Choice is always a good thing. Just because Hamlet and your mother are indecisive is no reason to punish those of us who can make timely, well thought through decisions.
Problem is that people are generally not doing that. The way to profit now is not through developing your own product, or even licensing. The most effective way has become buy a patent, lay low, then sue.
Do you have anything other than a few anectodal/. stories to back that up? I'll give you a hint: start here and prove that most of these are submarine patent lawsuits. I'll bet most of them are just run-of-the-mill patent disputes.
hey can find his major. They can find what classes he's taken.
Usual IANAL disclaimer, but doesn't the Buckley Amendment at least force them to get a subpoena which ought to require probable cause. Filing a FOA shouldn't be probable cause.
Amusing that he would have to file an FOA with the FBI in order to find out if they violated Federal education privacy laws while investing his tunnel FOA.
First off, since when is the www a "well policed little suburb?"
Actual quote from NYT:
Even as much of the Internet has come to resemble a pleasant, well-policed suburb, a little-known neighborhood known as Internet Relay Chat remains the Wild West. While copyright holders and law enforcement agencies take aim at their adversaries on Web sites and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Napster, I.R.C. remains the place where people with something to hide go to do business.
Sounds like a reasonable statement to me. The cops ARE going after child porn web sites and p2p networks.
The author also made some funny contradictions. Like the part where he says there are only 50,000 people on all of IRC on at any given time. And then in the next paragraph and the rest of the article he goes on to say how there's no way to know how many people are online. Funny, but a NYT editor should have caught that.
Actual NYT quote:
Probably no more than 500,000 people are using I.R.C. worldwide at any time, and many of them are engaged in legitimate activities, network administrators say. [SNIP] It is almost impossible to determine exactly how many people use I.R.C.
Note the careful use of qualifiers probably vs. exactly.
The article was big on assumptions, and short on fact.
Actual NYT quote:
"I.R.C. is where all of the kids come on and go nuts,'' William A. Bierman, a college student in Hawaii who helps develop I.R.C. server software and who is known online as billy-jon, said in a telephone interview. "All of the attention I.R.C. has gotten over the years has been because it's a haven for criminals, which is a very one-sided view.
"The whole idea behind I.R.C. is freedom of speech. There is really no structure on the Internet for policing I.R.C., and there are intentionally no rules. Obviously you're not allowed to hack the Pentagon, but there are no rules like 'You can't say this' or 'You can't do that.'"
The article was full of well researched facts including interviews with the authors of the most popular IRC software.
I guess if the point of the article was fear mongering of the technically challenged, it got it's point across. But it seemed kind of yellow to me.
The article wasn't aimed at you. It was aimed at the general public. It was fairly balanced and described the good, the bad, and the ugly of IRC. You've just got your panties in a twist because you think you're an l337 d00d.
Really at this point the only thing that Eclipse could do to wow me would be fixing bugs like "application performance sucks", or "there is no Qt frontend."
People *need* to share files. People used to need to pay MSFT big money to have a file server and licenses for computers to connect to that server... You think that MSFT doesn't want to stop that by changing the way things work and making sure no one can start up their own competing stuff?
It is likely temporary. The US has seen several of these kinds of idiocies enacted at various times. They last a few years and then are repealed or allowed to expire. That's the good news. The bad part is that each time they are enacted, people with a legitimate grievences and right to dissent are forced to pay a price they should not have had to.
Be very careful here. Conservatives tend to preach abstinence as a solution because they believe it is the morally correct thing to do. It is nice that it has the side effect of reducing STD incidence, but above all, they proclaim, abstinence is morally correct. Condoms, on the other hand, are immoral because they promote sex even though condoms reduce STD incidence as well.
Uganda slashed AIDS infections because the women got together and pulled a Lysistrata - The Aristophanes play where the women of Athens stop having sex with the men until the men stop fighting the Peloponesian war. In this case, the women said no sex until the men stopped having extra-marital sex and started using condoms. Abstinence was a temporary ploy used to get the men's attention and force some behavioral changes. It had zero to do with abstinence as the moral choice that conservatives have tried to foist on the world. And it worked in large part because the campaign also included a large dose of sex education (something conservatives don't like either) which empowered the women by letting them understand the choices they could make along with the consequences of those choices.
Merely stating that abstinence works is too simple. It is like proclaiming cold fusion exists in the absence of a theory that can predict the experimental results.
Note that there is no way to control which of these reactions occurs, so half the fusions should produce neutrons. The other half produce protons which are also relatively easily detected, usually with a kind of silicon diode.
