Have you seen the study where they connected a robotic arm to a gorilla's brain output? The gorilla learned how to control the arm and stopped using her own arm... then the arm atrophied! Her brain stopped recognizing her arm and let it die.... freaky.
Personal note... look into a federal or state facilities grant or loan... the loan is a 504 and is good for up to 3 million at very good interest rates and has available bridge loans to pay for the down... you should also qualify for a rural area special facilities loan, etc. there's a lot of money available with really good terms... you just have to help the government employees find it for you;-p they don't get paid enough to do the work themselves but the money is there waiting for you and you get a clean slate on it every year so apply now and apply again in January... get your money... OPM (Other Peoples Money) can do wonders.. BTW it's your tax dollars at work too.
How else do you attribute value to a product? It is the sum of it's parts, physical and intellectual.
In this case they aren't doing anything spectacular with the software that hasn't been done for years on standard PCs. The only major difference is the size and LCD. You're correct about setting a price they think the market will bare but they could get much deeper market penetration and brand adoption by pricing their offering at a more reasonable price point, say $300 which is a standard price for a single function consumer electronics device be it a music player, a video player, a cellphone or a toy and which seemingly allows for a good margin of profit or else they all would be priced higher.
In my estimation this means that they have to price the device at the higher amount because of some outside force, Or they are stupid... and I don't think they are stupid. The only stated outside force is the windows embedded player license which could easily reduce their margins by a substantial amount if they priced it lower...
My question here is how much of that price tag reflects the license tax to Microsoft? The hardware can't cost more than $150 by itself even at retail prices... even the LCD doesn't justify it. The software itself also doesn't justify the price... maybe another $100 for that so.... IMHO the license is half or more of the purchase price there. Surely the market can come up with a better or comperable offering for much less...I'm not buyin' it, figuratively or literally.
I'm curious if Apple could port this to compile on Darwin and then include it in the XServe offering as a email server application... if so they would do an awesome job of re-outfitting it with a great front end for admins... and since XServe can be purchased with unlimited seat license it would be a serious conversion tool both to XServe for email as well as away from Windows Desktops.
Personally I'm fighting against dioxyhydrogen... that stuff is seriously corrosive... have you seen what it does to metal? Not to mention it makes my fingertips look like prunes....
The simple reality is that 'functionality' is now a commodity. You can try to sell it but several tens or hundreds will undercut you or go for free, hoping that they will get the service contract which is usually more lucrative than the purchase contract.
Knowledge still has value but 'expressed' knowledge is becoming very cheap.
Hold on to your secrets or learn something that is difficult for the masses to understand OR take the time to master... that is where the money is now, basically 'Consulting'.
Anything you can turn into a process will soon be commoditized.. whereas the ability to turn something into a process will always be valuable.
Interestingly enough we have come full circle in 'manufacturing' where in the past custom solutions were valuable... then it became assembly line which was valuable... and now again it is custom solutions, but at a higher level... Craftsmen are again valuable! I recently heard of a painter who makes several million a year to paint super custom interiors for bigger than 5,000 sq. foot homes.... because he has old-world knowledge he is once again a very valuable individual... my kind of job..
SO custom service is king in our new world of commoditized modern technologies... we're in for half a decade at least until a big evolution in tech happens when bleeding edge stuff will again be king. Personally I don't have 50 years to wait, so I think I'll adopt the new mode.
Just go by a box full of usb drives.. 16MB or 32MB, get a volume discount and hand em' out to everyone. Voila... no more floppy, no more 'fix-my-floppy', no more 'the dog ate my floppy' (well, the dog can still eat the usb drive but it might actually come out intact).
Re:TrueColor - full electromagnetic spectrum
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
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hmmm in addition you would need to capture all that data when recording.. there better be some good compression and a focal length, cause capturing full spectrum with infinite depth could prove a challenging storage problem. I'm thinking it could drop off around the far extenet of human vision, not that seeing like an eagle wouldn't be cool and all, just a little disorienting...
BioDiesel is THE number onealternative fuel in both US and Europe and is making hug inroads in developing nations like India.
It is a RENEWABLE resource, ie: biomass... growable fuel which converts solar energy into a very usable fuel, vegetable oil which can be used NOW by all diesel engines with NO modifications..
Less relevant emissions and even fewer when a catalytic converter is added (yes CATs are a problem for petrol based diesel but are NOT a problem for bio based diesel)... up to 50% less emissions and maybe more.
