Every syllable starts at some pitch A and ends at a pitch B, monotonously increasing or decreasing the pitch along the way. Only the intervall between A nd B counts.
That's OK except for the monotonic part. It goes like this:
First tone: B=A
Second tone: B>A
Third tone: your tone falls from A, but then rises so that B>A
Fourth tone: B<A.
All this A and B stuff is confusing. Second tone sounds like a question, third tone sounds like a drawled question, and fourth tone sounds as if you're angry. If you always spoke in the first tone, folks would think that your voice was a tiny bit higher than it is.
Believe me, native speakers have no difficulty conveying emotion by the tone of their voices.
There's no reason to unreasonably subject a company to liability or additional liability regarding a clear risk. We simply don't know the risks associated with SCO's copyright registration. I, for one, will not allow my company to go blindly ahead.
Then I shall sue you for not using Linux, because that action damages me in a manner to be specified later.
ANYONE can sue you for ANYTHING. Or, for no reason at all (Yes, I do know about barratry. THat doesn't seem to be a showstopper for baseless litigation, nowadays.). You should never let the possibility that someone might sue you stop you from doing what's right. Stick to worrying about real problems, and don't let a paid shill's imagination lead you astray.
Right now, SCO has sued IBM over a contract dispute. That suggests that you should NOT enter into a contract with SCO. They haven't won that, nor shown any sign that they could win, IF they let it go to court. They've sent out some extortion letters, but again, there is no sign that there is any substance to those letters. Their ``licensing'' scheme is pretty plainly patterned after the false invoice scams: send out thousands of bills for services not rendered, and hope a few suckers pay.
Microsoft has promised to indemnify it customers for this sort of patent/copyright problem, but with their patent problems, that could be an empty promise. We all know about their $50B cash horde, but if Intertrust wins, $50B might not go far enough. It appears that Intertrust will pretty much be able to ask MS for a blank check, and get it, when they win. MS wouldn't have made such a promise unless they figured it wouldn't cost them anything. I'm sure they realized that if they lose this one it's all over anyway, so the indemnification looks like cheap talk to me. So far, it looks as if they can only win by buying the judge, but that won't be as easy as it was when they were up against the DOJ.
The *BDS's claim to be safe, but I seem to remember SCO saying that they weren't immune.
Sun seems to be in the clear this week, but who knows about next week? SCO keeps changing their story, like a four-year-old trying to tell a lie.
When it comes to lawsuits, there is no safe harbor in the US. As you say, even if you're right, it costs too much to defend yourself. No one will ever recover a penny from SCO; they'll be bankrupt when the dust settles, and so will you, if you let them stampede you into doing something stupid like using proprietary software when your competitors are using superior, libre software.
... start an audit of the kernel. If SCO won't say which code is infringing, then the auditors can certify which code is *not* infringing.
What a plan! Do you suppose that SCO will give the auditors a copy of their source tree so the auditors can check that nothing is too close? Maybe not, eh?
That's the problem with looking for proprietary code: only the proprietor could recognize it. We CAN'T. We publish our code, so the proprietors have the option to review our code, looking for problems. Thus, the kernel maintainers would be fools to ever think that they could get away with copyright violations. If any proprietary code makes it past Torvalds, Cox, et al, we can reasonably assume that it was a deliberate ``attack'' by someone (not necessarily the proprietor).
In the end, an audit like this would be an insurance policy against any further attacks on Linux's integrity.
We couldn't look for improperly copied code, but we could look for a chain of attribution, so that we can say we know where every line comes from. I don't know, but I suspect that the information exists to do that, if someone wanted to muck through the kernel CVS records.
If bad things (like patent litigation) must happen, better that they happen to bad people.
I'm against most modern uses of patents, and generally against the idea of making property out of ideas, but if it's going to happen, and someone's going to get screwed by it, well, this could almost make it worth while.
Still, if I got to choose between (a) a sane papent and legal system and (b) a ssytem which gouges Microsoft the way they deserve, I think I'd take (a). I think option (a) would include (b).
The J. M. Davis firearms museum, in Claremore, Oklahoma.
I remember going there when I was about 10, and if I ever get back to Oklahoma, I'm stopping there. Well worth a long drive, if you're interested in guns, old guns, really old guns, knives, swords, Damascus swords, Oklahoma history, Oklahoma Indians, and so on. It is a private museum, so doesn't have the breadth or trendiness of the Smithsonian, but if you're interested in what they have on hand, those are big advantages.
Also, where ever you go in the middle of the country, try to stop in small university towns. You'll find cheap food, cheap beer, good libraries, good coffee, specialty stores with real Chinese and Indian foods, which carry brands from Taiwan and India, concerts (classical, jazz, modern noise) and generally everything which makes life good. You'll also find a lot of corn fed idiots who are drinking their way to a degree and a good job, but they're largely harmless.
Rich people will save it. Middle class people will use it to pay down debt. Poor people use it instead of building up debt.
And that is exactly why, and how, it works.
Rich people will save it. Saving becomes investment, as soon as our current overcapacity problem works itself out. [2]
Middle class people will use it to pay down debt. Poor people use it instead of building up debt. Less debt means more consumer spending, which helps work out that over-capacity problem.
Also, you said, wrongly:
You don't get more back than you pay into the system,...
Middle class people get a bit over squat (or a bit more than that if they have kids),...
I'm middle-class, have kids, and got roughly $3000 more in refunds than had been withheld from my paycheck last year.
