Well, that's not entirely true, is it? Isn't the go/no go point when the officers start questioning the person? If they do that before Mirandizing the suspect, anything they say can be thrown out, no?
You can still photograph pictures of copyrighted buildings, statues, etc. if it's for your own use. If you start selling them, you might run into a problem, but taking a picture is perfectly legal.
I have a friend at MS now as an intern who actually loves the Sysinternals tools who says the developers there won't let MS do anything to kill them. So don't despair quite yet.
Hmm, in one of these discussions I had I think four feature shortfalls that I had run into with things that I use, but I can only think of two of them now, as it's been a while sice I used OO. (My Word use is also declining as I do more in LaTeX. Which, BTW, while better than Word in many respects, doesn't come close to being a replacement; it's in too much a different category to say that.)
The first is the quality of the track changes feature. This is what I was referring to with the versions in my last post. In Word 2000 and before, and in OO, deleting text turns it red and strikethrough. From Word 2002, it removes the deleted text and puts it in a bubble in the margin, with a marker pointing to where it was removed from. The latter strategy not just is a lot more aesthetically appealing, but also gives a correct impression of what the modified version will look like. The older strategy -- OO's strategy -- disrupts line breaks, pagenation, etc. because the deleted text isn't actually removed and still takes up space. On a few occasions I've used the track changes feature as somewhat of a non-linear undo method. I'd turn it on, remove a few things in different areas of the paper, then decide that I wanted something I deleted in the middle restored, so I could just right click and choose to reject the change. When stuff like the length of the document matters (as it does for many school papers) you can't use the older method to do it.
The second thing I miss is an equivalent of either Word's normal mode or the ability to collapse the top and bottom margins in page view. I often find myself changing to normal mode or collapsing the margins because the spaces between the bottom of the text on page i and the top of the text on i+1 is distracting or causes me to not be able to fit as much on the screen at once.
The other comments I have are about the interface. First, I'm not sure how I feel about the location of Format->Page. (Where you set margins and stuff.) I agree that it makes a lot more sense to put it there rather than File->Page Setup if you consider it by itself, but when most other programs that have an equivalent put it at File->Page Setup, I dunno. I'm not gonna begrudge them this though, but it did cause a bit of hunting the first time I wanted to change margins. The other thing is that on Windows, the controls seem just a bit off. It feels like I'm using something like a Qt application trying to mimic the host OS look but not using native controls. If it isn't using native controls, then it is just a tiny bit off, and if it is (as I've heard), they're doing something a little weird with them. (Maybe owner drawing the menus for instance to put the icons there.) I can't quite put my finger on the difference between it and a native app, but it's a bit disconcerting. The other thing is I like the Word approach of using the sidebar for, say, the styles bar instead of a separate window like OO uses, because it ensures that it won't cover the document and will readjust the zoom of the document when you open and close the sidebar if you have it on fit width.
Like I said, OO is getting better, and I'd like to see that continue. I don't know if I have the coding skills and I certainly don't have the time to actually help contribute, but I have at least gone and voted on a few feature requests on their bugtracker. (In case any one is curious or has the same wishes I do, issue 23465 is a stepping-stone towards the track changes wish, 4914 is normal mode, 6191 is another big track changes improvement letting you right click on changes to accept or reject them (I had forgotten about that!), 35088 is another small thing I ran into once (I had to fill out an application using one of these forms; I was in Gentoo at the
Not everything can be coded to the discipline of the kernel.
Dicipline? I'll be honest... I just got done writing an I/O scheduler for Linux, and my opinion has gone down a bit of the project. One of the big straws that broke the camel's back was the time I spent trying to figure out why gcc was giving me an error on the declaration of a variable 'current.' I spent 10 minutes trying to Google the error message to no avail. After 20 or 30 minutes of puzzling, searching, and cursing, it occured to me that it might be a macro. Sure enough, it was. Can someone explain who the hell creates a one word macro in lowercase? Is "doesn't respect scope and context" not the first reason why macros are frowned upon?
I don't have a big problem with stuff like "list_for_each"... it is used like a while loop, it makes the code more consistant and easier to read (I think), and it isn't something that anoyone is ever going to use as a variable name. But current? Sheesh.
