Sure they do. A lot. The TV or radio can't play a song without paying for it. Usually lots and lots of money. Normally you also have to pay to hear it, be it a radio/tv license or by listening to commercials.
Standards are not falling in private schools many in Britain are switching to the International Baccalaureate instead of A levels, because of the fall in standards - my old school was one of the first to do so.
As far as I know, standards in countries like India are fairly stable. This suggests I am right. It is inevitably biased towards the better schools (I bet they are not counting poor kids who do not go to school at all), but even the subset is a huge number of people.
Most people do not watch films for ideas, and are not interested in anything that might make them think.
Yes, there are films that rise above that, but they cater to a much smaller audience.
Much of the audience for film is illiterate (not completely, but they cannot read anything complex) and would be bewildered by what you would like to see. There is a comment in this thread by someone who found Lord of the Rings too wordy to read. That is a book that most people I know read as children.
Add to that the difficulties of actually fitting a book into a film, and the intrinsic difficulties of translating a story from one medium to another, its hardly surprising that the popular choice is "OK, will just do something with the appealing bits of the book and through some special effects and big names in to make it interesting."
Doing a "good job" would be more work for less money.
Re:Silly to create the organization
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Houses With Tails
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· Score: 1
The article linked to says that India has enough material to build an arsenal bigger than than anyone other than the US and Russia.
They do have a problem with long range delivery though.
Britain's problem is that it cannot maintain, and very likely use, its nukes without American help, so it cannot blast anyone away. Again, further down the New Statesman article it discusses what would happen if Britain tried to use its weapons with the permission of the US.
First off the PC wasn't an open design, it was closed but companies did a "whiteroom" re-engineering of the BIOS (something that the DMCA would outlaw today).
IBM also published complete hardware designs. The closed components were the BIOS and the OS (which was Microsoft's, not IBM's).
The other example you give which is MP3 isn't really open
The format is open in that it is published, but it is patent encumbered. Once the patents expire anyone will be able to implement decoders and encoders, and there most of the patents will expire in the next two years.
Can you give me any examples of that actually happening? Has anyone actually got significant PR for using (as opposed to distributing) GPL software and not giving enough back?
As for the GP, I can think of lots of GPL violations that have been reported on Slashdot and various news sites, but all of them have been actual violations of the license, not of its spirit.
If I may play Devil's Advocate for a second...
Did the liquor salesmen deserve to lose their lively-hood during prohibition? Just because something is illegal does not make it wrong.
I would say they did not deserve it. Prohibition was unwarranted government interference in people's lives.
Of course it is possible for a liquor salesman to be evil in how they conduct their business, but it is not necessarily or fundamentally evil in the way slavery is.
I would feel sorry for the Georgia slaveholder, he'd already (however rightly so - since it was made illegal) lost property that he'd paid for. But since he was doing something completely legal for years, society had made it illegal, it's okay for government thugs to destroy his home and and food/income as well? In the land of bad analogies that is/., your analogy truly stinks.
Just because something is legal does not make it right. He still deserves what he gets.
There was a time when the KHTML devs were not happy with how code from Webkit was being released (i.e. although they stuck to the letter of the LGPL, they were being unhelpful so not really sticking to to its spirit), but I think that has now been resolved.
Other than that I do not think they have ever done anything other than what the licences were meant to allow them to do.
Apparently one problem Asus faced with their original Linux-only Eee was that a lot of them got returned as "broken" by some dolts who tried to install MS Office and the likes on them, and concluded that the laptop is broken if they can't.
Citation? The last thing I read on this said that return rates were similar - it was MSI that got higher return rates for Linux.
Quite right, but why should I use all caps for a name? Is SPAM an abbreviation for something? No its a name, and is should be Spam, and bulk email spam (unless it is the first word in a sentence).
I hate names with stupid capitalisation, random punctuation in the middle of a name, etc. As for weirdness like C# and TeX....
Ancient Athens was a direct democracy as well, and a society that contributed a huge amount culturally. Although they did not give women the vote - or slaves, or people of foreign ancestry.
I rather like the idea of picking people for public office by lot. It eliminates the selection bias towards self-important interfering busy-bodies.