Last time I looked, the richest 5% of the taxpayers paid 50% of the taxes. The poorest 50% of the taxpayers paid less than 5% of the taxes [1]. So, if you want to cut taxes more than 5%, some of that tax break is going to have to go to folks with above-average incomes.
[1] Those figures are from memory, and could be off a bit. Even if the numbers are off, the conclusion is qualitatively true.
[2] We just finished a huge boom, so we have LOTS of over-capacity. It'll be a few years before we have much inflationary pressure. I predict that we'll see low interest rates, little change in unemployment numbers or wages, and steady growth in company profits for the next 2+ years. Buy stocks.
Why shouldn't the internet... be for both information AND television?
If you could do the TV without screwing up the rest, it would be peachy. I'm not sure that's possible, but I'd surely love to be proven wrong.
... the markup language we call "HTML"... is best suited for information-rich text documents such as academic papers...
I guess the logical question here would be something along the line of: ``If a page ISN'T information-rich, why would I go to the trouble of searching for it?''
I know that a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes the information I'm looking for is a graphic. But what the grandparent post was complaining about is that most websites are information-poor, and try to use graphics to hide the fact. What he was getting at, and I'm seconding, is that most uses of pictures on the web are counter-productive. At best, they impede my access to the information I'm looking for.
When I want entertainment, I get a book, or go outside and play. When I want to learn something, I google for recent papers. TV just isn't in the picture.
... you can lose everything to a margin call even if you bet right, and the price goes to zero. All the price has to do is rise a bit in the interim...
Sell it short, and buy an out-of-the-money call to limit your risk. If SCOX calls are cheap enough, that could be a profitable trade if something big happens quickly. Wow; that's a lot of ``ifs''. Maybe I'll pass.
Re:Sun Doesn't appeal to me
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Sun's Last Stand
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Sure it's more difficult (if you don't want to pay $20), but certainly possible even for the poorest college students
This is where Sun is screwing itself over. Sun is a hardware company, and they make their money selling hardware, and support for that hardware. Their business model seems to be based on selling proprietary hardware which costs a lot, and is worth a lot. They need, among other things, scads of college students who are familiar with their OS and willing to recommend it over things like Linux and *BSD.
Sun is charging $20 for the x86 Cd for Solaris 9. This is the option for the poor college student, who definitely WON'T have a Sun workstation in his dorm room, unless it's an ancient sparcstation from the campus surplus (probably with Linux on it!). The problem is that for a poor college student, $20 for Solaris 9 is non-trivial. If you know you want to learn Solaris, you can easily do it. If you aren't sure, you surely aren't going to try it.
By trying to get a few bucks from selling CD's, they are completely ceding the ``recent college grads push our stuff'' effect to Linux and the *BSDs. Talk about being stupidly shortsighted! If a company puts in a Linux server, they can be reasonably sure that any computer-savvy recent graduate can assist a competent administrator. If they put in a Solaris server, not only do they pay more for the hardware, but they will have a much harder time finding cheap labor who are semi-capable of administering it.
I use MSOffice at work, and have OO1.1beta2 at home. When I want to look at something from work at home, OO handles it just fine. I'm sure that you could find something that doesn't work, but I haven't.
It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke,...
< joke>Sounds as if OO is ready for business use. It's got MSOffice's essential characteristics.</joke>
When you say ``...It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke... '' do you mean: ``It's different from MSOffice.''? If your mission in life is to run MSOffice, then you will be happiest running Windows and MSOffice. If your mission is to work with data, and produce structured documents, you shouldn't be using an office suite at all.
This depends very much upon your jurisdiction.
At least in my part of the United States (and I think this actually is a state law, not a federal law),...
This is a question that someone needs to talk to a lawyer about. There are Federal laws, state laws, and then there are Federal laws that all the states must implement if they want to get that money from Washington.
... if you're a "bona fide professional" -- a vague description, but most IT people would be included -- and paid on a salary basis instead of a per-hour basis, they're not required to pay you for overtime.
This would certainly be wrong in Alaska. In Alaska, a ``bona fide professional'' is someone who holds a professional license, including without limitation lawyers, licensed professional engineers and physicians. I believe that merchant marine officers are NOT in that category, even though they hold professional licenses, though I could be wrong. CERTAINLY IT people would NOT be included.
In Alaska, management people can be salaried.I don't know how far down the chain this runs, but it's not very far. Corporate officers, definitely. Shop foremen, definitely not. You can't call your grunts managers and get out of paying overtime.
This sort of thing comes up occasionally here: companies try to get out of paying overtime by calling their employees ``salaried'' or ``management''. They lose, and pay fines.
Here's a free clue: talk to your state labor relations board. They can't give you legal advice, but they can read the law to you, and tell you how to file a complaint. There's a good chance they will investigate your company and shake things up a bit, in your favor.
If Iraq was not a threat to the US, who gave the US authority to decide unilaterally which people should be "liberated" at the expense of the "liberated people"?
No one needs to ``give the US authority''. No one HAS that authority to give. We took it on our selves, quite properly.
What moral or legal authority does the US have to decide if a goverment in a sovereign country should stay or go?
Unless you believe in a Supreme Being, there can be no such moral or legal authority. Bush quite clearly believes that God wants him to do what's right, and this clearly was right.
The US has no mandate to liberate anybody,...
To the contrary, to be able to liberate anyone and fail to do so is unconscionable.
... the only justification to attack another country is if yours is under genuine threat or if the UN decides that invasion is the only way to stop genocide.
You were starting to make sense, in a wrong-headed way, until you got to the UN part. Your points seem to be first that the UN, that collection of the scum of the earth, is somehow imbued with the moral authority that God apparently lacks in your eyes. The second point I got from this is that mass murder is ok, as long as you leave a few fish swimming in the gene pool so that it isn't genocide. Ridiculous crap.
