Are Kaplan's complaints warranted, or is he just taking advantage of some recent Microsoft court losses and trying to get his cut?
Why would we assume that those two are mutually exclusive?
Is there any doubt that MS would have behaved that way, if they really perceived GO to be a threat?
Is there any doubt that they would have behaved immorally and illegally if that's what it took to counter that threat to their monopoly?
Was there any reason for Kaplan to file a suit before there was a possibility of success?
I'd say there's a good chance that Kaplan is taking advantage of MS's recent court losses to get his cut... the cut that he's warranted because MS wrongly did him out of it!
My understanding is that space travel, like a trip to the moon, requires some very precise calculations.
Yes.
Was 3 digits of accuracy sufficient for the moon shots?
No.
Did NASA engineers do different slide rules?
Yes.
Did they use computers to make the calculations?
They used 7-place log tables for the calculations which required more than the four digits which you could get from a 20 inch slide rule.
I still have a set of Baron Vega's log tables which I used in high school. No, I never used log tables for engineering: I got to college a year or so after slide rules were dropped from the curriculum. The crusty old engineering profs were insistant that we have good scientific calculators, and that we know how to use them quickly and effectively. They also told tales about a hangar full of computers at Boeing during WWII: many hundreds of women who spent their shifts doing additions on hand-cranked adding machines.
We should spell Shakspeare in at least as many ways has he did himself.
In Shakespeare's day, nobody worried about English spelling in large part because serious people wrote serious things in Latin, where the spelling was thoroughly standardized. Because Latin was the language of the educated, nobody had bothered to standardize the spelling of the vernacular.
Since that time, English spelling has been standardized, and very few of us have reliance on Latin as an excuse today. English spelling isn't difficult: it follows two sets of simple rules. We have a set of rules for the words adopted from Latin (about half the language) and another set for the words derived from Anglo-Saxon. Foreign borrowings generally retain their foreign spellings. See my English spelling page for some pointers to resources for learning how simple it really is.
Those worried over form, miss content.
Those who don't worry over form obscure their content, and ensure that it will be missed or misconstrued. It's just plain rude to deliberately or carelessly use bad grammar and orthography: it shows contempt for your ideas and for your audience.
The Indian culture goes back much farther and has covered every bit as much territory as Western civ has.
The Greek and Roman roots of Western Civ are only about 2500 to 3000 years old. As I recall, the Hebrew roots are close to 5000 years old. That's far enough back that claims of longer duration are specious.
When the Europeans were still crucifying Jesus, the Indians had already invented existentialism.
I'm not sure that they ever got beyond it. That's what I was pointing out, above: that Western Civ has had a unique, long-running, free-ranging discussion on all that jazz. I call it unique in large part because it has come up with unique, and uniquely valuable, contributions. It represents multiple streams of thoughts over many centuries.
But to understand and confront Western culture today, Michel Foucault and Fredric Jameson and Paul Goodman and Jacques Derrida and Hayden White are infinitely more useful than Plutarch...
In so far as they are restating the old truths in a comfortable modern format, they're just fine. I'd suggest that C.S. Lewis has probably done a better job of that than any of your examples.
And no, I don't think Eurocentrism is wise at all.
If you go read what I wrote, you'll see that I pointed out that the great books lists are starting points. When I said that Eurocentrism is wise, I meant (and I thought I was saying quite clearly) that it's the only useful starting point for a Westerner. You don't stop with the great books, you start there. Then, when you have a firm grounding in your own culture, you go on. My Indian friends have a very different great books list, I'm sure, and different classical languages to study.
Most of the goods in your home are made thousands of miles away by people from an entirely different culture.
Is that at all relevant to the discussion?
I don't say "postmodernity" because I am a postmodernist. Postmodernity is where we live.
Where do you live? And what do you mean by "postmodernity"? If you mean that the fundamental underpinnings of our culture are significantly different than they were 200 years ago, you must live in some other country than the U.S. As an empirical confirmation of that, consider the 2004 U.S. general election. The winning candidates were careful to present themselves as cultural traditionalists.
The Eurocentricity of that list astounds me. Call me a PC postmodern relativist if you wish
Ok, you're a PC postmodern relativist.
I've read:
The Lady Murasaki - The Tale of Genji
Omar Khayyaam - Rubaiyat
The 1001 Nights.
I agree that they're worthwhile. I would like to read
Moses Maimonides - Guide for the Perplexed.
