Maybe you're suggesting that the word "Pirate" is just a historical reference to those lovable scamps of the Caribbean?
Actually, I think the name "The Pirate Bay" is a great parody, a true farce, of the way publishers and distributors have been trying to elevate the petty victimless crime of copyright infringement with a most violent kind of felony: armed robbery and hostage taking.
If infringing the copyright of some song I download through the tubes of the interwebs is an 88 cent act of piracy and makes me a pirate that should be punished to the tune of thousands of dollars, then when Adobe sticks its extension into one of my applications without my consent, that is rape, and Adobe is a corporate rapist.
Parent post is currently "40% insightful, 20% troll, 20% interesting"
The existence of moderators who gave this "insightful" and "interesting" points is a disturbing fact about the world's social realities: people on slashdot who do not have critical reading skills or who choose not to use them are affecting the quality of discourse. This is an uncomfortable truth, but one that has to be kept in mind.
Will someone please mod parent post into oblivion? A couple more "trolls" would do nicely. "Overrated" would not have the same long term affect on karma, so I think "troll" would do a better job of helping to keep future slashdot discussions on track.
No car analogy comes to mind. I can, however, offer a Linux simile:
The King Kong defense is like when Linus told the New York Times: Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect. Interview with the New York Times, September, 2003
Not to put too fine a point on it: TPB's defense is that there has been no intentional collusion or activity linking anyone who has alledgedly infringed a copyright and any of the defendants in this case. So none of the defendants can be guilty of assisting in any of the alledged infringements. I think there is a good telephone analogy: you cannot hold any telephone company employees guilty of assisting someone who has been making obscene phone calls.
(This is worth repeating whenever possible. Apparently the defense lawyer managed to repeat "King Kong" some 80 times in his presentation. I bet that drove Sony and the prosecutors apeshit.)
I don't think that's the case. I would guess any business large enough to have IT staff would buy site licenses direct from Microsoft and have their staff burn the images in house. Otherwise maintenance would become a monstrous problem, especially when you consider the difficulties of keeping MS OSs clean and protected from malware.
So I expect that most of these Vista --> WinXP upgrades are from home, student, and small office users. Those are also the ones most likely to give the Vista Home package a try, and then deciding they are better off upgrading back to WinXP.
But I don't know for sure. Still, I am pretty sure that very few businesses with a dozen computers or more are shopping for new ones at Staples, Office Depot, WalMart, or Dell's catalogs.
And elsewhere in this discussion, it is mentioned that the Vista Home Package does not include a right to downgrade to WinXP. It needs to be upgraded to a Vista Business Package (at a cost of apx $100), which can then be downgraded to WinXP.
Since I'm not going to RTFA as I've moved on to Ubuntu, perhaps someone can clarify this for me:
Microsoft makes no money off of Vista -> WinXP downgrades.
The downgrade option is part of high end Business Vista packages.
The downgrade option is not part of the Home Vista packages
Most computers that are downgraded from Vista to WinXP are mid and low end models that come with the Home Vista package
When a purchaser of a computer with the Home Vista package wants to downgrade to WinXP, the OEM therefore has to sell him the upgrade to a Business Vista package that is then immediately downgraded to WinXP
Microsoft gets significant money from all upgrades of Home Vista packages to Business Vista packages
Plus, it looks good on the reports that so many people who buy Home Vista immediately see an advantage to upgrading to Business Vista.
Did I get that right? Shades of Milo Minderbender! Microsoft has developed the digital equivalent of buying eggs in Cairo for 12 cents a dozen and selling them in Rome at 11 cents a dozen at a profit (because they first bought them at 9 cents a dozen in Athens before shipping them to Cairo)...
I am really glad that Ubuntu got good enough to use fast enough that I could walk away from the Microsoft culture before it sank this deep in Catch 22 logical fruit loops.
We know that the observer is an integral part of the experiment; at this level of physics there is no such thing as a third party observer.
But I understand that we cannot assess in advance the degree of effect the observer will have on an entirely new experiment.
Which leads me to the uncomfortable recognition that we might create the Higgs boson as we get better at looking for it.