Noone is going to come and write my factory control and admin system for free,...
Not unless they happen to need it for THEIR factory.
... even if they can give away the source afterwards.
I'd say UNLESS it's a libre program. They wouldn't do it free-to-you if you could lock them out afterwards.
Where would I get support? Updates? Who would I complain to if it went wrong without running the risk of the OSS programmers saying 'Sod it. Can't be bothered any more.'
You would get reliable, affordable support where you always find it: from well paid contractors who have the ability to deliver what you need. Some kid who wrote your system might say ``Sod it. Can't be bothered any more.'' (if he were British!), whether he'd written you a libre or a proprietary system. If the system is proprietary, you're screwed. If libre, you should be able to find another, more reliable contractor.
Here's a thought: supplying software to your business is probably a tiny niche in the software industry. There is a good chance that someday, your supplier will be bought out by a competitor, who will stop supporting your software the day the support contract runs out. You can buy their new program. And the new kit which is the only thing in the world which will run that program. Or, you can shut down for good next time there's a problem that a reboot won't fix, because they won't let anyone do support on their old code.
This is essentially what proprietary software is all about: the ability to gouge you right down to the bone. You can trust the proprietor to take you for every penny, right up to the point that it would be cheaper to buy a new factory, with software from some new supplier, who will start the cycle all over again. If the proprietor DOESN'T do that, his stockholders will quite rightly toss him out on his ear.
If you are lucky enough to get some libre process control software developed for your process, hire that developer! Go in with some of your competitors who use the same machinery and make it happen if you can.
Every year for 23 years, Tolkien wrote his children a letter from Father Christmas, from the late 20's into the 40's. The great depression and WWII get mentioned in passing, but Father Christmas always triumphs.
This one is good for reading to children, with wonderful pictures by Tolkien. For older children, you can sprinkle in a bit of history by telling why Father Christmas had such trouble delivering toys in 1932, and so on. For the Tolkien fancier, the book gives some insight into the author's mind. For example, my edition has samples of the ``elvish writing'' which Father Christmas sent to the children.
Re:Well, what's good for the goose...
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Copyright Defeats?
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· Score: 1
We're at the point where an average, individual person *cannot* do the amount of work required to protect his or her freedoms, without incurring significant hardship.
True. Jefferson said that the roots of the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots every 20 years. He might tell you that's a good thing; that incurring significant hardship to protect freedom is important. I'm not sure whether I'd agree.
I think that the fact that we can all agree that there is a problem is a hopeful sign. There are cultures in which the response would be: ``Justice is for the rich, the sky is up, your point is what?''. No hope for change there.
I find your theory that gravediggers ought to work for free to be intriguing.
That's a good one. Actually, if you took what I said literally, it would call for them to be compensated.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Wow! I should have thought of that one before!
Okay, let's qualify the principle. "If work provides benefit, the executor of the work deserves to be compensated."
I think there's some sense in that. When we talk about digging holes, it's plain that some work just shouldn't be compensated. When we talk about ``art'', it isn't so plain.
Any way to link benefit to compensation which doesn't involve artificially creating scarcity FOR THINGS WHICH HAVE ALREADY BEEN CREATED sounds ok to me. How about works for hire, rich patrons, and so on? It worked for thousands of years, and produced some real schlock and all the great sculptures and paintings the world reveres today.
Shakespear wrote his plays for two purposes: to be performed for profit (real, not artificial scarcity: there were a limited number of folks who could view a performance), and to please rich potential patrons, who might fund him to write sonnets, flattery, usw. It didn't seem to keep him from producing some fine literature.
I like those principles, except
on
Copyright Defeats?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I like those principles, except for the second
Creators deserve to be compensated.
I just dug a very deep hole, and filled it in again, neatly. I worked very hard. I deserve to be compensated.
As an absolute principle, ``Creators deserve to be compensated.'' is flawed. The rule is ``Arbeit macht mudes'', not ``Abeit macht Geld''.
Re:Well, what's good for the goose...
on
Copyright Defeats?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm thinking that the MPAA is infringing on my copyrights on their web site.
The reason that the MPAA can get away with jerking you around that way is that you can't afford to hire a stable of lawyers to stand up for your rights.
They can.
It's an amusing idea, but if you were to make a frivolous complaint, I'm sure that they'd sue you for damages. We all know how good they are at making up numbers.
When they frivolously damage YOU, of course, you could retain a lawfirm to recover damages. Unfortunately, your actual, recoverable, cash damages will probably be less than the first hour of consultation with the mouthpiece. You probably will prevail. Unfortunately, it will probably cost you tens of thousands to get there. At best, you'll get your legal costs and your $1.98 in damages. At worst, you'll wind up paying their legal fees, and defending a countersuit.
Strangely enough, the MPAA doesn't seem worried about any harm they might do to you.
Whatcha gonna say when several million Americans who have worked hard their entire lives suddenly can't collect the Social Security benefits they've been paying for their entire working lives?
I suppose that the really sad part is that most of those people, some of whom did actually ``worked hard their entire lives'', could have saved up enough to be secure in their old age, IF they hadn't been saddled with paying for FDR's nasty little Ponzi scheme all these years.
