.
... plus a few millions to print, distribute and sell the thing, plus marketing, plus lobbying the Booker jury, plus plus plus...
And this if we assume the author was not paid some sort of advance, which is not going to be the case. That's quite a few thousand pounds right there (up to a few cool millions if you happen to be a public figure like Tony Blair or Peter Andre).
Nice little bit of Tory propaganda there. I doubt "ousting Labour" would magically solve all problems with the UK parliamentary system... especially if it means voting in the British equivalent of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism", a bunch of aristocrats bankrolled by a millionaire living abroad (i.e. the Tories).
Did you consider concentrating efforts in one or two "marginal" constituencies in order to "spoil it" for one of the major parties ?
It might end up doing more for the debate than a simple (unwinnable) nationwide challenge, don't you think?
Er, the original Maemo was in fact based on an old Ubuntu AFAIK.
But it's irrelevant anyway, considering that Maemo doesn't exist anymore: it's been merged with Moblin to create the new "MeeGo" distribution, which will be RPM-based and completely independent from any "parent" distro.
Maemo is suffering from the US-centric view of the average IT media. It's simply the best smartphone OS... because it's not a phone OS, it's a full desktop OS with a phone-friendly UI, more or less like the iPhone. But differently from the iPhone, it's a standard Linux, it's open to all sorts of hacks, and you don't have to pay rent to develop for it (at least not yet). I have one, and it's mind-blowing. I can run anything I want without worrying about "jailbreaking" and other absurd locks. Once the price goes down a little, it will become the perfect device for, well, almost anything. (Yeah, the screen is resistive, but the quality and resolution... man, the iPhone looks very cheap in comparison).
What is holding Maemo back, at the moment is:
- the above-mentioned US-centric attitude
- fear. Many in Nokia are scared of dropping their old Symbian workhorse, which is still immensely profitable even if it managed to irritate almost every single user it ever had, and never managed to establish a decent ecosystem of third-party developers. They are afraid that Maemo (an untested platform in the wider market) might fail, so they don't allocate enough resources to it, which leads to unpolished releases, which in turn means they don't feel confident enough to push Maemo-based devices as hard as they should...
- internal politics. In Nokia, Symbian is the establishment, the cash-cow, the power, the suits, the veteran developers; Maemo is the skunkwork geek project, youthful and technically light-years ahead, but bringing a revolution in how things are done, with an unclear business model... not everyone is on board yet. Sometimes the friction shows.
Icons have a big advantage you don't mention: they don't need to be translated (in most cases).
I'm currently developing a program for mobile phones, and by using icons almost exclusively, I have almost-zero translation costs, and can sell it to a few billion non-English-speakers without worrying too much.
(as usual, there are exceptions -- some icons simply don't work outside their cultural context, but that's a problem that good icon-makers know they should avoid. For example, showing a stylized European medieval helmet to mean "history" would work wonders in Italy or France, but would result in problems with Chinese and African audiences; which is why most browsers use more universal time-related images like clocks)