Hell, I wouldn't even download office for free, because better programs exist.
What?
I ask that in all seriousness, at least for Word. I haven't used Word Perfect since it came with one of those strips you put above your function keys that told you what they all did alone, with alt, with ctrl, and with shift because there weren't menus because it was a curses-like interface with no mouse. So it's possible that it's better. But is there anything else? Really? (And don't say OO Writer or I'll toss my head back laughing. OO is a fine project and improving faster than Office is, but in a couple areas that are important to me, they're still at least a version behind the version of Office uses, which is in turn two versions behind the current beta. So there's a bit of catching up to do. Maybe v.3. Here's hoping.)
Did you even read that thread? He didn't say it was, he said he suspected it might be. No one came up with a definitive answer. To be honest, Occam's razor tells me that it probably wasn't vista...
Wow, "Zango is adware, but it has been said that it is a rootkit" to "Zango is a product designed to do for the Internet what commercial TV stations like NBC, CBS and ABC have done for TV, which is keep it free."
That's somewhat of a shift. Glad to see a company come around and drop their spyware so quickly.;-)
Then everyone you know would be making fun of you for being so stupid as to buy a computer that doesn't do what you want it to do.
What if every manufacturer does this?
That solves this problem too:
And no manufacturer that trades on a U.S. stock exchange will risk the value of their stock plummeting because everyone decided not to upgrade until something more palatable comes out.
If the manufacturers agree to do this -- especially if they can get congressional support that all computers made have to check the binary checksum (hey, they got through the DMCA...) -- then you're SOL. It's upgrade or stay with what you have.
Believe what you like, but you can't find a free market anywhere...
If that's gonna happen, whatever the GPL says isn't gonna stop it.
This is an ideological debate I think, not one that is going to have significant real-world impact. The patents clause in it might, but I don't think the DRM one will.
So, while the GPL crowd says they are promoting freedom...looking at it from a different perspective they are actually putting in constraints.
This is what the GPL has *always* done, just now it's starting to affect hardware instead of just other software. I can't take the Linux kernel and turn it into a closed-sounce app. That's a constraint, and it's imposed by the GPL. This doesn't mean it's a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination. I can't take something that's under the GPL and link it in with this amazing closed source library that I want to use. Again, it's a constraint imposed by the GPL. Just like what you say the GPL v3 is doing to hardware, the GPL v2 is constraining software "in its ability to allow certain types of designs."
So you say "which way do you think the Free Software Foundation is going to lean," but to frame this as a hardware vs. software battle is misleading at best and, I would say, wrong. It's about determining the right balance between constraints so that the software is free enough to modify, the hardware is free enough that you can do most stuff with it, but not so free that the software could be made unfree later. If that makes sense.
This relates to the BSD license vs GPL debate that comes up periodically. The BSD license really is more free than the GPL. It has only four restrictions and, I think, all four are present in the GPL. This means that I can do anything with BSD code that I can with GPL code, but because of the restrictions the GPL places on compiling with closed source libraries and whatnot, I can also do a lot MORE with BSD code. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that the BSD is a better license though, because companies can come in and swipe BSD code and put it into their propriatary product, thus not giving back to the community. Depending on your personal philosophy as a developer, that may or may not be okay. And while I think any debate over which license is freer makes about as much sense as debating wheteher 1+1=2 or 3, what people are really talking about (at least on the GPL side) is which promotes free software better. And the GPL does this very well. But to do it, it has to add constraints. It's becoming increasingly evident that those constraints have to encompass hardware restrictions instead of just software. But there's no change in philosophy here really.
1. Listen while he's on the network 2. His computer will broadcast his MAC address in the eithernet header of each packet 3. Remember it 4. Tell your computer to use that MAC address
Okay, in all honesty, I'm not sure it's that simple. His computer might notice and start complaining. So you might have to do something else, or just only use the network while his computer is off or away.
But the number of MAC address is completely unimportant
Not at all. Maybe if you weren't broadcasting SSID.
But if you are, it's like having a giant billboard out where the sidewalk meets the walkway to your door that says "TOILETS" and has an arrow pointing at the unlocked door. I think in that case, permission IS implied.
