In the meantime you have paid for litigation and staff time, suffered interruption to your business and possibly lost control of confidential information.
The solution is, of course, is to buy as little software as possible from BSA members, buy as much of that as possible shrink wrapped, and keep extensive documentation on what you do have.
More usefully, someone who lives in the US should formally report it to whover handles cases like this.
Follow it up in writing, ask why they are not prosecuting given that the evidence is public.
Either
1) it will lead to a prosecution and a deterent for others who might do this, or 2) you will be told it is not worth prosecuting over something like this, which gives us clear evidence that the penalty of perjury is a fiction. 3) You will be ignored.
Either 1) or 2) is a useful result, 3) might be avioded with enough follow up, depending on how things work in the US.
Except that any legal recognition of marriage necessarilly means imposing some sort of particular view of what marriage should be.
If you are going to allow gay marriages, why not polygamous (or polyadrus) ones? Why not temporary marriages with a time limit (which are allowed in Iran I believe).
Furthermore, divorce laws also impose particular views of when a marriage can be disolved.
Gay mariage bans are not a restriction of people's freedom in the same way that, for example, laws ciminalising gay sex are. They are merely endorsing a particular view of what marriage should be - as any marriage laws must do by their nature.
I was specifically talking about the particular parnoia in the parent comment, which Britain is overflowing with.
If you compare Britain with continental Europe, it is not particuarly religious, but comparatively restrictive about porn etc.
No, they are mostly agnostic wackos.
That is why Britain (a mostly agnostic and atheist country) seems to have more of them per capita than the US (a mostly Christian country which contains most of the world's Christian fundamentalists).
The Road Ahead is unreadably boring. I found it on a friend's bookshelf and a few minutes was enough to see that it was all old hat and obvious.
Other than that, the only Bill G prediction I can remember that the internet was a fad or words to that effect. I can not find a reference for it. What I did find while looking was this http://www.danielsen.com/jokes/BillGatesquotes.txt
Would you accept a new system where you paid 10% less taxes, but your neighbors paid 30% less?
No for two reasons:
1) Firstly they could bid higher than be for things we are in competition for, like housing.
2) For most people relative wealth is very important. "Noone buys a Rolls Royce because it is comfortable, they buy one to show how much better than are than everyone else"
The reason for not using Linux I hear most often is "I can easilly find people who know Windows it needs to be fixed".
Unfortunately, most of the people who fix consumer hardware are incompetent. People who fix PCs for consumers know how to re-install Windows and some apps and that is it. The fixed PC will, no doubt, be re-infected (well, what do you imagine the commonest problem will be with pirated software and no systems administration) within hours of be hooked up to the net again.
On the other hand, it is not hard to find competent people who know Linux. If your lucky someone from the LUG might fix your problem free, otherwise you may have to pay more than the Windows person, but at least it will be fixed permentantly and properly (and without wiping your data either!).
But no, people would far prefer the nice guy at the local PC shop, who sells them crappy hardware and incompetent service with a nice smile.
Market forces don't produce a heavy drive toward marginal cost until there are at least THREE competing providers of the good or service. (For two the strategy is to track each other's prices and split the market about 50/50
The same problem can occur in a market with three or more suppliers - it jsut becomes less likely as the number of supplier increases. That is why it is called an Oligopoly.
No he is not an idiot (there is no doubt he is a pretty good biologist), the problem is that he is a fanatic.
The result is that he does not engage in honest debate. Rather than listening to what the other side side of the arguemnt has to say and replying to it, he states what he thinks the people on the other side of the argument ought to think, and then rebuts that.
The result does sound rather idiotic. I gave up expecting an sense from him after an extremely silly article he wrote in the New Scientist years ago.
As you are the first person who claims to use the colaboration features (I assume that is what you mean by "simplifies processes") I have heard I would love to hear more about how you use it.
Funny how you are so keen on a feature that MS has been marketing heavilly and that most real users do not care about.
What exactly do you mean by "ties up our services"?
Correct sizing of what? Text - depends on the text size set by the user. Images - depends on monitor size and resolution. Sizes relative to browser windows - depend on all the above and the size of the window.
Incidentally KDE and Gnome have NOTHING to do how WINE renders anything - apart from giving it the size of the window to render in.
The web is not meant for precise layout. If you try to use it that way you are going to have to do endless testing, otherwise IE7 under WINE will tell you what you most need to know: that the CSS lays stuff out the way you expected and everything that is on scren is readable.
The risk that there is some major bug that does not show in WINE is tiny. Minor layout differences are inevitable anyway.
The endless testing is worth it for large, high traffic websites. It is not worth it for a lot of people, a lot of the time. Even big sites often get stuff wrong. Gmail lays out buttons distinctly awkwardly for me. Try increasing your default font size and see how many sites look funny.
