Actually, we have a very strong right not to listen. They can be allowed to say anything they want. They have no right to be up in my face to say it.
Consider, while I have every right to sing (badly) Jingle Bells at the top of my lungs in the middle of July. Does that same right extend to doing it outside your bedroom window at 3:00am? Of course not. Even if I'm not directly on your property I can get arrested for doing that. Free speech arguments won't hold any water against a disturbing the peace charge, even though free-speech is a constitutional right. Ergo, my "right" to free speech does not trump your "right" to a pleasant existance and a good night's sleep.
Now when you consider that my e-mail address is my property, I've paid good money for it after all, what right do they have to come stomping up on to my property with their shouted slogans of cheap furniture or judgements collected? Take this one step further to the poster who's getting spam on his cell-phone and having to pay for it.. or the fax spammers that existed before the law was put in to stop them. When spammers use *my* resources (time, bandwith, paper, storage, money) to do their marketing, without my permission - that's wrong, and should be stopped.
The difference between Dmitri and Spam is that only those who wanted to hear what Dmitri had to say went to listen to him. Those that didn't, didn't hear him. If you WANT to get spam and opt-in to all kinds of lists, well, go ahead. Until I opt-in though.. spammers can stay the hell out of my mailbox.
They should be clearer in their thinking. Take this paragraph:
Which is all very interesting, but the point is this: if you have learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard, the cost of retraining for Dvorak (however modest) is not worth paying. This implies, in turn, that the QWERTY standard is efficient. There is no market failure.
The key words? "if you have learned to type on...". This is the exact phenomenon desribed by lock-in.
Now is the DVORAK keyboard better? Maybe. Maybe not. Is QWERTY the best keyboard out there? Doubtful. With what we know about ergonomics now, someone could very likely come up with a keyboard that minimizes the problems of QWERTY while maximizing it's efficiencies. Will anyone do this? Of course not. There's too much of an infrastructure built around the QWERTY style.
And THAT is a market failure due to a monopoly.
Kwil
Re:Maybe the perception; not the reality
on
Mob Software
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· Score: 1
Uhh.. he specifically said that Linux and Open Source t is *not* mob software. For the specific reasons you mention.
If you read the entire article, mob software really doesn't exist yet.
Flipping through pages is crap! The scrollbar (and a good interface to it) is a far superior browsing method, and it never sticks together: it is many times more granular and thus keeps place much better.
Many times more granular? Excuse me? Pick up a copy of 'Don Quixote' or some other similarly weighty book. Compare the granularity between pages and a dinky scroll-bar along the side of your reader. Search engines do squat when all you remember is the plot-point and not the wording.
Also, if I'm reading a hard-copy and have to close the book up for something, I can later come back to the book, and without having consciously looked at where I was in the book, find the approximate location just by the feel of it. What's more amazing is that I can do this for several books at once. True, I don't have *exact* recall of where I was, but if you've got an ebook reader that can hold its place in several ebooks simultaneously, you've got something I haven't heard about. Never mind what happens if your e-book loses power.
Actually, unlike paper, digital text documents have an "infinite" capacity for any bookmark you want.
And, unlike paper bookmarks, digital text bookmarks require that I remember either the text I put on them at the time, or how many bookmarks in I've gone. Meanwhile, I pick up my Don Quixote and just by looking at it, while it's closed, I can tell that it's the yellow flag sticking out the bottom that's marking the page with the section about Pancho I'm interested in. How? While the color is an immediate tip-off, the location of it tells me that the passage I was interested in was near the bottom of the page, which corresponds to my memory of when I put the bookmark in. There is no "spatial" referencing for any bookmark you put in a digital text. One more back-channel of information gone.
I won't argue the point about screen quality, although there is some research pointing out that regardless of screen resolution, back-lighting itself is straining to the eyes.
Books require light (usually electric) during non-daylight hours.