I'd buy one. You'd probably buy one, too. But almost everyone else in the known universe wants Windows on their computer.
I have installed Linux for other people. I think an earlier comment was right - Linux's biggest problem is lack of consumer awareness, which comes down to lack of marketing.
Look at the reasons Mac owners say they prefer Macs. No malware is one of them. Linux is at least as good on that count. I actually think Linux GUI's are pretty good and better than Windows: but that is a matter of opinion. The examples here work for me (Mandriva 2008.1 KDE).
Of course having said that marketing is the problem, I do not have a solution. No one owns Linux, so no one has an incentive to pay the bills - the same reason that colas get better marketing than fruit juice.
It does, but rather than narrowing it down to a particular model, it narrows it down to any digital SLR (and maybe other types) camera made by Sigma.
Add to that the fact that reducing the image size will probably get rid of the evidence, using a raw image and demosaicing on a PC will tell you what software was used instead of what camera was used, there are a lot of limitations.
On the other hand, most people do not know all this - then again, most people are unlikely to think of deleting the meta-data either.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
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Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1
the definition of marriage has certainly changed over the years. Without dogpiling on the Mormons more, feel free to read the Bible/Torah/Koran and count how many wives people have.
True, but then who does get to define marriage? Everyone wants to define some limits on it. Most of the people who favour gay marriage would not want to allow polygamy, incestuous marriages etc.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
on
Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1
If I was going out to buy Ender's Game for the first time today, knowing what I do about the author, I may reconsider the purchase.
The artist is not the work.
Also, his views on homosexuality have been exaggerate by detractors, if that is what bothers you.
Oscar Wilde was pretty loathsome. He was jailed because of sodomy laws, but people forget that his actions would still put him into jail today because of the age of many of his sexual partners. Legally, if not technically, a peadophile. On the other hand, his plays are wonderful.
I do find Card too right wing when politics does come into is books. Usually they do not. I think science fiction settings make him detached enough for it not to get too personal, but there was a non-sci-fi book that he was allowing free downloads of that was dreadful because it was pure propaganda.
The later books in the Ender universe are pretty poor: Children of the Mind in particular. He did once comment that if James Hilton had been writing today he would have been pressurised to write a Shangri-La saga, and would never have found a publisher for "Goodbye, Mr Chips". Perhaps that means that the later Ender books were written purely because of pressure from the publisher?
If you are looking to for personal liability protection then you should create a corporation under which you do all your software development
Good advice. It is legally sound protection (although get legal advice to make sure it is correctly implemented), and it means you can still get the credit for your work.
Also, anyone who wants to sue you can probably get your identity, sue you without knowing your identity, etc.
which might even include hobby or GPL work.
GPL is not synonymous with hobby! However, anything done under a pseudonym will prevent it being anything other than a hobby.
Also, what if you want to sue to enforce the GPL? You might not be able to sue successfully and preserve your anonymity.
If we did not exists, we would not be able to debate the question - we are a biased sample.
I do not think anyone has the credentials to argue whether this universe is particularly suited to life - who knows what life forms might exist if the universe were different?
The science vs religion headline is not useful. scientific knowledge of ultimate origins may possibly eventually shed some light on God, but not right now. The argument for God's existence from the anthropic principle is a "God of the gaps" (a phrase I found in one of Russell Stannard's books on the subject) argument.
Is this testable in any way? If so, is it science?
On a Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop (Pentium dual core, 1Gb) running Mandriva with Java off and the memory settings changed but nothing else (no Quickstart or anything like that), running other things like playing audio, I get a start up time of 11 seconds the first time, 3 or 4 after that.
Also once one Open office app is started, the other load equally fast, so I guess that once the common libraries are loaded the individual apps are fast. Quickstart should make a huge difference to perceived start up speed.
I can't wait until deputies and senators have their internet access cut off by some automated script.
Exactly what I thought. Malware with a P2P client that just downloads a whole lot of material whose copyright is owned by someone litigious. Of course the same could be done with "material useful to terrorists" in Britain, or with child porn anywhere, but this is far more likely to get work because there are well funded people looking for downloaders.