RTFA:
Experiments that produce excess heat also have yielded helium-4, one potential product of the fusion of two deuterium nuclei, in amounts that correlate with the excess heat. Theory predicts that the fusion reaction should generate 24 million electron volts (MeV) of energy per helium-4 nucleus. An analysis by Michael McKubre of SRI International detected energy of 31 MeV-- a match within the experimental uncertainty of plus or minus 13 MeV. Skeptics had doubted the reaction was possible, but Hagelstein says McKubre's analysis of the experiments, reported at last year's cold fusion meeting, shows that fusion of two deuterium to yield helium-4 "is not as nutty as it initially seemed."
Seems they are producing all He4 (your 3rd possibility which current theory says should be produced at about 0.0001% of byproducts of D+D fusion).
History seems to show (though I'm neither a historian nor in a union, so I'm not exactly an expert...) that unionized workers can, on the whole, get better employment terms than non-unionized workers.
Not quite. The average or less than average worker may well receive better employment terms with a union. The problem is that the better than average worker may wind up worse off. Teachers are a classic case. Should teachers with high-demand skills (math, science) receive the same salary as teachers with low-demand skills (English)? Should outstanding teachers who are excellent at helping their students learn receive the same salary as average teachers? With a union with one-man one-vote rules on contracts, the average or below workers will vote for contracts that enforce wage equality since their wages are enhanced. But the extra paid to the average has to come from someplace (TANSTAAFL). All too often it comes from reducing the wages that would be commanded by those who are better than average in some way. With unskilled workers in jobs requiring few specialized skills, all workers may indeed benefit. But in professional situations (M.D.s, University Professors), it is less clear cut.
This is why/.ers on the whole would probably not favor unionization. We are, like the folks in Lake Wobegon, all above average.
First ran into Adventure on a DEC-10 while a Freshman at the Univ of Tennessee. The author had a fine sense of humor. I managed to figure out most of it except for the damned dragon. No matter what I did it killed me. One day, I ran into the dragon and typed
KILL DRAGON
With what? Your bare hands?
YES
Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! Unbelievable, isn't it?
Re:Software is void, revoked and terminated.
on
VIA Pulls PadLockSL
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In the case of Nullsoft, the guy who released waste, obviously had the authority to do so.
Why are you so sure he indeed had the authority to do so (source code and all w/ a GPL license? Are you his boss, perhaps, or maybe a Nullsoft lawyer? Have you read the Nullsoft source release policy statement? Do you have the employee's job description on your desk? Are you bugging Nullsoft's corporate offices? Why are you so obviously authoritative on this issue? Inquiring minds want to know!
You can't add products produced abroad to your roaring economy and exclude jobs created abroad. In the first case you have enlarged the scope of the economy you are measuring and in the latter case reduced the scope of what you are measuring. It is comparing apples to oranges.
Bullshit. If the profits are paid out today as dividends then they are accounted for through consumer income or savings in GDP calculations. If the profits are reinvested by the corporations, they are counted for as business savings in GDP calculations. In the latter case, they will eventually be paid out to the owners. Many companies pay out their profits in the form of stock buybacks rather than as dividends today in order to avoid double taxation on dividends. When one company buys another, the owners of the bought company receive the proceeds. This is just like a dividend except that the sellers pay taxes on the capital gains of the proceeds rather than the generally higher income tax rate. You simply don't know what you are talking about.
The economy doesn't measure anything at all. The size of the economy is the measure. Gross Domestic Product is the standard measure of an economy's size and corporate profit is only one small piece what goes into measuring GDP. In fact, GDP has 2 defining equations:
GDP = Consumer Spending + Business and Consumer Savings + Taxes - Welfare Transfers - Foreign Transfers
or
GDP = Consumer Spending + Business Spending + Government Spending + Value of Exports - Value of Imports
So where are those corporate profits in these equations? Well, guess what? Those corporate profits have to be paid out to the owners in one form or another. And those owners are consumers, too, so they show up in the Consumer Spending or Savings components. Saying that the economy measures corporate profits more than citizen welfare is silly since those profits accrue to the citizens. There are only three decent args to be made that GDP doesn't measure welfare. The first is that it doesn't count for income distribution. This is true, but income distribution in western democracies hasn't varied that much in the last 40 or so years and is much, much better than it was 100 or so years ago so you can't really say welfare has gotten worse using that argument. The 2nd is that consumption of consumer goods is not a good measure of happiness. Maybe not, but do you have a better one that can be measured regularly and we can all agree on? The third arg is that anything not sold in the economy isn't included in GDP and so things like evironmental change (good or bad) are not measured and yet affect our welfare. Economists have been wrestling with this defect for a while, and no one has yet to invent a way of easily measuring the value of such things (see problem 2, above).