And e-books require electricity 100% of the time, daylight or not. If my e-book runs out of batteries during a power outage (or when I'm up in the mountains) I'm screwed. If it suddenly gets dark while I'm reading my paper book, I can light a candle. And if I don't have any candles, well heck, at least I can read my book for half of every day without power while my e-book is now little more than an expensive paper-weight.
I own a book, not a license to it.
Of course you don't. You are not at all entitled to reproduce and resell copyrighted material without the author's permission.
The book is mine. The content? No. On the other hand, once I have the book, the publisher can't decide my usage period has expired and whisk the content away from me. As a side benefit, I can sell the book to a used book store, or donate it to the library. Try doing that with your e-book content.
Here's an interesting site:
http://www.fas.org/bwc/agr/main.htm It details some of the effects of a agrobio attack. If you're a terrorist, your goal is to destabalize, right?
Now consider:
The effects of hoof'n'mouth disease has done in the UK - especially to their agri-economy in the short term. Also consider what it may mean in the long term - higher demand on calves, etc.
How easily hoof'n'mouth can be transported.
How easily hoof'n'mouth spreads among sheep/cattle
The relative lack-of effects on humans (not so much worry about the feedback property)
The common american practice of factory/intensive farming. (better spreading conditions)
The population difference between America and Britain - and hence the food requirement difference.
So far an agrobio attack sounds pretty good for a willing terrorist. Wipe out the midwestern states cattle industry just by taking a nice tour of the countryside and some farms for a few days. Watch New York and LA go into riot mode as the price of food triples.
Now consider that as far as cattle diseases go, hoof'n'mouth is pretty benign. Imagine some sort of combination between mad cow and hoof'n'mouth - easily spread, humans get it from eating the animal, and brutalizes the food production industry.
And hey, this still even leaves the option of using the TNT while the country is dealing with the food shortages.. double whammy.
5) That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply to the Software for a person's use of the Software, your license to the Software ends automatically.
This is the clause that I think is the most interesting one. In essense, isn't it saying that if you make something based on this and patent it, you can't sue anybody for copying your functionality without losing your access to the CE software you based yours on?
Or to put it another way: Make something good off of this and we can take it if we want. Try to sue us for it and you'll lose the whole kit & kaboodle.
I don't get it.. an ISP says if you want to send mail through us, it has to be mail FROM us, and this is somehow construed as restricting our rights?
If it was the only ISP in town, maybe, but as it is, I don't see the big deal. It's not like my normal web-mail services don't have provision for sending something directly from them.
A pain? Sure. But lets reserve our energies for the real battles.
When it comes right down to it we as citzens should have and did get a tax refund because it was morally imperative. The government budgets XYZ for a year - lets say $3T. The government collects $4T. It follows that we should refund that extra $1T to the people who paid it. By the way, it also follows that if we only collected $2T that we should all get an additional "gap" tax bill at the end of the year, to cover the deficit.
We don't have a direct system like that though, and its too bad.
By your reasoning, we should send it right back to the government, because even though there wasn't a deficit, we still have a *massive* total debt hanging over our heads.
If the Artemis Project has anything to say about it, it may come a lot sooner than you think.
Though I'll agree the chances of this particular design (outside sleeping quarters at the top of the tower??) are slim to nil.
Karl
Re:why can't this be built in full gravity?
on
Hotel on the Moon
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· Score: 1
IANAE but..
I suppose you could make an argument for materials strength.. ie, it'd balance just fine both here and on the moon, but the lower gravity on the moon might lower the stress on the materials to a point where they wouldn't snap like they might here on earth.
1. Batteries: Batteries are severely limited in their range. Often they can only go 80km before having to be re-fueled, and this range decreases drastically as speed increases. Don't expect to go highway driving on a pure electric car. At least, not for a long drive.
2. Batteries: Batteries are heavy. When trying to lug around the weight of the batteries as well as the car, the less car, the longer the batteries last. The more car, the more batteries you need just to move it. Since the longer the batteries last, the better it is for your range, well, you get smaller cars. Smaller cars mean less passenger room and cargo space, and most people don't like that.