What's that? Oh, you wanted a solution? Well, we'll have to choose between collecting enough taxes to keep them on welfare, as they did for their parents, and letting them eat catfood. When the baby boomers were supporting their parents, there were a LOT of boomers, and few retired parents. Soon, there will be scads of retired boomers, and few young workers. THAT's why the Ponzi scheme is crashing, as they all eventually must. The catfood option may be forced upon us: we may not be able to do any better. There's a bit of poetic justice in that: it was the boomer's socialist leanings [1] that kept our economy from growing the way it could have with a bit more economic freedom.
... W/ the gov raiseing taxes and spending your money it produces over a dollar and a half growth for ever dollar put in.
If it were really this easy, Soviet Russia would be the richest country on Earth, followed closely by Mainland China. What do you suppose is wrong with your logic?
How about the fact that when YOU spend your money it has at least the same effect, in the short run? How about the fact that when you spend your money wisely, it has a far greater effect in the long run? How about the fact that diverting the economy from the private to the public sector reduces growth (that's how India wound up with its amazing growth rate)?
I think your post proves that we need to raise taxes so we can afford better education...
Unfortunately, throwing more money at education is like throwing heroine at a junkie: it will stop the jonesing, for a while, but it won't cure the problem. We can already afford better education; after all, it's cheaper than the bad kind.
FOr better education, all we need is for parents to get involved, to set high standards for their children and children's schools, and then insist that children and schools live up to those high standards. Parental involvement is the single most important factor, and higher taxes won't help that at all.
In fact, high property taxes to support the NEA and the rest of the public school aparatchiks are part of the reason that we have such low parental involvement: often, both parents must work to support the schools and all the rest of government, leaving little time for bake sales, children, education, and such trivia.
What children really need is one parent at home when they are. One parent at home who has time to sit them down, and find out what they learned in schoold today, and either praise them for that, or raise hell with the school because the kid got by without learning something that day. One parent at home who can do some tutoring when the kid needs it, or straighten him out when he's been causing trouble for the teacher.
What children typcially get is one or two parents who see them just enough to know whether they're still alive, and are too busy and too tired to deal with their problems. In the minds of most parents, school is the school's responsibility, and they resent having to be aware of it, except maybe around prom time.
Why is it that the G8 country with the most guns has the least freedom?
Subjects of the other G8 countries shouldn't talk about freedom; they obviously don't know what it is.
Germans can go to jail for being Nazis. Americans are free to declare themselves filthy swine, as long as they don't endanger the lives and property of others.
The French are forbidden to own or sell Nazi memorabilia, if we can judge by the recent squabbles about ebay auctions. Americans are free to keep, or to sell, the trophies they took from the nasties. I wonder if the French don't like to be reminded, today, that they once were brave.
The few gun laws we have are racist hangovers from another era, when the elites didn't want the Irish and the Negros to have guns. We're working on fixing those problems, and things are getting better, both in terms of racism and gun laws.
Americans are, generally, mature adults. They can, generally, be trusted to walk about the streets with weapons. <sarcasm> This is plainly true of NONE of the subjects of the other G8 countries. The fact that the ownership of weapons is so restricted as to be essentially illegal there tells us that those people must be so immature that they cannot be trusted with weapons, anymore than could a kindergartener (a five-year-old). Why else would there be a perceived need for such laws? Surely not because they aren't free? </sarcasm>
No tyrant has ever been able to oppress his countrymen while they were armed. It has always been necessary to disarm the people before they could be slaughtered. The lesson here is not that Americans will rise up and shoot their leaders: the lesson is that no leader will dare push too far while that's possible. SOME leader eventually WILL dare, once we are disarmed.
Freedom isn't keeping the central planning out of sight. Freedom isn't being able to screw yourself up with drugs. Freedom requires responsibility. You aren't free unless you can choose to do right, or wrong. You can't stay free unless you consistantly choose the right. Can't stay free first because you'll soon be killed or put away by the people whose lives you're ruining, second because if too many people start consistantly choosing the wrong, nobody can have the choice or the society fails completely.
The Dutch and Canadians can smoke pot without risking years in prison.
I suspect that one reason that the Dutch and the Canadians have been so casual about pot is that citizen involvement is not traditionally a necessary part of their government. Here, our representative republic requires educated, able, responsible citizens. That explains the drug laws here: if they worked, the republic would work better.
The fact that we have such laws that don't work shows that our republic NEEDS to work better. It's a social problem, and the solution is a social solution.
The fact that the Dutch and Canadians haven't tried a governmental solution to a societal problem might indicate superior wisdom, or might indicate governmental contempt for the society. It's hard to tell which from a distance, but Canada's decision might have at least a bit of wisdom mixed in.
We don't have nearly the freedom here in the US that we once did, as recently as 50 years ago. In fact, we're getting nearly as bad as Europe. We'll be in the same foul situation as you European folks in 50 years if we don't straighten out our society. Until then, don't make fools of yourselves by trying to explain to us about freedom. You all sound like Helen Keller trying to explain the light show at the concert.
"Warmth" may not be quantifiable (yet),... we may very well find out what exactly is responsible for it.
I suspect that we will find that ``warmth'' translates to something like: ``That sounds like the crappy, distorting, thermally-noisy tube stereo I paid six months income for back in 1955.''
44KHz is not enough to go up to even 22KHz (and humans can hear that rather well)...
I'm sure that some humans can. Back when I was fixing monitors, I was popular with the secretaries because I was the only male who could hear up to about 20kc. When they said that their monitor was squealing at them (vibration in the flyback transformer; squeeze some RTV silicon between the laminations), I could often hear it, faintly. Some women and a few men will be able to hear above 20kc. I doubt that having music run significantly higher than 21kc will be an audible and meaningful difference to one in a million.
16 bits is not nearly enough for a wide dynamic range.
