Well, the terms they are attempting to enforce may or may not be part of the contract: were you informed of them before you paid for the ticket? Did you sign agreeing to them? Are they "reasonable and customary"?
I'm not saying the terms are automatically invalid, but nor is it clear they can impose whatever terms they wish. AFAICS, this is an unsettled area of law, and they are mostly trying to scare people into compliance. Ironic.
This analysis is getting better than past ones, but still has the fatal flaw of assuming temporal synchronicity -- civilizations all achieve roughly the same level of technology withing light/travel time.
This patently false: not only is space unfathomably vast, but so is _TIME_. A civilization could have been born, grown, flurished and _died_ right next door 1 million years ago and we would _never_ know about it. The universe is ~115 billion years old. Lots of time for flares to get lost.
At best, EU sees its' mandate as protecting its' citizens rights. Not in protecting anyone else, least of all outsiders who [horrors!] are violating their country's [already generous] tax laws.
No. I would not hold keiretsu up as a model to emulate. Far too inefficient, all these familial ties. Slows down innovation and the deadwood piles up.
"Trust" is a dangerous concept because it is most likely to fail just when it is most needed. Long contracts are pitiful protection. Far better is to arrange things so the prize seized by defection is small compared to the value gained by continuing.
Frankly, I'm pleased at this explanation. I'd very much rather MSFT accept the GPL and OpenSource as a sound business concept than merely out of some arbitrary corporate policy decision. Which could easily be reversed in the continuous "Change" ego-stroking.
Here, it appears that in spite of their best efforts and doubtless strong admonishments that GPL code found its' way into a key product. Good. They've learned they can't be completely leakproof. So will have to comply. Underforce is fine, because it is the most certain and sincere.
As for "trust", what a load of BS! Shareholders generally cannot even trust their Boards nor employees who by law and custom are supposed to look out for their interests. Why should the rest of us expect any better?
Trust is only a precursor to betrayal like Google. Trust is neither required nor desired in business. Much more reliable to trust persuit of self-interest. Business is not family life. There are no bonds of affection. Delusional to pretend there are. And stupid to lean on these bonds too hard anyways.
The reason proprietary projects can be "more innovative" (really more risky) is there is greater [monetary] reward to compensate the risk. Most new products fail, and FOSS doesn't have much margin (compensation is sponsored and time-based).
That said, the entire Internet was built by FOSS and FOSS-like processes. From ftp and telnet through WWW/mosaic, it was all someone who had an idea and wanted to see if others liked it too.
For hardware, Apple's can be of higher quality because it is higher priced. It can be higher priced because it is perceived good value -- mostly the interfaces are less botched than their competition.
Defaults are much older than the information age. They've existed wherever there is choice. One very common one is the division of property after death -- a Will. All societies have a "default" way of handling this is there were no instructions (the person died intestate). But also have provisions for deviating from this default.
Getting married without a prenup is like dying without a will -- works great so long as the default law fits your situation. Otherwise, someone takes advantage of the default law.
There's a _huge_ difference between people on the ground who go look at things and talk to people, and people who analyse the photos people on the ground or in the sky/space have taken.
For one thing, analysts aren't in hostile territory and subject to arrest.
This one is silly -- why not just read the mic directly and apply the relevant digital filtering/transofrmation? RMS at least.
I'm more interested in turning an iPhone / iTouch into a dynomometer for engine performace tuning. Use the accelerometers. You'd need to find some way to enter RPM, probably a passenger hitting the Ks.
Most people have been answer in : How? so I'll thry whether to host or not. The ethical question:
Whether I'd host or not is first a question -- Is it my decision? Am I an employee, or an owner? This thing risks being an unprofitable venture. and owners should make decisions about such risks. Otherwise, an employee is effectively stealing. Some people think it's OK to steal from companies. I don't.
Presuming I _can_ make a decision, itthen becomes a question -- Is it worth it? Is the matter worth going to the mat for? Is it genuine and accurate, or is it libelous sour-grapes? Or a smear campaign? This is an individual judgement. Playing Don Quixote is in the best American democratic tradition, but you should choose your windmills.
How is an easier question other posters have addressed. I would add that I would do a "soft-launch", get the doc out there on USENET, 'blogs, wiki (leaks and other). Make sure it has good keywords for easy findeability (put in preface and META headers). Only once it has spread, then publicise it.
Insert a bunch of links to other locations so potentially hostile entities become discouraged they can "recapture" the doc. Many may be ignorant of internet operations and think they can kill one site to make it go away. Educate them. Likewise, even the publicity page can be spread and soft-lauched.