3. Batteries: Batteries often don't have enough torque to be able to get a car out of a "stuck" situation. So in climates with snow, or if you have to go off-road, an electric car can be a real problem.
4. Batteries: Batteries don't like the cold. Not a problem in a lot of places in the world, but in those where it is a problem, it's a major one. In a cold climate, you can cut the range of an electric car in half or worse.
5. Batteries: They're expensive, and when they're dead, they can't just be turfed as they generally have a lot of nasty chemicals in them we don't want leeching into the ground - after all, cutting pollution was the reason we're looking at electric in the first place, right?
You'll notice a theme here. Hopefully once they can start producing fuel cells economically we'll see a lot of these problems go away.
... in the process, you're preparing them to be professional programmers, because they're learning the programming environment they're likely to end up using in their professional lives.
And it wasn't that long ago that you could say Fortran was the language they'd most likely be using, or COBOL, or.. etc. The point is languages change. Just because it's what you happen to be using now doesn't mean it will be the primary language in the future. There's a whole lotta COBOL programmers who found out the hard way about that. Fortunately, Y2K came along and they had work for a while.:-)
PS, if they learn C and C++, it's easy for them to learn Java! But, if they learn Java (and only Java), then by your argument that "C++ is much more complex and difficult"
By that argument, Java sounds ideal as an introductory language. After all, things getting more complex and difficult is how courses are supposed to go right? We generally don't teach how to make beef wellington before teaching how to make apple pie, right? Though if we did, I'm sure the pie would be a snap.
Don't teach Freshmen how to make applets! Or SERVLETS!? Are you nuts! Teach them C and C++, and then it's easy for them to learn that other stuff, later!
Tell you what.. how about we use Java to teach them how to make standard applications first? You know, those things they taught you in your first C classes? A Huffman zip encoder and all that kind of jazz.
Don't even bother with applets or servlets or even threads until they've got a good foundation in the language and in the OOP concepts.
And Thalia did declare:
Research grants are indeed there to provide research for the benefit of the corporation providing the dough.
Your assumption is that it was a corporation providing the grant. Your implication is that only corporations do so.
The first may at times be true, but the second is false.
But it didn't become wide-spread until private corporations put in the money to connect the world. Before that, the connections only existed between specific Universities.
Non-sequitur; the fact that corporations invested in the internet had nothing to do with the patent system. In fact, had Andreessen patented 'web-browsing', it may have been a serious blow to the development of the internet we now know.
And corporations are, and should be, motivated by money.
Unsupported statement. Though many corporations may indeed be motivated by money, that doesn't necessarily mean all aspects of what they do are motivated by money. As well, can you think of no other motivation for a corporation? Altruism immediately comes to mind.
Consider Slashdot as an example for both of these: Supported entirely by banner advertising (a form Slashdot has itself reported as non-sustainable) and very little of it, to be honest, the bandwidth Slashdot consumes must be huge as evidenced by the "Slashdot Effect". We can assume then that Andover.net/VA Linux is actually suffering a loss on the operation of Slashdot. In other words, if the primary concern of VA Linux is money, they should close Slashdot. Yet as we can see, it remains running.
I suggest that the reason for this is that VA Linux's primary concern isn't "profit" as you suggest, but closer to advocacy and to the advancement (dare I say innovation?) of the Linux platform as a whole.
By calling it Linux/Open Source, he gets the Linux/Open Source community up and screaming, "That's not us, that's the GPL.."
Then Microsoft just has its lobby groups talk to the senators saying, "The Open Source community itself has agreed that the GPL is a cancer that attaches -etc."
From what I've read, the answer is yes in both cases - with a catch.
The catch is that you can not bundle your propietary code with any of the GPL programs that it would use.
You could probably even get away with putting a notice on your software that says your program relies on the GPL'd program "Blah" which can be downloaded from...