Better lubricant... less engine wear...
With increased production, costs will fall to less than current costs for petrol diesel, until then Federal subsidies bridge the gap to make BioDiesel equivalent in cost to petrol diesel.
Use soy, cotton, mustard and rape seed oils for what they are really good for, industrial energy - not food (BTW these cheap oils are being shoved down our throats as edible food products when in fact they are toxic poisons to all living creatures, only made edible by sleight of hand which is still only an illusion, except for when they are fermented as in Tofu...).
Go BioDiesel or GO Home! It's the best alternative to petroleum fuels... let nature harness the power of the sun and condense it into an oil that is perfect for generating energy.
KNew standards... yes, me and W3C, IEEE, ISO and the many other standards bodies made up of both professionals with interests and volunteer experts, PHDs included... thinking about what is best for all whether you understand it or not, Ivory Tower.. maybe but 99.9999999% (that's 9 nines) of the time these organizations, the respectable and respected ones, do know what is best for all.
Property huh? Kinda like SCO owns 'property'?
Domains are not property they are addresses, like phone numbers or zip codes... directions which instruct a client browser or other client type on how to find the resource it is looking for.
Domains come and go, they change hands their content changes arbitrarily.... even their base charateristics, their host server, capabilities, bandwidth, physical location.... they are tools used to identify a particular subset of a set of a larger set.
Domains are not property, they are an 'asset' however and worth fighting for if you have legs to stand on. Katie Jones could post her thoughts and feelings at any domain, blog, CMS site anywhere. The domain itself has no value to her other than that of an ego-trip that has only recently become interesting, due to media exposure.
Again, a domain does not have a physical location, it is not a scarcity... unless artificially created...
again, i don't think the publishing company has any right to the domain either.
What i am saying is that Katie Jones "should" adopt the.uk TLD and let companies fight over the "commercial" domain.
What does KJ have to lose? A few bookmarks? What does she have to gain? Nothing or illegitimate gains from a non-property.
Hmmm.. maybe this is why new TLDs were created and implemented in the time SINCE 1996?
The internet is a self-regulated community and if you want it to stay that way you will adopt new standards that make sense instead of fighting them stubbornly and making everyone else wait for you to catch up... otherwise someone with imposing authority will make you do so and then what sort of community do we have?
BTW I mentioned using their respective country TLD, in this case.uk
They are not rules only suggestions.. and yes the very TLDs are by their very nature suggestions, else they would not have been created. FYI options are never options, they are suggestions. You can always do anything you damn well please, now here are the "suggested options".
1996 was 8 years ago, how old are you? The internet was well established, for those of us old enough to read at the time. I was pirating mp3s, wavs, aiffs, mpgs and copies of Photoshop, Quark, many games and of course pron as early as 1994 and I was late to the pary, Hotline - long live hotline.
not to lend credibility to the lawsuit or it's legitimacy but people who want personal pages that are not for commercial use should be using the.us TLD (if you live in the USA or your respective country TLD)..com is for commercial entities.
Now using this same arguement, the publisher should not be trying to register or suing for the use of a domain that does not represent a commercial entity either. That is what "sub-domains" are for, ie: they should simple put it at katie.publisher-domain.com or www.publisher-domain.com/katie/
There is no reason for a book, movie, song or other published media getting to have it's own domain... it eats up space, confuses people, and basically turns the internet into a dirty database. What happens when someone wants to start a company named Katie?
Of course this crosses into the question of whether companies get to have the same name, not a problem... companies come and go, they make money and lose money they file and settle and dispute lawsuits around the rights of the company to use namespaces and have been doing so since the beginning of commerce... we have an established tradition here and a structured system in place to deal with it that everyone understands going into it. You want your company to get famous with a branded name... you'll have to fight for it, if you lose you can pick a new name and try your luck with that one, if your business is any good it will succeed despite the name.
Using a central DB midht not work for a true virus writer but if the intent is anti-virus and is officially sanctioned or is within a local network it could certainly be applied...your described method seems like a good alternative as well.
A "White Knight" worm can establish a positive compounded interest "pluggin" of potential holes... ie: for each system plugged it can, if coded correctly, decrement the number of systems it evaluates. A good system would be to create a temporary "white list" of plugged systems which a pro-worm could ignore as it had already visited that system and plugged it.
