And then there is this bill, signed a few years later by Obama:
The 2011 Defense Authorization Bill
additionally prohibits âoethe use of funds to modify or construct facilities in
the United States to house detainees transferred from United States Naval
Station, GuantÃnamo Bay, Cuba.â
It's like he's trying to have his torture, and yet claim powerlessness too.
Highly unimpressive.
I sure seem to recall a lot of squawking about that and in the end, since no
one would take the prisoners, Gitmo couldn't be closed.
That's highly unlikely. It would be trivial to transfer the prisoners into a specially built high security prison on some abandoned US military base in the middle of Nowhere, USA. Once the civilian trials had taken place, the facility could be handed over to some state government to become a regular prison.
Sadly, when it comes to addressing the human rights abuses committed by America in its witch hunt on turban wearing brown people,
Obama is just full od hot air like most Americans.
And if
they are compensated more for producing more and better work, they are more
likely to produce more and better work.
Actually that's completely wrong. People who are compensated more for more work end up at some point being content with what they were able to get.
The result is they don't perform to their full potential.
And people who are compensated *too much* for their work just rest on their laurels.
What's needed is to compensate people just enough to make them feel that they could achieve more, if they worked just a littlb bit harder. And never as much as a they think they deserve, or even enough overall that they can afford to switch into unproductive pursuits.
There's a reason the carrot is perpetually dangled in front of the donkey in cartoons. If the carrot was actually given to the donkey, it would be happy and not move anymore. And if the donkey was fed regularly enough, it wouldn't care much about the carrot either.
Nonsense. Patents apply to everybody. There's no exception for people who "only" make 1-10 units. Patents literally forbid you to tinker in your own home and then sell the item you just invented, if someone paid a fee and lodged a vague sounding description about something roughly similar already.
You're about half way there. At some point, you'll realize that you can set up a hotkey to launch a terminal. From there, if you type the first few characters of an app followed by TAB and ENTER, you get the same outcome. But since the terminal loads a shell automatically, you can IN ADDITION do all sorts of file management, get system information through/proc, and specify extra one off command line parameters for any script you care to run...
Will they? I suppose it's possible, but so far the only effective and
scalable free-service business model we've found is advertising. Radio,
television, web services... everything is ad-supported.
I disagree. The analogy of web services with radio and television is
inapplicable imho, yet it's also a quite informative juxtaposition.
In the case of TV and radio, scalability is a necessity which ultimately
occurs due to the limitations on frequency allocations in the broadcasting spectrum. Auctions for broadcasting licences are expensive, and direcly result in the need for very large audiences to recoup the initial costs. Yet in TV and radio, the users don't pay for the usage of the medium, while some who are willing to do so are advertisers. It is more difficult to convince a very large number of users to pay for individual subscriptions, than it is to convince a small number of advertisers to pay for their usage. Hence the symbiotic relation.
The case of web services doesn't work like that. The medium's usage is paid
for locally by the users (both individuals and companies pay for network usage), and the
nature of packet switching is such that there is no need to allocate exclusive portions of the total capacity. Thus the initial cost isn't there, and there is no imperative to scale at all. Companies like Google and Amazon *choose* to scale for many reasons, which results in problems of their own making.
The underlying network supports fully local, cheap, decentralized services.
However, this is incompatible with the preservation of control over content and transactions. Consider, for argument's sake, if Google or Amazon were broken up into thousands of
franchises, all cooperating with no central ownership. The scaling issues would vanish overnight. None of the franchises would *need* to scale to the whole internet. The hardware requirements per franchisee would be much less, and the average number of users would also be less, although similar in aggregate.
The main reason that advertising is so powerful - that it is easier to ask a small number of users/advertisers for money than a large number of users/surfers - would not apply. (Of course, this last example is whimsical for many reasons, but it illustrates imho the issues).
Open source efforts
become really successful when people are paid full-time to work on them.