Yeah! Don't like Campbell's Soup? Buy Primo.. oh wait.. they're Campbell's too. Uhmm.. Swanson's! They sell broth.. no wait.. they're also Campbell's. Okay. Let's try something else then..
Kraft! There's a company we don't like. Refuse to buy Tang! Buy Kool-aid instead.. oh wait.. Kraft owns Kool-aid as well. Fine, we won't buy kids drinks at all, we'll just buy Miller Beer instead.. what? Still Kraft? Damn.
Face it, if you rely entirely on industry self-regulation, your options rapidly disappear.
Just take the case of any small-town a Wal-Mart has moved near to. Typically it takes about two years for the small, locally based general stores in that town to be run out of business. Even if you loyally patronize the local store and never shop in the Wal-Mart yourself.
One of the other conversations on Slashdot had an excellently thought out rant by Bill Woody. It was on Direct Marketing v. Banner Ads, but I'll quote some of the more relevant sections here:
Magazine interstitials (the full and half pages in the midst of your articles) must always be at least glanced at so you can discern whether or not it is part of the article).
Magazine interstitials also serve the purpose of providing more information when a person goes back to the magazine to find more information about a product he is interested in. That is, advertising in a magazine serves two purposes: first, to encourage someone who hasn't thought about buying something to think about it. Second, to provide more information to someone who is interested in buying something how he may go about it.
For example, I advertise a product in a magazine for a bug tracking program I developed and sell under my own banner. People who search out and buy my product use the ad to know the URL of the web site they should visit to purchase the product. I'd say the vast majority of the people who visit my web site and purchase my product don't immediately see the ad and go "I must have Bug Tracking Software!!!" Instead, they save the magazine on the shelf for a few months, and then when someone says "we're starting a new product, and we need bug tracking software"--they pull the magazine off the shelf, flip through it, find my ad, and visit my site for a demo.
Banner ads [or web interstitials] don't work because they are not persistant. That is, while I'm paying approximately $15 per 1000 readers of that magazine per month for the advertising, the advertising is persistant--they can view the ad again and again, and go back to that ad months later, even after I stop the campaign. Banner ads, on the other hand, cost just as much (if not more) than a quarter page magazine ad, yet are not persistant, have less are to provide information, and for a product like mine, do not drive traffic effectively.
And in response to televison Bill said:
Television is not persistant--but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a banner ad per view. My brother ran a series of television ads for a local political campaign. One way he ran his 30 second spots was to run them "shotgunned" through the day on several major local television stations: for about $20 per insertion. Per viewer, that worked out to be less than $1/CPM--and on some news programs, a hell of a lot less.
This is especially true when you consider internet penetration. Just over 50% of americans are on the net. What percentage of those happen to be on the site hosting the interstitials?
On the other hand, greater than 90% of americans have a television and, even including cable/satellite, there are a helluva lot fewer stations than websites, leading to a greater concentration of users on any given television channel.
Unfortunately, copyright laws made in the US start affecting those of us outside the US as well - especially when we start having to buy "secure" PC's and monitors because there's no other option.
Nobody's saying they can't make the decisions on their own. What's being said, and what Sanchez didn't address, is that the system is designed with a bias toward corporations taking advantage of a poor person's financial situation to further their own goals - at the expense of that person's privacy.
So you'd gladly trade some personal information to get a substantial discount? Now what happens when the items they start selling by this method aren't luxuries but instead are needs, and the only way someone in poverty can afford them is by "willingly" giving up their privacy?
And the other, potentially worse, tendency of this policy is to create an air of acceptance toward exchanging privacy for something else. Want a job? Sure - just let us mount cameras in your house so we can make sure you don't open the company up to vicarious liability for something. What? Don't like those conditions, fine, it's a free country, go work somwhere else.
If Napster went away, even thought there'd be alternatives, I think the industry would breath a big sigh of relief and then take their sweet time about implementing their own scheme.
