And just try expressing an anti capitalist or critical of capitalism/libertarian/market opinion on slashdot. Slashdot is a bastion of free marketeers, libertarians and virulent 'anti left'.
Although this is totally anecdotal evidence, I have done precisely that on several occasions, including on issues totally unrelated to the virtues of Free Software, and am generally treated pretty well for it by moderators. I frequently get a huge number of replies from libertarians, some smart, some not-so-smart, but in general I haven't encountered nasty bias for doing so.
This is what I find interesting about Slashdot; people on either side of the aisle claim that it holds the opposite of their own bias.
That's not at all unique to Slashdot: Researchers have sat people down, surveyed them on their general political opinions, and then had them all watch a news clip and describe what bias they detected. The conservatives thought the clip had a liberal bias, the liberals thought the clip had a conservative bias, the libertarians thought the clip had an authoritarian bias, and the authoritarians thought the clip had an anarchist bias. And this was exactly the same story told in exactly the same way.
The fact that ancient Greeks knew the earth was round does not imply medieval Europeans knew it. Sure, a few scholars did, but it was a counter-intuitive fact that went against all logic.
Wrong again. For example, Dante's Purgatorio, written somewhere around 1315, has many clear references to a spherical Earth. He has the western and southern hemisphere completely wrong geographically, but he definitely thought the Earth was round. As far as we can tell, this geocentric system was considered the standard view on the matter at the time. We have records of sermons that referred to the spherical Earth, which means that regular folks were expected to understand the concept, and that the view had the full support of the most stable European institution of the time, namely the Christian church. Now, these were all geocentric models, but it was a mere 20 years later when Copernicus proposed heliocentricity.
Corporations also require participation in them - it's called cash-flow.
They don't necessarily though.
Imagine you live in a farming community downstream from West Virginia coal country. You don't buy coal directly, hardly anyone does, but you're most definitely affected by the runoffs coming from the mining upstream. You can't easily vote with your dollars, because the people making the decision on who's coal to use (or whether to use coal at all) aren't you, they're purchasers in electric companies and consumer goods companies who have no incentive to minimize your runoffs.
But you can vote with your ballot, through your elected representatives. It's not a big chance, but it's a non-zero chance.
1000 years ago: "Harrumpf! The world is flat! Sail on towards your oblivion, fools!"
That was closer to about 2200 years ago: Aristotle argued the world was round in about 350 BCE, and Eratosthenes had attempted to measure it sometime in the 3rd century BCE.
The reason the naysayers thought Christopher Columbus was a bit of an idiot was not that they thought the world was flat, but because they thought it was about 2.5 times as large as Columbus claimed it was (which was in fact true). The primary reason Columbus didn't end up starving to death somewhere in the middle of the ocean was because he got lucky and found land.
The whole "flat Earth" story was made up by Washington Irving in an attempt to make Columbus appear more heroic rather than the smart sailor but complete and utter bastard that most of the primary sources suggest.
At this point, there's a good argument that buying cable subscriptions is far from cost-effective.
Monthly cable subscription: About $45 a month, or $540 a year. 5 seasons worth of DVDs for the show I enjoy: $500.
Intangible advantages: Cable - I can see the most recent shows, so long as I stick to the network's schedule or remember to record it in advance or organize some sort of recording system such as TiVo. DVDs - I can watch what I actually like whenever I want, without commercials, for less money. And if I don't like 'em anymore, I may be able to sell off the DVDs to somebody else, recouping some of the cost of buying them in the first place.
"Government has a flaw that General Electric doesn’t have. The government is potentially democratic. There’s a way of influencing the government and participating in it. I’m not joking, just think about it. When you’re saying that the government is doing this and that and the other thing to us, yes, the government is reflecting the interests of the people in it, but they could be representing us - there is no way for private tyrannies to be representing us. So yes, they would like you to hate the government. There is a lot wrong with the government, there is a lot to be hated about it, there is a lot to be changed about it. But the main thing about it is you can participate in it. And there are ways of changing what it does, and therefore, for at least people who believe in democracy, gives us advantages that other systems of powers don’t have. It is potentially our system of power, and the private corporations aren’t."
Are you part of a group that it doesn't like? Even if there's no evidence whatsoever that anyone in that group has ever committed a serious crime? Then they can and will follow you around for years with one of these.