Given this assumption, a white knight worm would have a heavy impact intially but after the first day would drop off dramatically in an exponential manner.
Darwinism and Lamarckism are only at odds when it comes to theory... not results. Evolutions happens at many levels, some of which happen to be, and you can quote me on this, "response to environment". When I say this I need to qualify it by saying that sharks don't have unlimited teeth generations by chance and Giraffes have a long neck because the most nutritious leaf food is near the top of the tree, where the sun hits....
My point is that if a Macaque can survive and better recreate using a known and documented behavior, then the children of said Macaque may mimic and enhance the 'viability' of said gene/behavior which will in turn increase the chance that beneficial genes for bipedism will be expressed more and more as a useful survival and procreative gene sequence.
The theory is only questionable if you discount life's endurability.
Whether you like it or not this "modern-day pirate" has the right of law behind him. If you don't like it you need to organize against him and his kind. With today's networking capabilities, no one, nobody, no group - has an excuse.
What you are describing in terms of actions which may take place to express frustration with the status quo are no different than those of extreme PETA groups, violent demonstrators against WTO and yes, the PLO, IRA, Al Quaeda and other political militant groups, ie: 'terrorists' who have decided to take action without regard to civilization, civility or the accepted rule of law as we and our ancestors have decided will govern and structure our way of life.
Acknowledging and supporting public and common law can not be equated with 'willingness to bend over and squeal like a pig'. You defame and belittle a system of law which has been in place for over 200 years and it's predecessors from centuries before.
Public disobedience does not and should never equal violence or violent acts against groups or individuals. In a democracy or a democratic republic there can be no good reason for violent revolt. The system itself gaurantees enfranchisement for legitimate citizens whom can decide what direction law and government will take.
Just because your desires can not be met this year or next or this decade or next, this century or next... does not mean you have no power... it does mean that the majority of enfranchised citizens who are politically active disagree with you and continue to do so... until they agree with you, so keep using the right to free speech to express your views and if they have merit they will eventually persuade the majority to your side. If you can't persuade the majority then live your life as you choose within the law, ie: be vegan, be an informed consumer, vote with your wallet, peacably demonstrate.. etc.
The difference between your rights and those of the people of Iran or Iraq or Saudi Arabia is that you can express yourself without fear of retribution as long as you do so peacefully. Violence has no part in a country wherein the leadership has been elected, even if you believe deception was involved somehow.
The people will not stand for true deception, while misrepresentation has been embraced since day one... exemplified in "All men are created equal", except slaves and women... because they were not 'citizens' at the time, not owning land... this has changed as 'citizens' realized their error. In a similar fashion we all will come to the best possible conclusion in all aspects of life. It may take time and a changing of the gaurd, as in civil liberties and other fundamental issues, people hold opinions far beyond their validity or use... give it time to adjust.
From a moral standpoint I condemn violence which achieves incremental change. Better to revolt completely and achieve a fundamental change than to cruelly punish those who are simply trying to live within the agreed upon system.
"If you just want to get up there to launch a satellite" which has been done to death if you ask me.... I mean how many countries and companies already do this regularly, OH WAIT!
The prize is for Manned Flight.
Speaking of which, isn't "Space Flight" an oxymoron? Flight implies flying, movement through a medium using lift mechanisms. I was under the impression that generating lift required a medium a little more dense than the vacuum of space. Anyways... I don't see your Sub-Orbital Rocket Plane or Missile on the X-Prize list of contenders.. so that makes you:
Not insightful... just flamebait... Are you also concerned about terrorist attacks on satellite launches or the X-Prize?
We're talking about an isolated platform in the middle of the south pacific ocean with nothing around it for hundreds of miles..... there have to be better targets for a terrorists with ICBMs at their disposal.
Get real... this is not political.... and it is virtually isolated from any sort of assault, whether it be from China or from Osama...
The only reason the towers were vulnerable is that they were within range of a very short sighted attack... which had no impact on our security, our national security... but only caused devastating damage to innocent families.
When public Gmail accounts are available... just get yourself a couple hundred of 'em and write a script to partition and email yourself your data... as well as a script to download and rejoin your data... dude, save thousands by using a free service with ultimate backup, etc.
man, I wish I had a need of this myself... I'vd just come up with the holy grail...