The reason that these great book lists are Eurocentric is that the Western cultures are ours. A Chinese who hasn't read some Confucious would be strangely lacking: he simply wouldn't have the background to understand the fundamentals of his own culture. I like your suggestions for further reading, but I think that any Westerner would be foolish to try to understand other cultures before he has understood his own. Reading Confucious before reading the Greek and Christian authors will make a Westerner a bad copy of a Chinese, with a false idea of the meaning and worth of both cultures. A fish needs to know water before he studies air.
Those of us in the Western cultures need to know who Plutarch wrote about, and what he said about them, what Socrates and Plato and Aristotle had to say, who and what Peter and Paul and Luke and John wote about, and how that man they wrote about was fundamentally different in outlook than the Greeks and the Hebrews, and on and on. We need to know some Shakespeare and Conrad and Chaucer and Aquinas and Cervantes and Dante and Thucydides and Bunyan and Tacitus and what-have-you.
Western civilization is deep and complicated, and it has an intellectual history that no other culture really parallels. What Mortimer Adler called ``the great conversation'' is a more than 2000 year-long discussion on men and gods and God, what those others should expect from us and we from them, and on the nature of reality. Other cultures have stated opinions on all of these things, of course, but so far as I know, only our literature and our culture has explored the range of ideas and opinions in the sort of depth and over the number of centuries that ours has. For example, the idea that the individual has intrinsic value, that it's not acceptable to slaughter your enemies or your peasants or even the savage tribesmen on the next continent, even if they're useless to you, is a uniquely Western idea, barely 2000 years old. The idea that slavery is intrinsically wrong is another example of this uniqueness. Slavery exists today only where Western culture hasn't yet reached.
The great books lists are intended to let Westerners get a good grounding in our own culture, and our culture is so enormously rich and varied that that's not a small project. The lists just try to give folks a starting place: you don't stop with the great books, you start with them. So, for all the reasons I've mentioned, Eurocentricism is both wise and unavoidable.
The drag of NT licensing and unreliability will put them at a competitive disadvantage.
On the contrary, NT's licensing and reliability keep your downtime up and your uptime down! It's just what you need to keep productivity under control. It makes your decision to outsource everything look better, because it makes your employees look worse.
Given this position, isn't there standing for a contributor to actually litigate the validity of the GPL? You've got a company that has disclaimed the GPL, but still uses the software.
I'm not sure that's grounds for litigation. Whatever SCO may say, as long as what they do complies with the GPL (i.e., offer source, et cetera), I suspect that there are no grounds for a copyright infringement suit. Merely expressing an unfavorable opinion of the GPL doesn't violate its terms. If I'm wrong, maybe a lawyer could explain why?
And of course, the PR spin on this being "consistent" is hillarious.
The FSF, and the rest of the world, agree that if the GPL is invalid, then we revert to the standard ``copyright, all rights reserved, no distribution'' situation. SCO's implicit position that if the GPL is invalid, then the program in question goes to the ``no copyright, in the public domain'' situation[1].
There are only two things that SCO has approached consistancy on: their deliberate misunderstanding of the GPL, and the essential stupidity of all their contradictory positions.
In SCO's dream world, when the GPL is found to be invalid, Linux (and probably everything else) is theirs. In their hallucinations, there is nothing inconsistant in distributing GPLed programs while rejecting the GPL.
[1] How offering additional rights beyond those allowed by copyright could negate the author's copyright is left as an exercise for the reader, since SCO has never shared that particular part of their hallucinations with us.
In every state in the Union, the state Department of Labor gets a quarterly filing from every employer in that state, which has the names, SSNs, and wages of every employee of that firm (called UI wage records). It would be trivial to check that no SSN shows up on both the unemployment list and the wage record list.
The weakness in the system comes from the fact that you can work in one state, and file for UI benefits in another. I don't work in the tax department, so I'm not sure to what extent the states communicate. Still, I believe that you have to document your elegibility even if you file out of state, and that suggests that the state in which you file must contact the state in which you claim you worked. Again, we have the chance to compare the SSN to the UI wage records.
I'd guess that you have to file out-of-state, and probably only get a few checks (four checks ==> 8 weeks, and so on) before the claim is disallowed. You're vulnerable in cashing the checks, so you'd probably want to sell them to some smaller, less risk-averse criminal. I'd guess that 100 SSNs would net you a lot less than $1M, and an expected jail time of far more than 26 weeks.
I'm sure this happens, and I'd bet that the states aren't worried about it because they're already dealing with it just fine, and the problem is firmly under control.
It would probably be a good idea to stop using Social Security numbers for all of these reasons. [I.e., the SSN is both the public and the private identifier.] This is one of those instances where it might be favorable to have a National identification.
So, you're suggesting that we replace one obviously insecure numbering system (the SSN) with another (the national ID)? How would this differ from putting your picture on your Social Security card?
