I'm not certain about NY, but in many states you CANNOT have your rates raised for being involved in an accident in which you were not at fault.
If you aren't in a legally-parked vehicle and it is hit, you most certainly can't be charged for the accident.
On the other hand, if you hit somebody else and settle the matter without the use of insurance, and the insurance company finds out, they can raise your rates to the same degree that they could if you had filed.
Insurance companies love the myth that your rates go up when you file claims. They end up collecting premiums but not paying anything out.
Your rates are determined by your accident and ticket history - your claims history is irrelevant. At least, I believe that is the case in most states. I don't know about NY in particular, but certainly in PA you should file claims anytime you are eligible...
Honestly, the impact of Y2K depends on your industry.
If you're a 3-employee company and you spent $95k on Y2K, your boss was foolish.
On the other hand, if you're fortune 500 and you have the same accounting glitch, you're talking more than 6 hours of work to fix it.
If you're able to fix widespread accounting problems easily, then you're not super-dependant on your computers. So, it isn't worth spending extra to make sure they work.
Part of why nothing happened on Y2K was the fact that people actually took it seriously and tested their code. If you remediate your code and test switching your servers to Jan 2nd, 2000 and it works, why should you be surprised when nothing happens on the dawn of Y2K?
All the talk of wasted money on Y2K sounds like people complaining because they went on a careful diet to control their cholesterol and lived to the age of 85 and got hit by a car. They didn't ever have a heart attack - so the diet must have been a waste of effort, right?!
Simply have schools start an hour earlier or whatever. If you start work at 6AM, chances are you're going to get to bed earlier. You don't need to call 6AM 7AM to have this effect.
This isn't meant as a positive or negative statement regarding DK or SPF, neither of which I'm an expert on.
However, regarding needing to be able to reject mail before it is fully received - I'm not sure this is really a requirement.
Sure, it is a requirement considering the current environment, but that could change once an anti-spam solution is in place. Consider, if nearly 100% of spam doesn't go anywhere, why bother sending it? You don't need to stop spam - you just need to make it more expensive to spam than to just bulk mail people (snail mail). Initially the servers will not save any bandwidth, but once the spam is being killed wholesale spammers will write their scripts to avoid mailing to domains that will filter their spam. If I can send 1 million emails from a host before it is compromised (ie blacklisted), why send most of those to mail servers that you know will reject your mail? Spammers will quickly filter out domains that use either DK or SPF or whatever - so that they can target their junk at people who will actually read it.
So, in the long term, everybody's bandwidth usage goes down.
Now, when they start supporting virtual groups like bnr2 I'll be quite happy!
Bnr2 is a binary newsreader which allows you to create a virtual group which is a combination of several groups sans dupes. Alas, the code is stagnent and it is not open-source. It breaks readily once the database gets big, and bnr3 is windows-only.
Why the author doesn't just open-source the project I don't know. If somebody just ripped out whatever database code they're using and just pointed it at a mysql or BDB or some other tried-and-true dbms the project would probably take off.
I believe Pan is moving in this direction, but as you pointed out they're just getting started again.
No chemists really think that the lanthanides and actinides are "footnotes" in the periodic table. In truth both rows should be inserted under Group 3. We just put them under the table because the first option would make the table too wide.
Indeed, that whole issue could be sidestepped if you just printed the table in 5-point font like the galaxy arrangement. If you printed a regular table at that size you could put the f-orbital elements into the main table and still have it look "Reasonable" - whatever that means.
I think the new layout is a nice one - somebody else linked a prior spiraled arrangement, which avoids a pure spiral for the sake of saving space.
Honestly, though, until we start discovering "superactinides" I think the present layout is just fine. Then again, you could just put the superactinides to the left of the regular actinides, although the two series combined would be longer than the rest of the table.
If an employer wants to give you three years of severance then I'm fine with non-competes. Of course, that is rarely the case.
Typically they just want to make it so that it is impossible for you to take a better offer from anybody who is likely to actually offer you one. Then they can pay you less and you'll stick around...
So, where exactly is an IT professional who specializes in software design and marketing for office productivity software supposed to get a job if they leave MS (note, I"m not claiming these are the specific circumstances in this case).
That is like somebody who works on R&D for fine chemicals being told he can't take a job in the chemical industry. Well, unless he just wants to get a $10/hr job putting blood samples into the analyzer at a hospital, there aren't many other career paths open to somebody with that background.