Well, those 16 bit CD's already run from so quiet I can't hear it in a quiet room to much louder than I want to hear. That'll do for a lot of us.
Unlike records, you can't extract any "extra" quality from the CD. It's digitized, and you can't get what's not already on the disc.
That sounds a little odd. You're saying that with appropriate signal processing, you can make the record ``sound better'' than the vibrations encoded there? Why can't you similarly massage the digitized data? What is on the vinyl which isn't on the CD?
That's why audiophiles prefer LPs -- that's currently the only way to get better-than-CD sound.
I'm afraid that this will sound rude, but I can't think of a better way to say it: this sounds like audio voodoo. It sounds like ``LP is better than CD because it has all the old, familiar bugger-ups left in.''
Finally, please listen to a truly good-quality audio system...
I had an electrical engineer friend who was an audiophile, and had a special listening area with very high end equipment. It sounded like a trashy dorm room system to me. His ears may have been better than mine, but when we listened to the output of a signal generator, I could hear higher notes at lower amplitude than he could. That suggests to me that ``psychoacoustics'' may have a strong component of snobbery.
Slashdot Mirror
That's OK except for the monotonic part. It goes like this:
First tone: B=A
Second tone: B>A
Third tone: your tone falls from A, but then rises so that B>A
Fourth tone: B<A.
All this A and B stuff is confusing. Second tone sounds like a question, third tone sounds like a drawled question, and fourth tone sounds as if you're angry. If you always spoke in the first tone, folks would think that your voice was a tiny bit higher than it is.
Believe me, native speakers have no difficulty conveying emotion by the tone of their voices.
Then I shall sue you for not using Linux, because that action damages me in a manner to be specified later.
ANYONE can sue you for ANYTHING. Or, for no reason at all (Yes, I do know about barratry. THat doesn't seem to be a showstopper for baseless litigation, nowadays.). You should never let the possibility that someone might sue you stop you from doing what's right. Stick to worrying about real problems, and don't let a paid shill's imagination lead you astray.
Right now, SCO has sued IBM over a contract dispute. That suggests that you should NOT enter into a contract with SCO. They haven't won that, nor shown any sign that they could win, IF they let it go to court. They've sent out some extortion letters, but again, there is no sign that there is any substance to those letters. Their ``licensing'' scheme is pretty plainly patterned after the false invoice scams: send out thousands of bills for services not rendered, and hope a few suckers pay.
Microsoft has promised to indemnify it customers for this sort of patent/copyright problem, but with their patent problems, that could be an empty promise. We all know about their $50B cash horde, but if Intertrust wins, $50B might not go far enough. It appears that Intertrust will pretty much be able to ask MS for a blank check, and get it, when they win. MS wouldn't have made such a promise unless they figured it wouldn't cost them anything. I'm sure they realized that if they lose this one it's all over anyway, so the indemnification looks like cheap talk to me. So far, it looks as if they can only win by buying the judge, but that won't be as easy as it was when they were up against the DOJ.
The *BDS's claim to be safe, but I seem to remember SCO saying that they weren't immune.
Sun seems to be in the clear this week, but who knows about next week? SCO keeps changing their story, like a four-year-old trying to tell a lie.
When it comes to lawsuits, there is no safe harbor in the US. As you say, even if you're right, it costs too much to defend yourself. No one will ever recover a penny from SCO; they'll be bankrupt when the dust settles, and so will you, if you let them stampede you into doing something stupid like using proprietary software when your competitors are using superior, libre software.
What a plan! Do you suppose that SCO will give the auditors a copy of their source tree so the auditors can check that nothing is too close? Maybe not, eh?
That's the problem with looking for proprietary code: only the proprietor could recognize it. We CAN'T. We publish our code, so the proprietors have the option to review our code, looking for problems. Thus, the kernel maintainers would be fools to ever think that they could get away with copyright violations. If any proprietary code makes it past Torvalds, Cox, et al, we can reasonably assume that it was a deliberate ``attack'' by someone (not necessarily the proprietor).
In the end, an audit like this would be an insurance policy against any further attacks on Linux's integrity.
We couldn't look for improperly copied code, but we could look for a chain of attribution, so that we can say we know where every line comes from. I don't know, but I suspect that the information exists to do that, if someone wanted to muck through the kernel CVS records.
I'm against most modern uses of patents, and generally against the idea of making property out of ideas, but if it's going to happen, and someone's going to get screwed by it, well, this could almost make it worth while.
Still, if I got to choose between (a) a sane papent and legal system and (b) a ssytem which gouges Microsoft the way they deserve, I think I'd take (a). I think option (a) would include (b).
I remember going there when I was about 10, and if I ever get back to Oklahoma, I'm stopping there. Well worth a long drive, if you're interested in guns, old guns, really old guns, knives, swords, Damascus swords, Oklahoma history, Oklahoma Indians, and so on. It is a private museum, so doesn't have the breadth or trendiness of the Smithsonian, but if you're interested in what they have on hand, those are big advantages.
Also, where ever you go in the middle of the country, try to stop in small university towns. You'll find cheap food, cheap beer, good libraries, good coffee, specialty stores with real Chinese and Indian foods, which carry brands from Taiwan and India, concerts (classical, jazz, modern noise) and generally everything which makes life good. You'll also find a lot of corn fed idiots who are drinking their way to a degree and a good job, but they're largely harmless.
WRONG. Here's why:
Rich people will save it. Middle class people will use it to pay down debt. Poor people use it instead of building up debt.
And that is exactly why, and how, it works.
Rich people will save it.