Any good idea worth investing in has a few things to deter such activity... this is called a "high barrier to entry",
What that means is that the idea requires one or more of the following:
- Large amounts of capital investment
- Key staff in the prospective industry, requiring high salaries
- Prolonged Research and Development
- High raw resource costs
Any of these and especially any combination of these will keep the average businessman from being able to establish a credible business around the idea, hence the need for Venture Capital who can provide investment resources much greater than any individual or SBA or bank loan will be willing to invest in a risky venture.
Patents only count if you can capitalize on them... very few patents can be immediately licensed to established entities and very few can be developed sufficiently to become profitable within a reasonable timeframe for traditional funding.. again, Venture Capital.
that's just to start... there are many more reasons to pursue VC money...
I didn't say anything about running a profitable business... all it needs to do is pay for your hobby expenses and as I said it can do that simply by being a tax deduction. In fact any good business never makes a profit. Between expenses and payroll a good business will spend all it's profit every year.
How much work do you think it would be to run a small business? You pay $70 for a 5 year license... you set up a web site, you get an account with Kagi to handle credit cards and downloads for you.. or the like and CafePress for your marketing tools (t-shirts, stickers, etc... that you don't put any money down for, they just take a cut, same with Kagi). Every 3 months you fill out a form in Quickbooks or whatever and send it in to the IRS... that's it. You already spend the time developing... Anyways, I don't see why you resist it so much.
Oh yeah, it's not Tax Shennanigans... it's business. You're just not on the Capitalist bandwagon with the rest of America are ya?
The idea is that by providing a service or good you are improving the economy and society/culture, therefore you get a tax break. Is your software useful? Does it have value to the rest of us? If yes, then you get a reward. This is supposed to help people like yourself who can't afford to spend their time doing productive things without some form of compensation.
If you must, think of it as welfare for the small businessman and yes your other remaining tax dollars are paying for it... get you some welfare, you deserve it, it's what taxes are for.
Too bad. Doing something for fun and getting paid for it is probably the most rewarding thing I can think of doing. If you don't take the software you develop seriously then how can any one else. Your fun project will never find it's way to my machine simply because I can't trust you to support it, you have nothing invested in it. I can't give it value because you won't give it value.
disclaimer: IANAAccountant
BTW you missed the point... when you have a small cottage business you get to write the whole thing off as a loss on your taxes... ie: the Mac you buy depreciates in value... you get to write that value off, it's about 30% of the purchase price each year, that's about $1000 tax credit. Add in the developer manuals, other software you may purchase, a percentage of your cable modem, your cell phone, your hotspot access, your peripherals (scanner, printer, etc.) plus incidentals(keep your receipts) and you'd probably end up with a total of an extra $3000 tax credit, each year. This means you have to do a line item deduction, hire someone to do it for you for $100 which you also deduct.
If you put a little thought into it you can get a tax refund that could easily equal the total price of the Mac... then the following year you can pocket the extra cash. Yes you spend the money to buy the stuff, but you get it all back and get to keep the stuff, hence it's 'free' as in beer.
Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in the US alone use a second business, usually an expensive hobby, to get their tax dollars back from the government one way or another... usuallly through investing in the economy in some way, but getting to enjoy their expensive hobby for free. Sailing and flying hobbies are huge for this, as are traveling, scuba diving, and other adventure hobbies... you get a license or certification and act as your friends 'guide' when ever they want to go out, or take a few parties out in your boat or plane a couple times a year... instant business, that loses money every year, just enough that you get your tax dollars back, in the form of harbor fees or hangar fees or scuba gear or hiking equipment or a Mac...
Apple Loans start at like $30 a month... although you'd be paying for like 5 years... but then if you are a capable developer you should be able to make some money so develop some software and use the proceeds to pay for the Mac... it's called investing in your business and it's a tax write off, so in the end you shouldn't be paying anything for the Mac... a free Mac imagine that.
The barrier to entry got a little bit lower all of a sudden.
If you just want to develop free software... free as in beer, stick with Linux. Us Mac people would rather pay you for free as in speech software... which would let you develop more software for us.
It's hard to feel sorry for you in any case. You've got skills apparently so use them.
Again free as in beer is nice but put the extra effort into the details and give us a good binary dist as well, with a custom icon a thoughtful GUI and some documentation, for $20 - $30... if you get one person a month to buy it.. there's your Mac. Was that so hard?
