By your reasoning, if the government didn't install these filters on every backbone server on the internet and someone was viewing porn and it offended someone else then there would be a big scandal about it and bush would be portrayed as the anti-feminist woman hating porno president.
As a side issue, he has already portrayed himself as the anti-feminist woman hating president, sans porno.
And, you're right, Iranian citizens can not go home to their own computers to watch porn. And, I, a US citizen and therefor a member of the US government, heartily give you and everyone the right to view porn on government computers. If someone's a pornoholic, neglecting the duties of your employment is ample reason for dismissal. I'd support that decision provided it was legitimate and of sufficient magnitude. Requiring employees to email the administer any time the need to access a blocked site is a serious impediment to efficient working, and I would deerly like to see any executive supporting that decision to be fired for gross incompetence--especially in government work.
Strictly speaking, cryptography is less than a century old. Digital cryptography is less than fifty years old. And, PKI encryption is something less. It is possible that, sans quantum computing, we have found levels of encryption that are entirely impractical to break within our lifetimes.
Personally, I don't buy it. It is, however, possible.
This may be slightly inaccurate, but here's my answer about what's to stop this:
On the majority of Linux systems, and probably the bulk of FreeBSD systems, the local mail delivery system is not set up to deliver non-local mail. (And, frequently when they are set up for non-local delivery, they can only send mail within their domain.)
In this case, the exploit would have to request an application deliver the mail for it. Mutt will not do this. Pine will not do this. It is possible that Evolution or Kmail might accept requests. If this is the case, these applications would start rapidly filling up their outboxes, and possibly prompting the user for verification of the request. All in all, it'll be non-trivial to get these applications to start spamming without giving notice.
The above exploits would only work while the application in question is running.
Game developers? Game developers don't care about copy prevention. Publishers don't develop it either. Third parties sell it to publishers under false pretenses and nonsense that breaks down to "every time someone copies your discs, you lose money."
And, as a rule, these third parties are nowhere near the leading edge of computer science. They are always business ventures. They hunt and search for techniques to deliver what the slogan on their incorporation documents says they're going to deliver, and pay a nominal research cost to develop it into something they can sell. They are neither smart nor industrious. They can, however, speak BS and HS to CEOs and CIOs of B2B and B2B "Publishing Industry Leaders" in the expanding software publishing industry. Make Big Money.
Game developers, on the other hand, don't give a rat's ass about these people. They don't want people to mooch off their hard work without paying for it. But, most of the devs I've talked to understand that most copies are not lost purchases. They also realize how much trouble copy prevention mechanisms cause them and their fans/customers. However, the decision to impliment them is not theirs. And they can't bad mouth the decision, or the publisher will have a tantrum and drop them under the "don't slander us" clause of their contract.
However, if you frequent some of the better game company run forums... Ion Storm, and formerly Bioware, etc., you'll find that they have very explicit almost uniform rules about discussing copy prevention. They don't permit software titles to be mentioned, or links, but they will fully permit discussion of the problem and mechanisms and methods to correct the problems. When developers respond, it's sympathetic and hesitant, and usually mentions somehow that it's the publisher's fault and they can't do anything about it. Bioware's forums got strict and silent about the issue all at once, after a large continuous volume of complaints--very uncharacteristic of the company, and indicative of some sort of "shut up and shut them up" order.
Re:The REAL security problem in '04
on
Gates on Winsecurity
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
For these users, it's better to put the govenor on the engine, the automated seat belt, and the airbags rather than trying to teach them to use a turn signal when they change lanes.
I'm reminded of that solid metal car that Kinsman (the Grey Lensman, in E.E. "Doc" Smith's series) got into... the one that went 7000 miles per hour, was absolutely completely lightlessly black dark inside, had no seat belts or other cushioning, and was driven by an alien of a species that can "see" through solid matter. The accelleration was insane and he ran into everything on the way. Supposedly a severe bruising is in order if the driver "takes it easy" for "non-terrestrials".
What I find interesting about Gates' ideas about security is that it perfect sense from his perspective. Nerf the hardware so the software can't do anything it shouldn't without authorization. That way, his development costs can go down because there isn't nearly as much that can go properly wrong when someone writes bad code. He doesn't have to spend as much on development, and his customers don't have to worry about his crappy development.
It's a bit like industrial waste. No worries. We're saving money. (The science goes to waste, instead of the environment.)