What is uncomfortable about this is the way it raises the question: "If we are literally making it up as we go along, is this really the way we want the Universe to be?"
Are enough of the right people asking themselves that?
Well, in English if you are traveling North and need to turn West, then going left is right but going right is wrong.
Which might explain why USA politics has gotten itself into such a mess. We really need another Abott and Costello team to get our directions straignt again.
A promise of "best effort deletion" is essentially useless in terms of avoiding nuisance suits in this kind of situation. There are no "best practices" for handling the physical deletion of records in huge RDBMS systems with multiple secondary indexes, dynamic caches, etc. And with a 24/7 on line presence. So FB could not provide any solid technical defense if they were sued.
FB could and maybe does handle all user info with appropriate integrity and discretion. But FB cannot assure that all of its user base are treating each other properly. Specifically, FB can not assure that a couple of third party idjits hadn't figured out a way to game the caches to keep that embarrassing picture of you swimming in the bong water available even after the original was physically deleted.
I think FB is doing what it has to do to cover its ass. I think users of Face Book and similar huge on line RDBMS need to learn to be careful about what they put in front of the world.
On the face of it, this policy makes sense if FB realized that they could not assure timely clean-up when somebody quit. Too much risk of being sued.
Avoidance of lawsuits is almost certainly the reason for their policy of taking ownership of anything posted to FB. It is an easy way, and perhaps the only way, of assuring that they can kill stuff that needs to be removed without being hassled with nuisance suits.
I don't see any way of running something like FB without these kinds of policies. The only surprising thing here is that FB didn't realize it needed ownership forever until recently.
Until someone tells me why it would not be the case, I would expect the initial vectors of the debris to form the usual cone shape of ballistic collisions. That being so, it is quite possible that a portion of that cone would hit the atmosphere fairly quickly.
The people who fuss about satellites don't care about that portion, they tend to focus on the rest of the spatter cone, since that is what is going to be a long term risk to their satellites.
The Electoral College was created because communication was so poor.
Well that, and the fact that a compromise was needed that would preserve each of the original state's sovereignty while still reflecting the general popular vote to some degree. And at the time, there was also a much greater recognition of the need to protect each citizen from the "tyranny of the majority" than there is today. You hardly even hear that phrase today.
If adopted nationwide, the Iowa system would make Presidential elections a much simpler and less costly thing. Only voters in California, Florida, and about half a dozen other states would have any effect on the election, so there would be no need to bother with any of that voting and campaigning rigmarole in Iowa, Idaho, etc. It would be almost as simple as going to a purely popular vote, where voters in half a dozen big cities would be the only ones who mattered.
The Electoral College is a shitty construction, but let's not jump into the outhouse hole in our desire to get rid of it. The tyranny of the majority is the pits.
Bundling provably leads to market share when the bundled product is being sold to a naive market.
Fixed that for ya.
It would be a serious mistake to overlook the fact that when MSIE was clobbering Netscape, the overwhelming majority of the market had no prior experience with computers. MSIE succeeded to a great extent because MS recognized it could surf a one-time-only tsunami of n00be customers. That strategy will never again be successful; once you've raped all the virgins in the land, you cannot repeat that.
Okay, maybe s/rape/seduce/ --but the metaphor is still valid.
The Joy of Pi by David Blattner is a wonder. I just found that there is a website, Joy of Pi that I need to explore. It looks very promising.
A book I enjoyed back in ancient times when I was in high school is The mathematical magpie. It is collection of essays and short stories that I believe are timeless gems, all relating to mathematics.
Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick should be on the list.
There is a short book on the golden section but I cannot remember the title or name.
All governments are corrupt. From nations down to neighborhood associations.
It is the nature of some men and women to seek power over others, and because of this driving need, they are more likely to end up in government positions than other persons who might be more qualified in all kinds of ways, but who are not attracted to power. It is also true that those who are ethically unencumbered are more likely to win the races they enter than anyone who tries to follow the rules. The end result is the old adage I first heard applied to the Chicago political machine of the 1960s:
A government does not have to be good, and rarely is. It only has to be good enough that the populace will tolerate it.