To be fair, this is hardly new for the FBI. Remember COINTELPRO? You know, the FBI program after such dangerous and violent people as Martin Luther King and John Lennon. And there's some evidence that they continue to infiltrate and try to control numerous protest movements to ensure that their ideas are easily discredited.
Sony calling anon evil for the actions of this group is more or less no different then calling all Christians evil for the actions of Westboro baptist church, anyone can be a christian, and even take some portions of the christian beliefs out of context, yet you don't see the media or anyone hounding Christians as a whole for the actions of one group that claims to be Christians.
Or for that matter, calling all Muslims evil for the actions of Al Qaida (maybe a couple thousand people out of a population of well over 1 billion, or about 0.0002% of Muslims). But it sure happens far more than you might think.
I'm well aware of that. My point was that employers should not be looking for young developers, they should be looking for low-priced developers without much experience. But all too commonly, they are looking for young developers, not because of their price but because they don't know the various tricks of the trade that management uses to exploit developers.
The thing is, most employers already follow this rule. As someone who's career started in 2004, the first 3 years of it were extremely difficult because almost everybody in the industry needed 3 years of full-time development experience on the resume before they'd even talk to me. And of course, these same employers have the audacity to say "We can't find any good young developers!" as if making it difficult-to-impossible for anyone to join the industry (oh, and if they're large enough for age discrimination laws to apply, acting on that sentiment is illegal) would have no effect. I've gotten over that hump, but that was by taking any job that came my way, being willing to work 70 hours a week for about $7 an hour, and I'm sure having recruiters lie a bit to get my foot in the door.
And the reason for all this isn't hard to figure out: This "don't hire anyone without experience" is a pretty smart rule if one employer does it, but a really really dumb rule if every employer does it. In addition, because it takes 3 years for the negative effects of this to really sink in, the system looks great for a while. Basically, everyone wants the experienced demonstrably-capable programmers, but wants the responsibility of giving them basic practical experience to fall on somebody else. To do otherwise would require the vision and the funding to think about a picture bigger than "my company this fiscal year".
It's also a philosophical question. Microsoft as an organization believes that the best possible way of producing software is to hire the smartest programmers you can get your hands on, give them a carefully honed specification designed by the best marketing and UI people you can get their hands on, directed by the best management you can get their hands on, and have them go to work. And if you're Bill Gates, this really does seem like the right way to do business.
The trouble is: 1. You can't get your hands on all the smart people in the world. 2. Even if you could, enough people hammering at software in every way imaginable has a way of uncovering problems that the smart guys hadn't even thought of. I'm talking about stuff like "I didn't know that they were going to try to use some sort of wildly different equal sign Unicode code point from Cyrillic instead of a UTF-8 '='". That makes the population of users a much better source of uncovering obscure bugs than the best QA team could ever manage. 3. Linus's Law suggests that when somebody uncovers these sorts of obscure bugs, there's somebody in the world who could figure it out pretty easily. Using my earlier example, chances are that in the whole of Russia, there's somebody who really is interested in Unicode in a way that no sane person ever would be, and because of that developer's familiarity with Unicode and Cyrillic is going to have a good idea how to fix the bug in the best way possible. It may not be perfect right off the bat, but it will be started in the correct way because the person in question has the exact specialized knowledge needed to solve the problem. So the population of programmers not working for Microsoft is going to outperform Microsoft's programmers by sheer numbers if nothing else. 4. ESR pointed out that the guy in Russia interested in Unicode is far more motivated to fix a hypothetical Cyrillic Unicode bug than a programmer working in the bowels of Microsoft's headquarters, because it's a bug that affects them directly in a field they care about.
In other words, Microsoft can't win these kinds of fights, but they can't give up the belief that they can win these kinds of fights. Hence they won't change, no matter how much they should.
Your high opinion of the USPS is actually shared by a lot of people. According to a 2006 report, customers reporting a 93% approval rating. Now, granted, that was internally produced, but that's a pretty darn good rating.
The portion of the population that tend to be most strongly opposed to helping the less fortunate share some rather notable characteristics: 1. They are overwhelmingly white. 2. They are mostly over the age of 60. 3. They are mostly from the southeastern area of United States. 4. They are more rural than the average American (who these days is more likely to be living in a city or suburb).