Industry forces workers to highly specialize by only hiring workers with very specific skills. Then, they insist on non-compete clauses, which are contrary to specialization. This is essentially indentured servitude as most people can only make their full salary potential within a narrow field of jobs, and by blocking off opportunities within this narrow field an employer no longer has to compete with these jobs in pay. No longer does a company need to keep an employee from being wooed away by other R&D firms. Instead they need to compete with entry-level positions in different industries, since rarely do employees cross industry boundaries at high levels (unless we're just talking pure management or some area where specialized knowledge is less critical).
As far as protecting secrets goes - I'm fine with NDAs that prevent disclosure of specific details of company strategy or R&D. If the guy discloses something, then go after him. Now, NDAs which are very broad (such as you have to pretend that you no longer remember how to program in.NET which you learned at an MS training facility) are a different story.
Employees at all levels know secrets. You'd be surprised what bottom-level employees know within their domains of expertise. Companies don't hire 10X the requisite number of staff just so they can play need-to-know games and compartmentalize everybody.
Let's assume for a moment that all "alternative" therapies are hogwash, and that a placebo-controlled study will show that they are no more effective than a placebo. Does that make them ineffective, or wrong?
If they show that they are no more effective OR HARMFUL than a placebo than your argument has merit.
The problem is, that some alternative therapies can have side effects of their own. Additionally, in some cases patients need more than just a placebo...
Ok, but in 10 half lives (or 1500 years by the ridiculous premise of this discussion) you have 2^-10th less. That's 1/1000th the original supply. In 100 half lives (15,000 years) you have 2^-100th less, and that is starting to get really small.
Sure, there would be a stray atom here or there in the middle of the earth, but nothing to take notice of.
Standard operating procedure in many industries that work with radioisotopes is to just toss them in the trash after 10 half-lives (if the quantity is reasonably small) - by then the radiation is below background.
Most projects on sourceforge just use the GPL without thinking due to ignorance. This causes problems for corporate developers.
Uh, how do you know that this is a result of ignorance?
It could just be that they want their libraries to be GPL, and that they don't want people linking them into non-GPL products.
I see no reason that it should be obvious that libraries MUST be licensed LGPL. Licensing a library GPL confers an advantage to other GPL projects since they can use your library, and a disadvantage to non-GPL projects since they have to rewrite the whole thing themselves. To people with the FSF-mindset this is probably a good thing, since it encourages the liberation of software. Who knows, maybe one or two proprietary products end up getting GPLed just so they can use the library since their owners figure there isn't much downside to opening the code. With the LGPL they can just be lazy and link it in...
When you think about it, many proprietary projects out there could stand to be GPLed. The prominance of GPL code that these projects could otherwise use helps encourage proprietaryware to open up.
The problem with per-computer licensing is that it encourages a company to just create one massive 500-processor computer and use VMWare to run all their software on that one computer. Then a 50,000-employee company only needs 1 license for their entire company.
You can't just charge a fortunate for 1 license, since then nobody would ever start using your software, since most software tends to get piloted with small groups before working its way up to enterprise scale.
I always thought a concurrant-user model would work better, although for a database that gets murky.
Of course, the open source model is nice since you aren't charging a dime for anything and hence you don't need to fight out how to charge for your product...:)
To charge a car in 60 seconds is going to require one heck of a conductor! You wouldn't need signs on the new "gas stations" - you can just follow the high voltage lines...
Many attempts at generating hydrogen are based in making hydrogen a byproduct of existing industrial processes, like water treatment. In other words, which energy technologies succeed will depend more on manufacturing efficiencies than on output efficiencies.
It is interesting that most reductions in toxic waste releases at chemical plants were not the result of enviornmental protesting as much as the protestors waking up chemists who figured out that they're dumping out perfectly usable chemicals into the river. Quite a bit of the reduction in emmissions these days is the result of changes in process which reduce waste - and nobody needs to twist the arm of a plant manager to reduce waste...
*Tea tax...So they gave a monopoly to the East India Company to sell tea in the Colonies. This pissed off the smugglers, who violated British trade laws (as well as Naval laws) by importing inferior Dutch tea.
Uh, it seems like your theory is that 80% of US commercial shipping was "smuggling." In any nation where that is true there is probably something wrong with the import/export laws. For starters, allowing people to only buy one brand of tea might qualify as a dumb law.
Sure, the Dutch tea might be "inferior," but who really cares? I could see a truth in advertising and branding law - but if I want to buy 99 cent dutch tea instead of $24.99 East India genuine tea, that's my problem.