Given how may sites will not look right with at least some reasonably common configurations, your standard of professionalism is obviously rare.
The difference is that the victims of your hypothetical crimes are not tacitly encouraging it. Kidnap victims do not go around saying "If I am kidnapped I will not go to the cops", do they? They are also real crimes recognised by any society, not ones invented by governments in recent years.
MS (and other software companies) do tacitly encourage piracy. Otherwise why do they fail to enforce their copyrights.
I lvie in a country where some of the Holywood studios have proved enforcement works: people are far more cautius about priating DVDs than software because they ahve been sued for it. IBm has also been getting people to pay for Lotus Notes. MS thinks this market is worth fairly heavy advertising, but not worth suing the peole priating their software - why do you think that is?
If anyone from MS is reading and wants to prove me wrong: I will promise to find you thirty retailers, high street or shopping mall , that can easilly be proven to be pirating your software, in return for a guarantee that you will sue them.
Rumour has it that MS was considering enforcement, but backed down when some corporate users said that they would rather use Linux than pay for Windows.
Except that IE7 is not being emulated it is the original binary.
Incidentally you do know what WINE stands....
A $100 PC multiple boot all the versions of Windows still in use? Preferably with all the possible confiurations of service, and run all the different versions of IE still in use - where can I get that winder machine.
If you are not going to do that you are still risking that things will not work right with a configuration that you have not tested. The only serious issue I have had on a live site occured with IE 6 on Win 98: believe me, if I had a test machine it would not have been running Win 98.
Further more if I had been using Win 98, then WINE would have rendered my site more like the versions of Windows that most vistors used than the hypothticl Windows machine would have.
It makes sense if you are a full time web designer, but for someone like me, who makes occaisional changes to a handful of sites, it simple does not make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
In the meantime you have paid for litigation and staff time, suffered interruption to your business and possibly lost control of confidential information.
The solution is, of course, is to buy as little software as possible from BSA members, buy as much of that as possible shrink wrapped, and keep extensive documentation on what you do have.
More usefully, someone who lives in the US should formally report it to whover handles cases like this.
Follow it up in writing, ask why they are not prosecuting given that the evidence is public.
Either
1) it will lead to a prosecution and a deterent for others who might do this, or
2) you will be told it is not worth prosecuting over something like this, which gives us clear evidence that the penalty of perjury is a fiction.
3) You will be ignored.
Either 1) or 2) is a useful result, 3) might be avioded with enough follow up, depending on how things work in the US.
Except that any legal recognition of marriage necessarilly means imposing some sort of particular view of what marriage should be.
If you are going to allow gay marriages, why not polygamous (or polyadrus) ones? Why not temporary marriages with a time limit (which are allowed in Iran I believe).
Furthermore, divorce laws also impose particular views of when a marriage can be disolved.
Gay mariage bans are not a restriction of people's freedom in the same way that, for example, laws ciminalising gay sex are. They are merely endorsing a particular view of what marriage should be - as any marriage laws must do by their nature.
I was specifically talking about the particular parnoia in the parent comment, which Britain is overflowing with. If you compare Britain with continental Europe, it is not particuarly religious, but comparatively restrictive about porn etc.
So where and wtih who should a /. post be registered?
/. is in the US? The one where the poster is resident? How will people know?
With an international agency? Who wil pay for it? Where will it be located? How are registrations to be sent?
With national agencies? Which one then? The US one because
How will you verify that the registrant is the real owner? What happens if someone spots unregistered content and starts registering it?
A simpler solution would be to require a copyright notice and a statement stating who the copyrght holder is.
No, they are mostly agnostic wackos. That is why Britain (a mostly agnostic and atheist country) seems to have more of them per capita than the US (a mostly Christian country which contains most of the world's Christian fundamentalists).
Other than that, the only Bill G prediction I can remember that the internet was a fad or words to that effect. I can not find a reference for it. What I did find while looking was this http://www.danielsen.com/jokes/BillGatesquotes.txt
No for two reasons:
1) Firstly they could bid higher than be for things we are in competition for, like housing.
2) For most people relative wealth is very important. "Noone buys a Rolls Royce because it is comfortable, they buy one to show how much better than are than everyone else"
Sorry I cannot attribute the quote.
Most people would probably think "Windows looks a bit different after that update".
I told a neighbour recently that I did not use Windows. The reply was "What do use instead? Excel?"
Most people do not know what a PC is, or that it is a switchable component.
The reason for not using Linux I hear most often is "I can easilly find people who know Windows it needs to be fixed".
Unfortunately, most of the people who fix consumer hardware are incompetent. People who fix PCs for consumers know how to re-install Windows and some apps and that is it. The fixed PC will, no doubt, be re-infected (well, what do you imagine the commonest problem will be with pirated software and no systems administration) within hours of be hooked up to the net again.
