Yeah, in Saudi Arabia you can not even watch movies or listen to music and the society adapted. But, do we want to live in an oppressed society where medium-income individuals can not contribute to popular culture?
What if you can do it provided you license that well-known song for the purpose for which you intend to use it? If such a license was practically feasible for an average citizen (who can afford perhaps $20 for perpetual right to distribute the video to interested audience, which is likely to be family and friends), it would remove my objections to make such licensing mandatory rather than allowing license-free fair use.
This licensing would have to be neutral to opinions/cultural values/etc expressed in the non-commercial derived work and encapsulate all cases in one fee. If I distribute a home video of my dance performance to 5 songs, I do not expect to pay $100.
I am saying that, given of our inability to explain A in terms of B, we shouldn't turn away from attempts to explore A using collective intuition of A developed by hundreds of generations of many million people.
Recording your own music video to a popular tune and for non-commercial use should be considered fair use. It's unlikely that you are competing with any official distribution of the song or its derivative products. On the other hand, such use is essential for a society to have any kind of culture. If you can not record a video of your 1 year old son dancing to a well-known song, your ability to participate in the society and extended family is seriously curtailed.
Just because we can not answer all the questions, doesn't mean that we should not try to answer one most relevant to our lives. Let the God either wonder about his origins or understand them completely and we will worry about ours.
The basic reason to consider a possibility of a supernatural being is that we have no scientific basis of understanding our own continuousness. It's true that we can correlate it with physical phenomena, but we have no way to tell why certain chemical and electrical processes will correlate with self-awareness while others will not. We have no way to tell what happens to our "souls" before birth or after death or if other objects such as rocks are actually intelligent and self-aware. Currently, religion and spirituality provide more insight into this mystery than science.
In practice though users have had trouble updating BIOS or any other kind of firmware. The driver to update the firmware may not be there on the user's installation of desktop Linux, Vista 64 bit or virgin XP. Power failure at the wrong time can make the motherboard unbootable. Burn a CD or worse create a floppy schemes may leave out users who don't have the necessary hardware or media handy.
People have better luck with USB sticks and SD cards. At least there in an option of bringing the card to a store or a knowledgeable friend and have them fix it properly.
Just because you can not install applications in ROM, doesn't mean you can not infect or format local disks, USB devices or launch an attack on the Intranet which is otherwise behind a corporate firewall.
So OLPC is trading off application compatibility and even feasibility (no real time photo/video editing on these CPUs) for longer life. Good for them. The same argument can be made for using a specialized operating system designed for children rather than a generic Windows/Linux desktop.
Why not just include an SD card reader on the motherboard and let OEMs/end users integrate a system of their choice? In their approach, the system is not getting any security fixes. Potentially, the built in browser can be owned by simply visiting a web site. There is no way to install even a single extra application. Sounds like this has more to do with marketing than technology.
You could also argue for just using the cheapest Windows or Ubuntu notebooks instead of less powerful custom hardware that currently doesn't cost much less. Vegetable oil-powered generators and solar panels may not be out of reach of villages targeted by OLPC. Let different ideas in hardware and software compete and the best ones win in each target market.
You ignore by way of a straw man You should brush up your understanding fallacies. Straw man is arguing about a weaker position than what you are really trying to discredit, please point out where I have done that. On the other hand, your post contains a slippery slope fallacy (You ignore by way of a straw man a fundamental problem of allowing anyone, for any period, to suppress your rights: the rights turn into privileges--luxuries for better times) and a proof by example fallacy (The nature of totalitarian regimes requires they exploit a threat to cow the populace. (see Iraq, Myanmar, China, USSR)). I don't know that Chinese even consider themselves particularly threatened.
And how well does your new putsch represent people if it is willing to leave 25000 to die in earthquake rubble when the old government is at least getting people out, distributing food and rebuilding? Maybe you should think of more than tactical issues.
People dying somehow make human rights stop being an issue? Yup, you can't very well exercise your human rights after death (or at least the issue is our of hands of the government). When there is an imminent danger of your or mass death, such as a war, natural disaster, epidemic or a suspected suicide attempt in progress, it's Ok for your privacy, liberty on involuntary labor rights to be temporarily violated. It is also not appropriate to rally against your dictator, military junta or totalitarian government for a limited period when they are using all their resources for combating a genuine emergency. I hope tibetan monks cool it off for a couple of months.