In other words, they are the people who were on the receiving end of the Civil Rights Movement, and in many cases are descended from people who were on the receiving end of the Civil War. They were folks brought up in a racist society, and whether they took part in it or not they were used to an environment in which killing black people for the slightest of reasons was socially acceptable while helping them in any way was generally frowned upon. The perception among these folks (carefully stoked by the Republican Party as part of their "southern strategy") is that benefits that help the less fortunate are for black people, and thus they oppose them.
The Constitution doesn't require it, but the US Code currently does. You're right that Congress could conceivably get rid of the whole thing, but if they did so the various direct marketing firms would scream bloody murder, so they don't.
Unlike, say, UPS, the US Postal Service is not and has never been a for-profit corporation. It's an agency of the US Government, required by law to exist, serve all citizens, and is granted a special monopoly status. If it's in the public interest, it can run at a deficit, take up unprofitable jobs like serving the people that live in the middle of nowhere (which many private competitors refuse to ship to), or keep prices lower than they would be in a pure market-driven system.
At worst, if the mail volume drops dramatically, they could move to having fewer delivery days in areas that don't get a lot of mail. And they may well be able to use technology to improve their sorting and delivery system, but as it stands they have processes that put FedEx to shame.
There's a flip side to all of this, though: 1. Road maintenance is more expensive in the rural and suburban areas that are most likely to lack public transit, for the simple reason that there's more miles of road to maintain. So from the "benefits received" theory, it would not be invalid to suggest that people choosing to live in those areas should be paying more of the cost of roads. 2. The premise of your second paragraph, that the majority of the country is far away from cities, which means no good chance at public transit, is incorrect: As of 2000, a majority of Americans live in communities of at least 200,000 people, and approximately 70% live in communities larger than 50,000 people. 3. There would be a good argument that the more rural residents who need to get places but can't afford to drive should take the opportunity to demand new and/or better public transit from their elected officials. If you're part of the 70% of the country in communities larger than 50,000, this would probably reduce your transportation costs significantly (even with the higher taxes needed to pay for it) as well as massively helping out any really low-income people in your community. 4. If you agree with the vast majority of scientists in thinking that the environmental impact of driving is a problem, then you have to somehow convince people to drive less in addition to getting more efficient vehicles. Higher costs of driving mean people are driving less, which helps solve the problem. It's unpleasant, but it works. 5. The road trip was heavily glorified roughly between 1945 and 1975. Before 1945, people didn't normally travel those kind of distances, and when they did would use rail rather than cars. In the late 1970's, especially with the gas shortages, its stopped being glorified and more of a chore. So this only applies if you are a baby boomer. Also, the road trip's history in the US is significantly smaller than either baseball (1849) or apple pie (recipes date to the 1830's if not earlier).
My car is very fuel efficient though (32MPG on average), but why should I pay more than say someone who buys a gas guzzler (10MPG) but doesn't have to commute to work?
Because Mr Gas Guzzler is damaging roads less than you are. Now, both of you are much better than, say, a heavily-laden semi traveling the entire length of I-80, but mileage matters.
Anyone at Facebook in a position to know anything about any such possible deal is not legally allowed to say anything. If Facebook isn't dumb, they started any discussions with a confidentiality agreement due to their legal requirements not to say anything. Also, since Skype is privately owned, the majority owner would have nothing to gain by publicizing the talks.
That means that whoever is talking to the press about this is either: 1. some other party with a motivation for derailing the deal, such as eBay (a minority owner of Skype), B. an insider at Facebook illegally attempting to manipulate the stock price, or III. somebody with no clue who wants to seem cool to the business press.
I'd think someone with such a fantastic Carlin quote would realize that George also had a great comment related to this very problem:
And you know, in this country, now there are alot of people who want to expand the death penalty to include drug dealers. This is really stupid. Drug dealers aren't afraid to die. They're already killing each other every day on the streets by the hundreds. Drive-bys, gang shootings, they're not afraid to die. Death penalty doesn't mean anything unless you use it on people who are afraid to die. Like... the bankers who launder the drug money. The bankers, who launder, the drug money. Forget the dealers, you want to slow down that drug traffic, you got to start executing a few of these fucking bankers. White, middle class Republican bankers.... You start execut- you start nailing one white banker per week to a big wooden cross, you're going to see that drug traffic begin to slow down pretty fucking quick. Pretty fucking quick- you won't even be able to buy drugs in schools and prisons anymore!