I disagree here too. Success is a matter of availability and relevance. Whether people work full time on such projects is not the cause. GNU goes back to the 80s, so does Perl, but what makes them successful is that people found them useful in a particular era. The polish came later. And in fact, nowadays, almost nobody uses perl anymore despite many strengths. Open source has a very long history, while the corporate backing of it ebbs and flows, eg GCC.
Companies can spend a lot of time polishing a project
but if its usage is niche, and if there are many alternatives that solve similar problems, and if the problem isn't pressing, then success still won't materialize.
The Big Engineering that Google does is great, it's not unlike IBM in tackling important fundamental problems. But ultimately IBM found that its approach wasn't the only way to flood the world with computers.
When are people going to realize that FB's just another
internet company with a reasonably successful business model, and worthy of
neither adulation nor hatred?
Wrong. FB is worthy of hatred because what they do is inherently evil. They spy on people, and sell off that information.
The "it's just a job/business" excuse doesn't work when the job/business is evil.
For example, when the local Mafia goons come to collect protection money, it's "just a job" for them right? Nothing personal. They're just regular people who are trying to make ends meet, like eveybody else. Don't hate them. Wrong, it's evil, and the goons display a singularly bad sense of judgement in accepting to do this kind of work.
Similarly, spies are evil, James Bond notwithstanding. They steal secrets, and betray people in the process. And FB are a spying organization. They treat users' rights as a joke, and due to their size and ubiquity, are substantially responsible for the state of privacy on the internet today.
There's nothing wrong with that. All those free services can go. They'll be replaced by other free services from new companies that will abide by the rules and still think they can make a profit, by doing what their customers want instead of what they don't want. Moreover, if open source has taught us anything, it's that high quality free stuff still gets made by people who just want to be proud to help advance the human race.
So let the data collecting leeches die a well deserved death. We don't need them.
You're so naive! Apple will just ask a Texas judge to declare the UK court's judgment null and void. No need to send the troops in unless the UK's Supreme Court sends a QC to appeal.
You're missing the point. This is important because Linus is expressing an
idea that millions of other Linux users are thinking. Unlike him, they
don't have a large audience, so their thoughts mostly go unnoticed. But
these thoughts nevertheless have a huge impact on the entire Open Source
ecosystem.
OMG! What if he gets it a bit wrong? Is it like a million Linux users tried to cry out, but were silenced instead?
Also, he didn't spell absence right. A million people had better open a dictionary before monday!
So you're saying that in a country that has strong paper based voting systems in place, then those who want to corrupt the process must do so by explicitly threatening people and being corrupt in plain daylight, instead of subtly adjusting the numbers hidden inside computing machines?
Isn't the actual implication of your post that Mexio as a nation is rather cowardly, willing to be exploited and disrespected in the broad view of everyone?
There is no way to protect democracy if citizens are literally going to accept shameless displays of corruption in public and go along with it.
However, in countries where most citizens will stand up to defend their liberty when it is obviously being taken from them, it makes sense to oppose computer voting, as it allows criminals to hide their crimes while they are committing them.
Color is fine in a UI as long as it means something. If it's just decoration
that creates cognitive load with no user benefit. Apple abandoned this idea
Right, that's why people hang pictures on their white walls, and sometimes even put up wallpaper. Whereas hostpitals and prisons go for the monochromatic look, to help people get creative without distractions.
If you give it away for free, you can charge for worshops based off of the material in the book. In fact, probably, you must give it away so that enough people get to preview the material. Think of the book as advertising for the workshops.
If you don't advertise, then nobody will come. How do you advertise? You give away the book.
Of course, if your book isn't any good, then nobody will want to meet you. But I'm assuming that you think sufficiently highly of the work that you produced, that you are willing to take the chance.
To break even, figure out how many people would buy the book if it stinks,
then that's how many people need to come to the first few workshops. You maximize the chance that they will come to those workshops by distributing the book widely. Also, the workshops will allow you to revise the book and improve it using feedback from interested people.
The jackass is you. All I'm seeing is "it's always been done like this, therefore that's the only way to do it, now with pseudo-economic mumbo jumbo".