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Have you seen the study where they connected a robotic arm to a gorilla's brain output? The gorilla learned how to control the arm and stopped using her own arm... then the arm atrophied! Her brain stopped recognizing her arm and let it die.... freaky.
my 2
Personal note... look into a federal or state facilities grant or loan... the loan is a 504 and is good for up to 3 million at very good interest rates and has available bridge loans to pay for the down... you should also qualify for a rural area special facilities loan, etc. there's a lot of money available with really good terms... you just have to help the government employees find it for you ;-p they don't get paid enough to do the work themselves but the money is there waiting for you and you get a clean slate on it every year so apply now and apply again in January... get your money... OPM (Other Peoples Money) can do wonders.. BTW it's your tax dollars at work too.
How else do you attribute value to a product? It is the sum of it's parts, physical and intellectual.
In this case they aren't doing anything spectacular with the software that hasn't been done for years on standard PCs. The only major difference is the size and LCD. You're correct about setting a price they think the market will bare but they could get much deeper market penetration and brand adoption by pricing their offering at a more reasonable price point, say $300 which is a standard price for a single function consumer electronics device be it a music player, a video player, a cellphone or a toy and which seemingly allows for a good margin of profit or else they all would be priced higher.
In my estimation this means that they have to price the device at the higher amount because of some outside force, Or they are stupid... and I don't think they are stupid. The only stated outside force is the windows embedded player license which could easily reduce their margins by a substantial amount if they priced it lower...
My question here is how much of that price tag reflects the license tax to Microsoft? The hardware can't cost more than $150 by itself even at retail prices... even the LCD doesn't justify it. The software itself also doesn't justify the price... maybe another $100 for that so.... IMHO the license is half or more of the purchase price there. Surely the market can come up with a better or comperable offering for much less...I'm not buyin' it, figuratively or literally.
I'm curious if Apple could port this to compile on Darwin and then include it in the XServe offering as a email server application... if so they would do an awesome job of re-outfitting it with a great front end for admins... and since XServe can be purchased with unlimited seat license it would be a serious conversion tool both to XServe for email as well as away from Windows Desktops.
Personally I'm fighting against dioxyhydrogen... that stuff is seriously corrosive... have you seen what it does to metal? Not to mention it makes my fingertips look like prunes....
The simple reality is that 'functionality' is now a commodity. You can try to sell it but several tens or hundreds will undercut you or go for free, hoping that they will get the service contract which is usually more lucrative than the purchase contract.
Knowledge still has value but 'expressed' knowledge is becoming very cheap.
Hold on to your secrets or learn something that is difficult for the masses to understand OR take the time to master... that is where the money is now, basically 'Consulting'.
Anything you can turn into a process will soon be commoditized.. whereas the ability to turn something into a process will always be valuable.
Interestingly enough we have come full circle in 'manufacturing' where in the past custom solutions were valuable... then it became assembly line which was valuable... and now again it is custom solutions, but at a higher level... Craftsmen are again valuable! I recently heard of a painter who makes several million a year to paint super custom interiors for bigger than 5,000 sq. foot homes.... because he has old-world knowledge he is once again a very valuable individual... my kind of job..
SO custom service is king in our new world of commoditized modern technologies... we're in for half a decade at least until a big evolution in tech happens when bleeding edge stuff will again be king. Personally I don't have 50 years to wait, so I think I'll adopt the new mode.
Just go by a box full of usb drives.. 16MB or 32MB, get a volume discount and hand em' out to everyone. Voila... no more floppy, no more 'fix-my-floppy', no more 'the dog ate my floppy' (well, the dog can still eat the usb drive but it might actually come out intact).
hmmm in addition you would need to capture all that data when recording.. there better be some good compression and a focal length, cause capturing full spectrum with infinite depth could prove a challenging storage problem. I'm thinking it could drop off around the far extenet of human vision, not that seeing like an eagle wouldn't be cool and all, just a little disorienting...
BioDiesel is THE number onealternative fuel in both US and Europe and is making hug inroads in developing nations like India.
It is a RENEWABLE resource, ie: biomass... growable fuel which converts solar energy into a very usable fuel, vegetable oil which can be used NOW by all diesel engines with NO modifications..
Less relevant emissions and even fewer when a catalytic converter is added (yes CATs are a problem for petrol based diesel but are NOT a problem for bio based diesel)... up to 50% less emissions and maybe more.
Better lubricant... less engine wear...