Saving becomes investment, as soon as our current overcapacity problem works itself out. [2]
Middle class people will use it to pay down debt. Poor people use it instead of building up debt.
Less debt means more consumer spending, which helps work out that over-capacity problem.
Also, you said, wrongly:
You don't get more back than you pay into the system, ...
Middle class people get a bit over squat (or a bit more than that if they have kids), ...
I'm middle-class, have kids, and got roughly $3000 more in refunds than had been withheld from my paycheck last year.
Last time I looked, the richest 5% of the taxpayers paid 50% of the taxes. The poorest 50% of the taxpayers paid less than 5% of the taxes [1]. So, if you want to cut taxes more than 5%, some of that tax break is going to have to go to folks with above-average incomes.
[1] Those figures are from memory, and could be off a bit. Even if the numbers are off, the conclusion is qualitatively true.
[2] We just finished a huge boom, so we have LOTS of over-capacity. It'll be a few years before we have much inflationary pressure. I predict that we'll see low interest rates, little change in unemployment numbers or wages, and steady growth in company profits for the next 2+ years. Buy stocks.
If you could do the TV without screwing up the rest, it would be peachy. I'm not sure that's possible, but I'd surely love to be proven wrong.
... the markup language we call "HTML" ... is best suited for information-rich text documents such as academic papers ...
I guess the logical question here would be something along the line of: ``If a page ISN'T information-rich, why would I go to the trouble of searching for it?''
I know that a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes the information I'm looking for is a graphic. But what the grandparent post was complaining about is that most websites are information-poor, and try to use graphics to hide the fact. What he was getting at, and I'm seconding, is that most uses of pictures on the web are counter-productive. At best, they impede my access to the information I'm looking for.
When I want entertainment, I get a book, or go outside and play. When I want to learn something, I google for recent papers. TV just isn't in the picture.
Sell it short, and buy an out-of-the-money call to limit your risk. If SCOX calls are cheap enough, that could be a profitable trade if something big happens quickly. Wow; that's a lot of ``ifs''. Maybe I'll pass.
This is where Sun is screwing itself over. Sun is a hardware company, and they make their money selling hardware, and support for that hardware. Their business model seems to be based on selling proprietary hardware which costs a lot, and is worth a lot. They need, among other things, scads of college students who are familiar with their OS and willing to recommend it over things like Linux and *BSD.
Sun is charging $20 for the x86 Cd for Solaris 9. This is the option for the poor college student, who definitely WON'T have a Sun workstation in his dorm room, unless it's an ancient sparcstation from the campus surplus (probably with Linux on it!). The problem is that for a poor college student, $20 for Solaris 9 is non-trivial. If you know you want to learn Solaris, you can easily do it. If you aren't sure, you surely aren't going to try it.
By trying to get a few bucks from selling CD's, they are completely ceding the ``recent college grads push our stuff'' effect to Linux and the *BSDs. Talk about being stupidly shortsighted! If a company puts in a Linux server, they can be reasonably sure that any computer-savvy recent graduate can assist a competent administrator. If they put in a Solaris server, not only do they pay more for the hardware, but they will have a much harder time finding cheap labor who are semi-capable of administering it.
It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke, ...
< joke>Sounds as if OO is ready for business use. It's got MSOffice's essential characteristics.</joke>
When you say ``...It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke ... '' do you mean: ``It's different from MSOffice.''? If your mission in life is to run MSOffice, then you will be happiest running Windows and MSOffice. If your mission is to work with data, and produce structured documents, you shouldn't be using an office suite at all.
This is a question that someone needs to talk to a lawyer about. There are Federal laws, state laws, and then there are Federal laws that all the states must implement if they want to get that money from Washington.
This would certainly be wrong in Alaska. In Alaska, a ``bona fide professional'' is someone who holds a professional license, including without limitation lawyers, licensed professional engineers and physicians. I believe that merchant marine officers are NOT in that category, even though they hold professional licenses, though I could be wrong. CERTAINLY IT people would NOT be included.
In Alaska, management people can be salaried.I don't know how far down the chain this runs, but it's not very far. Corporate officers, definitely. Shop foremen, definitely not. You can't call your grunts managers and get out of paying overtime.
This sort of thing comes up occasionally here: companies try to get out of paying overtime by calling their employees ``salaried'' or ``management''. They lose, and pay fines.
Here's a free clue: talk to your state labor relations board. They can't give you legal advice, but they can read the law to you, and tell you how to file a complaint. There's a good chance they will investigate your company and shake things up a bit, in your favor.
For a start, most of the Microsoft execs would be in jail. Let's see ... life without Ballmer ... Yep! Clearly better off.
No one needs to ``give the US authority''. No one HAS that authority to give. We took it on our selves, quite properly.
What moral or legal authority does the US have to decide if a goverment in a sovereign country should stay or go?
Unless you believe in a Supreme Being, there can be no such moral or legal authority. Bush quite clearly believes that God wants him to do what's right, and this clearly was right.
The US has no mandate to liberate anybody, ...
To the contrary, to be able to liberate anyone and fail to do so is unconscionable.
You were starting to make sense, in a wrong-headed way, until you got to the UN part. Your points seem to be first that the UN, that collection of the scum of the earth, is somehow imbued with the moral authority that God apparently lacks in your eyes. The second point I got from this is that mass murder is ok, as long as you leave a few fish swimming in the gene pool so that it isn't genocide. Ridiculous crap.
Not unless they happen to need it for THEIR factory.
I'd say UNLESS it's a libre program. They wouldn't do it free-to-you if you could lock them out afterwards.