How about one from real life experience. A teenage is trying to break into the high school...so he climbs up on the roof looking for a way in. He walks on the domed plastic skylights over the guy and, amazingly, one breaks and he falls through. 30 feet later he meets up with the nice polished hardwood gym floor and breaks both his legs. The outcome? He doesn't get convicted of breaking and entering...or even tresspassing. No. Instead, he sues the school and settles for/wins some undisclosed sum.
These cases are often a fair exception. There's in my mind a case in which the school SHOULD have beared some burden but didn't that's in many ways similar. Girl falls through catwalk about the auditorium and get's some serious injuries. To get up there you need to go through a door. This is a known hangout for kids, and parents have complained to the school to do something about it. Like, I dunno, put a lock on the door. The school doesn't. She sued, and totally lost. Most frivolous lawsuits go the right way. It's unfortunate that they happen because the defendant does have to put a lot amount of money into defending themself, but they really aren't as big a problem as some people believe.
If the laws go away, the punishment goes away, and so, unless you're demented, does your fear. Ergo the laws are preventing it. Indirectly, I'll agree to, but they are nonetheless.
There's an issue of negligence though. To be responsible for injuries caused by an attractive nuisance you still have to be negligent, it's just that the standard for what constitutes negligence is lower. If you put out a refrigerator with the door on, that has pretty much been defined as an example of negligence both by courts and statutes. (In fact, many places make it a crime to put out a refrigerator like that for that very reason; if you're breaking the law and someone gets hurt, it's hard to claim that you're not negligent.)
So with the Wi-Fi, there has to be some negligence. As long as having an open net in-and-of-itself is negligence, I don't see a legal issue. Unless of course you're doing something to push the content; this is why feeding a goatse image out is a BAD idea. If a minor accesses your network and the parents sue, that could very easily be considered negligence because enough minors know how to operate laptops that there's a fair risk that it'll happen eventually.
And even at that, they have to catch you while you are using the computer in order to find out your MAC
That depends. For many people, it would be "while the computer is on", because there's something that runs in the background. I leave AIM (Gaim really, but on the AIM protocol (now Jabber too)) running whenever my computer is on (well usually), so it's sending out packets pretty regularily. 'course, I don't have a laptop and aren't on wireless.
Where did you get the crystal ball that tells you whether you'll need that money in a year?
What if you don't know if you'll need it or not? Then you can't put it into a 5-year to start with, because then you can't get to it after the year (without losing interest).
Like a Taylor series of any periodic function*, a square wave would be an infinite sum. Just in the square wave case, it's an infinite sum of sines or cosines instead of polynomials.
The reds have a high "payoff percentage", meaning that they have a high rate of return given the money you spend developing them. They make a fair amount of money, and don't cost too too much to develop.
The Monopoly book I mention in another post puts them in third place. The full stats are orange (23.5%*), light blue (20.7), red (17.8), light purple (17.7), dark blue (17.3), yellow (17.2), railroads (16), green (15.1), dark purple (13.6), utilities (17.5).
* The percentage is the proportion of your investment that you make each time an opponent makes a trip around the board.
Neither measure gives the 'best' monopoly to own. If I get the orange properties and you have greens for instance, but we each have only $900 say (this is the optimum amount for orange, but bear with me here) I can put three houses on each, while you can only do one house on two and two houses on one. If you look at any property the rent increases dramatically from 2 to 3 houses, and my 3 house properties will make more than even your two house one. If you're unlucky, I could bankrupt you before you could build up your greens. So payoff matters.
But at the same time, light blues are second place there, and if I have light blue and you have green and we each have $5000, you can develop your properties to hotels and still have almost enough to make four of my rents. I, however, would be wiped out with four of your rents. And looking at the probabilities of landing on properties, greens have a substantial advantage over light blues. So it would be a very rare thing for you to not win that game. So payoff isn't the whole thing; the actual absolute income also matters.
My point is that reds have a nice mix.:-p They are powerful enough to hold their own against, say, the greens quite well, but not too expensive to develop either.