Smuggling and the black market are the natural result when regulation prevents the meeting of a demand. Now, when that demand is a fringe element of society (violent criminals, terrorists, etc.) then it can be controlled. On the other hand, when the demand is on the part of everybody who drinks tea, then it cannot be controlled. This sounds like an article I read on chemical exports to China. Apparently the red tape was so thick that companies like Du Pont were "smuggling" chemicals there. This involved pulling a supertanker up to the dock and giving the dock manager a million dollars to spread around. The Chinese government ignored the offences since they desired to do commerce and the red tape was more there for the sake of politics than to actually restrain trade.
When 95% of the population breaks a law, it isn't the population which needs to be brought under control...
*Trial-by-peers. The problems of Boston continued escalating...Since trial-by-jury - a standard Right of Englishmen - meant a "trial by peers," the British were unsuccessful in getting a conviction against smugglers, because the jury was made up of smugglers.
Again, you see to be of the opinion that any random selection of Bostonians would contain a large number of "smugglers." Well, I already stated my opinion on this matter.
However, I find this claim truly astonishing when you consider the purpose of a jury in the first place. The reason you have juries of peers is so that crimes are only punished when your peers think that you've done something wrong. For example, most people don't want neighbers who are prone to killing people at random, so when somebody expresses this tendancy everybody is happy to lock them up. On the other hand, most Bostonians were obviously sympathetic to the cause of the "smugglers" and so they were acquitted - after all, they were good neighbors. What you consider a failing of the justice system I consider a great triumph.
Laws don't exist so that people can be forced to follow them. They exist for the benefit of the people who generally do follow them. When a society obtains no benefit from a law they are often right to change it.
And indeed, this is what happens to people who don't put in as many hours as their neighbors - they can't compete in house-bidding wars.
People spend half their incomes just to own a home. Why? Simple - supply is limited, and so prices are bid up. People say, well, if I just work an extra 5 hours per week I can outbid the other guy and live where I want to. The other guy ups the ante to 10 hours, and pretty soon you're where we all are now...
Of course, the moon is a special case since its rotation and revolution are synchronized. In general L1/L2 points are not good space elevator locations, but for the moon they may happen to work.
You could argue that this is an unfair bundling. Intel obviously has early access to their processor specs, which gives them a head start on their compiler. This gives the compiler an advantage over the competition.
On the other side, the compiler is designed to cripple non-Intel processors. It doesn't do this by failing to make AMDs work better. Rather, it does so by ignoring CPU capabilities and running unoptimized code on non-Intel processors.
Now, If they have generic, P3, and P4 code branches, and the CPU has the capabilities of the P4 processor (as indicated by CPUID), then the P4 branch should be run. Intel doesn't need to do a big study on AMD code alignments and make a k8 branch or anything like that. However, if the branch uses SSE2 and the processor supports SSE2 then it should use the optimizations.
There is a big difference between going out of your way to support a competitor in a related market, and outright making your product deliberately slower when used with a competitor's product. If the CPUID says the processor supports SSE2 and you have SSE2 code to execute it, then that branch should be used.
Companies are there to make money not for moral or social values. I'm not saying that's a good thing but that's how the system works.
You could replace corporation with people in your sentence and technically you are still correct - people are generally selfish. Fortunately, most people are also able to operate under some level of self-control so that society is actually able to function.
No society can operate solely on the basis of law - unless you want to employ 1/3rd of the population as police, and half of the rest as judges, lawyers, and prison guards. If you look at the trend in the legal profession, you'd think we're already halfway there...
At some point, people need to say - sure, I could do this, and I could probably get away with it, but the amount of hurt I'm going to do to somebody else as a result of my actions isn't worth the benefit to me.
Now, clearly law helps by preventing the immoral from profiting at the expense of the moral. However, at some point you need more than laws - or you'll never be able to pass enough of them.
Corporations present particular difficulties - they can have considerable influence over the lawmakers themselves, and have considerable resources to be used in dodging laws. A fine which is crippling to an individual isn't even a slap on the wrist for a corporation. Sometimes fines just become a cost of doing business.
China is truly a unique country. It is essentially capitalistic with some state-run industry, and it is almost a complete dictatorship. They don't have the economic problems that brought down the USSR. Their massive population base means that it is only a matter of time before they become the predominant military superpower.
It isn't like we need to send in the marines or anything like that - however as a start it would be nice to not actively help them censor and control their own people...