Or are you proposing something else which is more than a numbering system? If so, let's hear some details.
The shift to the new processors,... will not begin until the first part of next year.
So, why upgrade now?
Well, if you're buying a new machine every year or so anyway, you don't care that these are the last of the Powermacs, and that you will soon be stuck with an orphan.
If you aren't buying a new, top of the line Mac every year or so, just because, then you've got good reason to wait a year or so, while they shake the bugs out of the new offerings.
Apple probably figured out that the early announcement was only going to hurt discretionary, low-end sales for the next six months (if that), and decided they could live with the hit.
The problem is, you can't use the fact that 'if taxpayers pay for it and contribute to it, then they should have access to it', as justification.
Look at the NSA, CIA, random military bases. You're liable to be shot on sight if you sneak into them,...
So who ultimately decides the cutoff as to what we as taxpayers can see and what we can't?
How about using: ``If they can't justify shooting you on sight if you sneak in, they can't justify keeping the information you paid for secret.'' as our criterion?
In this situation they made the proper choice, but I can't trust our judicial system in light of the 'other' rulings they've made.
Me, too.
This sort of wisdom does seem out of character for the courts in general. Not all judges are stupid, crooked, vicious scum, but that's the way to bet. Maybe this fellow is a principled exception to the general rule. Maybe he was just too stoned, and gave the wrong instructions to the clerk who wrote the ruling.
Social constraints exist so that we can live with each other as humans in a fashion where the amount of pain that people have to go through is lessened. Almost all situations in which these constraints are removed tend toward decay.
Well said, and painfully, obviously true.
Some of the earliest posts on this story were making fun of Dvorak for stating the obvious. I think that the post you were replying to shows that stating the obvious can be a great service.
"We should not have been doing that," Mr. Perry said. "That, however, has been remediated."
Translation: ``We've come up with some fiction which will let us maintain plausible deniability next time we lose data we shouldn't have had in the first place.''
As for the sensitive data, he added, "We no longer store it on files."
Translation: ``We're going to come up with some nifty new word to replace the word `file', so we can truthfully say that we no longer have your data in our files.''
More seriously, it makes good sense to me that they were retaining data for research purposes. They'd be irresponsible not to, just as surely as they were irresponsible not to have an air gap between that data and the internet.
After asking 15 consulting agencies and bringing people from out of state for interviews for 3 months now, we still haven't found anybody who can manage the configuaration of the huge software systems we have.
So, you've spent over 3 months looking for someone who knows everything you need. Presumably, you've had someone doing the work during this time, right? Or is your entire project on hold?
If you have someone who can keep things going, why don't you hire some fresh CS grad or maybe an experienced systems administrator today, and make him be the apprentice configuration manager? He can learn from the guy who's keeping things going, and I suspect that he'll be up to speed and fully productive long before you find your Prince Charming.
Since you're hiring him as apprentice, you can reasonably start him at a modest salary, with the promise that if he makes the milestones you set, he'll be getting the full salary for the job soon.
Where are the qualified people these days?
Waiting for you to hire them and train them up. There's a good chance you have the right guy for that job working for you right now, if you weren't so fixated on ``no training''.
I went and looked at your help-wanted ad. The experience requirements don't seem outrageous. I'm sure that there are more than nine people in Texas who have three years commercial coding experience, and are comfortable with C++.
I've got a few questions:
What sort of hours might a person with that sort of experience think you would expect him to work?
What sort of money does ``Attractive salary plan'' add up to in Dallas?
What sort of money could a person who is technically competent and a ``motivated individual who is a self starter and can work well under little supervision... a strong communicator, both written and oral'' make if he worked those hours in some non-programming position, or started his own business?
I bet you can see where this is going: I suspect that there are plenty of qualified people, but they've already got better gigs, which give them fewer hours, more money, better working conditions, or maybe even all three. In short, somebody who could make a good living doing your job could probably make a better living doing something else.
That's no reflection on you or your ad; it just means that development is becoming a low-end, low-value job. The skills it takes can get a better reward elsewhere.
There's a difference between obeying the laws of a legitimate nation-state versus...
That's true, but we were talking about Mainland China. If that's a legitimate government, then so is Mugabe's, and so was Phol Pot's.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that just because a government is recognised by other governments, it's a legitimate government in a civilised country. Today, the only member of the international diplomatic community which stands up and says that Mugabe is an insane, evil dictator is Mugabe himself. What a pity that no one's listening.
Like it or not, the PRC is a legitimate nation-state.