I have a book on Monopoly (yes... I'm that big of a nerd) that says oranges are most landed on, with reds second. (Or, if you count railroads, it goes RRs then orange then red.) It gives 49% vs 50% for red and orange* though, so the difference isn't much. It's very possible that modifying assumptions based on long or short jail stays** would tip the balance. I don't know what assumption this book uses.
For the record, here are the stats: RRs (64%), orange (50), red (49), yellow (45), green (44) light purple (43), light blue (39), utilities (32), dark blues (27), dark purples (24).
* The percentage is the chance that a given player will land on a property of that color group during one trip around the board ** Whether players choose to stay in jail for all three turns (unless they get a double) or pay to get out immediately has a surprisingly large effect on the statistics of properties and color groups, especially on the side with light purple and oranges. Staying in jail for all three turns for instance drops New York Ave's frequency by about 7%, dropping it from 4th place to 7th. This site has a lot of statistics.
For some time I thought it would be an interesting exercise to calculate the Monopoly probabilities myself and compare, but then I started to do it. (By hand.) When you find somewhere around a dozen ways you can get from Go to Income Tax (roll a 4; roll a 7 (to chance) and get go back 4; roll a double 10, a 12, get go to Go, then a non-double 4; roll a double 10, a 12, get go to Go, then a 7, and get go back 4; roll a double 10, a 12, get go to boardwalk, then a 5; roll a double 10, a 12, get go to boardwalk, then a non-double 8, and get go back 4; and those last four with a 12 then a 10 instead of a 10 then 12; plus maybe some I'm forgetting), it starts to turn old REAL fast. Automating it (so you have the computer develop the associated Markov chain) would be one way to do it, but that loses a lot of the appeal.;-)
(I'm also not sure if the more appropriate statistic is to figure out if you just LAND on a property (so for instance if you roll two twos do you count that as a hit for income tax) or end your turn there; my instincts tell me the former, but I'm not sure. That's also another possible source for the discrepancy between your math book and my Monopoly book. If the Monopoly book has the probability of just landing on a square vs your book ending, even if both assume a short jail stay I think that it would come out in orange's favor.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, duh. Haven't you ever seen the end of Monty Python?
Well, that's not entirely true, is it? Isn't the go/no go point when the officers start questioning the person? If they do that before Mirandizing the suspect, anything they say can be thrown out, no?
You can still photograph pictures of copyrighted buildings, statues, etc. if it's for your own use. If you start selling them, you might run into a problem, but taking a picture is perfectly legal.
I have a friend at MS now as an intern who actually loves the Sysinternals tools who says the developers there won't let MS do anything to kill them. So don't despair quite yet.
Hmm, in one of these discussions I had I think four feature shortfalls that I had run into with things that I use, but I can only think of two of them now, as it's been a while sice I used OO. (My Word use is also declining as I do more in LaTeX. Which, BTW, while better than Word in many respects, doesn't come close to being a replacement; it's in too much a different category to say that.)
The first is the quality of the track changes feature. This is what I was referring to with the versions in my last post. In Word 2000 and before, and in OO, deleting text turns it red and strikethrough. From Word 2002, it removes the deleted text and puts it in a bubble in the margin, with a marker pointing to where it was removed from. The latter strategy not just is a lot more aesthetically appealing, but also gives a correct impression of what the modified version will look like. The older strategy -- OO's strategy -- disrupts line breaks, pagenation, etc. because the deleted text isn't actually removed and still takes up space. On a few occasions I've used the track changes feature as somewhat of a non-linear undo method. I'd turn it on, remove a few things in different areas of the paper, then decide that I wanted something I deleted in the middle restored, so I could just right click and choose to reject the change. When stuff like the length of the document matters (as it does for many school papers) you can't use the older method to do it.
The second thing I miss is an equivalent of either Word's normal mode or the ability to collapse the top and bottom margins in page view. I often find myself changing to normal mode or collapsing the margins because the spaces between the bottom of the text on page i and the top of the text on i+1 is distracting or causes me to not be able to fit as much on the screen at once.