Where would I get support? Updates? Who would I complain to if it went wrong without running the risk of the OSS programmers saying 'Sod it. Can't be bothered any more.'
You would get reliable, affordable support where you always find it: from well paid contractors who have the ability to deliver what you need. Some kid who wrote your system might say ``Sod it. Can't be bothered any more.'' (if he were British!), whether he'd written you a libre or a proprietary system. If the system is proprietary, you're screwed. If libre, you should be able to find another, more reliable contractor.
Here's a thought: supplying software to your business is probably a tiny niche in the software industry. There is a good chance that someday, your supplier will be bought out by a competitor, who will stop supporting your software the day the support contract runs out. You can buy their new program. And the new kit which is the only thing in the world which will run that program. Or, you can shut down for good next time there's a problem that a reboot won't fix, because they won't let anyone do support on their old code.
This is essentially what proprietary software is all about: the ability to gouge you right down to the bone. You can trust the proprietor to take you for every penny, right up to the point that it would be cheaper to buy a new factory, with software from some new supplier, who will start the cycle all over again. If the proprietor DOESN'T do that, his stockholders will quite rightly toss him out on his ear.
If you are lucky enough to get some libre process control software developed for your process, hire that developer! Go in with some of your competitors who use the same machinery and make it happen if you can.
Every year for 23 years, Tolkien wrote his children a letter from Father Christmas, from the late 20's into the 40's. The great depression and WWII get mentioned in passing, but Father Christmas always triumphs.
This one is good for reading to children, with wonderful pictures by Tolkien. For older children, you can sprinkle in a bit of history by telling why Father Christmas had such trouble delivering toys in 1932, and so on. For the Tolkien fancier, the book gives some insight into the author's mind. For example, my edition has samples of the ``elvish writing'' which Father Christmas sent to the children.
True. Jefferson said that the roots of the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots every 20 years. He might tell you that's a good thing; that incurring significant hardship to protect freedom is important. I'm not sure whether I'd agree.
I think that the fact that we can all agree that there is a problem is a hopeful sign. There are cultures in which the response would be: ``Justice is for the rich, the sky is up, your point is what?''. No hope for change there.
That's a good one. Actually, if you took what I said literally, it would call for them to be compensated.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Wow! I should have thought of that one before!
Okay, let's qualify the principle. "If work provides benefit, the executor of the work deserves to be compensated."
I think there's some sense in that. When we talk about digging holes, it's plain that some work just shouldn't be compensated. When we talk about ``art'', it isn't so plain.
Any way to link benefit to compensation which doesn't involve artificially creating scarcity FOR THINGS WHICH HAVE ALREADY BEEN CREATED sounds ok to me. How about works for hire, rich patrons, and so on? It worked for thousands of years, and produced some real schlock and all the great sculptures and paintings the world reveres today.
Shakespear wrote his plays for two purposes: to be performed for profit (real, not artificial scarcity: there were a limited number of folks who could view a performance), and to please rich potential patrons, who might fund him to write sonnets, flattery, usw. It didn't seem to keep him from producing some fine literature.
Creators deserve to be compensated.
I just dug a very deep hole, and filled it in again, neatly. I worked very hard. I deserve to be compensated.
As an absolute principle, ``Creators deserve to be compensated.'' is flawed. The rule is ``Arbeit macht mudes'', not ``Abeit macht Geld''.
The reason that the MPAA can get away with jerking you around that way is that you can't afford to hire a stable of lawyers to stand up for your rights.
They can.
It's an amusing idea, but if you were to make a frivolous complaint, I'm sure that they'd sue you for damages. We all know how good they are at making up numbers.
When they frivolously damage YOU, of course, you could retain a lawfirm to recover damages. Unfortunately, your actual, recoverable, cash damages will probably be less than the first hour of consultation with the mouthpiece. You probably will prevail. Unfortunately, it will probably cost you tens of thousands to get there. At best, you'll get your legal costs and your $1.98 in damages. At worst, you'll wind up paying their legal fees, and defending a countersuit.
Strangely enough, the MPAA doesn't seem worried about any harm they might do to you.
How about: ``I told you it was a Ponzi scheme!''?
I suppose that the really sad part is that most of those people, some of whom did actually ``worked hard their entire lives'', could have saved up enough to be secure in their old age, IF they hadn't been saddled with paying for FDR's nasty little Ponzi scheme all these years.
What's that? Oh, you wanted a solution? Well, we'll have to choose between collecting enough taxes to keep them on welfare, as they did for their parents, and letting them eat catfood. When the baby boomers were supporting their parents, there were a LOT of boomers, and few retired parents. Soon, there will be scads of retired boomers, and few young workers. THAT's why the Ponzi scheme is crashing, as they all eventually must. The catfood option may be forced upon us: we may not be able to do any better. There's a bit of poetic justice in that: it was the boomer's socialist leanings [1] that kept our economy from growing the way it could have with a bit more economic freedom.
By the way, this is a problem all over.
[1] Some links to neat places on that page, BTW.
If it were really this easy, Soviet Russia would be the richest country on Earth, followed closely by Mainland China. What do you suppose is wrong with your logic?
How about the fact that when YOU spend your money it has at least the same effect, in the short run? How about the fact that when you spend your money wisely, it has a far greater effect in the long run? How about the fact that diverting the economy from the private to the public sector reduces growth (that's how India wound up with its amazing growth rate)?
Unfortunately, throwing more money at education is like throwing heroine at a junkie: it will stop the jonesing, for a while, but it won't cure the problem. We can already afford better education; after all, it's cheaper than the bad kind.