It's kinda funny. If Gates gets his way, he'll be able to offshore the majority of his software development to the cheapest bidder. He'll still need real computer scientists to design and research the future for Microsoft, but then he can hire bargain basement code monkeys to follow their design documents as closely as they can figure out. "If it compiles, it works."
Windows Media Player 9--the future. (Can I kill myself now?)
It's important to keep moving, but if you're both going 150,000kmph in the same direction, you're relatively motionless to each other, making yourselves targets. And, if you're going too fast past each other your shots are going to be very difficult.
Babylon 5's 4th season space battles were some of the best I've ever seen.
As far as nitty gritty goes, The battle in Star Trek Nemesis was very in-your-face, very real. Unfortunately, there was a whole lot of unrealism within the scope of the Trek universe, but otherwise it was epic.
Also, not free, and not really a hardcore spreadsheet app, but OmniOutliner will pass for most spreadsheet tasks. You can use multiple columns, type them as numerical currency, and summarize (sum) numerical columns. There's an example expense list on the site.
1. Nuclear. There's a far shorter supply of heavy radioactive metals available than carbon. The account I read stated known uranium mines could meet our current energy demands for a few decades. Safe disposal requires more energy than the extraction process.
2. Solar. There are a number of solar energy technogies. Photovoltaics are the most exotic, and neatest, but they're also currently the most inefficient.
A. Photovoltaics. STMicroelectronics, in Italy, is developing a cheaper biomimetic photovoltaic cell. It should be 10% efficient (compared with 15%-20% for pure silicon wafer cells), but cost 1/20th to produce. This would yeild economically attractive photovoltaic cells.
B. Photothermal heating. Basically, water in pipes on your roof. Very efficient, and capable of supplying the majority of hot water a home needs.
C. <a href="http://www.boeing.com/assocproducts/energy/p owertower.html">Solar Power Towers</a>. Probably the most attractive option for mass power production. The cost is approximately $15/kWhr currently, compared with $7/kWhr for oil. Short decription: A field of heliostats (sun-tracking mirrors) focus sunlight on a central tower filled with a thermal conducting agent (molten salt) which is pumped and stored in tanks. The thermal energy is used in these designs in a heat exchanger to vaporize water to power steam generators. Thermal storage and transfer is 99% efficient, with some loss due to imperfect insulation. Unlike photovoltaics, these power stations can generate power at night from the stored energy.
3. Wind. Wind is probably THE most reliable energy source. It all depends on location. Off-shore near beaches are often prime locations. The mid-western US also has constant too-strong-to-be-comfortable winds.
The trouble with most of these systems is storing and transfering energy. You can't keep your car on an extension cable, and batteries are short-lived, expendible, and toxic. Enter Hydrogen: The perfect energy carrier. Retrievable from most of the surface of the world. All it requires is energy to produce, which renewable sources can generate endlessly.
The real trouble with Peak Oil is modern agriculture. Our agricultural surpluses are dependant on petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides. Modern high yeild farming depends on oil. The "Green" alternatives are either more than double in price or relatively impotent--pick one. Once oil prices start going up, you'll have to pick: Oil and Gas for your SUV, or food. And you won't be the one who picks. Congress will. That's the most depressing part of the whole thing.
I encourage everyone to write their congresscritters about solar power towers. They can jump start the hydrogen economy with stations like this throughout the unariable lands of the US and middle-east.
You seem a little confused. The copyright holder does lose his right: he loses the right to decide upon the fate of that individual work such as charging you a fee for using the work.
What does this have to do with digital distribution? This has always been true.
You're confusing two separate issues. This might sound semantic, so I hope you consider it carefully. Corporations are not companies. If you replace "companies" with "corporations" throughout your text, I'd agree with it up until the nihilistic bit at the end. I think you'll disagree with it also, with consideration.
The history of corporations is very brief. A corporation is an entity which protects a company from liability. They were created for the shipping enterprises to the new world: If a ship was lost, an investor in a corporation wouldn't be liable for the ship, the cargo, and lawsuits from the relatives of the crew. They'd only be liable for what they invested in the corporation.
Companies, on the other hand, were doing just fine before corporations. Corporations were enabling for companies, but not necessary. The industrial revolution was kicked off and went along just fine until Corporations re-appeared and were applied to non-shipping companies in the 19th century.
If you think about it, a company is organized specialized labor intended to yield higher efficiency with its products than otherwise possible. This is obviously more efficient, if more vulnerable, than general labor. Corporation, on the other hand, is a government granted protection intended for investors.