The other comments I have are about the interface. First, I'm not sure how I feel about the location of Format->Page. (Where you set margins and stuff.) I agree that it makes a lot more sense to put it there rather than File->Page Setup if you consider it by itself, but when most other programs that have an equivalent put it at File->Page Setup, I dunno. I'm not gonna begrudge them this though, but it did cause a bit of hunting the first time I wanted to change margins. The other thing is that on Windows, the controls seem just a bit off. It feels like I'm using something like a Qt application trying to mimic the host OS look but not using native controls. If it isn't using native controls, then it is just a tiny bit off, and if it is (as I've heard), they're doing something a little weird with them. (Maybe owner drawing the menus for instance to put the icons there.) I can't quite put my finger on the difference between it and a native app, but it's a bit disconcerting. The other thing is I like the Word approach of using the sidebar for, say, the styles bar instead of a separate window like OO uses, because it ensures that it won't cover the document and will readjust the zoom of the document when you open and close the sidebar if you have it on fit width.
Like I said, OO is getting better, and I'd like to see that continue. I don't know if I have the coding skills and I certainly don't have the time to actually help contribute, but I have at least gone and voted on a few feature requests on their bugtracker. (In case any one is curious or has the same wishes I do, issue 23465 is a stepping-stone towards the track changes wish, 4914 is normal mode, 6191 is another big track changes improvement letting you right click on changes to accept or reject them (I had forgotten about that!), 35088 is another small thing I ran into once (I had to fill out an application using one of these forms; I was in Gentoo at the
Does the Sysinternals guy count?
Someone needs to mod the parent insightful, just to be ironic.
Not everything can be coded to the discipline of the kernel.
Dicipline? I'll be honest... I just got done writing an I/O scheduler for Linux, and my opinion has gone down a bit of the project. One of the big straws that broke the camel's back was the time I spent trying to figure out why gcc was giving me an error on the declaration of a variable 'current.' I spent 10 minutes trying to Google the error message to no avail. After 20 or 30 minutes of puzzling, searching, and cursing, it occured to me that it might be a macro. Sure enough, it was. Can someone explain who the hell creates a one word macro in lowercase? Is "doesn't respect scope and context" not the first reason why macros are frowned upon?
I don't have a big problem with stuff like "list_for_each"... it is used like a while loop, it makes the code more consistant and easier to read (I think), and it isn't something that anoyone is ever going to use as a variable name. But current? Sheesh.
Hell, I wouldn't even download office for free, because better programs exist.
What?
I ask that in all seriousness, at least for Word. I haven't used Word Perfect since it came with one of those strips you put above your function keys that told you what they all did alone, with alt, with ctrl, and with shift because there weren't menus because it was a curses-like interface with no mouse. So it's possible that it's better. But is there anything else? Really? (And don't say OO Writer or I'll toss my head back laughing. OO is a fine project and improving faster than Office is, but in a couple areas that are important to me, they're still at least a version behind the version of Office uses, which is in turn two versions behind the current beta. So there's a bit of catching up to do. Maybe v.3. Here's hoping.)
Did you even read that thread? He didn't say it was, he said he suspected it might be. No one came up with a definitive answer. To be honest, Occam's razor tells me that it probably wasn't vista...
you get an office suite which does everything you need
Except when it doesn't.
Wow, "Zango is adware, but it has been said that it is a rootkit" to "Zango is a product designed to do for the Internet what commercial TV stations like NBC, CBS and ABC have done for TV, which is keep it free."
;-)
That's somewhat of a shift. Glad to see a company come around and drop their spyware so quickly.
Then everyone you know would be making fun of you for being so stupid as to buy a computer that doesn't do what you want it to do.
What if every manufacturer does this?
That solves this problem too:
And no manufacturer that trades on a U.S. stock exchange will risk the value of their stock plummeting because everyone decided not to upgrade until something more palatable comes out.
If the manufacturers agree to do this -- especially if they can get congressional support that all computers made have to check the binary checksum (hey, they got through the DMCA...) -- then you're SOL. It's upgrade or stay with what you have.
Believe what you like, but you can't find a free market anywhere...
If that's gonna happen, whatever the GPL says isn't gonna stop it.
This is an ideological debate I think, not one that is going to have significant real-world impact. The patents clause in it might, but I don't think the DRM one will.
So, while the GPL crowd says they are promoting freedom...looking at it from a different perspective they are actually putting in constraints.