No, it's not legitimate. China is a nation, or a state, in the same sense that California or Papua New Guinea are. Unlike California or Papua New Guinea, there is no legitimate government there, just a bunch of brutal, murderous, uncivilised thugs.
So, part of the problem with this is that it turns many small Internet providers into de facto censorship organizations responsible for the policing and determination of ALL content hosted through them or make them software companies due to this little inclusion in the law:
So, what article did you read? Right... this is Slashdot, you didn't read no steenk'n article.
The summary says that Utah ISPs must offer to customers a way to prevent access to a list of websites provided by the state AG. That has nobody censoring anything, except for a few, foolish parents, who imagine that this will let them leave little Johnnie alone with his computer.
No one has to take the ISPs up on this offer, no one will ever know whether you take the ISP up on this offer, and there is no reason to think that getting on the Utah AG's list would hurt your viewership from Utah (there may be reason to think that being on it will help you get clicks from elsewhere, but that's another story).
From the ACLU's press release
The new law, passed by the 2005 session of the Utah legislature, has three primary components:
1) Utah Internet content providers must evaluate and rate their speech, at the risk of criminal punishment.
2) The Utah Attorney General must create a public registry of Internet sites worldwide containing "material harmful to minors" -- speech that is unlawful to intentionally distribute to minors but that is constitutionally protected for adults.
3) It extends existing criminal restrictions on distribution of "harmful" materials to distribution on the Internet. Similar provisions have been uniformly held unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause and the First Amendment by federal courts across the nation.
So: tell the world whether your published material is kiddie-safe or not, the State AG makes a list of who's not kiddie-safe, you can't do online what you can't do offline. Of all of these, only the first might be argued to put any sort of new burden on anyone.
Even by the ACLU's ill-conceived standards, this suit sounds like a foolish exercise in barratry. Looking at the list of plantiffs, it doesn't look like the little guy that the ACLU used to claim to protect. Again, from the ACLU press release:
Plaintiffs are The King's English, Inc.; Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore; Nathan Florence; W. Andrew McCullough; Computer Solutions International, Inc.; Mountain Wireless Utah, LLC; the Sexual Health Network, Inc., Utah Progressive Network Education Fund, Inc.; the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah; the Association of American Publishers; the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund; the Freedom to Read Foundation; and the Publishers Marketing Association.
The Association of American Publishers; the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund; the Freedom to Read Foundation; and the Publishers Marketing Association? The ACLU seems to have gotten in bed with the big dogs on this one.
I'm sure that most Utah publishers will deal with this by declaring that no part of their websites are kiddie safe, and so anyone who's silly enough to use the ISP's method to block the AG's list will miss out on their local homeschool support group, their neighbor's kids homework site, and probably a whole raft of credit-card-required porn sites. So what?
Tharkban, someone should probably tell you that Christians have no need to follow any of the laws in the old Testament (though we all should be making an effort to follow a much stricter version of the ten comandments). If you want to see what really matters to Christians from the old Testament, read Matthew 22:34-40.
In the version I'm reading, that ends with ``... on these - the two commands - all the law and the prophets do hang.'' The ``two commands'' are love God and love your neighbor. The part about ``all the law and the prophets do hang'' means that those two commands are the essense of the entire old Testament.
All that crap about what's clean or unclean, cooking kids or charging interest, really doesn't matter in comparison to whether you love God and your neighbor.
So, given all that, why did I say we should all be following the ten commandments? The ten commandments are practical advice about practical expressions of that love. Why a stricter version? It's not enough to merely ``not kill'': if we love our neighbors, we won't even wish they were dead. You can follow the letter of the ten commandments perfectly, and still fall far short of following their spirit.
"...environmental activists sauntered into the Eddie Bauer store on Michigan Avenue, headed to the broad storefront windows opening out on the Magnificent Mile and proceeded to take off their clothes.
Other than a brazen publicity stunt, what does this do? It certainly tells us those particular environmental activists are nutcases, but what does it tell us about nanotechnology?
The strip show aimed to expose more than skin: Activists hoped to lay bare growing allegations of the toxic dangers of nanotechnology.
Again, how does laying bare their skin lay bare the dangers of anything else? This will fuel stereotypes which portray all Greenies as wacked-out wienies, but what does it tell us about nanotechnology?
I suppose that they hope their arrests will lead to press interviews, but those can only lead to soundbites, and folks who are swayed by that sort of crap are going to sway the other way tomorrow.
True to a point, but the TI-89 and TI-92 do symbolic algebra, so that you can ask for the integral of x^3 and it spits out x^4/4.