Move up to the modern day, and corporations have become something else. They're no longer a vehicle for investment, but an entity with the rights and privledges of human beings. The liability protection for investors has been extended to liability protection for executives and liability protection for the company itself to protect the investment of the investors, instead of just the investors themselves. All of this means individuals are capable of doing things free from the judgement of their peers in a court of law. The only way to reach someone protected by a corporation is to breach the corporate veil, which requires specific wrong steps by the protectee.
Corporations are a legal entity, divorced from the organizational unit of a capitalist company. Legal entities can be fixed.
Or rather, don't buy one for when you wear out your current one. Buy a second if you think you'll want to use it. I have an iBook G4, and it gives me 4 hours easy. I don't need one.
The reason you don't want to buy a replacement battery before you need it is because Lithium Ion batteries start losing their charge capacity when they're made. After five years they've lost 25% of their max charge, even if they've never been used. Add to that, it'll be cheaper to pick up the extra battery later.
However, if you're buying a big fatass dell or something, you'll need the extra battery.
I got 802.11g and bluetooth with my laptop. The power consumption on the iBook is laughably small. I wasn't sure I'd use bluetooth, but it's very nice to have the option. I'm considering getting a GPS gadget with bluetooth, at the very least.
Instead, that course should concentrate encapsulation and presentation of data intended for human consumption. The course should open up with a primer on XML syntax and structure. They should stress that languages like XML, XHTML, and HTML are designed to tell machines things that humans would understand from presentation. CSS is should be introduced, with basic to intermediate layout and presentation techniques, especially linking, just so the class understands that their output doesn't have to look like crap, and structure comes first. ECMA Script (Javascript) should be covered in a different class, but it's structural placement and some examples should be touched upon.
A second followup course should deal with ECMA Script, introduce HTML Forms briefly as an introduction to XForms, and hit upon more server-side concepts like mod_rewrite, cool URLs, smarter addresses, etc. While the first course concentrates on form and "what", this course focuses on execution and "how".
Good layout techniques with CSS should be covered in a more artsy course dedicated to dynamic presentation. That means reflow, not gifpix. This course will cover concepts concepts leaning towards good UI design: Why shouldn't you remove underlines from links lightly? It should spend a lot of time on text layout: optimal widths (why they're optimal), whitespace, line height, kerning, serifs, distraction (animation). Color coordination should be covered. Basically, this is a layout and design course, not a course on CSS syntax. Concepts learned should be applicable to other style sheet languages. Students should be encouraged to design right before introducing wrong hacks for IE.
Once we nail it down, an unsigned 64-bit int should fit that nicely, with a factor of ten breathing room just in case we're off a bit, or if seventeen billion years is just too soon for another y2k bug.
(The universe is somewhere between 2^59 and 2^61 seconds old.)
If time was constant everywhere in the universe, you could assign 295,147,905,179,352,825,856 IPv6 addresses to every second. Since it ain't, I'm not sure it's useful to count from the moment the quantum sock that is our universe turned inside out in the dryer of the unknowable non-existing nothingness that was before.
If the history of ReiserFS is anything to go by, then backwards compatibility with previous ReiserFS filesystem is not a reasonable expectation. It will have a new block-level format, will not work with old format filesystems, and it will probably horribly corrupt your existing ReiserFS filesystems if you try to use it with new ReiserFS4 filesystems. If it claims backwards compatibility it will do what I have just stated anyway. The worst problems will occur when new and old format partitions are used simultaneously.
You can also expect Reiser to want this entirely new module in Linus' 2.6 branch and probably 2.4 as well, despite its ridiculously untested state. You may even hear about abuse, rudeness, and new GPL violations from the kernel developers, coming loudly from the Reiser camp.
Oh? So ReiserFS will join the heights of not-fucking-up to which ext2, ext3, xfs, jfs, fat32, and ntfs4 rose to two years ago. I could almost hope for it. ReiserFS is pretty good for/var/ and/tmp/. It's a real shitter for/usr/ and/home/.
File corruption has been a thing of the past, unless you used ReiserFS.
"As yet I looked upon crime as a distant evil, benevolence and generosity
were ever present before me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor
in the busy scene where so many admirable qualities were called forth
and displayed. But in giving an account of the progress of my intellect,
I must not omit a circumstance which occurred in the beginning of the month
of August of the same year.