The unemployment rate is defined as the number of persons looking for work (looking is pretty generously defined since, IIRC, all you have to do is send out one resume every couple of weeks) divided by the sum of those working plus those looking for work. Those are simple definitions agreed to by most every labor economist and backed by 50+ years of research. They are not cooked at all by anyone. Don't confuse the spin put on any particular month's number by the politicians, talking heads, and crackpots with the science behind the definition and measurement of those numbers. Too many people (investors, scientists, ordinary folks) rely on the numbers being measured honestly according to the agreed definitions to let "government" cook the numbers.
Finally, there is a huge link between the number of jobs in an economy and the size of the economy (see equations for GDP, above) and anyone who writes: Jobs and economy are not directly linked at all hasn't got a clue about economics.
Once in a while you can get shown the light
In the strangest of places if you look at it right.
Many years ago the PBS Nova program did a show on a physicist (Jack Fry) from the Univ of Wisconsin who thought he had figured out the secret of the old Italian violin makers. Short version is that a violin uses a sound post to transfer the sound from the top of the violin to the back. But the sound post is off center which means that the top and back don't vibrate evenly. Simple solution: reduce the thickness of part of the top and back to match the off-center sound post. Measurments on the old Cremora instruments indicate that they do indeed have this sort of asymmetry in the thickness of the top and back. There is a lot of debate over weather this is the whole story, though. Strads really do have a distinct warm sound that has yet to be reproduced in its entirety.
Data Flow Diagrams are a great tool for mediating between your customers and your programmers. The customer sees his business processes laid out in a format they can understand while the programmer sees those processes laid out in a way that clearly describes the requirements and boundries of the problem. I typically use UML class diagrams and sequence diagrams for design work once I have done a DFD for the customer. There may well be UML diagrams that can allow the customer and programmer to communicate with one another, but DFDs do the job so well that I have never bothered to look into them.
Slashdot Mirror
Choice is always a good thing. Just because Hamlet and your mother are indecisive is no reason to punish those of us who can make timely, well thought through decisions.
Problem is that people are generally not doing that. The way to profit now is not through developing your own product, or even licensing. The most effective way has become buy a patent, lay low, then sue.
/. stories to back that up? I'll give you a hint: start here and prove that most of these are submarine patent lawsuits. I'll bet most of them are just run-of-the-mill patent disputes.
Do you have anything other than a few anectodal
hey can find his major. They can find what classes he's taken.
Usual IANAL disclaimer, but doesn't the Buckley Amendment at least force them to get a subpoena which ought to require probable cause. Filing a FOA shouldn't be probable cause.
Amusing that he would have to file an FOA with the FBI in order to find out if they violated Federal education privacy laws while investing his tunnel FOA.
Did you read the same article I did?
First off, since when is the www a "well policed little suburb?"
Actual quote from NYT:
Even as much of the Internet has come to resemble a pleasant, well-policed suburb, a little-known neighborhood known as Internet Relay Chat remains the Wild West. While copyright holders and law enforcement agencies take aim at their adversaries on Web sites and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Napster, I.R.C. remains the place where people with something to hide go to do business.
Sounds like a reasonable statement to me. The cops ARE going after child porn web sites and p2p networks.
The author also made some funny contradictions. Like the part where he says there are only 50,000 people on all of IRC on at any given time. And then in the next paragraph and the rest of the article he goes on to say how there's no way to know how many people are online. Funny, but a NYT editor should have caught that.
Actual NYT quote:
Probably no more than 500,000 people are using I.R.C. worldwide at any time, and many of them are engaged in legitimate activities, network administrators say. [SNIP] It is almost impossible to determine exactly how many people use I.R.C.
Note the careful use of qualifiers probably vs. exactly.
The article was big on assumptions, and short on fact.
Actual NYT quote:
"I.R.C. is where all of the kids come on and go nuts,'' William A. Bierman, a college student in Hawaii who helps develop I.R.C. server software and who is known online as billy-jon, said in a telephone interview. "All of the attention I.R.C. has gotten over the years has been because it's a haven for criminals, which is a very one-sided view.
"The whole idea behind I.R.C. is freedom of speech. There is really no structure on the Internet for policing I.R.C., and there are intentionally no rules. Obviously you're not allowed to hack the Pentagon, but there are no rules like 'You can't say this' or 'You can't do that.'"
The article was full of well researched facts including interviews with the authors of the most popular IRC software.
I guess if the point of the article was fear mongering of the technically challenged, it got it's point across. But it seemed kind of yellow to me.