It's true that these concepts have been heavily abused, to the point of governments artificially starting wars (say, Iraq or Kosovo) to preserve the state of emergency. But I don't think chinese science is advanced enough to produce a massive artificial earthquake.
Children are a somewhat different case because, in theory, they don't have all of the information that they need to make effective decisions about their future. And this is why parents/legal guardians are entrusted with a right to override ineffective decisions that children might otherwise make about their future. Although a particular parent can be unfortunately abusive or stupid (mine fell into the later category), this is still better than an abusive and stupid government (like my birth country) having total control over ALL the young minds.
Although there are some useful things to be learned in school, most skills beyond basic reading can be easily learned when one feels the need. I won a national competition in math, but now I remember zilch from high school algebra. I frequently come to work late and sometimes make silly excuses when I miss a meeting, yet I am one of the most productive employees in the team.
So if my daughter occasionally skips classes I don't see it as a grave offense punishable by making her wear a GPS tracking bracelets like convicted felons on probation. I will certainly talk to her and may cut off her entertainment activities for a time, but I will rather move out of the country than allow government to treat her like a criminal. If she just skips a couple of classes per month, I will just chuck it off to her being a kid.
Well, the most common bug is random memory corruption. How will you change Wine so that stack, heap and loaded DLLs are always at exactly the same memory addresses as in the target version of Windows. Being a user process, Wine doesn't even have a complete control of the 4GB address space. malloc algorithms used by Win32 may not perform well with Linux memory manager. As I mentioned, windows upgrades and service packs already break these apps as often as wine.
You want developers and QA to spend most of their time on the platform that will be your primary market. Sadly, Windows will be the most common answer for a desktop application. Gtk+/Qt are not exposing all the capabilities of Win32 API. For a serious application, you will likely need custom controls that can not be easily ported even if you have the source code. You will want good interoperability with other Windows apps such as MSOffice through COM or copy/paste. When Java is not enough for your UI/system integration/performance needs, using Wine will save serious effort over maintaining multiple binaries.
Would you hold Wine responsible for bugs or use of undocumented internals in the programs that do not run? Plenty of software breaks just by being run on a new version of Windows, new service pack or a new video driver.
1.0 release can be just defined by some milestones set ahead of time. For example, implementation of all published APIs in a set of DLLs, minus a few documented exceptions.
You already emit sound waves and light through your windows. So I presume you don't mind people watching you 24/7 with binoculars, bouncing laser light off your windows to eavesdrop on your conversations and tempest-style technologies to see what is on your computer monitor?
Just because the information is theoretically available doesn't mean that it is available to a corrupt officer who doesn't have cooperation of the whole government organization and outside scientists. Crooks are usually dumb and have no idea how to write human behavior modeling software.
Because you do not want to support Microsoft by purchasing Windows? Besides, these days MS will not even sell you a version of Windows that runs best under a VM (XP for newest x86 computers, 98 for the rest).
I see a business model of developing programs for the dominant desktop platform but also certifying them to run properly under Wine for Linux users. If the application is explicitly Wine-aware, it shouldn't be that hard to get it Gtk+/Qt themed, use UNIX-styled file dialogs or call native libraries for Linux-specific functionality. Of course.Net/Mono may be a better solution for a lot of developers.
Honestly, it's too hard for individual consumers to stop supporting evil regimes. Even if a product is assembled in USA or in a democratic country, parts may very well all come from China. In many cases, like a MacBook or an Intel CPU, there are simply no alternatives for the whole class of products, some essential to daily lives.
Our government should grow some balls and formulate a foreign trading policy that doesn't support repressive regimes or force our economy to "integrate" with a 3rd world country's standards of product safety, wages and labor laws.
This is a coverup of the fact that 2000SG344 will hit Earth as was originally reported in year 2000. What is a more perfect cover than to actually plan out the whole mission under the guise of advancing science or preparing for Mars? Then, once independent scientists wise up, public can be reassured that NASA developed the technology to deflect the asteroid with a series of controlled, directed pocket nuke type charges.