Frankenstein's creation is a wordy mofo. (read it for yourself)
Saruman gets perhaps less than seven minutes of "screentime" in the book itself. Saruman is dealt with in a nearly self-contained story after the resolution of the war with Sauron. Nearly, because you can't understand the motives of some characters or the rather un-hobbity behavior of some particular hobbits without Lord of the Rings.
I wouldn't be surprised if the entire story were cut out for time, and the flow of the movie. It was hinted at in Fellowship, but also dismissed, possibly as a test of desire. (Sam's vision in Galadriel's Mirror)
Use accumulated labor to improve the means of living labour.
Where it does not interfere with Rules #1 and #2, use excess living labour (surplus) to improve the exchange value of accumulated labour.
Rule #3 is the domain of rent-seeking and monopolies. It is the thing which Karl Marx and Adam Smith (and the rest of the pre-20th century ecconomists) feared most about free markets and capitalism. Rule #3 is the domain of stock [option] trading, copyrights, patents, and anti-competitive/exclusionary business practices.
The GPL requires all users to have equal rights to the code on the terms established in the GPL. Because Apple can withdraw from APSL without returning, the GPL conflicts with it. Therefore, you cannot use GPL software with APSL software. This is bad, because there's a lot of GPL code out there that you wouldn't be allowed to re-use.
This is completely consistent with the FSF's goals and stated advantages of Free Software.
This is why the APSL is an Open Source license instead of a Free Software license. If the GPL were compatible the APSL, then code could be borrowed from GPL, and then Apple could take it and close it. This would provide Apple unequal rights, would be a disadvantage to users, and a disadvantage to Apple in that they'd be denying collective review and improvement. However, there's a monetary advantage in robbing the commons, especially a technically non-depleting resources. (counter: the reality of code rot makes a non-renewing commons constantly diminishing in value, if not depletable.)
Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah. Blah.
Any questions?
PS: Yes, Apple is groovy and gets lots of brownies for APSL 2.0 and their use of it. It's slightly flawed as a commons license, but it's a wonderful public license for proprietarized BSD code.
I wish FSF would spend more time to promote current leaders of open source and encourage others to follow in their footsteps.
I agree with this statement, except I must point out that the FSF objects to lenient perspective of Open Source (vs Free Software). FSF's historically justified fear is that Open Source can be undermined and eventually become mostly closed. FSF injects a little preventative kick into the GPL to prevent this. It seems that most Open Source developers understand this fear, which is why they use a Free Software license (GPL) even though they object to FSF's boat rocking.
So basically, they are more interested in "ideological purity" than promoting realistic progress towards their goal. This is fine as a PHD thesis of some MIT student. But it does show that RMS/FSF are worthless as a realistic leader of today's free software movement. The question is, who and which organizations are up to the task?
I'm not sure how to say this. FSF rocks the boat. Over the last ten years, they've shifted most of the software industry's "realistic" perspective. They haven't done it through fanatical ranting and raving. They've done it through solid reasoning, logical arguments, and promotion the very American concept of equal distribution of rights.
When you say "realistic", I think you're saying "consistent with the world I grew up in". I think you're afraid of the changes they're advocating. I think you're afraid of what IBM and Apple are doing. I think this is why you advocate a change of guard: a change to someone more moderate, someone who doesn't want things to change quite so much.
I say this, because evidence contradicts the grounds you're advocating. Namely, "RMS/FSF are worthless as a realistic leader of today's free software movement." (This sounds like Party language to me, with special non-literal meanings for every word.) This arguement is barbed. Firstly, I want to object to the FSF being called a leader, though they provide some of the services of a leader. Second, how "worthless?" Exactly what does the FSF support, and how much progress have they made, contrasted with "realistic" expectations? The FSF has beaten down brick walls of opposition where technical merrit couldn't. The FSF has played an important role encourage each of the national governments that have adopted Free and Open software agendas. RMS is inflamatory, and gets on people's nerves, for exactly the right reasons: to make people think about things they'd "meh" about. You have to think to shoot down his arguements, and you know when you're reaching or blindly dismissing.
On another front, the FSF's articles and reviews are hardly inflamatory on their own. As several other posters noted, the FSF isn't shooting down licenses as bad, or evil--simply unfair. It seems it's always a third party that gets excited, percieves the article as some sort of attack, and reacts.