This is what the GPL has *always* done, just now it's starting to affect hardware instead of just other software. I can't take the Linux kernel and turn it into a closed-sounce app. That's a constraint, and it's imposed by the GPL. This doesn't mean it's a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination. I can't take something that's under the GPL and link it in with this amazing closed source library that I want to use. Again, it's a constraint imposed by the GPL. Just like what you say the GPL v3 is doing to hardware, the GPL v2 is constraining software "in its ability to allow certain types of designs."
So you say "which way do you think the Free Software Foundation is going to lean," but to frame this as a hardware vs. software battle is misleading at best and, I would say, wrong. It's about determining the right balance between constraints so that the software is free enough to modify, the hardware is free enough that you can do most stuff with it, but not so free that the software could be made unfree later. If that makes sense.
This relates to the BSD license vs GPL debate that comes up periodically. The BSD license really is more free than the GPL. It has only four restrictions and, I think, all four are present in the GPL. This means that I can do anything with BSD code that I can with GPL code, but because of the restrictions the GPL places on compiling with closed source libraries and whatnot, I can also do a lot MORE with BSD code. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that the BSD is a better license though, because companies can come in and swipe BSD code and put it into their propriatary product, thus not giving back to the community. Depending on your personal philosophy as a developer, that may or may not be okay. And while I think any debate over which license is freer makes about as much sense as debating wheteher 1+1=2 or 3, what people are really talking about (at least on the GPL side) is which promotes free software better. And the GPL does this very well. But to do it, it has to add constraints. It's becoming increasingly evident that those constraints have to encompass hardware restrictions instead of just software. But there's no change in philosophy here really.
Procedure:
1. Listen while he's on the network
2. His computer will broadcast his MAC address in the eithernet header of each packet
3. Remember it
4. Tell your computer to use that MAC address
Okay, in all honesty, I'm not sure it's that simple. His computer might notice and start complaining. So you might have to do something else, or just only use the network while his computer is off or away.
But the number of MAC address is completely unimportant
Not at all. Maybe if you weren't broadcasting SSID.
But if you are, it's like having a giant billboard out where the sidewalk meets the walkway to your door that says "TOILETS" and has an arrow pointing at the unlocked door. I think in that case, permission IS implied.
How about one from real life experience. A teenage is trying to break into the high school...so he climbs up on the roof looking for a way in. He walks on the domed plastic skylights over the guy and, amazingly, one breaks and he falls through. 30 feet later he meets up with the nice polished hardwood gym floor and breaks both his legs. The outcome? He doesn't get convicted of breaking and entering...or even tresspassing. No. Instead, he sues the school and settles for/wins some undisclosed sum.
These cases are often a fair exception. There's in my mind a case in which the school SHOULD have beared some burden but didn't that's in many ways similar. Girl falls through catwalk about the auditorium and get's some serious injuries. To get up there you need to go through a door. This is a known hangout for kids, and parents have complained to the school to do something about it. Like, I dunno, put a lock on the door. The school doesn't. She sued, and totally lost. Most frivolous lawsuits go the right way. It's unfortunate that they happen because the defendant does have to put a lot amount of money into defending themself, but they really aren't as big a problem as some people believe.
If the laws go away, the punishment goes away, and so, unless you're demented, does your fear. Ergo the laws are preventing it. Indirectly, I'll agree to, but they are nonetheless.
There's an issue of negligence though. To be responsible for injuries caused by an attractive nuisance you still have to be negligent, it's just that the standard for what constitutes negligence is lower. If you put out a refrigerator with the door on, that has pretty much been defined as an example of negligence both by courts and statutes. (In fact, many places make it a crime to put out a refrigerator like that for that very reason; if you're breaking the law and someone gets hurt, it's hard to claim that you're not negligent.)
So with the Wi-Fi, there has to be some negligence. As long as having an open net in-and-of-itself is negligence, I don't see a legal issue. Unless of course you're doing something to push the content; this is why feeding a goatse image out is a BAD idea. If a minor accesses your network and the parents sue, that could very easily be considered negligence because enough minors know how to operate laptops that there's a fair risk that it'll happen eventually.