With increased production, costs will fall to less than current costs for petrol diesel, until then Federal subsidies bridge the gap to make BioDiesel equivalent in cost to petrol diesel.
Use soy, cotton, mustard and rape seed oils for what they are really good for, industrial energy - not food (BTW these cheap oils are being shoved down our throats as edible food products when in fact they are toxic poisons to all living creatures, only made edible by sleight of hand which is still only an illusion, except for when they are fermented as in Tofu...).
Go BioDiesel or GO Home! It's the best alternative to petroleum fuels... let nature harness the power of the sun and condense it into an oil that is perfect for generating energy.
KNew standards... yes, me and W3C, IEEE, ISO and the many other standards bodies made up of both professionals with interests and volunteer experts, PHDs included... thinking about what is best for all whether you understand it or not, Ivory Tower.. maybe but 99.9999999% (that's 9 nines) of the time these organizations, the respectable and respected ones, do know what is best for all.
.uk TLD and let companies fight over the "commercial" domain.
Property huh? Kinda like SCO owns 'property'?
Domains are not property they are addresses, like phone numbers or zip codes... directions which instruct a client browser or other client type on how to find the resource it is looking for.
Domains come and go, they change hands their content changes arbitrarily.... even their base charateristics, their host server, capabilities, bandwidth, physical location.... they are tools used to identify a particular subset of a set of a larger set.
Domains are not property, they are an 'asset' however and worth fighting for if you have legs to stand on. Katie Jones could post her thoughts and feelings at any domain, blog, CMS site anywhere. The domain itself has no value to her other than that of an ego-trip that has only recently become interesting, due to media exposure.
Again, a domain does not have a physical location, it is not a scarcity... unless artificially created...
again, i don't think the publishing company has any right to the domain either.
What i am saying is that Katie Jones "should" adopt the
What does KJ have to lose? A few bookmarks? What does she have to gain? Nothing or illegitimate gains from a non-property.
Hmmm.. maybe this is why new TLDs were created and implemented in the time SINCE 1996?
.uk
The internet is a self-regulated community and if you want it to stay that way you will adopt new standards that make sense instead of fighting them stubbornly and making everyone else wait for you to catch up... otherwise someone with imposing authority will make you do so and then what sort of community do we have?
BTW I mentioned using their respective country TLD, in this case
They are not rules only suggestions.. and yes the very TLDs are by their very nature suggestions, else they would not have been created. FYI options are never options, they are suggestions. You can always do anything you damn well please, now here are the "suggested options".
1996 was 8 years ago, how old are you? The internet was well established, for those of us old enough to read at the time. I was pirating mp3s, wavs, aiffs, mpgs and copies of Photoshop, Quark, many games and of course pron as early as 1994 and I was late to the pary, Hotline - long live hotline.
boohyah!
not to lend credibility to the lawsuit or it's legitimacy but people who want personal pages that are not for commercial use should be using the .us TLD (if you live in the USA or your respective country TLD). .com is for commercial entities.
Now using this same arguement, the publisher should not be trying to register or suing for the use of a domain that does not represent a commercial entity either. That is what "sub-domains" are for, ie: they should simple put it at katie.publisher-domain.com or www.publisher-domain.com/katie/
There is no reason for a book, movie, song or other published media getting to have it's own domain... it eats up space, confuses people, and basically turns the internet into a dirty database. What happens when someone wants to start a company named Katie?
Of course this crosses into the question of whether companies get to have the same name, not a problem... companies come and go, they make money and lose money they file and settle and dispute lawsuits around the rights of the company to use namespaces and have been doing so since the beginning of commerce... we have an established tradition here and a structured system in place to deal with it that everyone understands going into it. You want your company to get famous with a branded name... you'll have to fight for it, if you lose you can pick a new name and try your luck with that one, if your business is any good it will succeed despite the name.
Using a central DB midht not work for a true virus writer but if the intent is anti-virus and is officially sanctioned or is within a local network it could certainly be applied...your described method seems like a good alternative as well.
A "White Knight" worm can establish a positive compounded interest "pluggin" of potential holes... ie: for each system plugged it can, if coded correctly, decrement the number of systems it evaluates. A good system would be to create a temporary "white list" of plugged systems which a pro-worm could ignore as it had already visited that system and plugged it.
Given this assumption, a white knight worm would have a heavy impact intially but after the first day would drop off dramatically in an exponential manner.