The FSF's agenda is damned simple, and damned agreeable in a Platonic sense. The FSF is realistic, understands that it can't achieve its goals with JUST the GPL. For example, they advocated placing the Vorbis tools under the BSD license over the (L)GPL. They wrote the LGPL to encourage the use of GPL software, even by proprietary software. Of course they oppose these licenses: they can be undermined, the software can be hijacked, existing rights can be selectively revoked for users if this happens.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogrove, but your momerathes are completely outgrabe.
in a galaxy far away two companies called Philips and Sony wrote the Red Book on CD-DA (Compact Disc-Digital Audio) and that was that. All CD players in existence could happily play CD's mastered to that standard.
Amusingly enough, the RIAA was formed for this very purpose, for records. Now, they're an instrument in the destruction of standards, and the industry surrounding them.
Slashdot Mirror
And it feeds the trees!
By your reasoning, if the government didn't install these filters on every backbone server on the internet and someone was viewing porn and it offended someone else then there would be a big scandal about it and bush would be portrayed as the anti-feminist woman hating porno president.
As a side issue, he has already portrayed himself as the anti-feminist woman hating president, sans porno.
And, you're right, Iranian citizens can not go home to their own computers to watch porn. And, I, a US citizen and therefor a member of the US government, heartily give you and everyone the right to view porn on government computers. If someone's a pornoholic, neglecting the duties of your employment is ample reason for dismissal. I'd support that decision provided it was legitimate and of sufficient magnitude. Requiring employees to email the administer any time the need to access a blocked site is a serious impediment to efficient working, and I would deerly like to see any executive supporting that decision to be fired for gross incompetence--especially in government work.
Then you have:
You don't have to thank a deity for Free Software. You can thank living people.
Strictly speaking, cryptography is less than a century old. Digital cryptography is less than fifty years old. And, PKI encryption is something less. It is possible that, sans quantum computing, we have found levels of encryption that are entirely impractical to break within our lifetimes.
Personally, I don't buy it. It is, however, possible.
This may be slightly inaccurate, but here's my answer about what's to stop this:
Game developers? Game developers don't care about copy prevention. Publishers don't develop it either. Third parties sell it to publishers under false pretenses and nonsense that breaks down to "every time someone copies your discs, you lose money."
And, as a rule, these third parties are nowhere near the leading edge of computer science. They are always business ventures. They hunt and search for techniques to deliver what the slogan on their incorporation documents says they're going to deliver, and pay a nominal research cost to develop it into something they can sell. They are neither smart nor industrious. They can, however, speak BS and HS to CEOs and CIOs of B2B and B2B "Publishing Industry Leaders" in the expanding software publishing industry. Make Big Money.
Game developers, on the other hand, don't give a rat's ass about these people. They don't want people to mooch off their hard work without paying for it. But, most of the devs I've talked to understand that most copies are not lost purchases. They also realize how much trouble copy prevention mechanisms cause them and their fans/customers. However, the decision to impliment them is not theirs. And they can't bad mouth the decision, or the publisher will have a tantrum and drop them under the "don't slander us" clause of their contract.
However, if you frequent some of the better game company run forums... Ion Storm, and formerly Bioware, etc., you'll find that they have very explicit almost uniform rules about discussing copy prevention. They don't permit software titles to be mentioned, or links, but they will fully permit discussion of the problem and mechanisms and methods to correct the problems. When developers respond, it's sympathetic and hesitant, and usually mentions somehow that it's the publisher's fault and they can't do anything about it. Bioware's forums got strict and silent about the issue all at once, after a large continuous volume of complaints--very uncharacteristic of the company, and indicative of some sort of "shut up and shut them up" order.
I'm reminded of that solid metal car that Kinsman (the Grey Lensman, in E.E. "Doc" Smith's series) got into... the one that went 7000 miles per hour, was absolutely completely lightlessly black dark inside, had no seat belts or other cushioning, and was driven by an alien of a species that can "see" through solid matter. The accelleration was insane and he ran into everything on the way. Supposedly a severe bruising is in order if the driver "takes it easy" for "non-terrestrials".
What I find interesting about Gates' ideas about security is that it perfect sense from his perspective. Nerf the hardware so the software can't do anything it shouldn't without authorization. That way, his development costs can go down because there isn't nearly as much that can go properly wrong when someone writes bad code. He doesn't have to spend as much on development, and his customers don't have to worry about his crappy development.
It's a bit like industrial waste. No worries. We're saving money. (The science goes to waste, instead of the environment.)