You mean that when you do a fingerprint database search you don't see the computer monitor flash 800 million fingerprints on the screen one at a time until it finds the match? You're not suggesting that the CSI guys are lying to us, are you?
Of course, it doesn't help that Sun is out there screaming that SWT isn't Java, that it isn't in the standard libraries/JREs, and consequently requires separate installation.
I tried messing with an SWT-based hello-world in eclipse and was frustrated that nowhere is there a simple how-to on how to do it. I couldn't get the SWT libraries correctly linked in.
I think the absence of an SWT tutorial was due to IBM promoting SWT only as a tool for making eclipse plugins and not as a general toolkit for java apps - this was done to appease Sun, which of course was on the AWT or swing only bandwagon. Perhaps this has changed...
I see your point - obviously you have to be careful. The entire design of the GPL was to put software into the free-software realm. If you want to cross-license it you'll need to be really careful. Keep in mind that the same applies if you're writing proprietary software - that 6-line function does just as much damange to your copyright there as well.
BTW, if you modify some GPLed code and rerelease it without updating the copyright list, are you still part copyright holder? Does the presence of someone else's copyright cancel out your own implicit copyright?
I would say no in general, but you do run into a few issues. The presence of copyright notice automatically defeats an argument in court that a copyright infringement was inadvertent. You're now open to that defence if you choose to sue.
You still have copyright, but if you can be shown to have known the copyright was breached for a number of years and done nothing at all about it (not even a kind notice to the violator) then you might be vulnerable to estoppel by laches. This is essentially a statue-of-limitations for civil law so that you can't just wait until your opponents liability has multiplied and then clean up. Once you know about a violation you need to act if you want to have a chance in court later.
Copyright notices are not requried by law, but they are like fences - they show an intent to keep people out of you stuff.
You confuse standards with implementations. This is a issue that has absolutely nothing to do with licensing.
Uh, the parent asserted an advantage of using BSD with a reference implementation of a standard. That has EVERYTHING to do with standards, and EVERYTHING to do with licensing. This is actually a very common argument, and my goal was simply to provoke discussion on whether using BSD is a net positive or negative in this case.
If it saves "png+" then it's a non-standard format and the majority of the products on the market won't open it.
Ok, so png+ reads fine by libpng but a few features are missing (such as animation or 3D or something). The open source browser as a result has a "diminished" experience.
Don't get me wrong - I steer clear of proprietaryware all the time and I'm typing this on firefox on linux. My point is that the BSD license makes it easier to embrace and extend a standard. Sure, you can do it without the code, but there is nothing you can do about that. The argument was that BSD was better than GPL for reference implementations of a standard, and I was merely questioning that position.
I would hope the companies are wising up, since they're essentially getting duped.
Keep in mind that in many of these businesses IT is not considered a core-competency or a differentiator in the marketplace. As a result, the move is to lightly customize off-the-shelf software. This has benefits since everybody can benefit from standardized business practices, but if you are in fact doing something better than everyone else you end up giving away your advantage this way.
If you're a typical firm that makes widgets, your executive team is a bunch of top-notch widget-makers with 30 years experience each and Ph.D.s in widgeteering. If you want to move up the ladder you had better have at least an MS in widgeteering. If you're just a programmer then you're only there since the widgeteers don't want to bother with imaging their PCs. (This is the mindset in many big companies.) If somebody in Elbonia comes up with a cheaper way of automating your widget-press your job is toast. Never mind that if they invested in a little software R&D yoru widget-presses might be faster than everybody else's. They'd rather save a dime and just have it be the same. The people on top can clearly see how investing more in widget R&D will make them come out on top. They can't see how investing in software R&D can provide much benefit.
This applies to MANY professions. In a law firm money is only spent lavishly on the best lawyers. In a biotech it is only spent on the best biochemists. And so on...
And this is how companies like software firms and consulting firms have cleaned up. Their widgets include software, and companies are willing to pay a premium for them to make software so that they don't need to think about it themselves.
Don't get me wrong - I think that buying COTS makes a lot of sense - probably most of the time. However, firms have become reluctant to consider cases where an IT investment will give them a sustainable advantage. As a result, you get "IT doesn't matter."
Also - if you want your advantage to be sustainable you need to pay your IT people well. Otherwise they'll just switch over to your competitor and redevelop for them the same software they just developed for you. Widget-makers understand that they'll lose their advantage if their best and brightest widgeteers move to their competitor. They don't seem to get it with IT though...
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I'm not certain about NY, but in many states you CANNOT have your rates raised for being involved in an accident in which you were not at fault.