Possibly. But you have to weigh that against the downside of as long as Napster (the most heavily publicized and easiest to use of these type of distribution technologies) is functioning, more and more people are becoming accustomed to the idea that "Music is free". Not to mention it is currently hindering those legit services that do exist and are trying to get steam. (Such as Emusic to name but one)
I think I'd rather take the risk that the large record labels won't move on their own. Especially when you think that some smaller labels are already doing their own foray's into e-publishing their collections. The majors being slow just helps those minors that are moving with the technology rather than against it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we have a very strong right not to listen. They can be allowed to say anything they want. They have no right to be up in my face to say it.
Consider, while I have every right to sing (badly) Jingle Bells at the top of my lungs in the middle of July. Does that same right extend to doing it outside your bedroom window at 3:00am? Of course not. Even if I'm not directly on your property I can get arrested for doing that. Free speech arguments won't hold any water against a disturbing the peace charge, even though free-speech is a constitutional right. Ergo, my "right" to free speech does not trump your "right" to a pleasant existance and a good night's sleep.
Now when you consider that my e-mail address is my property, I've paid good money for it after all, what right do they have to come stomping up on to my property with their shouted slogans of cheap furniture or judgements collected? Take this one step further to the poster who's getting spam on his cell-phone and having to pay for it.. or the fax spammers that existed before the law was put in to stop them. When spammers use *my* resources (time, bandwith, paper, storage, money) to do their marketing, without my permission - that's wrong, and should be stopped.
The difference between Dmitri and Spam is that only those who wanted to hear what Dmitri had to say went to listen to him. Those that didn't, didn't hear him. If you WANT to get spam and opt-in to all kinds of lists, well, go ahead. Until I opt-in though.. spammers can stay the hell out of my mailbox.
They should be clearer in their thinking. Take this paragraph:
Which is all very interesting, but the point is this: if you have learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard, the cost of retraining for Dvorak (however modest) is not worth paying. This implies, in turn, that the QWERTY standard is efficient. There is no market failure.
The key words? "if you have learned to type on...". This is the exact phenomenon desribed by lock-in.
Now is the DVORAK keyboard better? Maybe. Maybe not. Is QWERTY the best keyboard out there? Doubtful. With what we know about ergonomics now, someone could very likely come up with a keyboard that minimizes the problems of QWERTY while maximizing it's efficiencies. Will anyone do this? Of course not. There's too much of an infrastructure built around the QWERTY style.
And THAT is a market failure due to a monopoly.
Kwil
Uhh.. he specifically said that Linux and Open Source t is *not* mob software. For the specific reasons you mention.
If you read the entire article, mob software really doesn't exist yet.
Flipping through pages is crap! The scrollbar (and a good interface to it) is a far superior browsing method, and it never sticks together: it is many times more granular and thus keeps place much better.
Many times more granular? Excuse me? Pick up a copy of 'Don Quixote' or some other similarly weighty book. Compare the granularity between pages and a dinky scroll-bar along the side of your reader. Search engines do squat when all you remember is the plot-point and not the wording.
Also, if I'm reading a hard-copy and have to close the book up for something, I can later come back to the book, and without having consciously looked at where I was in the book, find the approximate location just by the feel of it. What's more amazing is that I can do this for several books at once. True, I don't have *exact* recall of where I was, but if you've got an ebook reader that can hold its place in several ebooks simultaneously, you've got something I haven't heard about. Never mind what happens if your e-book loses power.
Actually, unlike paper, digital text documents have an "infinite" capacity for any bookmark you want.
And, unlike paper bookmarks, digital text bookmarks require that I remember either the text I put on them at the time, or how many bookmarks in I've gone. Meanwhile, I pick up my Don Quixote and just by looking at it, while it's closed, I can tell that it's the yellow flag sticking out the bottom that's marking the page with the section about Pancho I'm interested in. How? While the color is an immediate tip-off, the location of it tells me that the passage I was interested in was near the bottom of the page, which corresponds to my memory of when I put the bookmark in. There is no "spatial" referencing for any bookmark you put in a digital text. One more back-channel of information gone.