Nice in theory, except the world is 7 billion people and the USA is a puny 300 million. There are literally more old people with hearing problems just in China than there are people alive in the US. Put designs up on the internet, and there will be a flood of cheap products.
but so does France and nobody says a peep about them.
Why is it that the French always get not blamed by Americans?
That's so unfair. Did you know that the Germans never get not blamed
about their industrial spying? It's very frustrating, as Germany is quite good at it. But no, it's like you mustn't mention the spying. You know, Germans are proud people too, and they should get their turn not being blamed every once in a while.
Now the British, they're amateurs in industrial spying. Refusing to not blame them makes perfect sense, at least to me.
No, you don't get it. The argument is that the _design_ is too complex for anyone other than a highly trained engineer. Ok, have an engineer do the design, _once_. Then it's done.
Put the specs on the internet, let anyone build their own for free if they like. All that nonsense about marketing, shelf space, and blah blah blah is unnecessary. Hearing aids will still get built. And they'll be much cheaper than they currently are.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like he's trying to have his torture, and yet claim powerlessness too. Highly unimpressive.
Roger Wilco
That's highly unlikely. It would be trivial to transfer the prisoners into a specially built high security prison on some abandoned US military base in the middle of Nowhere, USA. Once the civilian trials had taken place, the facility could be handed over to some state government to become a regular prison.
Sadly, when it comes to addressing the human rights abuses committed by America in its witch hunt on turban wearing brown people, Obama is just full od hot air like most Americans.
Actually that's completely wrong. People who are compensated more for more work end up at some point being content with what they were able to get. The result is they don't perform to their full potential. And people who are compensated *too much* for their work just rest on their laurels.
What's needed is to compensate people just enough to make them feel that they could achieve more, if they worked just a littlb bit harder. And never as much as a they think they deserve, or even enough overall that they can afford to switch into unproductive pursuits.
There's a reason the carrot is perpetually dangled in front of the donkey in cartoons. If the carrot was actually given to the donkey, it would be happy and not move anymore. And if the donkey was fed regularly enough, it wouldn't care much about the carrot either.
It's OK! Users with this problem just have to reboot the tablet and it will be fixed.
It can't get more thoughtcrimeywimey than that.
You're about half way there. At some point, you'll realize that you can set up a hotkey to launch a terminal. From there, if you type the first few characters of an app followed by TAB and ENTER, you get the same outcome. But since the terminal loads a shell automatically, you can IN ADDITION do all sorts of file management, get system information through /proc, and specify extra one off command line parameters for any script you care to run...
Come on, AAPLy some common sense!
I disagree. The analogy of web services with radio and television is inapplicable imho, yet it's also a quite informative juxtaposition.
In the case of TV and radio, scalability is a necessity which ultimately occurs due to the limitations on frequency allocations in the broadcasting spectrum. Auctions for broadcasting licences are expensive, and direcly result in the need for very large audiences to recoup the initial costs. Yet in TV and radio, the users don't pay for the usage of the medium, while some who are willing to do so are advertisers. It is more difficult to convince a very large number of users to pay for individual subscriptions, than it is to convince a small number of advertisers to pay for their usage. Hence the symbiotic relation.
The case of web services doesn't work like that. The medium's usage is paid for locally by the users (both individuals and companies pay for network usage), and the nature of packet switching is such that there is no need to allocate exclusive portions of the total capacity. Thus the initial cost isn't there, and there is no imperative to scale at all. Companies like Google and Amazon *choose* to scale for many reasons, which results in problems of their own making.
The underlying network supports fully local, cheap, decentralized services. However, this is incompatible with the preservation of control over content and transactions. Consider, for argument's sake, if Google or Amazon were broken up into thousands of franchises, all cooperating with no central ownership. The scaling issues would vanish overnight. None of the franchises would *need* to scale to the whole internet. The hardware requirements per franchisee would be much less, and the average number of users would also be less, although similar in aggregate. The main reason that advertising is so powerful - that it is easier to ask a small number of users/advertisers for money than a large number of users/surfers - would not apply. (Of course, this last example is whimsical for many reasons, but it illustrates imho the issues).