If you aren't in a legally-parked vehicle and it is hit, you most certainly can't be charged for the accident.
On the other hand, if you hit somebody else and settle the matter without the use of insurance, and the insurance company finds out, they can raise your rates to the same degree that they could if you had filed.
Insurance companies love the myth that your rates go up when you file claims. They end up collecting premiums but not paying anything out.
Your rates are determined by your accident and ticket history - your claims history is irrelevant. At least, I believe that is the case in most states. I don't know about NY in particular, but certainly in PA you should file claims anytime you are eligible...
Honestly, the impact of Y2K depends on your industry.
If you're a 3-employee company and you spent $95k on Y2K, your boss was foolish.
On the other hand, if you're fortune 500 and you have the same accounting glitch, you're talking more than 6 hours of work to fix it.
If you're able to fix widespread accounting problems easily, then you're not super-dependant on your computers. So, it isn't worth spending extra to make sure they work.
Part of why nothing happened on Y2K was the fact that people actually took it seriously and tested their code. If you remediate your code and test switching your servers to Jan 2nd, 2000 and it works, why should you be surprised when nothing happens on the dawn of Y2K?
All the talk of wasted money on Y2K sounds like people complaining because they went on a careful diet to control their cholesterol and lived to the age of 85 and got hit by a car. They didn't ever have a heart attack - so the diet must have been a waste of effort, right?!
Simply have schools start an hour earlier or whatever. If you start work at 6AM, chances are you're going to get to bed earlier. You don't need to call 6AM 7AM to have this effect.
This isn't meant as a positive or negative statement regarding DK or SPF, neither of which I'm an expert on.
However, regarding needing to be able to reject mail before it is fully received - I'm not sure this is really a requirement.
Sure, it is a requirement considering the current environment, but that could change once an anti-spam solution is in place. Consider, if nearly 100% of spam doesn't go anywhere, why bother sending it? You don't need to stop spam - you just need to make it more expensive to spam than to just bulk mail people (snail mail). Initially the servers will not save any bandwidth, but once the spam is being killed wholesale spammers will write their scripts to avoid mailing to domains that will filter their spam. If I can send 1 million emails from a host before it is compromised (ie blacklisted), why send most of those to mail servers that you know will reject your mail? Spammers will quickly filter out domains that use either DK or SPF or whatever - so that they can target their junk at people who will actually read it.
So, in the long term, everybody's bandwidth usage goes down.
Now, when they start supporting virtual groups like bnr2 I'll be quite happy!
Bnr2 is a binary newsreader which allows you to create a virtual group which is a combination of several groups sans dupes. Alas, the code is stagnent and it is not open-source. It breaks readily once the database gets big, and bnr3 is windows-only.
Why the author doesn't just open-source the project I don't know. If somebody just ripped out whatever database code they're using and just pointed it at a mysql or BDB or some other tried-and-true dbms the project would probably take off.
I believe Pan is moving in this direction, but as you pointed out they're just getting started again.
No chemists really think that the lanthanides and actinides are "footnotes" in the periodic table. In truth both rows should be inserted under Group 3. We just put them under the table because the first option would make the table too wide.
Indeed, that whole issue could be sidestepped if you just printed the table in 5-point font like the galaxy arrangement. If you printed a regular table at that size you could put the f-orbital elements into the main table and still have it look "Reasonable" - whatever that means.
I think the new layout is a nice one - somebody else linked a prior spiraled arrangement, which avoids a pure spiral for the sake of saving space.
Honestly, though, until we start discovering "superactinides" I think the present layout is just fine. Then again, you could just put the superactinides to the left of the regular actinides, although the two series combined would be longer than the rest of the table.
If an employer wants to give you three years of severance then I'm fine with non-competes. Of course, that is rarely the case.
Typically they just want to make it so that it is impossible for you to take a better offer from anybody who is likely to actually offer you one. Then they can pay you less and you'll stick around...
So, where exactly is an IT professional who specializes in software design and marketing for office productivity software supposed to get a job if they leave MS (note, I"m not claiming these are the specific circumstances in this case).
.NET which you learned at an MS training facility) are a different story.
That is like somebody who works on R&D for fine chemicals being told he can't take a job in the chemical industry. Well, unless he just wants to get a $10/hr job putting blood samples into the analyzer at a hospital, there aren't many other career paths open to somebody with that background.