It's funny that I live in a place that doesn't have a real crime problem, although it has a strict due process, respect or privacy and presumption of innocence. Maybe no thanks to the federal law but due to discretion by the police officers. I would be shocked if our local police department went combing through "commercially available" personal information of all residents of Foster City, CA residence looking for criminals.
I hear crime (individual+organized+government) is a lot higher in totalitarian countries where law enforcement doesn't show such self restraint. Christians, Buddhist monks and journalists are sent to reeducation camps, brutalized or simply disappear and are never heard of again.
The same techniques will likely be effective for identifying most effective protestors against current administration, or people that can be most effectively exploiting sexually, financially or politically. In fact, terrorists generally cover their tracks much better than innocent civilians.
One word - future. Ten years from now, Windows Server 2003 will not run on then current hardware and much of your specialized and homebrew applications will not run properly on the new OS. You will have to migrate your data to new solutions and pay massive retraining and software maintenance costs.
With Redhat, you will have an option of staying with any component of your existing solution. If enough other people are interested or you can justify hiring in-house programmers, you can get the whole old operating system running on new hardware. For a less radical solution, you will be able to maintain existing C, X11 and Gtk+ libraries to get unchanged application binaries running on a new OS. The more open source code you have in your disposal, especially with an active development community, the more flexible and inexpensive your future hardware/software migration going to be.
If O.J. Simpson is your role model in regards to handling matters of criminal and civil law, then you have in fact done a good job. He has done nothing illegal in the sense that he was found "not guilty" by the criminal jury and avoided paying a civil judgement. You keep talking about how skillful you were at running away from your creditors. If you have done nothing wrong, why did you have to run? If you obtained the load in good faith and were going to pay off as much of it as you were able, why not go for bankruptcy right away and compensate the creditors with sale of part of your property which is not a life necessity?
Yeah, in Saudi Arabia you can not even watch movies or listen to music and the society adapted. But, do we want to live in an oppressed society where medium-income individuals can not contribute to popular culture?
This licensing would have to be neutral to opinions/cultural values/etc expressed in the non-commercial derived work and encapsulate all cases in one fee. If I distribute a home video of my dance performance to 5 songs, I do not expect to pay $100.
I am saying that, given of our inability to explain A in terms of B, we shouldn't turn away from attempts to explore A using collective intuition of A developed by hundreds of generations of many million people.
Recording your own music video to a popular tune and for non-commercial use should be considered fair use. It's unlikely that you are competing with any official distribution of the song or its derivative products. On the other hand, such use is essential for a society to have any kind of culture. If you can not record a video of your 1 year old son dancing to a well-known song, your ability to participate in the society and extended family is seriously curtailed.
Just because we can not answer all the questions, doesn't mean that we should not try to answer one most relevant to our lives. Let the God either wonder about his origins or understand them completely and we will worry about ours.
The basic reason to consider a possibility of a supernatural being is that we have no scientific basis of understanding our own continuousness. It's true that we can correlate it with physical phenomena, but we have no way to tell why certain chemical and electrical processes will correlate with self-awareness while others will not. We have no way to tell what happens to our "souls" before birth or after death or if other objects such as rocks are actually intelligent and self-aware. Currently, religion and spirituality provide more insight into this mystery than science.
In practice though users have had trouble updating BIOS or any other kind of firmware. The driver to update the firmware may not be there on the user's installation of desktop Linux, Vista 64 bit or virgin XP. Power failure at the wrong time can make the motherboard unbootable. Burn a CD or worse create a floppy schemes may leave out users who don't have the necessary hardware or media handy.
People have better luck with USB sticks and SD cards. At least there in an option of bringing the card to a store or a knowledgeable friend and have them fix it properly.
Just because you can not install applications in ROM, doesn't mean you can not infect or format local disks, USB devices or launch an attack on the Intranet which is otherwise behind a corporate firewall.
So OLPC is trading off application compatibility and even feasibility (no real time photo/video editing on these CPUs) for longer life. Good for them. The same argument can be made for using a specialized operating system designed for children rather than a generic Windows/Linux desktop.