A good scapegoat isn't just someone who can take the blame, it's somebody who you're trying to attack or remove for reasons you can't actually state publicly. For instance, if The Boss has to pick between scapegoating Alice or Bob, they might pick on whoever's standing in the way of a plum promotion for their good friend Fred, regardless of whether Alice or Bob had more to do with the problem in the first place. Or if someone from country A attacked country B, if the leaders of country B wanted to attack country C but couldn't come up with a legitimate reason they might try to blame the whole thing on country C rather than country A.
So I'm guessing Sony has it in for Anonymous for reasons totally unrelated to this breach.
"For-profit" comes in for two reasons:
1. Non-profits are much harder to control with outside cash. It's not impossible (case in point: One Laptop Per Child), but it's more difficult for a takeover to happen. Such takeovers are bad because they can force a project to be abandoned or FUBARed, and the only thing the developers and users can do to defend themselves is to fork the project.
2. Non-profits are generally trying to produce as much useful software as cheaply as possible, while for-profits are generally trying to produce software that's useful enough to be popular (so they can sell services, consulting, and related tools) but no more useful than that (because that increases costs and reduces sales of the ancillary products).
If you want to make money related to open source software, I see 2 good ways to do it: 1. Sell the addition of features to a package. For instance, I was working for a cell company that wanted to adapt a project that had been written for GSM phones to work with CDMA phones, so we hired a developer to make the modification and contribute it back to the trunk. We got what we needed at a fraction of the price of a commercial solution, the developer got an appropriate fee for his services, and the project got a new feature, so everybody won. 2. Sell applications built on open source software rather than open source software. For instance, selling the nifty website you built on top of your open source database, rather than selling the database.
Slashdot Mirror
And just try expressing an anti capitalist or critical of capitalism/libertarian/market opinion on slashdot. Slashdot is a bastion of free marketeers, libertarians and virulent 'anti left'.
Although this is totally anecdotal evidence, I have done precisely that on several occasions, including on issues totally unrelated to the virtues of Free Software, and am generally treated pretty well for it by moderators. I frequently get a huge number of replies from libertarians, some smart, some not-so-smart, but in general I haven't encountered nasty bias for doing so.
This is what I find interesting about Slashdot; people on either side of the aisle claim that it holds the opposite of their own bias.
That's not at all unique to Slashdot: Researchers have sat people down, surveyed them on their general political opinions, and then had them all watch a news clip and describe what bias they detected. The conservatives thought the clip had a liberal bias, the liberals thought the clip had a conservative bias, the libertarians thought the clip had an authoritarian bias, and the authoritarians thought the clip had an anarchist bias. And this was exactly the same story told in exactly the same way.
The fact that ancient Greeks knew the earth was round does not imply medieval Europeans knew it. Sure, a few scholars did, but it was a counter-intuitive fact that went against all logic.
Wrong again. For example, Dante's Purgatorio, written somewhere around 1315, has many clear references to a spherical Earth. He has the western and southern hemisphere completely wrong geographically, but he definitely thought the Earth was round. As far as we can tell, this geocentric system was considered the standard view on the matter at the time. We have records of sermons that referred to the spherical Earth, which means that regular folks were expected to understand the concept, and that the view had the full support of the most stable European institution of the time, namely the Christian church. Now, these were all geocentric models, but it was a mere 20 years later when Copernicus proposed heliocentricity.
Corporations also require participation in them - it's called cash-flow.
They don't necessarily though.
Imagine you live in a farming community downstream from West Virginia coal country. You don't buy coal directly, hardly anyone does, but you're most definitely affected by the runoffs coming from the mining upstream. You can't easily vote with your dollars, because the people making the decision on who's coal to use (or whether to use coal at all) aren't you, they're purchasers in electric companies and consumer goods companies who have no incentive to minimize your runoffs.
But you can vote with your ballot, through your elected representatives. It's not a big chance, but it's a non-zero chance.
1000 years ago: "Harrumpf! The world is flat! Sail on towards your oblivion, fools!"