Don't blindly take what it gives you. A classmate tried using a TI92 in an intro to real analysis class, and got a rude surprise when some of it's results were wrong. Don't recall the details, but it had something to do with inequalities, I think.
Bruce, could the dependency problem be handled by distributing ``fat binaries'' which included all dependencies, but weren't yet linked? That is, distribute all the object code, but let the installer link it.
That way, the installer could query the OS about each dependency, and provide it from it's own package if the OS didn't have it on tap. I suppose that you should also give the installer the option to tell the OS what it provides, so that the OS could offer it to other programs. Obviously, if your libraries are proprietary, your installer wouldn't make that offer!
This system could work for proprietary packagers, too: they could write their own installers, load them with stupid safeguards and copy protections and generally make them as close to unusable as they wished. Libre programs would offer all the libraries on which they depended.
Libre or proprietary, this system would give everyone the portability of static compilation and the RAM footprint of dynamic. To keep from cluttering your hard disk with multiple copies of far too many libraries (maybe the distribution core should require everything and provide nothing?), let the installer remove anything which the OS demonstrates it can provide. That is, if you get link errors using what the OS provides, use your own version. If you don't get link errors, remove your own version from the disk. When you're done installing, perhaps remove the linker and installation logic, and so on.
I'd think that a system which wanted to use this wouldn't have to give the installer much. It would have to provide a clearly defined, specified-with-upwards-compatibility-in-mind way to query and inform about what it requires and provides. The installer would have to include a linker (For Libre software, it could simply include the necessary parts of GCC) and a bit of logic to run it. Maybe the OS should be able to recognise such an installer and initiate the queries? That might allow some sort of auto-installation.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would we assume that those two are mutually exclusive?
Is there any doubt that MS would have behaved that way, if they really perceived GO to be a threat?
Is there any doubt that they would have behaved immorally and illegally if that's what it took to counter that threat to their monopoly?
Was there any reason for Kaplan to file a suit before there was a possibility of success?
I'd say there's a good chance that Kaplan is taking advantage of MS's recent court losses to get his cut ... the cut that he's warranted because MS wrongly did him out of it!
Yes.
Was 3 digits of accuracy sufficient for the moon shots?
No.
Did NASA engineers do different slide rules?
Yes.
Did they use computers to make the calculations?
They used 7-place log tables for the calculations which required more than the four digits which you could get from a 20 inch slide rule.
I still have a set of Baron Vega's log tables which I used in high school. No, I never used log tables for engineering: I got to college a year or so after slide rules were dropped from the curriculum. The crusty old engineering profs were insistant that we have good scientific calculators, and that we know how to use them quickly and effectively. They also told tales about a hangar full of computers at Boeing during WWII: many hundreds of women who spent their shifts doing additions on hand-cranked adding machines.
In Shakespeare's day, nobody worried about English spelling in large part because serious people wrote serious things in Latin, where the spelling was thoroughly standardized. Because Latin was the language of the educated, nobody had bothered to standardize the spelling of the vernacular.
Since that time, English spelling has been standardized, and very few of us have reliance on Latin as an excuse today. English spelling isn't difficult: it follows two sets of simple rules. We have a set of rules for the words adopted from Latin (about half the language) and another set for the words derived from Anglo-Saxon. Foreign borrowings generally retain their foreign spellings. See my English spelling page for some pointers to resources for learning how simple it really is.
Those worried over form, miss content.
Those who don't worry over form obscure their content, and ensure that it will be missed or misconstrued. It's just plain rude to deliberately or carelessly use bad grammar and orthography: it shows contempt for your ideas and for your audience.
The Greek and Roman roots of Western Civ are only about 2500 to 3000 years old. As I recall, the Hebrew roots are close to 5000 years old. That's far enough back that claims of longer duration are specious.
When the Europeans were still crucifying Jesus, the Indians had already invented existentialism.
I'm not sure that they ever got beyond it. That's what I was pointing out, above: that Western Civ has had a unique, long-running, free-ranging discussion on all that jazz. I call it unique in large part because it has come up with unique, and uniquely valuable, contributions. It represents multiple streams of thoughts over many centuries.
But to understand and confront Western culture today, Michel Foucault and Fredric Jameson and Paul Goodman and Jacques Derrida and Hayden White are infinitely more useful than Plutarch ...
In so far as they are restating the old truths in a comfortable modern format, they're just fine. I'd suggest that C.S. Lewis has probably done a better job of that than any of your examples.
And no, I don't think Eurocentrism is wise at all.