The US Constitution was built with this in mind. Its system of checks and balances are designed to keep the natural corruptive nature of politics reined in by making it very difficult for any one individual or group from obtaining across the board power. I think we could now design a better system, since we know a lot more now, and we have some neat technologies that were not available back in the day. But so long as what we've got is good enough, that's not going to happen.
Wikileaks has just raised the bar by shining light into some murky corners. Back room deals and cover-ups that used to be good enough are not good enough any longer... and that's a big win for the Nation.
We'll arbitarily assume Microsft is targeting Ubuntu specifically...
Hardly an arbitrary assumption. Erosion to Apple has been on-going for a decade or more, and I'm sure that Microsoft has that fully analyzed and has a multitude of strategies and tactics all ready to roll out to counter any conceivable move from Apple. But Ubuntu has arrived by a comet's orbit out of what had looked like empty space: there really was not much in the other Linux distros to attract Microsoft's core markets. Creation of this position is more likely a response to Ubuntu than to any of the known threats to Redmond's hegemony.
...what is it about Ubuntu that's making Microsoft target them specifically?
As mentioned above, the speed and brightness with which Ubuntu has emerged on the scene is definitely part of the reason.
A bigger part is that the Ubuntu distro provides, for free, with its standard 7-click installation that even a cave man can manage, not only an alternative to Windows, but also an alternative to MS Office, MSIE, FrontPage, Access, and even MS Outlook. Oh yeah, also MS Server. Ubuntu undercuts many of the few profitable products that Microsoft has left to sell.
Microsoft should be afraid. It should be very afraid. It will be interesting to see how it responds, because its jungle model of killing the competition does not look very effective against the Ubuntu tsunami.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you're suggesting that the word "Pirate" is just a historical reference to those lovable scamps of the Caribbean?
Actually, I think the name "The Pirate Bay" is a great parody, a true farce, of the way publishers and distributors have been trying to elevate the petty victimless crime of copyright infringement with a most violent kind of felony: armed robbery and hostage taking.
If infringing the copyright of some song I download through the tubes of the interwebs is an 88 cent act of piracy and makes me a pirate that should be punished to the tune of thousands of dollars, then when Adobe sticks its extension into one of my applications without my consent, that is rape, and Adobe is a corporate rapist.
Parent post is currently "40% insightful, 20% troll, 20% interesting"
The existence of moderators who gave this "insightful" and "interesting" points is a disturbing fact about the world's social realities: people on slashdot who do not have critical reading skills or who choose not to use them are affecting the quality of discourse. This is an uncomfortable truth, but one that has to be kept in mind.
Will someone please mod parent post into oblivion? A couple more "trolls" would do nicely. "Overrated" would not have the same long term affect on karma, so I think "troll" would do a better job of helping to keep future slashdot discussions on track.
No car analogy comes to mind. I can, however, offer a Linux simile:
The King Kong defense is like when Linus told the New York Times: Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
Interview with the New York Times, September, 2003
Not to put too fine a point on it: TPB's defense is that there has been no intentional collusion or activity linking anyone who has alledgedly infringed a copyright and any of the defendants in this case. So none of the defendants can be guilty of assisting in any of the alledged infringements. I think there is a good telephone analogy: you cannot hold any telephone company employees guilty of assisting someone who has been making obscene phone calls.
(This is worth repeating whenever possible. Apparently the defense lawyer managed to repeat "King Kong" some 80 times in his presentation. I bet that drove Sony and the prosecutors apeshit.)
Tell me about the King Kong defence. Please compare and contrast it to the Chewbacca defence, to provide an adequate frame of reference.
I don't think that's the case. I would guess any business large enough to have IT staff would buy site licenses direct from Microsoft and have their staff burn the images in house. Otherwise maintenance would become a monstrous problem, especially when you consider the difficulties of keeping MS OSs clean and protected from malware.
So I expect that most of these Vista --> WinXP upgrades are from home, student, and small office users. Those are also the ones most likely to give the Vista Home package a try, and then deciding they are better off upgrading back to WinXP.