On the other hand, it is not hard to find competent people who know Linux. If your lucky someone from the LUG might fix your problem free, otherwise you may have to pay more than the Windows person, but at least it will be fixed permentantly and properly (and without wiping your data either!).
But no, people would far prefer the nice guy at the local PC shop, who sells them crappy hardware and incompetent service with a nice smile.
Like System Settings (kcontrol) in KDE and the Gnome Control Centre?
The few occasions when I have resortd to editing text files has been when doing things that the majority of people do not do.
There are lots of things for which Windows users need to edit the registry. This is usually more complicated than editing a Linux config file.
Stop Spreading FUD.
The same problem can occur in a market with three or more suppliers - it jsut becomes less likely as the number of supplier increases. That is why it is called an Oligopoly.
How does Google stop me from using my computer without their network?
No he is not an idiot (there is no doubt he is a pretty good biologist), the problem is that he is a fanatic.
The result is that he does not engage in honest debate. Rather than listening to what the other side side of the arguemnt has to say and replying to it, he states what he thinks the people on the other side of the argument ought to think, and then rebuts that.
The result does sound rather idiotic. I gave up expecting an sense from him after an extremely silly article he wrote in the New Scientist years ago.
As you are the first person who claims to use the colaboration features (I assume that is what you mean by "simplifies processes") I have heard I would love to hear more about how you use it.
Funny how you are so keen on a feature that MS has been marketing heavilly and that most real users do not care about.
What exactly do you mean by "ties up our services"?
Correct sizing of what? Text - depends on the text size set by the user. Images - depends on monitor size and resolution. Sizes relative to browser windows - depend on all the above and the size of the window.
Incidentally KDE and Gnome have NOTHING to do how WINE renders anything - apart from giving it the size of the window to render in.
The web is not meant for precise layout. If you try to use it that way you are going to have to do endless testing, otherwise IE7 under WINE will tell you what you most need to know: that the CSS lays stuff out the way you expected and everything that is on scren is readable.
The risk that there is some major bug that does not show in WINE is tiny. Minor layout differences are inevitable anyway.
The endless testing is worth it for large, high traffic websites. It is not worth it for a lot of people, a lot of the time. Even big sites often get stuff wrong. Gmail lays out buttons distinctly awkwardly for me. Try increasing your default font size and see how many sites look funny.
Given how may sites will not look right with at least some reasonably common configurations, your standard of professionalism is obviously rare.
The difference is that the victims of your hypothetical crimes are not tacitly encouraging it. Kidnap victims do not go around saying "If I am kidnapped I will not go to the cops", do they? They are also real crimes recognised by any society, not ones invented by governments in recent years.
MS (and other software companies) do tacitly encourage piracy. Otherwise why do they fail to enforce their copyrights.
I lvie in a country where some of the Holywood studios have proved enforcement works: people are far more cautius about priating DVDs than software because they ahve been sued for it. IBm has also been getting people to pay for Lotus Notes. MS thinks this market is worth fairly heavy advertising, but not worth suing the peole priating their software - why do you think that is?
If anyone from MS is reading and wants to prove me wrong: I will promise to find you thirty retailers, high street or shopping mall , that can easilly be proven to be pirating your software, in return for a guarantee that you will sue them.
Rumour has it that MS was considering enforcement, but backed down when some corporate users said that they would rather use Linux than pay for Windows.
Except that IE7 is not being emulated it is the original binary.
Incidentally you do know what WINE stands....
A $100 PC multiple boot all the versions of Windows still in use? Preferably with all the possible confiurations of service, and run all the different versions of IE still in use - where can I get that winder machine.
If you are not going to do that you are still risking that things will not work right with a configuration that you have not tested. The only serious issue I have had on a live site occured with IE 6 on Win 98: believe me, if I had a test machine it would not have been running Win 98.
Further more if I had been using Win 98, then WINE would have rendered my site more like the versions of Windows that most vistors used than the hypothticl Windows machine would have.
Thanks, that is the most useful tip I have ever got on slashdot.
A lot of people think that.
The only problem is that this group of people does not include Bill Gates, and is not likely to.
$400 a year of $20 a day? Not exactly cheap.
It makes sense if you are a full time web designer, but for someone like me, who makes occaisional changes to a handful of sites, it simple does not make sense.
In case you did not know the Jesuits tend to be fairly liberal and thee last Pope did not altogether like them (Personally I do): see this:
i ty/pope/johnpaulii_2.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christian
On the other hand very few of the sites I use require javascript.
The ones I regularly use I whitelist.
Sites that are new to me I may choose not to read if they require jsavascript, otherwise I allow them temporarily.
Amazing! Sensible web development practices.
I wish we had done that at the dot com I once worked for.....
I do configure my web server, about a quarter of the way round the globe, using Kate.
Vi is available everywhere, but with most servers you can open it over ftp or sftp, edit it, and save it back.