I won't argue the point about screen quality, although there is some research pointing out that regardless of screen resolution, back-lighting itself is straining to the eyes.
Books require light (usually electric) during non-daylight hours.
And e-books require electricity 100% of the time, daylight or not. If my e-book runs out of batteries during a power outage (or when I'm up in the mountains) I'm screwed. If it suddenly gets dark while I'm reading my paper book, I can light a candle. And if I don't have any candles, well heck, at least I can read my book for half of every day without power while my e-book is now little more than an expensive paper-weight.
I own a book, not a license to it.
Of course you don't. You are not at all entitled to reproduce and resell copyrighted material without the author's permission.
The book is mine. The content? No. On the other hand, once I have the book, the publisher can't decide my usage period has expired and whisk the content away from me. As a side benefit, I can sell the book to a used book store, or donate it to the library. Try doing that with your e-book content.
Here's an interesting site:
http://www.fas.org/bwc/agr/main.htm It details some of the effects of a agrobio attack. If you're a terrorist, your goal is to destabalize, right?
Now consider:
The effects of hoof'n'mouth disease has done in the UK - especially to their agri-economy in the short term. Also consider what it may mean in the long term - higher demand on calves, etc.
How easily hoof'n'mouth can be transported.
How easily hoof'n'mouth spreads among sheep/cattle
The relative lack-of effects on humans (not so much worry about the feedback property)
The common american practice of factory/intensive farming. (better spreading conditions)
The population difference between America and Britain - and hence the food requirement difference.
So far an agrobio attack sounds pretty good for a willing terrorist. Wipe out the midwestern states cattle industry just by taking a nice tour of the countryside and some farms for a few days. Watch New York and LA go into riot mode as the price of food triples.
Now consider that as far as cattle diseases go, hoof'n'mouth is pretty benign. Imagine some sort of combination between mad cow and hoof'n'mouth - easily spread, humans get it from eating the animal, and brutalizes the food production industry.
And hey, this still even leaves the option of using the TNT while the country is dealing with the food shortages.. double whammy.
5) That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply to the Software for a person's use of the Software, your license to the Software ends automatically.
This is the clause that I think is the most interesting one. In essense, isn't it saying that if you make something based on this and patent it, you can't sue anybody for copying your functionality without losing your access to the CE software you based yours on?
Or to put it another way: Make something good off of this and we can take it if we want. Try to sue us for it and you'll lose the whole kit & kaboodle.
Or am I just being cynical again?
Kwil
http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/07/11/science/phy sical/11PART.html
I don't get it.. an ISP says if you want to send mail through us, it has to be mail FROM us, and this is somehow construed as restricting our rights?
If it was the only ISP in town, maybe, but as it is, I don't see the big deal. It's not like my normal web-mail services don't have provision for sending something directly from them.
A pain? Sure. But lets reserve our energies for the real battles.
When it comes right down to it we as citzens should have and did get a tax refund because it was morally imperative. The government budgets XYZ for a year - lets say $3T. The government collects $4T. It follows that we should refund that extra $1T to the people who paid it. By the way, it also follows that if we only collected $2T that we should all get an additional "gap" tax bill at the end of the year, to cover the deficit.
We don't have a direct system like that though, and its too bad.
By your reasoning, we should send it right back to the government, because even though there wasn't a deficit, we still have a *massive* total debt hanging over our heads.
If the Artemis Project has anything to say about it, it may come a lot sooner than you think.
Though I'll agree the chances of this particular design (outside sleeping quarters at the top of the tower??) are slim to nil.
Karl
IANAE but..
I suppose you could make an argument for materials strength.. ie, it'd balance just fine both here and on the moon, but the lower gravity on the moon might lower the stress on the materials to a point where they wouldn't snap like they might here on earth.