FOr better education, all we need is for parents to get involved, to set high standards for their children and children's schools, and then insist that children and schools live up to those high standards. Parental involvement is the single most important factor, and higher taxes won't help that at all.
In fact, high property taxes to support the NEA and the rest of the public school aparatchiks are part of the reason that we have such low parental involvement: often, both parents must work to support the schools and all the rest of government, leaving little time for bake sales, children, education, and such trivia.
What children really need is one parent at home when they are. One parent at home who has time to sit them down, and find out what they learned in schoold today, and either praise them for that, or raise hell with the school because the kid got by without learning something that day. One parent at home who can do some tutoring when the kid needs it, or straighten him out when he's been causing trouble for the teacher.
What children typcially get is one or two parents who see them just enough to know whether they're still alive, and are too busy and too tired to deal with their problems. In the minds of most parents, school is the school's responsibility, and they resent having to be aware of it, except maybe around prom time.
More taxes fixes this how?
Subjects of the other G8 countries shouldn't talk about freedom; they obviously don't know what it is.
Germans can go to jail for being Nazis. Americans are free to declare themselves filthy swine, as long as they don't endanger the lives and property of others.
The French are forbidden to own or sell Nazi memorabilia, if we can judge by the recent squabbles about ebay auctions. Americans are free to keep, or to sell, the trophies they took from the nasties. I wonder if the French don't like to be reminded, today, that they once were brave.
The few gun laws we have are racist hangovers from another era, when the elites didn't want the Irish and the Negros to have guns. We're working on fixing those problems, and things are getting better, both in terms of racism and gun laws.
Americans are, generally, mature adults. They can, generally, be trusted to walk about the streets with weapons. <sarcasm> This is plainly true of NONE of the subjects of the other G8 countries. The fact that the ownership of weapons is so restricted as to be essentially illegal there tells us that those people must be so immature that they cannot be trusted with weapons, anymore than could a kindergartener (a five-year-old). Why else would there be a perceived need for such laws? Surely not because they aren't free? </sarcasm>
No tyrant has ever been able to oppress his countrymen while they were armed. It has always been necessary to disarm the people before they could be slaughtered. The lesson here is not that Americans will rise up and shoot their leaders: the lesson is that no leader will dare push too far while that's possible. SOME leader eventually WILL dare, once we are disarmed.
Freedom isn't keeping the central planning out of sight. Freedom isn't being able to screw yourself up with drugs. Freedom requires responsibility. You aren't free unless you can choose to do right, or wrong. You can't stay free unless you consistantly choose the right. Can't stay free first because you'll soon be killed or put away by the people whose lives you're ruining, second because if too many people start consistantly choosing the wrong, nobody can have the choice or the society fails completely.
The Dutch and Canadians can smoke pot without risking years in prison.
I suspect that one reason that the Dutch and the Canadians have been so casual about pot is that citizen involvement is not traditionally a necessary part of their government. Here, our representative republic requires educated, able, responsible citizens. That explains the drug laws here: if they worked, the republic would work better.
The fact that we have such laws that don't work shows that our republic NEEDS to work better. It's a social problem, and the solution is a social solution.
The fact that the Dutch and Canadians haven't tried a governmental solution to a societal problem might indicate superior wisdom, or might indicate governmental contempt for the society. It's hard to tell which from a distance, but Canada's decision might have at least a bit of wisdom mixed in.
We don't have nearly the freedom here in the US that we once did, as recently as 50 years ago. In fact, we're getting nearly as bad as Europe. We'll be in the same foul situation as you European folks in 50 years if we don't straighten out our society. Until then, don't make fools of yourselves by trying to explain to us about freedom. You all sound like Helen Keller trying to explain the light show at the concert.
I suspect that we will find that ``warmth'' translates to something like: ``That sounds like the crappy, distorting, thermally-noisy tube stereo I paid six months income for back in 1955.''
44KHz is not enough to go up to even 22KHz (and humans can hear that rather well)...
I'm sure that some humans can. Back when I was fixing monitors, I was popular with the secretaries because I was the only male who could hear up to about 20kc. When they said that their monitor was squealing at them (vibration in the flyback transformer; squeeze some RTV silicon between the laminations), I could often hear it, faintly. Some women and a few men will be able to hear above 20kc. I doubt that having music run significantly higher than 21kc will be an audible and meaningful difference to one in a million.
16 bits is not nearly enough for a wide dynamic range.
Well, those 16 bit CD's already run from so quiet I can't hear it in a quiet room to much louder than I want to hear. That'll do for a lot of us.
Unlike records, you can't extract any "extra" quality from the CD. It's digitized, and you can't get what's not already on the disc.
That sounds a little odd. You're saying that with appropriate signal processing, you can make the record ``sound better'' than the vibrations encoded there? Why can't you similarly massage the digitized data? What is on the vinyl which isn't on the CD?
That's why audiophiles prefer LPs -- that's currently the only way to get better-than-CD sound.
I'm afraid that this will sound rude, but I can't think of a better way to say it: this sounds like audio voodoo. It sounds like ``LP is better than CD because it has all the old, familiar bugger-ups left in.''
Finally, please listen to a truly good-quality audio system ...
I had an electrical engineer friend who was an audiophile, and had a special listening area with very high end equipment. It sounded like a trashy dorm room system to me. His ears may have been better than mine, but when we listened to the output of a signal generator, I could hear higher notes at lower amplitude than he could. That suggests to me that ``psychoacoustics'' may have a strong component of snobbery.
I did. That's why I say that so confidently.