That was closer to about 2200 years ago: Aristotle argued the world was round in about 350 BCE, and Eratosthenes had attempted to measure it sometime in the 3rd century BCE.
The reason the naysayers thought Christopher Columbus was a bit of an idiot was not that they thought the world was flat, but because they thought it was about 2.5 times as large as Columbus claimed it was (which was in fact true). The primary reason Columbus didn't end up starving to death somewhere in the middle of the ocean was because he got lucky and found land.
The whole "flat Earth" story was made up by Washington Irving in an attempt to make Columbus appear more heroic rather than the smart sailor but complete and utter bastard that most of the primary sources suggest.
At this point, there's a good argument that buying cable subscriptions is far from cost-effective.
Monthly cable subscription: About $45 a month, or $540 a year.
5 seasons worth of DVDs for the show I enjoy: $500.
Intangible advantages:
Cable - I can see the most recent shows, so long as I stick to the network's schedule or remember to record it in advance or organize some sort of recording system such as TiVo.
DVDs - I can watch what I actually like whenever I want, without commercials, for less money. And if I don't like 'em anymore, I may be able to sell off the DVDs to somebody else, recouping some of the cost of buying them in the first place.
I'm going to quote Noam Chomsky on this one:
"Government has a flaw that General Electric doesn’t have. The government is potentially democratic. There’s a way of influencing the government and participating in it. I’m not joking, just think about it. When you’re saying that the government is doing this and that and the other thing to us, yes, the government is reflecting the interests of the people in it, but they could be representing us - there is no way for private tyrannies to be representing us. So yes, they would like you to hate the government. There is a lot wrong with the government, there is a lot to be hated about it, there is a lot to be changed about it. But the main thing about it is you can participate in it. And there are ways of changing what it does, and therefore, for at least people who believe in democracy, gives us advantages that other systems of powers don’t have. It is potentially our system of power, and the private corporations aren’t."
Are you part of a group that it doesn't like? Even if there's no evidence whatsoever that anyone in that group has ever committed a serious crime? Then they can and will follow you around for years with one of these.
To be fair, this is hardly new for the FBI. Remember COINTELPRO? You know, the FBI program after such dangerous and violent people as Martin Luther King and John Lennon. And there's some evidence that they continue to infiltrate and try to control numerous protest movements to ensure that their ideas are easily discredited.
Sony calling anon evil for the actions of this group is more or less no different then calling all Christians evil for the actions of Westboro baptist church, anyone can be a christian, and even take some portions of the christian beliefs out of context, yet you don't see the media or anyone hounding Christians as a whole for the actions of one group that claims to be Christians.
Or for that matter, calling all Muslims evil for the actions of Al Qaida (maybe a couple thousand people out of a population of well over 1 billion, or about 0.0002% of Muslims). But it sure happens far more than you might think.
I'm well aware of that. My point was that employers should not be looking for young developers, they should be looking for low-priced developers without much experience. But all too commonly, they are looking for young developers, not because of their price but because they don't know the various tricks of the trade that management uses to exploit developers.
The thing is, most employers already follow this rule. As someone who's career started in 2004, the first 3 years of it were extremely difficult because almost everybody in the industry needed 3 years of full-time development experience on the resume before they'd even talk to me. And of course, these same employers have the audacity to say "We can't find any good young developers!" as if making it difficult-to-impossible for anyone to join the industry (oh, and if they're large enough for age discrimination laws to apply, acting on that sentiment is illegal) would have no effect. I've gotten over that hump, but that was by taking any job that came my way, being willing to work 70 hours a week for about $7 an hour, and I'm sure having recruiters lie a bit to get my foot in the door.
And the reason for all this isn't hard to figure out: This "don't hire anyone without experience" is a pretty smart rule if one employer does it, but a really really dumb rule if every employer does it. In addition, because it takes 3 years for the negative effects of this to really sink in, the system looks great for a while. Basically, everyone wants the experienced demonstrably-capable programmers, but wants the responsibility of giving them basic practical experience to fall on somebody else. To do otherwise would require the vision and the funding to think about a picture bigger than "my company this fiscal year".