But I don't know for sure. Still, I am pretty sure that very few businesses with a dozen computers or more are shopping for new ones at Staples, Office Depot, WalMart, or Dell's catalogs.
XP Home is $90.
Vista Home Basic is $90.
And elsewhere in this discussion, it is mentioned that the Vista Home Package does not include a right to downgrade to WinXP. It needs to be upgraded to a Vista Business Package (at a cost of apx $100), which can then be downgraded to WinXP.
Since I'm not going to RTFA as I've moved on to Ubuntu, perhaps someone can clarify this for me:
Did I get that right? Shades of Milo Minderbender! Microsoft has developed the digital equivalent of buying eggs in Cairo for 12 cents a dozen and selling them in Rome at 11 cents a dozen at a profit (because they first bought them at 9 cents a dozen in Athens before shipping them to Cairo)...
I am really glad that Ubuntu got good enough to use fast enough that I could walk away from the Microsoft culture before it sank this deep in Catch 22 logical fruit loops.
/. isn't just for classical physicists, anymore.
That was zen. This is tao.
Excellent!
You have extended my grasp of perlish for which I am humbly grateful...
may finely be the thing which pushes big company away from Microsoft
s/finely/finally/
But in this case both actually apply, but I don't know how to say that in perlish.
Yeah.
We know that the observer is an integral part of the experiment; at this level of physics there is no such thing as a third party observer.
But I understand that we cannot assess in advance the degree of effect the observer will have on an entirely new experiment.
Which leads me to the uncomfortable recognition that we might create the Higgs boson as we get better at looking for it.
What is uncomfortable about this is the way it raises the question: "If we are literally making it up as we go along, is this really the way we want the Universe to be?"
Are enough of the right people asking themselves that?
:-)
Well, in English if you are traveling North and need to turn West, then going left is right but going right is wrong.
Which might explain why USA politics has gotten itself into such a mess. We really need another Abott and Costello team to get our directions straignt again.
It's the limeys and the frogs trying to play "let's sneak up on 'em" the way the yanks and the russkies used to do.
There, has that got enough pejorative in it for ya?
A promise of "best effort deletion" is essentially useless in terms of avoiding nuisance suits in this kind of situation. There are no "best practices" for handling the physical deletion of records in huge RDBMS systems with multiple secondary indexes, dynamic caches, etc. And with a 24/7 on line presence. So FB could not provide any solid technical defense if they were sued.
FB could and maybe does handle all user info with appropriate integrity and discretion. But FB cannot assure that all of its user base are treating each other properly. Specifically, FB can not assure that a couple of third party idjits hadn't figured out a way to game the caches to keep that embarrassing picture of you swimming in the bong water available even after the original was physically deleted.
I think FB is doing what it has to do to cover its ass. I think users of Face Book and similar huge on line RDBMS need to learn to be careful about what they put in front of the world.
On the face of it, this policy makes sense if FB realized that they could not assure timely clean-up when somebody quit. Too much risk of being sued.
Avoidance of lawsuits is almost certainly the reason for their policy of taking ownership of anything posted to FB. It is an easy way, and perhaps the only way, of assuring that they can kill stuff that needs to be removed without being hassled with nuisance suits.
I don't see any way of running something like FB without these kinds of policies. The only surprising thing here is that FB didn't realize it needed ownership forever until recently.
Until someone tells me why it would not be the case, I would expect the initial vectors of the debris to form the usual cone shape of ballistic collisions. That being so, it is quite possible that a portion of that cone would hit the atmosphere fairly quickly.
The people who fuss about satellites don't care about that portion, they tend to focus on the rest of the spatter cone, since that is what is going to be a long term risk to their satellites.
The Electoral College was created because communication was so poor.
Well that, and the fact that a compromise was needed that would preserve each of the original state's sovereignty while still reflecting the general popular vote to some degree. And at the time, there was also a much greater recognition of the need to protect each citizen from the "tyranny of the majority" than there is today. You hardly even hear that phrase today.