If you go read what I wrote, you'll see that I pointed out that the great books lists are starting points. When I said that Eurocentrism is wise, I meant (and I thought I was saying quite clearly) that it's the only useful starting point for a Westerner. You don't stop with the great books, you start there. Then, when you have a firm grounding in your own culture, you go on. My Indian friends have a very different great books list, I'm sure, and different classical languages to study.
Most of the goods in your home are made thousands of miles away by people from an entirely different culture.
Is that at all relevant to the discussion?
I don't say "postmodernity" because I am a postmodernist. Postmodernity is where we live.
Where do you live? And what do you mean by "postmodernity"? If you mean that the fundamental underpinnings of our culture are significantly different than they were 200 years ago, you must live in some other country than the U.S. As an empirical confirmation of that, consider the 2004 U.S. general election. The winning candidates were careful to present themselves as cultural traditionalists.
Ok, you're a PC postmodern relativist.
I've read:
The Lady Murasaki - The Tale of Genji
Omar Khayyaam - Rubaiyat
The 1001 Nights.
I agree that they're worthwhile. I would like to read
Moses Maimonides - Guide for the Perplexed.
The reason that these great book lists are Eurocentric is that the Western cultures are ours. A Chinese who hasn't read some Confucious would be strangely lacking: he simply wouldn't have the background to understand the fundamentals of his own culture. I like your suggestions for further reading, but I think that any Westerner would be foolish to try to understand other cultures before he has understood his own. Reading Confucious before reading the Greek and Christian authors will make a Westerner a bad copy of a Chinese, with a false idea of the meaning and worth of both cultures. A fish needs to know water before he studies air.
Those of us in the Western cultures need to know who Plutarch wrote about, and what he said about them, what Socrates and Plato and Aristotle had to say, who and what Peter and Paul and Luke and John wote about, and how that man they wrote about was fundamentally different in outlook than the Greeks and the Hebrews, and on and on. We need to know some Shakespeare and Conrad and Chaucer and Aquinas and Cervantes and Dante and Thucydides and Bunyan and Tacitus and what-have-you.
Western civilization is deep and complicated, and it has an intellectual history that no other culture really parallels. What Mortimer Adler called ``the great conversation'' is a more than 2000 year-long discussion on men and gods and God, what those others should expect from us and we from them, and on the nature of reality. Other cultures have stated opinions on all of these things, of course, but so far as I know, only our literature and our culture has explored the range of ideas and opinions in the sort of depth and over the number of centuries that ours has. For example, the idea that the individual has intrinsic value, that it's not acceptable to slaughter your enemies or your peasants or even the savage tribesmen on the next continent, even if they're useless to you, is a uniquely Western idea, barely 2000 years old. The idea that slavery is intrinsically wrong is another example of this uniqueness. Slavery exists today only where Western culture hasn't yet reached.
The great books lists are intended to let Westerners get a good grounding in our own culture, and our culture is so enormously rich and varied that that's not a small project. The lists just try to give folks a starting place: you don't stop with the great books, you start with them. So, for all the reasons I've mentioned, Eurocentricism is both wise and unavoidable.
On the contrary, NT's licensing and reliability keep your downtime up and your uptime down! It's just what you need to keep productivity under control. It makes your decision to outsource everything look better, because it makes your employees look worse.
Yes, that's right.
Given this position, isn't there standing for a contributor to actually litigate the validity of the GPL? You've got a company that has disclaimed the GPL, but still uses the software.
I'm not sure that's grounds for litigation. Whatever SCO may say, as long as what they do complies with the GPL (i.e., offer source, et cetera), I suspect that there are no grounds for a copyright infringement suit. Merely expressing an unfavorable opinion of the GPL doesn't violate its terms. If I'm wrong, maybe a lawyer could explain why?
And of course, the PR spin on this being "consistent" is hillarious.
The FSF, and the rest of the world, agree that if the GPL is invalid, then we revert to the standard ``copyright, all rights reserved, no distribution'' situation. SCO's implicit position that if the GPL is invalid, then the program in question goes to the ``no copyright, in the public domain'' situation[1].
There are only two things that SCO has approached consistancy on: their deliberate misunderstanding of the GPL, and the essential stupidity of all their contradictory positions.
In SCO's dream world, when the GPL is found to be invalid, Linux (and probably everything else) is theirs. In their hallucinations, there is nothing inconsistant in distributing GPLed programs while rejecting the GPL.
[1] How offering additional rights beyond those allowed by copyright could negate the author's copyright is left as an exercise for the reader, since SCO has never shared that particular part of their hallucinations with us.