It's kinda funny. If Gates gets his way, he'll be able to offshore the majority of his software development to the cheapest bidder. He'll still need real computer scientists to design and research the future for Microsoft, but then he can hire bargain basement code monkeys to follow their design documents as closely as they can figure out. "If it compiles, it works."
Windows Media Player 9--the future. (Can I kill myself now?)
It's important to keep moving, but if you're both going 150,000kmph in the same direction, you're relatively motionless to each other, making yourselves targets. And, if you're going too fast past each other your shots are going to be very difficult.
Babylon 5's 4th season space battles were some of the best I've ever seen.
As far as nitty gritty goes, The battle in Star Trek Nemesis was very in-your-face, very real. Unfortunately, there was a whole lot of unrealism within the scope of the Trek universe, but otherwise it was epic.
Also, not free, and not really a hardcore spreadsheet app, but OmniOutliner will pass for most spreadsheet tasks. You can use multiple columns, type them as numerical currency, and summarize (sum) numerical columns. There's an example expense list on the site.
1. Nuclear. There's a far shorter supply of heavy radioactive metals available than carbon. The account I read stated known uranium mines could meet our current energy demands for a few decades. Safe disposal requires more energy than the extraction process.
p owertower.html">Solar Power Towers</a>. Probably the most attractive option for mass power production. The cost is approximately $15/kWhr currently, compared with $7/kWhr for oil. Short decription: A field of heliostats (sun-tracking mirrors) focus sunlight on a central tower filled with a thermal conducting agent (molten salt) which is pumped and stored in tanks. The thermal energy is used in these designs in a heat exchanger to vaporize water to power steam generators. Thermal storage and transfer is 99% efficient, with some loss due to imperfect insulation. Unlike photovoltaics, these power stations can generate power at night from the stored energy.
2. Solar. There are a number of solar energy technogies. Photovoltaics are the most exotic, and neatest, but they're also currently the most inefficient.
A. Photovoltaics. STMicroelectronics, in Italy, is developing a cheaper biomimetic photovoltaic cell. It should be 10% efficient (compared with 15%-20% for pure silicon wafer cells), but cost 1/20th to produce. This would yeild economically attractive photovoltaic cells.
B. Photothermal heating. Basically, water in pipes on your roof. Very efficient, and capable of supplying the majority of hot water a home needs.
C. <a href="http://www.boeing.com/assocproducts/energy/
3. Wind. Wind is probably THE most reliable energy source. It all depends on location. Off-shore near beaches are often prime locations. The mid-western US also has constant too-strong-to-be-comfortable winds.
The trouble with most of these systems is storing and transfering energy. You can't keep your car on an extension cable, and batteries are short-lived, expendible, and toxic. Enter Hydrogen: The perfect energy carrier. Retrievable from most of the surface of the world. All it requires is energy to produce, which renewable sources can generate endlessly.
The real trouble with Peak Oil is modern agriculture. Our agricultural surpluses are dependant on petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides. Modern high yeild farming depends on oil. The "Green" alternatives are either more than double in price or relatively impotent--pick one. Once oil prices start going up, you'll have to pick: Oil and Gas for your SUV, or food. And you won't be the one who picks. Congress will. That's the most depressing part of the whole thing.
I encourage everyone to write their congresscritters about solar power towers. They can jump start the hydrogen economy with stations like this throughout the unariable lands of the US and middle-east.
What does this have to do with digital distribution? This has always been true.
You're confusing two separate issues. This might sound semantic, so I hope you consider it carefully. Corporations are not companies. If you replace "companies" with "corporations" throughout your text, I'd agree with it up until the nihilistic bit at the end. I think you'll disagree with it also, with consideration.
The history of corporations is very brief. A corporation is an entity which protects a company from liability. They were created for the shipping enterprises to the new world: If a ship was lost, an investor in a corporation wouldn't be liable for the ship, the cargo, and lawsuits from the relatives of the crew. They'd only be liable for what they invested in the corporation.
Companies, on the other hand, were doing just fine before corporations. Corporations were enabling for companies, but not necessary. The industrial revolution was kicked off and went along just fine until Corporations re-appeared and were applied to non-shipping companies in the 19th century.
If you think about it, a company is organized specialized labor intended to yield higher efficiency with its products than otherwise possible. This is obviously more efficient, if more vulnerable, than general labor. Corporation, on the other hand, is a government granted protection intended for investors.