It's also a philosophical question. Microsoft as an organization believes that the best possible way of producing software is to hire the smartest programmers you can get your hands on, give them a carefully honed specification designed by the best marketing and UI people you can get their hands on, directed by the best management you can get their hands on, and have them go to work. And if you're Bill Gates, this really does seem like the right way to do business.
The trouble is:
1. You can't get your hands on all the smart people in the world.
2. Even if you could, enough people hammering at software in every way imaginable has a way of uncovering problems that the smart guys hadn't even thought of. I'm talking about stuff like "I didn't know that they were going to try to use some sort of wildly different equal sign Unicode code point from Cyrillic instead of a UTF-8 '='". That makes the population of users a much better source of uncovering obscure bugs than the best QA team could ever manage.
3. Linus's Law suggests that when somebody uncovers these sorts of obscure bugs, there's somebody in the world who could figure it out pretty easily. Using my earlier example, chances are that in the whole of Russia, there's somebody who really is interested in Unicode in a way that no sane person ever would be, and because of that developer's familiarity with Unicode and Cyrillic is going to have a good idea how to fix the bug in the best way possible. It may not be perfect right off the bat, but it will be started in the correct way because the person in question has the exact specialized knowledge needed to solve the problem. So the population of programmers not working for Microsoft is going to outperform Microsoft's programmers by sheer numbers if nothing else.
4. ESR pointed out that the guy in Russia interested in Unicode is far more motivated to fix a hypothetical Cyrillic Unicode bug than a programmer working in the bowels of Microsoft's headquarters, because it's a bug that affects them directly in a field they care about.
In other words, Microsoft can't win these kinds of fights, but they can't give up the belief that they can win these kinds of fights. Hence they won't change, no matter how much they should.
Your high opinion of the USPS is actually shared by a lot of people. According to a 2006 report, customers reporting a 93% approval rating. Now, granted, that was internally produced, but that's a pretty darn good rating.
The portion of the population that tend to be most strongly opposed to helping the less fortunate share some rather notable characteristics:
1. They are overwhelmingly white.
2. They are mostly over the age of 60.
3. They are mostly from the southeastern area of United States.
4. They are more rural than the average American (who these days is more likely to be living in a city or suburb).
In other words, they are the people who were on the receiving end of the Civil Rights Movement, and in many cases are descended from people who were on the receiving end of the Civil War. They were folks brought up in a racist society, and whether they took part in it or not they were used to an environment in which killing black people for the slightest of reasons was socially acceptable while helping them in any way was generally frowned upon. The perception among these folks (carefully stoked by the Republican Party as part of their "southern strategy") is that benefits that help the less fortunate are for black people, and thus they oppose them.
The Constitution doesn't require it, but the US Code currently does. You're right that Congress could conceivably get rid of the whole thing, but if they did so the various direct marketing firms would scream bloody murder, so they don't.
Unlike, say, UPS, the US Postal Service is not and has never been a for-profit corporation. It's an agency of the US Government, required by law to exist, serve all citizens, and is granted a special monopoly status. If it's in the public interest, it can run at a deficit, take up unprofitable jobs like serving the people that live in the middle of nowhere (which many private competitors refuse to ship to), or keep prices lower than they would be in a pure market-driven system.
At worst, if the mail volume drops dramatically, they could move to having fewer delivery days in areas that don't get a lot of mail. And they may well be able to use technology to improve their sorting and delivery system, but as it stands they have processes that put FedEx to shame.
That's clearly crazy talk. Admins don't have time for girlfriends.
Also, to answer the question of what J. L. Tympanum should read, a good starting point: The alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ.
There's a flip side to all of this, though:
1. Road maintenance is more expensive in the rural and suburban areas that are most likely to lack public transit, for the simple reason that there's more miles of road to maintain. So from the "benefits received" theory, it would not be invalid to suggest that people choosing to live in those areas should be paying more of the cost of roads.
2. The premise of your second paragraph, that the majority of the country is far away from cities, which means no good chance at public transit, is incorrect: As of 2000, a majority of Americans live in communities of at least 200,000 people, and approximately 70% live in communities larger than 50,000 people.
3. There would be a good argument that the more rural residents who need to get places but can't afford to drive should take the opportunity to demand new and/or better public transit from their elected officials. If you're part of the 70% of the country in communities larger than 50,000, this would probably reduce your transportation costs significantly (even with the higher taxes needed to pay for it) as well as massively helping out any really low-income people in your community.