The article wasn't aimed at you. It was aimed at the general public. It was fairly balanced and described the good, the bad, and the ugly of IRC. You've just got your panties in a twist because you think you're an l337 d00d.
Really at this point the only thing that Eclipse could do to wow me would be fixing bugs like "application performance sucks", or "there is no Qt frontend."
or printing in Linux...
1 TB of storage, what the hell for?
Because things expand to fill the available space. Trust me, you'll fill it up.
People *need* to share files. People used to need to pay MSFT big money to have a file server and licenses for computers to connect to that server ... You think that MSFT doesn't want to stop that by changing the way things work and making sure no one can start up their own competing stuff?
That must be why Microsoft gives away its Services For Unix which includes NSF.
The latest rumor on this situation is that some fiber optic cables were cut...
Does this finally show that hackers and crackers are the same thing?
Come to think, GPL of Solaris would allow Sun to build their own Linux and include the good bits of Solaris in it; maybe that's their plan.
Come to think, GPL of Solaris would allow Sun to build their own Solaris and include the good bits of Linux in it; maybe that's their plan.
Well put.
Yeah, its about Sun claiming to be supporting the open source community, while simultaneously refusing to do anything for said community.
Be very careful here. Conservatives tend to preach abstinence as a solution because they believe it is the morally correct thing to do. It is nice that it has the side effect of reducing STD incidence, but above all, they proclaim, abstinence is morally correct. Condoms, on the other hand, are immoral because they promote sex even though condoms reduce STD incidence as well.
Uganda slashed AIDS infections because the women got together and pulled a Lysistrata - The Aristophanes play where the women of Athens stop having sex with the men until the men stop fighting the Peloponesian war. In this case, the women said no sex until the men stopped having extra-marital sex and started using condoms. Abstinence was a temporary ploy used to get the men's attention and force some behavioral changes. It had zero to do with abstinence as the moral choice that conservatives have tried to foist on the world. And it worked in large part because the campaign also included a large dose of sex education (something conservatives don't like either) which empowered the women by letting them understand the choices they could make along with the consequences of those choices.
Merely stating that abstinence works is too simple. It is like proclaiming cold fusion exists in the absence of a theory that can predict the experimental results.
Note that there is no way to control which of these reactions occurs, so half the fusions should produce neutrons. The other half produce protons which are also relatively easily detected, usually with a kind of silicon diode.
RTFA:
Experiments that produce excess heat also have yielded helium-4, one potential product of the fusion of two deuterium nuclei, in amounts that correlate with the excess heat. Theory predicts that the fusion reaction should generate 24 million electron volts (MeV) of energy per helium-4 nucleus. An analysis by Michael McKubre of SRI International detected energy of 31 MeV-- a match within the experimental uncertainty of plus or minus 13 MeV. Skeptics had doubted the reaction was possible, but Hagelstein says McKubre's analysis of the experiments, reported at last year's cold fusion meeting, shows that fusion of two deuterium to yield helium-4 "is not as nutty as it initially seemed."
Seems they are producing all He4 (your 3rd possibility which current theory says should be produced at about 0.0001% of byproducts of D+D fusion).
Current Linux desktops won't succeed because people DON'T WANT endless choices
Except for those of us who do.
History seems to show (though I'm neither a historian nor in a union, so I'm not exactly an expert...) that unionized workers can, on the whole, get better employment terms than non-unionized workers.
/.ers on the whole would probably not favor unionization. We are, like the folks in Lake Wobegon, all above average.
Not quite. The average or less than average worker may well receive better employment terms with a union. The problem is that the better than average worker may wind up worse off. Teachers are a classic case. Should teachers with high-demand skills (math, science) receive the same salary as teachers with low-demand skills (English)? Should outstanding teachers who are excellent at helping their students learn receive the same salary as average teachers? With a union with one-man one-vote rules on contracts, the average or below workers will vote for contracts that enforce wage equality since their wages are enhanced. But the extra paid to the average has to come from someplace (TANSTAAFL). All too often it comes from reducing the wages that would be commanded by those who are better than average in some way. With unskilled workers in jobs requiring few specialized skills, all workers may indeed benefit. But in professional situations (M.D.s, University Professors), it is less clear cut.
This is why
First ran into Adventure on a DEC-10 while a Freshman at the Univ of Tennessee. The author had a fine sense of humor. I managed to figure out most of it except for the damned dragon. No matter what I did it killed me. One day, I ran into the dragon and typed
KILL DRAGON
With what? Your bare hands?
YES
Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! Unbelievable, isn't it?