If done correctly it would work amazingly well.
Darwinism and Lamarckism are only at odds when it comes to theory... not results. Evolutions happens at many levels, some of which happen to be, and you can quote me on this, "response to environment". When I say this I need to qualify it by saying that sharks don't have unlimited teeth generations by chance and Giraffes have a long neck because the most nutritious leaf food is near the top of the tree, where the sun hits....
My point is that if a Macaque can survive and better recreate using a known and documented behavior, then the children of said Macaque may mimic and enhance the 'viability' of said gene/behavior which will in turn increase the chance that beneficial genes for bipedism will be expressed more and more as a useful survival and procreative gene sequence.
The theory is only questionable if you discount life's endurability.
Whether you like it or not this "modern-day pirate" has the right of law behind him. If you don't like it you need to organize against him and his kind. With today's networking capabilities, no one, nobody, no group - has an excuse.
What you are describing in terms of actions which may take place to express frustration with the status quo are no different than those of extreme PETA groups, violent demonstrators against WTO and yes, the PLO, IRA, Al Quaeda and other political militant groups, ie: 'terrorists' who have decided to take action without regard to civilization, civility or the accepted rule of law as we and our ancestors have decided will govern and structure our way of life.
Acknowledging and supporting public and common law can not be equated with 'willingness to bend over and squeal like a pig'. You defame and belittle a system of law which has been in place for over 200 years and it's predecessors from centuries before.
Public disobedience does not and should never equal violence or violent acts against groups or individuals. In a democracy or a democratic republic there can be no good reason for violent revolt. The system itself gaurantees enfranchisement for legitimate citizens whom can decide what direction law and government will take.
Just because your desires can not be met this year or next or this decade or next, this century or next... does not mean you have no power... it does mean that the majority of enfranchised citizens who are politically active disagree with you and continue to do so... until they agree with you, so keep using the right to free speech to express your views and if they have merit they will eventually persuade the majority to your side. If you can't persuade the majority then live your life as you choose within the law, ie: be vegan, be an informed consumer, vote with your wallet, peacably demonstrate.. etc.
The difference between your rights and those of the people of Iran or Iraq or Saudi Arabia is that you can express yourself without fear of retribution as long as you do so peacefully. Violence has no part in a country wherein the leadership has been elected, even if you believe deception was involved somehow.
The people will not stand for true deception, while misrepresentation has been embraced since day one... exemplified in "All men are created equal", except slaves and women... because they were not 'citizens' at the time, not owning land... this has changed as 'citizens' realized their error. In a similar fashion we all will come to the best possible conclusion in all aspects of life. It may take time and a changing of the gaurd, as in civil liberties and other fundamental issues, people hold opinions far beyond their validity or use... give it time to adjust.
From a moral standpoint I condemn violence which achieves incremental change. Better to revolt completely and achieve a fundamental change than to cruelly punish those who are simply trying to live within the agreed upon system.
"If you just want to get up there to launch a satellite" which has been done to death if you ask me.... I mean how many countries and companies already do this regularly, OH WAIT!
The prize is for Manned Flight.
Speaking of which, isn't "Space Flight" an oxymoron? Flight implies flying, movement through a medium using lift mechanisms. I was under the impression that generating lift required a medium a little more dense than the vacuum of space. Anyways... I don't see your Sub-Orbital Rocket Plane or Missile on the X-Prize list of contenders.. so that makes you:
a hater, don't hate.
Luckily with the movie, I Robot coming out Will Smith will dispell any doubts as to how robots will handle all those problems for you....
Not insightful... just flamebait... Are you also concerned about terrorist attacks on satellite launches or the X-Prize?
We're talking about an isolated platform in the middle of the south pacific ocean with nothing around it for hundreds of miles..... there have to be better targets for a terrorists with ICBMs at their disposal.
Get real... this is not political.... and it is virtually isolated from any sort of assault, whether it be from China or from Osama...
The only reason the towers were vulnerable is that they were within range of a very short sighted attack... which had no impact on our security, our national security... but only caused devastating damage to innocent families.
When public Gmail accounts are available... just get yourself a couple hundred of 'em and write a script to partition and email yourself your data... as well as a script to download and rejoin your data... dude, save thousands by using a free service with ultimate backup, etc.
man, I wish I had a need of this myself... I'vd just come up with the holy grail...