Industry forces workers to highly specialize by only hiring workers with very specific skills. Then, they insist on non-compete clauses, which are contrary to specialization. This is essentially indentured servitude as most people can only make their full salary potential within a narrow field of jobs, and by blocking off opportunities within this narrow field an employer no longer has to compete with these jobs in pay. No longer does a company need to keep an employee from being wooed away by other R&D firms. Instead they need to compete with entry-level positions in different industries, since rarely do employees cross industry boundaries at high levels (unless we're just talking pure management or some area where specialized knowledge is less critical).
As far as protecting secrets goes - I'm fine with NDAs that prevent disclosure of specific details of company strategy or R&D. If the guy discloses something, then go after him. Now, NDAs which are very broad (such as you have to pretend that you no longer remember how to program in
Employees at all levels know secrets. You'd be surprised what bottom-level employees know within their domains of expertise. Companies don't hire 10X the requisite number of staff just so they can play need-to-know games and compartmentalize everybody.
Let's assume for a moment that all "alternative" therapies are hogwash, and that a placebo-controlled study will show that they are no more effective than a placebo. Does that make them ineffective, or wrong?
If they show that they are no more effective OR HARMFUL than a placebo than your argument has merit.
The problem is, that some alternative therapies can have side effects of their own. Additionally, in some cases patients need more than just a placebo...
Ok, but in 10 half lives (or 1500 years by the ridiculous premise of this discussion) you have 2^-10th less. That's 1/1000th the original supply. In 100 half lives (15,000 years) you have 2^-100th less, and that is starting to get really small.
Sure, there would be a stray atom here or there in the middle of the earth, but nothing to take notice of.
Standard operating procedure in many industries that work with radioisotopes is to just toss them in the trash after 10 half-lives (if the quantity is reasonably small) - by then the radiation is below background.
Most projects on sourceforge just use the GPL without thinking due to ignorance. This causes problems for corporate developers.
Uh, how do you know that this is a result of ignorance?
It could just be that they want their libraries to be GPL, and that they don't want people linking them into non-GPL products.
I see no reason that it should be obvious that libraries MUST be licensed LGPL. Licensing a library GPL confers an advantage to other GPL projects since they can use your library, and a disadvantage to non-GPL projects since they have to rewrite the whole thing themselves. To people with the FSF-mindset this is probably a good thing, since it encourages the liberation of software. Who knows, maybe one or two proprietary products end up getting GPLed just so they can use the library since their owners figure there isn't much downside to opening the code. With the LGPL they can just be lazy and link it in...
When you think about it, many proprietary projects out there could stand to be GPLed. The prominance of GPL code that these projects could otherwise use helps encourage proprietaryware to open up.
The problem with per-computer licensing is that it encourages a company to just create one massive 500-processor computer and use VMWare to run all their software on that one computer. Then a 50,000-employee company only needs 1 license for their entire company.
:)
You can't just charge a fortunate for 1 license, since then nobody would ever start using your software, since most software tends to get piloted with small groups before working its way up to enterprise scale.
I always thought a concurrant-user model would work better, although for a database that gets murky.
Of course, the open source model is nice since you aren't charging a dime for anything and hence you don't need to fight out how to charge for your product...
The delay is a setting on the mail server attempting to send mail - it can wait potentially a long time before trying again.
Or, if it is a spammer they might try again later in 5 seconds...
To charge a car in 60 seconds is going to require one heck of a conductor! You wouldn't need signs on the new "gas stations" - you can just follow the high voltage lines...
Many attempts at generating hydrogen are based in making hydrogen a byproduct of existing industrial processes, like water treatment. In other words, which energy technologies succeed will depend more on manufacturing efficiencies than on output efficiencies.
It is interesting that most reductions in toxic waste releases at chemical plants were not the result of enviornmental protesting as much as the protestors waking up chemists who figured out that they're dumping out perfectly usable chemicals into the river. Quite a bit of the reduction in emmissions these days is the result of changes in process which reduce waste - and nobody needs to twist the arm of a plant manager to reduce waste...
*Tea tax...So they gave a monopoly to the East India Company to sell tea in the Colonies. This pissed off the smugglers, who violated British trade laws (as well as Naval laws) by importing inferior Dutch tea.
Uh, it seems like your theory is that 80% of US commercial shipping was "smuggling." In any nation where that is true there is probably something wrong with the import/export laws. For starters, allowing people to only buy one brand of tea might qualify as a dumb law.
Sure, the Dutch tea might be "inferior," but who really cares? I could see a truth in advertising and branding law - but if I want to buy 99 cent dutch tea instead of $24.99 East India genuine tea, that's my problem.