I disagree here too. Success is a matter of availability and relevance. Whether people work full time on such projects is not the cause. GNU goes back to the 80s, so does Perl, but what makes them successful is that people found them useful in a particular era. The polish came later. And in fact, nowadays, almost nobody uses perl anymore despite many strengths. Open source has a very long history, while the corporate backing of it ebbs and flows, eg GCC. Companies can spend a lot of time polishing a project but if its usage is niche, and if there are many alternatives that solve similar problems, and if the problem isn't pressing, then success still won't materialize.
The Big Engineering that Google does is great, it's not unlike IBM in tackling important fundamental problems. But ultimately IBM found that its approach wasn't the only way to flood the world with computers.
Wrong. FB is worthy of hatred because what they do is inherently evil. They spy on people, and sell off that information.
The "it's just a job/business" excuse doesn't work when the job/business is evil. For example, when the local Mafia goons come to collect protection money, it's "just a job" for them right? Nothing personal. They're just regular people who are trying to make ends meet, like eveybody else. Don't hate them. Wrong, it's evil, and the goons display a singularly bad sense of judgement in accepting to do this kind of work.
Similarly, spies are evil, James Bond notwithstanding. They steal secrets, and betray people in the process. And FB are a spying organization. They treat users' rights as a joke, and due to their size and ubiquity, are substantially responsible for the state of privacy on the internet today.
So let the data collecting leeches die a well deserved death. We don't need them.
FTFY's
You're so naive! Apple will just ask a Texas judge to declare the UK court's judgment null and void. No need to send the troops in unless the UK's Supreme Court sends a QC to appeal.
OMG! What if he gets it a bit wrong? Is it like a million Linux users tried to cry out, but were silenced instead?
Also, he didn't spell absence right. A million people had better open a dictionary before monday!
Isn't the actual implication of your post that Mexio as a nation is rather cowardly, willing to be exploited and disrespected in the broad view of everyone?
There is no way to protect democracy if citizens are literally going to accept shameless displays of corruption in public and go along with it. However, in countries where most citizens will stand up to defend their liberty when it is obviously being taken from them, it makes sense to oppose computer voting, as it allows criminals to hide their crimes while they are committing them.
Why weren't you watching porn *while* looking for videos of frogs signing each other? Does it really take that much concentration to watch the former?
Right, that's why people hang pictures on their white walls, and sometimes even put up wallpaper. Whereas hostpitals and prisons go for the monochromatic look, to help people get creative without distractions.
Hold on! When the Earth gets downgraded to dwarf planet status, will we have to give the software back or what?
L. Ron Hubbard, is that you? I thought I'd recognized you! How've you been?
Of course, if your book isn't any good, then nobody will want to meet you. But I'm assuming that you think sufficiently highly of the work that you produced, that you are willing to take the chance.
To break even, figure out how many people would buy the book if it stinks, then that's how many people need to come to the first few workshops. You maximize the chance that they will come to those workshops by distributing the book widely. Also, the workshops will allow you to revise the book and improve it using feedback from interested people.
Gee, I hope he didn't try to pick up the 1-year old...
If only one of those files is a MP3, the RIAA is going to have an orgasm.
Nice in theory, except the world is 7 billion people and the USA is a puny 300 million. There are literally more old people with hearing problems just in China than there are people alive in the US. Put designs up on the internet, and there will be a flood of cheap products.
Why is it that the French always get not blamed by Americans? That's so unfair. Did you know that the Germans never get not blamed about their industrial spying? It's very frustrating, as Germany is quite good at it. But no, it's like you mustn't mention the spying. You know, Germans are proud people too, and they should get their turn not being blamed every once in a while.
Now the British, they're amateurs in industrial spying. Refusing to not blame them makes perfect sense, at least to me.
Put the specs on the internet, let anyone build their own for free if they like. All that nonsense about marketing, shelf space, and blah blah blah is unnecessary. Hearing aids will still get built. And they'll be much cheaper than they currently are.