Any good idea worth investing in has a few things to deter such activity... this is called a "high barrier to entry",
What that means is that the idea requires one or more of the following:
- Large amounts of capital investment
- Key staff in the prospective industry, requiring high salaries
- Prolonged Research and Development
- High raw resource costs
Any of these and especially any combination of these will keep the average businessman from being able to establish a credible business around the idea, hence the need for Venture Capital who can provide investment resources much greater than any individual or SBA or bank loan will be willing to invest in a risky venture.
Patents only count if you can capitalize on them... very few patents can be immediately licensed to established entities and very few can be developed sufficiently to become profitable within a reasonable timeframe for traditional funding.. again, Venture Capital.
that's just to start... there are many more reasons to pursue VC money...
Guess you're just a charity case huh?
I didn't say anything about running a profitable business... all it needs to do is pay for your hobby expenses and as I said it can do that simply by being a tax deduction. In fact any good business never makes a profit. Between expenses and payroll a good business will spend all it's profit every year.
How much work do you think it would be to run a small business? You pay $70 for a 5 year license... you set up a web site, you get an account with Kagi to handle credit cards and downloads for you.. or the like and CafePress for your marketing tools (t-shirts, stickers, etc... that you don't put any money down for, they just take a cut, same with Kagi). Every 3 months you fill out a form in Quickbooks or whatever and send it in to the IRS... that's it. You already spend the time developing... Anyways, I don't see why you resist it so much.
Oh yeah, it's not Tax Shennanigans... it's business. You're just not on the Capitalist bandwagon with the rest of America are ya?
The idea is that by providing a service or good you are improving the economy and society/culture, therefore you get a tax break. Is your software useful? Does it have value to the rest of us? If yes, then you get a reward. This is supposed to help people like yourself who can't afford to spend their time doing productive things without some form of compensation.
If you must, think of it as welfare for the small businessman and yes your other remaining tax dollars are paying for it... get you some welfare, you deserve it, it's what taxes are for.
Too bad. Doing something for fun and getting paid for it is probably the most rewarding thing I can think of doing. If you don't take the software you develop seriously then how can any one else. Your fun project will never find it's way to my machine simply because I can't trust you to support it, you have nothing invested in it. I can't give it value because you won't give it value.
disclaimer: IANAAccountant
BTW you missed the point... when you have a small cottage business you get to write the whole thing off as a loss on your taxes... ie: the Mac you buy depreciates in value... you get to write that value off, it's about 30% of the purchase price each year, that's about $1000 tax credit. Add in the developer manuals, other software you may purchase, a percentage of your cable modem, your cell phone, your hotspot access, your peripherals (scanner, printer, etc.) plus incidentals(keep your receipts) and you'd probably end up with a total of an extra $3000 tax credit, each year. This means you have to do a line item deduction, hire someone to do it for you for $100 which you also deduct.
If you put a little thought into it you can get a tax refund that could easily equal the total price of the Mac... then the following year you can pocket the extra cash. Yes you spend the money to buy the stuff, but you get it all back and get to keep the stuff, hence it's 'free' as in beer.
Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in the US alone use a second business, usually an expensive hobby, to get their tax dollars back from the government one way or another... usuallly through investing in the economy in some way, but getting to enjoy their expensive hobby for free. Sailing and flying hobbies are huge for this, as are traveling, scuba diving, and other adventure hobbies... you get a license or certification and act as your friends 'guide' when ever they want to go out, or take a few parties out in your boat or plane a couple times a year... instant business, that loses money every year, just enough that you get your tax dollars back, in the form of harbor fees or hangar fees or scuba gear or hiking equipment or a Mac...
Apple Loans start at like $30 a month... although you'd be paying for like 5 years... but then if you are a capable developer you should be able to make some money so develop some software and use the proceeds to pay for the Mac... it's called investing in your business and it's a tax write off, so in the end you shouldn't be paying anything for the Mac... a free Mac imagine that.
The barrier to entry got a little bit lower all of a sudden.
If you just want to develop free software... free as in beer, stick with Linux. Us Mac people would rather pay you for free as in speech software... which would let you develop more software for us.
It's hard to feel sorry for you in any case. You've got skills apparently so use them.
Again free as in beer is nice but put the extra effort into the details and give us a good binary dist as well, with a custom icon a thoughtful GUI and some documentation, for $20 - $30... if you get one person a month to buy it.. there's your Mac. Was that so hard?