Sounds like a normal, Dilbert-day in the corporate whirld! Some people want one thing, others think they're crazy. Neanderthal decision-makers choose to offend the maximum number of participants to show power. (There is no personal power visible or shown in doing the right thing).
If there are fairness issues, just enable MACs (not the Big ones:) for 30 min per hour. Yes, 'leet gekes can get 'round this easily, but a few leeches isn't the problem. If someone complains moderately justifiably, reset the router.
Of course put in fine print (limited to 30 minutes) to minimize the justifiable whining and make the leeches come out where you can pour salt on them. Not all customers are worthwhile. Some need to be told not tot return/trespass. If you resemble this and the allusion offends you, good. You offend others (often deliberately) and need to feel what you inflict. Fortunately, this probably occurs frequently.
Agreed. Wine ages in bottles, spirits do _not_. To be "aged" they must be stored in wood.
If this whiskey were in an old vat and still overproof, it might have been cut with water just prior to bottling.
If that bottling were in the 1950-early 60s and that water filtered through some sort of activated carbon (not unusual), it could have picked up the C-14 that way.
I think they should check the D/H and O-18/O-16 ratios as well. More data means better conclusions.
Knowledgeable techs do _NOT_ crimp plugs often. We know enough to avoid the fiddling and RSI hand-stress. Common noob mistakes:
Split pairs -- electrons may be color blind, but they _do_ know who their dance [twist] partners are. The correct wiremap is counter-intuitive: if you don't know whether you're crimping T-568-A or -B, you probably got it wrong. Those cables often are hard to find because they work well in one direction and poorly in the other.
dressing-out stranded for plug insertion is very difficult. They flop. You can use solid, but they work-harden with flex and become unreliable.
do you know the right plugs for solid and stranded and how deeply to seat them?
The smart thing is to find a good source and buy factory made patchcords.
Sure, you can find a legal downside to just about anything. And he has worked hard at it for his employeers who must feel threatened.
Yes, there is a slim chance that something untoward has happened in the open-source development chain. Most likely proprietary code being inadvertantly included. However, the likely rememdy for innocent use of such code is likely to be zero.
It was the blantant ripoff nature that attracted the penalties. Of course, this confusion is grist for the FUDmill.
Amazon is not required to respect human rights (particularly free speech) beyond a _very_ limited set of Equal-Employment and anti-racial consumer credit & service laws. The right of free speech can be claimed only against governmental authorities.
Amazon most particularly is not required to stock any books that it does not want to, for any reason or no reason whatsoever. Nor report any sales to the general public.
What Amazon has done is make a business decision that it preferred annoying GLBT people and their allies rather than "The Moral Majority"types who undoubtedly complained.
Perhaps a rather sad state of affairs, but probably accurately reflective of Amazon's customer base. You cannot legislate preference or tastes, let alone morality.
Glass half-empty or half-full? One can at least be happy Amazon carries the books at all.
While I understand linkrot is a danger, the cure isn't some new layer of indirection but fundamentally more permanent archive structure. That really is entirely the site's choice and responsibility.
Why do so many URLs look like RDBMs queries? Has someone been sold a bill-of-goods?
As for shorter URLs, they become much shorter minus the DB cruft. And then all it takes is a modicum of logic to form some durable system.
Some people cannot avoid flavor-of-the-month. Those people should not be making decisions with any sort of permanence or continuity.
This is not a new observation. It applied just as much and was equally discussed on USENET vis-a-vis moderated vs unmoderated newsgroups.
The fundamental problem with moderation is that it inevitably slows and stifles conversation. Often it actually loses creative contributions which really discourages contributors.
Sometimes the slowing might be a good thing. More often, it is thought to be a good thing by people who are more annoyed by undesireable postings than worried about postings that might have been dropped. The underappreciated "false postive" problem.
Maybe, mabe not. This guy appearently was accused of spousal abuse, not prosecuted, then decided to turn the tables. Who knows?
But there's a _very_ easy remedy: his lawyer asks for summary judgement or a directed verdict in his suit against the cops. His case has been compromised, aned those are reasonable remedies.
Judges do not like to grant summary, so s/he might review the probable cause the warrent-granting judge signed off on. I expect some pointed questions under oath of the requesting officers. Unless they have pretty cast-iron probable cause of a serious felony, the cops are _hosed_.
Not only will they have to pay whatever the suit claimed, but the Phoenix PD will suffer a serious loss of credibility with both judges, and probably all in the district. They'll find it harder to get warrents. Something they have to do every day. I expect some serious grovelling and a punative internal investigation to restore credibility.
Or maybe nothing, depending on the personalities involved.
Corruption can happen to organizations just as sure as individuals. It has the potential to happen whenever goals are placed in conflict, particularly invovling money.