4. If you agree with the vast majority of scientists in thinking that the environmental impact of driving is a problem, then you have to somehow convince people to drive less in addition to getting more efficient vehicles. Higher costs of driving mean people are driving less, which helps solve the problem. It's unpleasant, but it works.
5. The road trip was heavily glorified roughly between 1945 and 1975. Before 1945, people didn't normally travel those kind of distances, and when they did would use rail rather than cars. In the late 1970's, especially with the gas shortages, its stopped being glorified and more of a chore. So this only applies if you are a baby boomer. Also, the road trip's history in the US is significantly smaller than either baseball (1849) or apple pie (recipes date to the 1830's if not earlier).
My car is very fuel efficient though (32MPG on average), but why should I pay more than say someone who buys a gas guzzler (10MPG) but doesn't have to commute to work?
Because Mr Gas Guzzler is damaging roads less than you are. Now, both of you are much better than, say, a heavily-laden semi traveling the entire length of I-80, but mileage matters.
Anyone at Facebook in a position to know anything about any such possible deal is not legally allowed to say anything. If Facebook isn't dumb, they started any discussions with a confidentiality agreement due to their legal requirements not to say anything. Also, since Skype is privately owned, the majority owner would have nothing to gain by publicizing the talks.
That means that whoever is talking to the press about this is either:
1. some other party with a motivation for derailing the deal, such as eBay (a minority owner of Skype),
B. an insider at Facebook illegally attempting to manipulate the stock price, or
III. somebody with no clue who wants to seem cool to the business press.
I'd think someone with such a fantastic Carlin quote would realize that George also had a great comment related to this very problem:
And you know, in this country, now there are alot of people who want to expand the death penalty to include drug dealers. This is really stupid. Drug dealers aren't afraid to die. They're already killing each other every day on the streets by the hundreds. Drive-bys, gang shootings, they're not afraid to die. Death penalty doesn't mean anything unless you use it on people who are afraid to die. Like... the bankers who launder the drug money. The bankers, who launder, the drug money. Forget the dealers, you want to slow down that drug traffic, you got to start executing a few of these fucking bankers. White, middle class Republican bankers. ... You start execut- you start nailing one white banker per week to a big wooden cross, you're going to see that drug traffic begin to slow down pretty fucking quick. Pretty fucking quick- you won't even be able to buy drugs in schools and prisons anymore!
Clerk 1: Two people ... three people have fallen to their almost certain death!
Clerk 2: Must be a board meeting.
Monty Python brilliancy
- find a scapegoat.
A good scapegoat isn't just someone who can take the blame, it's somebody who you're trying to attack or remove for reasons you can't actually state publicly. For instance, if The Boss has to pick between scapegoating Alice or Bob, they might pick on whoever's standing in the way of a plum promotion for their good friend Fred, regardless of whether Alice or Bob had more to do with the problem in the first place. Or if someone from country A attacked country B, if the leaders of country B wanted to attack country C but couldn't come up with a legitimate reason they might try to blame the whole thing on country C rather than country A.
So I'm guessing Sony has it in for Anonymous for reasons totally unrelated to this breach.
"For-profit" comes in for two reasons:
1. Non-profits are much harder to control with outside cash. It's not impossible (case in point: One Laptop Per Child), but it's more difficult for a takeover to happen. Such takeovers are bad because they can force a project to be abandoned or FUBARed, and the only thing the developers and users can do to defend themselves is to fork the project.
2. Non-profits are generally trying to produce as much useful software as cheaply as possible, while for-profits are generally trying to produce software that's useful enough to be popular (so they can sell services, consulting, and related tools) but no more useful than that (because that increases costs and reduces sales of the ancillary products).
If you want to make money related to open source software, I see 2 good ways to do it:
1. Sell the addition of features to a package. For instance, I was working for a cell company that wanted to adapt a project that had been written for GSM phones to work with CDMA phones, so we hired a developer to make the modification and contribute it back to the trunk. We got what we needed at a fraction of the price of a commercial solution, the developer got an appropriate fee for his services, and the project got a new feature, so everybody won.
2. Sell applications built on open source software rather than open source software. For instance, selling the nifty website you built on top of your open source database, rather than selling the database.