Karl
There's actually a few problems:
1. Batteries: Batteries are severely limited in their range. Often they can only go 80km before having to be re-fueled, and this range decreases drastically as speed increases. Don't expect to go highway driving on a pure electric car. At least, not for a long drive.
2. Batteries: Batteries are heavy. When trying to lug around the weight of the batteries as well as the car, the less car, the longer the batteries last. The more car, the more batteries you need just to move it. Since the longer the batteries last, the better it is for your range, well, you get smaller cars. Smaller cars mean less passenger room and cargo space, and most people don't like that.
3. Batteries: Batteries often don't have enough torque to be able to get a car out of a "stuck" situation. So in climates with snow, or if you have to go off-road, an electric car can be a real problem.
4. Batteries: Batteries don't like the cold. Not a problem in a lot of places in the world, but in those where it is a problem, it's a major one. In a cold climate, you can cut the range of an electric car in half or worse.
5. Batteries: They're expensive, and when they're dead, they can't just be turfed as they generally have a lot of nasty chemicals in them we don't want leeching into the ground - after all, cutting pollution was the reason we're looking at electric in the first place, right?
You'll notice a theme here. Hopefully once they can start producing fuel cells economically we'll see a lot of these problems go away.
... in the process, you're preparing them to be professional programmers, because they're learning the programming environment they're likely to end up using in their professional lives.
:-)
And it wasn't that long ago that you could say Fortran was the language they'd most likely be using, or COBOL, or.. etc. The point is languages change. Just because it's what you happen to be using now doesn't mean it will be the primary language in the future. There's a whole lotta COBOL programmers who found out the hard way about that. Fortunately, Y2K came along and they had work for a while.
PS, if they learn C and C++, it's easy for them to learn Java! But, if they learn Java (and only Java), then by your argument that "C++ is much more complex and difficult"
By that argument, Java sounds ideal as an introductory language. After all, things getting more complex and difficult is how courses are supposed to go right? We generally don't teach how to make beef wellington before teaching how to make apple pie, right? Though if we did, I'm sure the pie would be a snap.
Don't teach Freshmen how to make applets! Or SERVLETS!? Are you nuts! Teach them C and C++, and then it's easy for them to learn that other stuff, later!
Tell you what.. how about we use Java to teach them how to make standard applications first? You know, those things they taught you in your first C classes? A Huffman zip encoder and all that kind of jazz.
Don't even bother with applets or servlets or even threads until they've got a good foundation in the language and in the OOP concepts.
And Thalia did declare:
Research grants are indeed there to provide research for the benefit of the corporation providing the dough.
Your assumption is that it was a corporation providing the grant. Your implication is that only corporations do so.
The first may at times be true, but the second is false.
But it didn't become wide-spread until private corporations put in the money to connect the world. Before that, the connections only existed between specific Universities.
Non-sequitur; the fact that corporations invested in the internet had nothing to do with the patent system. In fact, had Andreessen patented 'web-browsing', it may have been a serious blow to the development of the internet we now know.
And corporations are, and should be, motivated by money.
Unsupported statement. Though many corporations may indeed be motivated by money, that doesn't necessarily mean all aspects of what they do are motivated by money. As well, can you think of no other motivation for a corporation? Altruism immediately comes to mind.
Consider Slashdot as an example for both of these: Supported entirely by banner advertising (a form Slashdot has itself reported as non-sustainable) and very little of it, to be honest, the bandwidth Slashdot consumes must be huge as evidenced by the "Slashdot Effect". We can assume then that Andover.net/VA Linux is actually suffering a loss on the operation of Slashdot. In other words, if the primary concern of VA Linux is money, they should close Slashdot. Yet as we can see, it remains running.
I suggest that the reason for this is that VA Linux's primary concern isn't "profit" as you suggest, but closer to advocacy and to the advancement (dare I say innovation?) of the Linux platform as a whole.
In short, there's more to people than greed.
Kwil
Pretty obvious actually.
By calling it Linux/Open Source, he gets the Linux/Open Source community up and screaming, "That's not us, that's the GPL.."