Move up to the modern day, and corporations have become something else. They're no longer a vehicle for investment, but an entity with the rights and privledges of human beings. The liability protection for investors has been extended to liability protection for executives and liability protection for the company itself to protect the investment of the investors, instead of just the investors themselves. All of this means individuals are capable of doing things free from the judgement of their peers in a court of law. The only way to reach someone protected by a corporation is to breach the corporate veil, which requires specific wrong steps by the protectee.
Corporations are a legal entity, divorced from the organizational unit of a capitalist company. Legal entities can be fixed.
Or rather, don't buy one for when you wear out your current one. Buy a second if you think you'll want to use it. I have an iBook G4, and it gives me 4 hours easy. I don't need one.
The reason you don't want to buy a replacement battery before you need it is because Lithium Ion batteries start losing their charge capacity when they're made. After five years they've lost 25% of their max charge, even if they've never been used. Add to that, it'll be cheaper to pick up the extra battery later.
However, if you're buying a big fatass dell or something, you'll need the extra battery.
I got 802.11g and bluetooth with my laptop. The power consumption on the iBook is laughably small. I wasn't sure I'd use bluetooth, but it's very nice to have the option. I'm considering getting a GPS gadget with bluetooth, at the very least.
Agreed.
Instead, that course should concentrate encapsulation and presentation of data intended for human consumption. The course should open up with a primer on XML syntax and structure. They should stress that languages like XML, XHTML, and HTML are designed to tell machines things that humans would understand from presentation. CSS is should be introduced, with basic to intermediate layout and presentation techniques, especially linking, just so the class understands that their output doesn't have to look like crap, and structure comes first. ECMA Script (Javascript) should be covered in a different class, but it's structural placement and some examples should be touched upon.
A second followup course should deal with ECMA Script, introduce HTML Forms briefly as an introduction to XForms, and hit upon more server-side concepts like mod_rewrite, cool URLs, smarter addresses, etc. While the first course concentrates on form and "what", this course focuses on execution and "how".
Good layout techniques with CSS should be covered in a more artsy course dedicated to dynamic presentation. That means reflow, not gifpix. This course will cover concepts concepts leaning towards good UI design: Why shouldn't you remove underlines from links lightly? It should spend a lot of time on text layout: optimal widths (why they're optimal), whitespace, line height, kerning, serifs, distraction (animation). Color coordination should be covered. Basically, this is a layout and design course, not a course on CSS syntax. Concepts learned should be applicable to other style sheet languages. Students should be encouraged to design right before introducing wrong hacks for IE.
Once we nail it down, an unsigned 64-bit int should fit that nicely, with a factor of ten breathing room just in case we're off a bit, or if seventeen billion years is just too soon for another y2k bug.
(The universe is somewhere between 2^59 and 2^61 seconds old.)
If time was constant everywhere in the universe, you could assign 295,147,905,179,352,825,856 IPv6 addresses to every second. Since it ain't, I'm not sure it's useful to count from the moment the quantum sock that is our universe turned inside out in the dryer of the unknowable non-existing nothingness that was before.
If the history of ReiserFS is anything to go by, then backwards compatibility with previous ReiserFS filesystem is not a reasonable expectation. It will have a new block-level format, will not work with old format filesystems, and it will probably horribly corrupt your existing ReiserFS filesystems if you try to use it with new ReiserFS4 filesystems. If it claims backwards compatibility it will do what I have just stated anyway. The worst problems will occur when new and old format partitions are used simultaneously.
You can also expect Reiser to want this entirely new module in Linus' 2.6 branch and probably 2.4 as well, despite its ridiculously untested state. You may even hear about abuse, rudeness, and new GPL violations from the kernel developers, coming loudly from the Reiser camp.
Oh? So ReiserFS will join the heights of not-fucking-up to which ext2, ext3, xfs, jfs, fat32, and ntfs4 rose to two years ago. I could almost hope for it. ReiserFS is pretty good for /var/ and /tmp/. It's a real shitter for /usr/ and /home/.
File corruption has been a thing of the past, unless you used ReiserFS.
Reiser? Is that you?
"As yet I looked upon crime as a distant evil, benevolence and generosity
were ever present before me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor
in the busy scene where so many admirable qualities were called forth
and displayed. But in giving an account of the progress of my intellect,
I must not omit a circumstance which occurred in the beginning of the month
of August of the same year.