Police and courts exist to keep order by administering justice fairly and impartially. When police or their political civic masters receive the fines levied, they are corrupt or at least can appear to be so. That undermines the entire justice system by undermining the credibility and impartiality of police.
Much the same happens with District Attornies. There the currency is not money but plea-bargains. The DAs can be corrupt by overcharging/oversentencing and offering a plea-bargain to make their jobs easier, reduce court costs, raise conviction rate and make themselves appear effective.
The worst corruption is that which happens openly yet no-one pauses to consider it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the terms they are attempting to enforce may or may not be part of the contract: were you informed of them before you paid for the ticket? Did you sign agreeing to them? Are they "reasonable and customary"?
I'm not saying the terms are automatically invalid, but nor is it clear they can impose whatever terms they wish. AFAICS, this is an unsettled area of law, and they are mostly trying to scare people into compliance. Ironic.
Yes. Sorry about the typo. I meant 15 Billion years.
This analysis is getting better than past ones, but still has the fatal flaw of assuming temporal synchronicity -- civilizations all achieve roughly the same level of technology withing light/travel time.
This patently false: not only is space unfathomably vast, but so is _TIME_. A civilization could have been born, grown, flurished and _died_ right next door 1 million years ago and we would _never_ know about it. The universe is ~115 billion years old. Lots of time for flares to get lost.
At best, EU sees its' mandate as protecting its' citizens rights. Not in protecting anyone else, least of all outsiders who [horrors!] are violating their country's [already generous] tax laws.
I'm on AT&T (SWbell) in Houston and just checked out /b/ and /r9k/. Acting a bit slow (slashdot effect?) but otherwise available.
YMMV. Maybe somebody is blocked. Maybe its' a nice troll. Expecting the Internet to always work everywhere is to misunderstand the Tao.
"Trust" is a dangerous concept because it is most likely to fail just when it is most needed. Long contracts are pitiful protection. Far better is to arrange things so the prize seized by defection is small compared to the value gained by continuing.
Too good a deal is no deal at all.
Frankly, I'm pleased at this explanation. I'd very much rather MSFT accept the GPL and OpenSource as a sound business concept than merely out of some arbitrary corporate policy decision. Which could easily be reversed in the continuous "Change" ego-stroking.
Here, it appears that in spite of their best efforts and doubtless strong admonishments that GPL code found its' way into a key product. Good. They've learned they can't be completely leakproof. So will have to comply. Underforce is fine, because it is the most certain and sincere.
As for "trust", what a load of BS! Shareholders generally cannot even trust their Boards nor employees who by law and custom are supposed to look out for their interests. Why should the rest of us expect any better?
Trust is only a precursor to betrayal like Google. Trust is neither required nor desired in business. Much more reliable to trust persuit of self-interest. Business is not family life. There are no bonds of affection. Delusional to pretend there are. And stupid to lean on these bonds too hard anyways.
My morning logon fortune was: "I read National Geographic for the same reason as Playboy -- to see places I'm never going to go." :)
Agreed pure software FOSS _can_ be more innovative, my comments were more addressed to hardware efforts.
That said, the entire Internet was built by FOSS and FOSS-like processes. From ftp and telnet through WWW/mosaic, it was all someone who had an idea and wanted to see if others liked it too.
For hardware, Apple's can be of higher quality because it is higher priced. It can be higher priced because it is perceived good value -- mostly the interfaces are less botched than their competition.
Getting married without a prenup is like dying without a will -- works great so long as the default law fits your situation. Otherwise, someone takes advantage of the default law.
For one thing, analysts aren't in hostile territory and subject to arrest.
IIRC it is maintained by Fred Emmott. Why no credit/cooperation??? Lacking expanation, I'm unhappy.
I'm more interested in turning an iPhone / iTouch into a dynomometer for engine performace tuning. Use the accelerometers. You'd need to find some way to enter RPM, probably a passenger hitting the Ks.
Whether I'd host or not is first a question -- Is it my decision? Am I an employee, or an owner? This thing risks being an unprofitable venture. and owners should make decisions about such risks. Otherwise, an employee is effectively stealing. Some people think it's OK to steal from companies. I don't.
Presuming I _can_ make a decision, itthen becomes a question -- Is it worth it? Is the matter worth going to the mat for? Is it genuine and accurate, or is it libelous sour-grapes? Or a smear campaign? This is an individual judgement. Playing Don Quixote is in the best American democratic tradition, but you should choose your windmills.
How is an easier question other posters have addressed. I would add that I would do a "soft-launch", get the doc out there on USENET, 'blogs, wiki (leaks and other). Make sure it has good keywords for easy findeability (put in preface and META headers). Only once it has spread, then publicise it.