And even at that, they have to catch you while you are using the computer in order to find out your MAC
That depends. For many people, it would be "while the computer is on", because there's something that runs in the background. I leave AIM (Gaim really, but on the AIM protocol (now Jabber too)) running whenever my computer is on (well usually), so it's sending out packets pretty regularily. 'course, I don't have a laptop and aren't on wireless.
Where did you get the crystal ball that tells you whether you'll need that money in a year?
What if you don't know if you'll need it or not? Then you can't put it into a 5-year to start with, because then you can't get to it after the year (without losing interest).
Like a Taylor series of any periodic function*, a square wave would be an infinite sum. Just in the square wave case, it's an infinite sum of sines or cosines instead of polynomials.
*except constant functions
The reds have a high "payoff percentage", meaning that they have a high rate of return given the money you spend developing them. They make a fair amount of money, and don't cost too too much to develop.
:-p They are powerful enough to hold their own against, say, the greens quite well, but not too expensive to develop either.
The Monopoly book I mention in another post puts them in third place. The full stats are orange (23.5%*), light blue (20.7), red (17.8), light purple (17.7), dark blue (17.3), yellow (17.2), railroads (16), green (15.1), dark purple (13.6), utilities (17.5).
* The percentage is the proportion of your investment that you make each time an opponent makes a trip around the board.
Neither measure gives the 'best' monopoly to own. If I get the orange properties and you have greens for instance, but we each have only $900 say (this is the optimum amount for orange, but bear with me here) I can put three houses on each, while you can only do one house on two and two houses on one. If you look at any property the rent increases dramatically from 2 to 3 houses, and my 3 house properties will make more than even your two house one. If you're unlucky, I could bankrupt you before you could build up your greens. So payoff matters.
But at the same time, light blues are second place there, and if I have light blue and you have green and we each have $5000, you can develop your properties to hotels and still have almost enough to make four of my rents. I, however, would be wiped out with four of your rents. And looking at the probabilities of landing on properties, greens have a substantial advantage over light blues. So it would be a very rare thing for you to not win that game. So payoff isn't the whole thing; the actual absolute income also matters.
My point is that reds have a nice mix.
I have a book on Monopoly (yes... I'm that big of a nerd) that says oranges are most landed on, with reds second. (Or, if you count railroads, it goes RRs then orange then red.) It gives 49% vs 50% for red and orange* though, so the difference isn't much. It's very possible that modifying assumptions based on long or short jail stays** would tip the balance. I don't know what assumption this book uses.
;-)
For the record, here are the stats: RRs (64%), orange (50), red (49), yellow (45), green (44) light purple (43), light blue (39), utilities (32), dark blues (27), dark purples (24).
* The percentage is the chance that a given player will land on a property of that color group during one trip around the board
** Whether players choose to stay in jail for all three turns (unless they get a double) or pay to get out immediately has a surprisingly large effect on the statistics of properties and color groups, especially on the side with light purple and oranges. Staying in jail for all three turns for instance drops New York Ave's frequency by about 7%, dropping it from 4th place to 7th. This site has a lot of statistics.
For some time I thought it would be an interesting exercise to calculate the Monopoly probabilities myself and compare, but then I started to do it. (By hand.) When you find somewhere around a dozen ways you can get from Go to Income Tax (roll a 4; roll a 7 (to chance) and get go back 4; roll a double 10, a 12, get go to Go, then a non-double 4; roll a double 10, a 12, get go to Go, then a 7, and get go back 4; roll a double 10, a 12, get go to boardwalk, then a 5; roll a double 10, a 12, get go to boardwalk, then a non-double 8, and get go back 4; and those last four with a 12 then a 10 instead of a 10 then 12; plus maybe some I'm forgetting), it starts to turn old REAL fast. Automating it (so you have the computer develop the associated Markov chain) would be one way to do it, but that loses a lot of the appeal.
(I'm also not sure if the more appropriate statistic is to figure out if you just LAND on a property (so for instance if you roll two twos do you count that as a hit for income tax) or end your turn there; my instincts tell me the former, but I'm not sure. That's also another possible source for the discrepancy between your math book and my Monopoly book. If the Monopoly book has the probability of just landing on a square vs your book ending, even if both assume a short jail stay I think that it would come out in orange's favor.)