Then Microsoft just has its lobby groups talk to the senators saying, "The Open Source community itself has agreed that the GPL is a cancer that attaches -etc."
Kwil
From what I've read, the answer is yes in both cases - with a catch.
...
The catch is that you can not bundle your propietary code with any of the GPL programs that it would use.
You could probably even get away with putting a notice on your software that says your program relies on the GPL'd program "Blah" which can be downloaded from
Of course.. I could be just shootin' wind.
Yeah! Don't like Campbell's Soup? Buy Primo.. oh wait.. they're Campbell's too. Uhmm.. Swanson's! They sell broth.. no wait.. they're also Campbell's. Okay. Let's try something else then..
Kraft! There's a company we don't like. Refuse to buy Tang! Buy Kool-aid instead.. oh wait.. Kraft owns Kool-aid as well. Fine, we won't buy kids drinks at all, we'll just buy Miller Beer instead.. what? Still Kraft? Damn.
Face it, if you rely entirely on industry self-regulation, your options rapidly disappear.
Just take the case of any small-town a Wal-Mart has moved near to. Typically it takes about two years for the small, locally based general stores in that town to be run out of business. Even if you loyally patronize the local store and never shop in the Wal-Mart yourself.
To be honest, I'd think the RIAA would have a better case than CDDB does.
After all, it's the RIAA that holds the copyright to the song titles etc.
Presented by Wal-Mart & McDonalds:
Play through Wal-Mart..
See lots of signs saying "Low low prices!"
Shoot the Target salesmen..
The McDonalds holds the health packs, the Burger King has acid pool for floor..
Yeah companies'd love that.
Funny you should say that.
I read that disclaimer and figured no problem, since I upgraded to 5.5 quite a while ago.
BUT
I got the same message. (Does not need to be installed)
I've already written Microsoft and am waiting for a reply.
And in response to televison Bill said:
This is especially true when you consider internet penetration. Just over 50% of americans are on the net. What percentage of those happen to be on the site hosting the interstitials?
On the other hand, greater than 90% of americans have a television and, even including cable/satellite, there are a helluva lot fewer stations than websites, leading to a greater concentration of users on any given television channel.
Why limit it to those in the US?
Unfortunately, copyright laws made in the US start affecting those of us outside the US as well - especially when we start having to buy "secure" PC's and monitors because there's no other option.
Of course, the counter to this is that if he hadn't have mentioned all of those things, we would have been calling him vaporware..
Politicians just can't win.
(Which isn't a bad slogan now that I think of it..)
Nobody's saying they can't make the decisions on their own. What's being said, and what Sanchez didn't address, is that the system is designed with a bias toward corporations taking advantage of a poor person's financial situation to further their own goals - at the expense of that person's privacy.
So you'd gladly trade some personal information to get a substantial discount? Now what happens when the items they start selling by this method aren't luxuries but instead are needs, and the only way someone in poverty can afford them is by "willingly" giving up their privacy?
And the other, potentially worse, tendency of this policy is to create an air of acceptance toward exchanging privacy for something else. Want a job? Sure - just let us mount cameras in your house so we can make sure you don't open the company up to vicarious liability for something. What? Don't like those conditions, fine, it's a free country, go work somwhere else.
If Napster went away, even thought there'd be alternatives, I think the industry would breath a big sigh of relief and then take their sweet time about implementing their own scheme.
Possibly. But you have to weigh that against the downside of as long as Napster (the most heavily publicized and easiest to use of these type of distribution technologies) is functioning, more and more people are becoming accustomed to the idea that "Music is free". Not to mention it is currently hindering those legit services that do exist and are trying to get steam. (Such as Emusic to name but one)
I think I'd rather take the risk that the large record labels won't move on their own. Especially when you think that some smaller labels are already doing their own foray's into e-publishing their collections. The majors being slow just helps those minors that are moving with the technology rather than against it.
KWiL