If adopted nationwide, the Iowa system would make Presidential elections a much simpler and less costly thing. Only voters in California, Florida, and about half a dozen other states would have any effect on the election, so there would be no need to bother with any of that voting and campaigning rigmarole in Iowa, Idaho, etc. It would be almost as simple as going to a purely popular vote, where voters in half a dozen big cities would be the only ones who mattered.
The Electoral College is a shitty construction, but let's not jump into the outhouse hole in our desire to get rid of it. The tyranny of the majority is the pits.
Agreed, bashing Microsoft is inappropriate. But Python isn't the answer.
Microsoft should perled, for only then can you say
.
Idunno. My guess is that they've plotted it out, and the curve has one hell of a long right hand tail...
At the moment I've got 6 apps running on my front desktop, and uh, none on the back desktop. So I've got 6 apps running concurrently.
Oh wait... I'm using Ubuntu, not a thing Microsoft on this machine. My bad.
Bundling provably leads to market share when the bundled product is being sold to a naive market.
Fixed that for ya.
It would be a serious mistake to overlook the fact that when MSIE was clobbering Netscape, the overwhelming majority of the market had no prior experience with computers. MSIE succeeded to a great extent because MS recognized it could surf a one-time-only tsunami of n00be customers. That strategy will never again be successful; once you've raped all the virgins in the land, you cannot repeat that.
Okay, maybe s/rape/seduce/ --but the metaphor is still valid.
A book I enjoyed back in ancient times when I was in high school is The mathematical magpie. It is collection of essays and short stories that I believe are timeless gems, all relating to mathematics.
Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick should be on the list.
There is a short book on the golden section but I cannot remember the title or name.
All governments are corrupt. From nations down to neighborhood associations.
It is the nature of some men and women to seek power over others, and because of this driving need, they are more likely to end up in government positions than other persons who might be more qualified in all kinds of ways, but who are not attracted to power. It is also true that those who are ethically unencumbered are more likely to win the races they enter than anyone who tries to follow the rules. The end result is the old adage I first heard applied to the Chicago political machine of the 1960s:
A government does not have to be good, and rarely is. It only has to be good enough that the populace will tolerate it.
The US Constitution was built with this in mind. Its system of checks and balances are designed to keep the natural corruptive nature of politics reined in by making it very difficult for any one individual or group from obtaining across the board power. I think we could now design a better system, since we know a lot more now, and we have some neat technologies that were not available back in the day. But so long as what we've got is good enough, that's not going to happen.
Wikileaks has just raised the bar by shining light into some murky corners. Back room deals and cover-ups that used to be good enough are not good enough any longer... and that's a big win for the Nation.
So which type of Linux are they running in Houston?
Sounds like they need to switch distros.
What did Linus say a few years ago? Here it is:
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
Interview with the New York Times, September, 2003
We'll arbitarily assume Microsft is targeting Ubuntu specifically...
Hardly an arbitrary assumption. Erosion to Apple has been on-going for a decade or more, and I'm sure that Microsoft has that fully analyzed and has a multitude of strategies and tactics all ready to roll out to counter any conceivable move from Apple. But Ubuntu has arrived by a comet's orbit out of what had looked like empty space: there really was not much in the other Linux distros to attract Microsoft's core markets. Creation of this position is more likely a response to Ubuntu than to any of the known threats to Redmond's hegemony.
...what is it about Ubuntu that's making Microsoft target them specifically?
As mentioned above, the speed and brightness with which Ubuntu has emerged on the scene is definitely part of the reason.
A bigger part is that the Ubuntu distro provides, for free, with its standard 7-click installation that even a cave man can manage, not only an alternative to Windows, but also an alternative to MS Office, MSIE, FrontPage, Access, and even MS Outlook. Oh yeah, also MS Server. Ubuntu undercuts many of the few profitable products that Microsoft has left to sell.
Microsoft should be afraid. It should be very afraid. It will be interesting to see how it responds, because its jungle model of killing the competition does not look very effective against the Ubuntu tsunami.
Maybe they will make an offer to buy Canonical?