The reason it might not happen is that there is not actual motive for anyone to do it apart from pure malice - i.e. no money in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure they do. A lot. The TV or radio can't play a song without paying for it. Usually lots and lots of money. Normally you also have to pay to hear it, be it a radio/tv license or by listening to commercials.
The payment often goes the other way.
hv3 uses tkhtml3, and, while it is not as complete as the big four rendering engines, it seems well ahead of the other light alternatives, in that it has Javascript and passes Acid 2, it uses little memory and is going to show up in at least one distro's repo.
Standards are not falling in private schools many in Britain are switching to the International Baccalaureate instead of A levels, because of the fall in standards - my old school was one of the first to do so.
As far as I know, standards in countries like India are fairly stable. This suggests I am right. It is inevitably biased towards the better schools (I bet they are not counting poor kids who do not go to school at all), but even the subset is a huge number of people.
Yet sci-fi books are about ideas
Most people do not watch films for ideas, and are not interested in anything that might make them think.
Yes, there are films that rise above that, but they cater to a much smaller audience.
Much of the audience for film is illiterate (not completely, but they cannot read anything complex) and would be bewildered by what you would like to see. There is a comment in this thread by someone who found Lord of the Rings too wordy to read. That is a book that most people I know read as children.
Add to that the difficulties of actually fitting a book into a film, and the intrinsic difficulties of translating a story from one medium to another, its hardly surprising that the popular choice is "OK, will just do something with the appealing bits of the book and through some special effects and big names in to make it interesting."
Doing a "good job" would be more work for less money.
People have done this already, so it can work. I used to know a guy involved in running this: http://www.redbricks.org.uk/?q=node/2
The article linked to says that India has enough material to build an arsenal bigger than than anyone other than the US and Russia.
They do have a problem with long range delivery though.
Britain's problem is that it cannot maintain, and very likely use, its nukes without American help, so it cannot blast anyone away. Again, further down the New Statesman article it discusses what would happen if Britain tried to use its weapons with the permission of the US.
Your number is wrong on one count, and possibly another:
Britain does not have independent nuclear weapons.
States outside those five have large arsenals. India for example.
First off the PC wasn't an open design, it was closed but companies did a "whiteroom" re-engineering of the BIOS (something that the DMCA would outlaw today).
reengineering for inter-operability is allowed
IBM also published complete hardware designs. The closed components were the BIOS and the OS (which was Microsoft's, not IBM's).
The other example you give which is MP3 isn't really open
The format is open in that it is published, but it is patent encumbered. Once the patents expire anyone will be able to implement decoders and encoders, and there most of the patents will expire in the next two years.
Can you give me any examples of that actually happening? Has anyone actually got significant PR for using (as opposed to distributing) GPL software and not giving enough back?
As for the GP, I can think of lots of GPL violations that have been reported on Slashdot and various news sites, but all of them have been actual violations of the license, not of its spirit.
If I may play Devil's Advocate for a second... Did the liquor salesmen deserve to lose their lively-hood during prohibition? Just because something is illegal does not make it wrong.
I would say they did not deserve it. Prohibition was unwarranted government interference in people's lives.
Of course it is possible for a liquor salesman to be evil in how they conduct their business, but it is not necessarily or fundamentally evil in the way slavery is.
I would feel sorry for the Georgia slaveholder, he'd already (however rightly so - since it was made illegal) lost property that he'd paid for. But since he was doing something completely legal for years, society had made it illegal, it's okay for government thugs to destroy his home and and food/income as well? In the land of bad analogies that is /., your analogy truly stinks.
Just because something is legal does not make it right. He still deserves what he gets.
Other than that I do not think they have ever done anything other than what the licences were meant to allow them to do.
Enabling some repos and installing some codes does it.
Apparently one problem Asus faced with their original Linux-only Eee was that a lot of them got returned as "broken" by some dolts who tried to install MS Office and the likes on them, and concluded that the laptop is broken if they can't.
Citation? The last thing I read on this said that return rates were similar - it was MSI that got higher return rates for Linux.