Smuggling and the black market are the natural result when regulation prevents the meeting of a demand. Now, when that demand is a fringe element of society (violent criminals, terrorists, etc.) then it can be controlled. On the other hand, when the demand is on the part of everybody who drinks tea, then it cannot be controlled. This sounds like an article I read on chemical exports to China. Apparently the red tape was so thick that companies like Du Pont were "smuggling" chemicals there. This involved pulling a supertanker up to the dock and giving the dock manager a million dollars to spread around. The Chinese government ignored the offences since they desired to do commerce and the red tape was more there for the sake of politics than to actually restrain trade.
When 95% of the population breaks a law, it isn't the population which needs to be brought under control...
*Trial-by-peers. The problems of Boston continued escalating...Since trial-by-jury - a standard Right of Englishmen - meant a "trial by peers," the British were unsuccessful in getting a conviction against smugglers, because the jury was made up of smugglers.
Again, you see to be of the opinion that any random selection of Bostonians would contain a large number of "smugglers." Well, I already stated my opinion on this matter.
However, I find this claim truly astonishing when you consider the purpose of a jury in the first place. The reason you have juries of peers is so that crimes are only punished when your peers think that you've done something wrong. For example, most people don't want neighbers who are prone to killing people at random, so when somebody expresses this tendancy everybody is happy to lock them up. On the other hand, most Bostonians were obviously sympathetic to the cause of the "smugglers" and so they were acquitted - after all, they were good neighbors. What you consider a failing of the justice system I consider a great triumph.
Laws don't exist so that people can be forced to follow them. They exist for the benefit of the people who generally do follow them. When a society obtains no benefit from a law they are often right to change it.
And indeed, this is what happens to people who don't put in as many hours as their neighbors - they can't compete in house-bidding wars.
People spend half their incomes just to own a home. Why? Simple - supply is limited, and so prices are bid up. People say, well, if I just work an extra 5 hours per week I can outbid the other guy and live where I want to. The other guy ups the ante to 10 hours, and pretty soon you're where we all are now...
Of course, the moon is a special case since its rotation and revolution are synchronized. In general L1/L2 points are not good space elevator locations, but for the moon they may happen to work.
You could argue that this is an unfair bundling. Intel obviously has early access to their processor specs, which gives them a head start on their compiler. This gives the compiler an advantage over the competition.
On the other side, the compiler is designed to cripple non-Intel processors. It doesn't do this by failing to make AMDs work better. Rather, it does so by ignoring CPU capabilities and running unoptimized code on non-Intel processors.
Now, If they have generic, P3, and P4 code branches, and the CPU has the capabilities of the P4 processor (as indicated by CPUID), then the P4 branch should be run. Intel doesn't need to do a big study on AMD code alignments and make a k8 branch or anything like that. However, if the branch uses SSE2 and the processor supports SSE2 then it should use the optimizations.
There is a big difference between going out of your way to support a competitor in a related market, and outright making your product deliberately slower when used with a competitor's product. If the CPUID says the processor supports SSE2 and you have SSE2 code to execute it, then that branch should be used.
Companies are there to make money not for moral or social values. I'm not saying that's a good thing but that's how the system works.
You could replace corporation with people in your sentence and technically you are still correct - people are generally selfish. Fortunately, most people are also able to operate under some level of self-control so that society is actually able to function.
No society can operate solely on the basis of law - unless you want to employ 1/3rd of the population as police, and half of the rest as judges, lawyers, and prison guards. If you look at the trend in the legal profession, you'd think we're already halfway there...
At some point, people need to say - sure, I could do this, and I could probably get away with it, but the amount of hurt I'm going to do to somebody else as a result of my actions isn't worth the benefit to me.
Now, clearly law helps by preventing the immoral from profiting at the expense of the moral. However, at some point you need more than laws - or you'll never be able to pass enough of them.
Corporations present particular difficulties - they can have considerable influence over the lawmakers themselves, and have considerable resources to be used in dodging laws. A fine which is crippling to an individual isn't even a slap on the wrist for a corporation. Sometimes fines just become a cost of doing business.
China is truly a unique country. It is essentially capitalistic with some state-run industry, and it is almost a complete dictatorship. They don't have the economic problems that brought down the USSR. Their massive population base means that it is only a matter of time before they become the predominant military superpower.
It isn't like we need to send in the marines or anything like that - however as a start it would be nice to not actively help them censor and control their own people...