The weakness in the system comes from the fact that you can work in one state, and file for UI benefits in another. I don't work in the tax department, so I'm not sure to what extent the states communicate. Still, I believe that you have to document your elegibility even if you file out of state, and that suggests that the state in which you file must contact the state in which you claim you worked. Again, we have the chance to compare the SSN to the UI wage records.
I'd guess that you have to file out-of-state, and probably only get a few checks (four checks ==> 8 weeks, and so on) before the claim is disallowed. You're vulnerable in cashing the checks, so you'd probably want to sell them to some smaller, less risk-averse criminal. I'd guess that 100 SSNs would net you a lot less than $1M, and an expected jail time of far more than 26 weeks.
I'm sure this happens, and I'd bet that the states aren't worried about it because they're already dealing with it just fine, and the problem is firmly under control.
So, you're suggesting that we replace one obviously insecure numbering system (the SSN) with another (the national ID)? How would this differ from putting your picture on your Social Security card?
Or are you proposing something else which is more than a numbering system? If so, let's hear some details.
So, why upgrade now?
Well, if you're buying a new machine every year or so anyway, you don't care that these are the last of the Powermacs, and that you will soon be stuck with an orphan.
If you aren't buying a new, top of the line Mac every year or so, just because, then you've got good reason to wait a year or so, while they shake the bugs out of the new offerings.
Apple probably figured out that the early announcement was only going to hurt discretionary, low-end sales for the next six months (if that), and decided they could live with the hit.
Look at the NSA, CIA, random military bases. You're liable to be shot on sight if you sneak into them,...
So who ultimately decides the cutoff as to what we as taxpayers can see and what we can't?
How about using: ``If they can't justify shooting you on sight if you sneak in, they can't justify keeping the information you paid for secret.'' as our criterion?
In this situation they made the proper choice, but I can't trust our judicial system in light of the 'other' rulings they've made.
Me, too.
This sort of wisdom does seem out of character for the courts in general. Not all judges are stupid, crooked, vicious scum, but that's the way to bet. Maybe this fellow is a principled exception to the general rule. Maybe he was just too stoned, and gave the wrong instructions to the clerk who wrote the ruling.
Oops, I misspelled ``another'' as ``this''.
See Tigerline and GRASS for examples of data and software, respectively.
Well said, and painfully, obviously true.
Some of the earliest posts on this story were making fun of Dvorak for stating the obvious. I think that the post you were replying to shows that stating the obvious can be a great service.
Translation: ``We've come up with some fiction which will let us maintain plausible deniability next time we lose data we shouldn't have had in the first place.''
As for the sensitive data, he added, "We no longer store it on files."
Translation: ``We're going to come up with some nifty new word to replace the word `file', so we can truthfully say that we no longer have your data in our files.''
More seriously, it makes good sense to me that they were retaining data for research purposes. They'd be irresponsible not to, just as surely as they were irresponsible not to have an air gap between that data and the internet.
So, you've spent over 3 months looking for someone who knows everything you need. Presumably, you've had someone doing the work during this time, right? Or is your entire project on hold?
If you have someone who can keep things going, why don't you hire some fresh CS grad or maybe an experienced systems administrator today, and make him be the apprentice configuration manager? He can learn from the guy who's keeping things going, and I suspect that he'll be up to speed and fully productive long before you find your Prince Charming.
Since you're hiring him as apprentice, you can reasonably start him at a modest salary, with the promise that if he makes the milestones you set, he'll be getting the full salary for the job soon.
Where are the qualified people these days?
Waiting for you to hire them and train them up. There's a good chance you have the right guy for that job working for you right now, if you weren't so fixated on ``no training''.
I've got a few questions:
- What sort of hours might a person with that sort of experience think you would expect him to work?
- What sort of money does ``Attractive salary plan'' add up to in Dallas?
- What sort of money could a person who is technically competent and a ``motivated individual who is a self starter and can work well under little supervision
... a strong communicator, both written and oral'' make if he worked those hours in some non-programming position, or started his own business?
I bet you can see where this is going: I suspect that there are plenty of qualified people, but they've already got better gigs, which give them fewer hours, more money, better working conditions, or maybe even all three. In short, somebody who could make a good living doing your job could probably make a better living doing something else.That's no reflection on you or your ad; it just means that development is becoming a low-end, low-value job. The skills it takes can get a better reward elsewhere.
That's true, but we were talking about Mainland China. If that's a legitimate government, then so is Mugabe's, and so was Phol Pot's.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that just because a government is recognised by other governments, it's a legitimate government in a civilised country. Today, the only member of the international diplomatic community which stands up and says that Mugabe is an insane, evil dictator is Mugabe himself. What a pity that no one's listening.
Like it or not, the PRC is a legitimate nation-state.