I hate names with stupid capitalisation, random punctuation in the middle of a name, etc. As for weirdness like C# and TeX....
I rather like the idea of picking people for public office by lot. It eliminates the selection bias towards self-important interfering busy-bodies.
I'd buy one. You'd probably buy one, too. But almost everyone else in the known universe wants Windows on their computer.
I have installed Linux for other people. I think an earlier comment was right - Linux's biggest problem is lack of consumer awareness, which comes down to lack of marketing.
Look at the reasons Mac owners say they prefer Macs. No malware is one of them. Linux is at least as good on that count. I actually think Linux GUI's are pretty good and better than Windows: but that is a matter of opinion. The examples here work for me (Mandriva 2008.1 KDE).
Of course having said that marketing is the problem, I do not have a solution. No one owns Linux, so no one has an incentive to pay the bills - the same reason that colas get better marketing than fruit juice.
Add to that the fact that reducing the image size will probably get rid of the evidence, using a raw image and demosaicing on a PC will tell you what software was used instead of what camera was used, there are a lot of limitations.
On the other hand, most people do not know all this - then again, most people are unlikely to think of deleting the meta-data either.
the definition of marriage has certainly changed over the years. Without dogpiling on the Mormons more, feel free to read the Bible/Torah/Koran and count how many wives people have.
True, but then who does get to define marriage? Everyone wants to define some limits on it. Most of the people who favour gay marriage would not want to allow polygamy, incestuous marriages etc.
If I was going out to buy Ender's Game for the first time today, knowing what I do about the author, I may reconsider the purchase.
The artist is not the work.
Also, his views on homosexuality have been exaggerate by detractors, if that is what bothers you.
Oscar Wilde was pretty loathsome. He was jailed because of sodomy laws, but people forget that his actions would still put him into jail today because of the age of many of his sexual partners. Legally, if not technically, a peadophile. On the other hand, his plays are wonderful.
I do find Card too right wing when politics does come into is books. Usually they do not. I think science fiction settings make him detached enough for it not to get too personal, but there was a non-sci-fi book that he was allowing free downloads of that was dreadful because it was pure propaganda.
The later books in the Ender universe are pretty poor: Children of the Mind in particular. He did once comment that if James Hilton had been writing today he would have been pressurised to write a Shangri-La saga, and would never have found a publisher for "Goodbye, Mr Chips". Perhaps that means that the later Ender books were written purely because of pressure from the publisher?
If you are looking to for personal liability protection then you should create a corporation under which you do all your software development
Good advice. It is legally sound protection (although get legal advice to make sure it is correctly implemented), and it means you can still get the credit for your work.
Also, anyone who wants to sue you can probably get your identity, sue you without knowing your identity, etc.
which might even include hobby or GPL work.
GPL is not synonymous with hobby! However, anything done under a pseudonym will prevent it being anything other than a hobby.
Also, what if you want to sue to enforce the GPL? You might not be able to sue successfully and preserve your anonymity.
I do not think anyone has the credentials to argue whether this universe is particularly suited to life - who knows what life forms might exist if the universe were different?
The science vs religion headline is not useful. scientific knowledge of ultimate origins may possibly eventually shed some light on God, but not right now. The argument for God's existence from the anthropic principle is a "God of the gaps" (a phrase I found in one of Russell Stannard's books on the subject) argument.
Is this testable in any way? If so, is it science?
Also once one Open office app is started, the other load equally fast, so I guess that once the common libraries are loaded the individual apps are fast. Quickstart should make a huge difference to perceived start up speed.
I can't wait until deputies and senators have their internet access cut off by some automated script.
Exactly what I thought. Malware with a P2P client that just downloads a whole lot of material whose copyright is owned by someone litigious. Of course the same could be done with "material useful to terrorists" in Britain, or with child porn anywhere, but this is far more likely to get work because there are well funded people looking for downloaders.
The reason it might not happen is that there is not actual motive for anyone to do it apart from pure malice - i.e. no money in it.
We're lucky Monkeys didn't patent opposable thumbs.
They did but kept it submarine: they just did not implement the idea, but waited for someone else to use it to sue.