You mean that when you do a fingerprint database search you don't see the computer monitor flash 800 million fingerprints on the screen one at a time until it finds the match? You're not suggesting that the CSI guys are lying to us, are you?
Of course, it doesn't help that Sun is out there screaming that SWT isn't Java, that it isn't in the standard libraries/JREs, and consequently requires separate installation.
I tried messing with an SWT-based hello-world in eclipse and was frustrated that nowhere is there a simple how-to on how to do it. I couldn't get the SWT libraries correctly linked in.
I think the absence of an SWT tutorial was due to IBM promoting SWT only as a tool for making eclipse plugins and not as a general toolkit for java apps - this was done to appease Sun, which of course was on the AWT or swing only bandwagon. Perhaps this has changed...
I see your point - obviously you have to be careful. The entire design of the GPL was to put software into the free-software realm. If you want to cross-license it you'll need to be really careful. Keep in mind that the same applies if you're writing proprietary software - that 6-line function does just as much damange to your copyright there as well.
BTW, if you modify some GPLed code and rerelease it without updating the copyright list, are you still part copyright holder? Does the presence of someone else's copyright cancel out your own implicit copyright?
I would say no in general, but you do run into a few issues. The presence of copyright notice automatically defeats an argument in court that a copyright infringement was inadvertent. You're now open to that defence if you choose to sue.
You still have copyright, but if you can be shown to have known the copyright was breached for a number of years and done nothing at all about it (not even a kind notice to the violator) then you might be vulnerable to estoppel by laches. This is essentially a statue-of-limitations for civil law so that you can't just wait until your opponents liability has multiplied and then clean up. Once you know about a violation you need to act if you want to have a chance in court later.
Copyright notices are not requried by law, but they are like fences - they show an intent to keep people out of you stuff.
You confuse standards with implementations. This is a issue that has absolutely nothing to do with licensing.
Uh, the parent asserted an advantage of using BSD with a reference implementation of a standard. That has EVERYTHING to do with standards, and EVERYTHING to do with licensing. This is actually a very common argument, and my goal was simply to provoke discussion on whether using BSD is a net positive or negative in this case.
If it saves "png+" then it's a non-standard format and the majority of the products on the market won't open it.
Ok, so png+ reads fine by libpng but a few features are missing (such as animation or 3D or something). The open source browser as a result has a "diminished" experience.
Don't get me wrong - I steer clear of proprietaryware all the time and I'm typing this on firefox on linux. My point is that the BSD license makes it easier to embrace and extend a standard. Sure, you can do it without the code, but there is nothing you can do about that. The argument was that BSD was better than GPL for reference implementations of a standard, and I was merely questioning that position.
I would hope the companies are wising up, since they're essentially getting duped.
Keep in mind that in many of these businesses IT is not considered a core-competency or a differentiator in the marketplace. As a result, the move is to lightly customize off-the-shelf software. This has benefits since everybody can benefit from standardized business practices, but if you are in fact doing something better than everyone else you end up giving away your advantage this way.
If you're a typical firm that makes widgets, your executive team is a bunch of top-notch widget-makers with 30 years experience each and Ph.D.s in widgeteering. If you want to move up the ladder you had better have at least an MS in widgeteering. If you're just a programmer then you're only there since the widgeteers don't want to bother with imaging their PCs. (This is the mindset in many big companies.) If somebody in Elbonia comes up with a cheaper way of automating your widget-press your job is toast. Never mind that if they invested in a little software R&D yoru widget-presses might be faster than everybody else's. They'd rather save a dime and just have it be the same. The people on top can clearly see how investing more in widget R&D will make them come out on top. They can't see how investing in software R&D can provide much benefit.
This applies to MANY professions. In a law firm money is only spent lavishly on the best lawyers. In a biotech it is only spent on the best biochemists. And so on...
And this is how companies like software firms and consulting firms have cleaned up. Their widgets include software, and companies are willing to pay a premium for them to make software so that they don't need to think about it themselves.
Don't get me wrong - I think that buying COTS makes a lot of sense - probably most of the time. However, firms have become reluctant to consider cases where an IT investment will give them a sustainable advantage. As a result, you get "IT doesn't matter."
Also - if you want your advantage to be sustainable you need to pay your IT people well. Otherwise they'll just switch over to your competitor and redevelop for them the same software they just developed for you. Widget-makers understand that they'll lose their advantage if their best and brightest widgeteers move to their competitor. They don't seem to get it with IT though...