In the case of Nullsoft, the guy who released waste, obviously had the authority to do so.
Why are you so sure he indeed had the authority to do so (source code and all w/ a GPL license? Are you his boss, perhaps, or maybe a Nullsoft lawyer? Have you read the Nullsoft source release policy statement? Do you have the employee's job description on your desk? Are you bugging Nullsoft's corporate offices? Why are you so obviously authoritative on this issue? Inquiring minds want to know!
Depends. Does HPC stand for High Performance Cow or High Performance Chicken?
You can't add products produced abroad to your roaring economy and exclude jobs created abroad. In the first case you have enlarged the scope of the economy you are measuring and in the latter case reduced the scope of what you are measuring. It is comparing apples to oranges.
Bullshit. If the profits are paid out today as dividends then they are accounted for through consumer income or savings in GDP calculations. If the profits are reinvested by the corporations, they are counted for as business savings in GDP calculations. In the latter case, they will eventually be paid out to the owners. Many companies pay out their profits in the form of stock buybacks rather than as dividends today in order to avoid double taxation on dividends. When one company buys another, the owners of the bought company receive the proceeds. This is just like a dividend except that the sellers pay taxes on the capital gains of the proceeds rather than the generally higher income tax rate. You simply don't know what you are talking about.
The economy doesn't measure anything at all. The size of the economy is the measure. Gross Domestic Product is the standard measure of an economy's size and corporate profit is only one small piece what goes into measuring GDP. In fact, GDP has 2 defining equations:
GDP = Consumer Spending + Business and Consumer Savings + Taxes - Welfare Transfers - Foreign Transfers
or
GDP = Consumer Spending + Business Spending + Government Spending + Value of Exports - Value of Imports
So where are those corporate profits in these equations? Well, guess what? Those corporate profits have to be paid out to the owners in one form or another. And those owners are consumers, too, so they show up in the Consumer Spending or Savings components. Saying that the economy measures corporate profits more than citizen welfare is silly since those profits accrue to the citizens. There are only three decent args to be made that GDP doesn't measure welfare. The first is that it doesn't count for income distribution. This is true, but income distribution in western democracies hasn't varied that much in the last 40 or so years and is much, much better than it was 100 or so years ago so you can't really say welfare has gotten worse using that argument. The 2nd is that consumption of consumer goods is not a good measure of happiness. Maybe not, but do you have a better one that can be measured regularly and we can all agree on? The third arg is that anything not sold in the economy isn't included in GDP and so things like evironmental change (good or bad) are not measured and yet affect our welfare. Economists have been wrestling with this defect for a while, and no one has yet to invent a way of easily measuring the value of such things (see problem 2, above).
The unemployment rate is defined as the number of persons looking for work (looking is pretty generously defined since, IIRC, all you have to do is send out one resume every couple of weeks) divided by the sum of those working plus those looking for work. Those are simple definitions agreed to by most every labor economist and backed by 50+ years of research. They are not cooked at all by anyone. Don't confuse the spin put on any particular month's number by the politicians, talking heads, and crackpots with the science behind the definition and measurement of those numbers. Too many people (investors, scientists, ordinary folks) rely on the numbers being measured honestly according to the agreed definitions to let "government" cook the numbers.
Finally, there is a huge link between the number of jobs in an economy and the size of the economy (see equations for GDP, above) and anyone who writes: Jobs and economy are not directly linked at all hasn't got a clue about economics.
Once in a while you can get shown the light
In the strangest of places if you look at it right.
Jobs and economy are not directly linked at all.
This was moderated as Insightful? -1 Inane would be a better description.
Many years ago the PBS Nova program did a show on a physicist (Jack Fry) from the Univ of Wisconsin who thought he had figured out the secret of the old Italian violin makers. Short version is that a violin uses a sound post to transfer the sound from the top of the violin to the back. But the sound post is off center which means that the top and back don't vibrate evenly. Simple solution: reduce the thickness of part of the top and back to match the off-center sound post. Measurments on the old Cremora instruments indicate that they do indeed have this sort of asymmetry in the thickness of the top and back. There is a lot of debate over weather this is the whole story, though. Strads really do have a distinct warm sound that has yet to be reproduced in its entirety.
Data Flow Diagrams are a great tool for mediating between your customers and your programmers. The customer sees his business processes laid out in a format they can understand while the programmer sees those processes laid out in a way that clearly describes the requirements and boundries of the problem. I typically use UML class diagrams and sequence diagrams for design work once I have done a DFD for the customer. There may well be UML diagrams that can allow the customer and programmer to communicate with one another, but DFDs do the job so well that I have never bothered to look into them.