No, it's not legitimate. China is a nation, or a state, in the same sense that California or Papua New Guinea are. Unlike California or Papua New Guinea, there is no legitimate government there, just a bunch of brutal, murderous, uncivilised thugs.
Have you seen their wives?
So, what article did you read? Right ... this is Slashdot, you didn't read no steenk'n article.
The summary says that Utah ISPs must offer to customers a way to prevent access to a list of websites provided by the state AG. That has nobody censoring anything, except for a few, foolish parents, who imagine that this will let them leave little Johnnie alone with his computer.
No one has to take the ISPs up on this offer, no one will ever know whether you take the ISP up on this offer, and there is no reason to think that getting on the Utah AG's list would hurt your viewership from Utah (there may be reason to think that being on it will help you get clicks from elsewhere, but that's another story).
From the ACLU's press release
So: tell the world whether your published material is kiddie-safe or not, the State AG makes a list of who's not kiddie-safe, you can't do online what you can't do offline. Of all of these, only the first might be argued to put any sort of new burden on anyone.
Even by the ACLU's ill-conceived standards, this suit sounds like a foolish exercise in barratry. Looking at the list of plantiffs, it doesn't look like the little guy that the ACLU used to claim to protect. Again, from the ACLU press release:
The Association of American Publishers; the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund; the Freedom to Read Foundation; and the Publishers Marketing Association? The ACLU seems to have gotten in bed with the big dogs on this one.I'm sure that most Utah publishers will deal with this by declaring that no part of their websites are kiddie safe, and so anyone who's silly enough to use the ISP's method to block the AG's list will miss out on their local homeschool support group, their neighbor's kids homework site, and probably a whole raft of credit-card-required porn sites. So what?
In the version I'm reading, that ends with ``... on these - the two commands - all the law and the prophets do hang.'' The ``two commands'' are love God and love your neighbor. The part about ``all the law and the prophets do hang'' means that those two commands are the essense of the entire old Testament.
All that crap about what's clean or unclean, cooking kids or charging interest, really doesn't matter in comparison to whether you love God and your neighbor.
So, given all that, why did I say we should all be following the ten commandments? The ten commandments are practical advice about practical expressions of that love. Why a stricter version? It's not enough to merely ``not kill'': if we love our neighbors, we won't even wish they were dead. You can follow the letter of the ten commandments perfectly, and still fall far short of following their spirit.
Other than a brazen publicity stunt, what does this do? It certainly tells us those particular environmental activists are nutcases, but what does it tell us about nanotechnology?
The strip show aimed to expose more than skin: Activists hoped to lay bare growing allegations of the toxic dangers of nanotechnology.
Again, how does laying bare their skin lay bare the dangers of anything else? This will fuel stereotypes which portray all Greenies as wacked-out wienies, but what does it tell us about nanotechnology?
I suppose that they hope their arrests will lead to press interviews, but those can only lead to soundbites, and folks who are swayed by that sort of crap are going to sway the other way tomorrow.
Don't blindly take what it gives you. A classmate tried using a TI92 in an intro to real analysis class, and got a rude surprise when some of it's results were wrong. Don't recall the details, but it had something to do with inequalities, I think.
Not sure about the html stuff, but I'm reliably informed that's true for the calculator and spell checking stuff.
Learn it first, get the electronic aid afterwards.
That way, the installer could query the OS about each dependency, and provide it from it's own package if the OS didn't have it on tap. I suppose that you should also give the installer the option to tell the OS what it provides, so that the OS could offer it to other programs. Obviously, if your libraries are proprietary, your installer wouldn't make that offer!
This system could work for proprietary packagers, too: they could write their own installers, load them with stupid safeguards and copy protections and generally make them as close to unusable as they wished. Libre programs would offer all the libraries on which they depended.
Libre or proprietary, this system would give everyone the portability of static compilation and the RAM footprint of dynamic. To keep from cluttering your hard disk with multiple copies of far too many libraries (maybe the distribution core should require everything and provide nothing?), let the installer remove anything which the OS demonstrates it can provide. That is, if you get link errors using what the OS provides, use your own version. If you don't get link errors, remove your own version from the disk. When you're done installing, perhaps remove the linker and installation logic, and so on.
I'd think that a system which wanted to use this wouldn't have to give the installer much. It would have to provide a clearly defined, specified-with-upwards-compatibility-in-mind way to query and inform about what it requires and provides. The installer would have to include a linker (For Libre software, it could simply include the necessary parts of GCC) and a bit of logic to run it. Maybe the OS should be able to recognise such an installer and initiate the queries? That might allow some sort of auto-installation.