Insert a bunch of links to other locations so potentially hostile entities become discouraged they can "recapture" the doc. Many may be ignorant of internet operations and think they can kill one site to make it go away. Educate them. Likewise, even the publicity page can be spread and soft-lauched.
If there are fairness issues, just enable MACs (not the Big ones:) for 30 min per hour. Yes, 'leet gekes can get 'round this easily, but a few leeches isn't the problem. If someone complains moderately justifiably, reset the router.
Of course put in fine print (limited to 30 minutes) to minimize the justifiable whining and make the leeches come out where you can pour salt on them. Not all customers are worthwhile. Some need to be told not tot return/trespass. If you resemble this and the allusion offends you, good. You offend others (often deliberately) and need to feel what you inflict. Fortunately, this probably occurs frequently.
If this whiskey were in an old vat and still overproof, it might have been cut with water just prior to bottling.
If that bottling were in the 1950-early 60s and that water filtered through some sort of activated carbon (not unusual), it could have picked up the C-14 that way.
I think they should check the D/H and O-18/O-16 ratios as well. More data means better conclusions.
Split pairs -- electrons may be color blind, but they _do_ know who their dance [twist] partners are. The correct wiremap is counter-intuitive: if you don't know whether you're crimping T-568-A or -B, you probably got it wrong. Those cables often are hard to find because they work well in one direction and poorly in the other.
dressing-out stranded for plug insertion is very difficult. They flop. You can use solid, but they work-harden with flex and become unreliable.
do you know the right plugs for solid and stranded and how deeply to seat them?
The smart thing is to find a good source and buy factory made patchcords.
Sure, you can find a legal downside to just about anything. And he has worked hard at it for his employeers who must feel threatened.
Yes, there is a slim chance that something untoward has happened in the open-source development chain. Most likely proprietary code being inadvertantly included. However, the likely rememdy for innocent use of such code is likely to be zero.
It was the blantant ripoff nature that attracted the penalties. Of course, this confusion is grist for the FUDmill.
Yes, it would be misrepresentation. But they probably have that covered with a disclaimer star "excludes some sexually themed books".
Amazon most particularly is not required to stock any books that it does not want to, for any reason or no reason whatsoever. Nor report any sales to the general public.
What Amazon has done is make a business decision that it preferred annoying GLBT people and their allies rather than "The Moral Majority"types who undoubtedly complained.
Perhaps a rather sad state of affairs, but probably accurately reflective of Amazon's customer base. You cannot legislate preference or tastes, let alone morality.
Glass half-empty or half-full? One can at least be happy Amazon carries the books at all.
Why do so many URLs look like RDBMs queries? Has someone been sold a bill-of-goods?
As for shorter URLs, they become much shorter minus the DB cruft. And then all it takes is a modicum of logic to form some durable system.
Some people cannot avoid flavor-of-the-month. Those people should not be making decisions with any sort of permanence or continuity.
The fundamental problem with moderation is that it inevitably slows and stifles conversation. Often it actually loses creative contributions which really discourages contributors.
Sometimes the slowing might be a good thing. More often, it is thought to be a good thing by people who are more annoyed by undesireable postings than worried about postings that might have been dropped. The underappreciated "false postive" problem.
But there's a _very_ easy remedy: his lawyer asks for summary judgement or a directed verdict in his suit against the cops. His case has been compromised, aned those are reasonable remedies.
Judges do not like to grant summary, so s/he might review the probable cause the warrent-granting judge signed off on. I expect some pointed questions under oath of the requesting officers. Unless they have pretty cast-iron probable cause of a serious felony, the cops are _hosed_.
Not only will they have to pay whatever the suit claimed, but the Phoenix PD will suffer a serious loss of credibility with both judges, and probably all in the district. They'll find it harder to get warrents. Something they have to do every day. I expect some serious grovelling and a punative internal investigation to restore credibility.
Or maybe nothing, depending on the personalities involved.
Corruption can happen to organizations just as sure as individuals. It has the potential to happen whenever goals are placed in conflict, particularly invovling money.
Police and courts exist to keep order by administering justice fairly and impartially. When police or their political civic masters receive the fines levied, they are corrupt or at least can appear to be so. That undermines the entire justice system by undermining the credibility and impartiality of police.
Much the same happens with District Attornies. There the currency is not money but plea-bargains. The DAs can be corrupt by overcharging/oversentencing and offering a plea-bargain to make their jobs easier, reduce court costs, raise conviction rate and make themselves appear effective.
The worst corruption is that which happens openly yet no-one pauses to consider it.