Frankenstein's creation is a wordy mofo. (read it for yourself)
Saruman gets perhaps less than seven minutes of "screentime" in the book itself. Saruman is dealt with in a nearly self-contained story after the resolution of the war with Sauron. Nearly, because you can't understand the motives of some characters or the rather un-hobbity behavior of some particular hobbits without Lord of the Rings.
I wouldn't be surprised if the entire story were cut out for time, and the flow of the movie. It was hinted at in Fellowship, but also dismissed, possibly as a test of desire. (Sam's vision in Galadriel's Mirror)
Rule #3 is the domain of rent-seeking and monopolies. It is the thing which Karl Marx and Adam Smith (and the rest of the pre-20th century ecconomists) feared most about free markets and capitalism. Rule #3 is the domain of stock [option] trading, copyrights, patents, and anti-competitive/exclusionary business practices.
Microsoft broke the first two rules.
So, you're repremanding reactionary posting, and advocated reactionary posting in its place?
The GPL requires all users to have equal rights to the code on the terms established in the GPL. Because Apple can withdraw from APSL without returning, the GPL conflicts with it. Therefore, you cannot use GPL software with APSL software. This is bad, because there's a lot of GPL code out there that you wouldn't be allowed to re-use.
This is completely consistent with the FSF's goals and stated advantages of Free Software.
This is why the APSL is an Open Source license instead of a Free Software license. If the GPL were compatible the APSL, then code could be borrowed from GPL, and then Apple could take it and close it. This would provide Apple unequal rights, would be a disadvantage to users, and a disadvantage to Apple in that they'd be denying collective review and improvement. However, there's a monetary advantage in robbing the commons, especially a technically non-depleting resources. (counter: the reality of code rot makes a non-renewing commons constantly diminishing in value, if not depletable.)
Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah. Blah.
Any questions?
PS: Yes, Apple is groovy and gets lots of brownies for APSL 2.0 and their use of it. It's slightly flawed as a commons license, but it's a wonderful public license for proprietarized BSD code.
I agree with this statement, except I must point out that the FSF objects to lenient perspective of Open Source (vs Free Software). FSF's historically justified fear is that Open Source can be undermined and eventually become mostly closed. FSF injects a little preventative kick into the GPL to prevent this. It seems that most Open Source developers understand this fear, which is why they use a Free Software license (GPL) even though they object to FSF's boat rocking.
I'm not sure how to say this. FSF rocks the boat. Over the last ten years, they've shifted most of the software industry's "realistic" perspective. They haven't done it through fanatical ranting and raving. They've done it through solid reasoning, logical arguments, and promotion the very American concept of equal distribution of rights.
When you say "realistic", I think you're saying "consistent with the world I grew up in". I think you're afraid of the changes they're advocating. I think you're afraid of what IBM and Apple are doing. I think this is why you advocate a change of guard: a change to someone more moderate, someone who doesn't want things to change quite so much.
I say this, because evidence contradicts the grounds you're advocating. Namely, "RMS/FSF are worthless as a realistic leader of today's free software movement." (This sounds like Party language to me, with special non-literal meanings for every word.) This arguement is barbed. Firstly, I want to object to the FSF being called a leader, though they provide some of the services of a leader. Second, how "worthless?" Exactly what does the FSF support, and how much progress have they made, contrasted with "realistic" expectations? The FSF has beaten down brick walls of opposition where technical merrit couldn't. The FSF has played an important role encourage each of the national governments that have adopted Free and Open software agendas. RMS is inflamatory, and gets on people's nerves, for exactly the right reasons: to make people think about things they'd "meh" about. You have to think to shoot down his arguements, and you know when you're reaching or blindly dismissing.
On another front, the FSF's articles and reviews are hardly inflamatory on their own. As several other posters noted, the FSF isn't shooting down licenses as bad, or evil--simply unfair. It seems it's always a third party that gets excited, percieves the article as some sort of attack, and reacts.
The FSF's agenda is damned simple, and damned agreeable in a Platonic sense. The FSF is realistic, understands that it can't achieve its goals with JUST the GPL. For example, they advocated placing the Vorbis tools under the BSD license over the (L)GPL. They wrote the LGPL to encourage the use of GPL software, even by proprietary software. Of course they oppose these licenses: they can be undermined, the software can be hijacked, existing rights can be selectively revoked for users if this happens.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogrove, but your momerathes are completely outgrabe.Amusingly enough, the RIAA was formed for this very purpose, for records. Now, they're an instrument in the destruction of standards, and the industry surrounding them.