Why not just include an SD card reader on the motherboard and let OEMs/end users integrate a system of their choice? In their approach, the system is not getting any security fixes. Potentially, the built in browser can be owned by simply visiting a web site. There is no way to install even a single extra application. Sounds like this has more to do with marketing than technology.
You could also argue for just using the cheapest Windows or Ubuntu notebooks instead of less powerful custom hardware that currently doesn't cost much less. Vegetable oil-powered generators and solar panels may not be out of reach of villages targeted by OLPC. Let different ideas in hardware and software compete and the best ones win in each target market.
And how well does your new putsch represent people if it is willing to leave 25000 to die in earthquake rubble when the old government is at least getting people out, distributing food and rebuilding? Maybe you should think of more than tactical issues.
It's true that these concepts have been heavily abused, to the point of governments artificially starting wars (say, Iraq or Kosovo) to preserve the state of emergency. But I don't think chinese science is advanced enough to produce a massive artificial earthquake.
Although there are some useful things to be learned in school, most skills beyond basic reading can be easily learned when one feels the need. I won a national competition in math, but now I remember zilch from high school algebra. I frequently come to work late and sometimes make silly excuses when I miss a meeting, yet I am one of the most productive employees in the team.
So if my daughter occasionally skips classes I don't see it as a grave offense punishable by making her wear a GPS tracking bracelets like convicted felons on probation. I will certainly talk to her and may cut off her entertainment activities for a time, but I will rather move out of the country than allow government to treat her like a criminal. If she just skips a couple of classes per month, I will just chuck it off to her being a kid.
Well, the most common bug is random memory corruption. How will you change Wine so that stack, heap and loaded DLLs are always at exactly the same memory addresses as in the target version of Windows. Being a user process, Wine doesn't even have a complete control of the 4GB address space. malloc algorithms used by Win32 may not perform well with Linux memory manager. As I mentioned, windows upgrades and service packs already break these apps as often as wine.
You want developers and QA to spend most of their time on the platform that will be your primary market. Sadly, Windows will be the most common answer for a desktop application. Gtk+/Qt are not exposing all the capabilities of Win32 API. For a serious application, you will likely need custom controls that can not be easily ported even if you have the source code. You will want good interoperability with other Windows apps such as MSOffice through COM or copy/paste. When Java is not enough for your UI/system integration/performance needs, using Wine will save serious effort over maintaining multiple binaries.
Would you hold Wine responsible for bugs or use of undocumented internals in the programs that do not run? Plenty of software breaks just by being run on a new version of Windows, new service pack or a new video driver.
1.0 release can be just defined by some milestones set ahead of time. For example, implementation of all published APIs in a set of DLLs, minus a few documented exceptions.
You already emit sound waves and light through your windows. So I presume you don't mind people watching you 24/7 with binoculars, bouncing laser light off your windows to eavesdrop on your conversations and tempest-style technologies to see what is on your computer monitor?
Just because the information is theoretically available doesn't mean that it is available to a corrupt officer who doesn't have cooperation of the whole government organization and outside scientists. Crooks are usually dumb and have no idea how to write human behavior modeling software.
Because you do not want to support Microsoft by purchasing Windows? Besides, these days MS will not even sell you a version of Windows that runs best under a VM (XP for newest x86 computers, 98 for the rest).
.Net/Mono may be a better solution for a lot of developers.
I see a business model of developing programs for the dominant desktop platform but also certifying them to run properly under Wine for Linux users. If the application is explicitly Wine-aware, it shouldn't be that hard to get it Gtk+/Qt themed, use UNIX-styled file dialogs or call native libraries for Linux-specific functionality. Of course
Honestly, it's too hard for individual consumers to stop supporting evil regimes. Even if a product is assembled in USA or in a democratic country, parts may very well all come from China. In many cases, like a MacBook or an Intel CPU, there are simply no alternatives for the whole class of products, some essential to daily lives.
Our government should grow some balls and formulate a foreign trading policy that doesn't support repressive regimes or force our economy to "integrate" with a 3rd world country's standards of product safety, wages and labor laws.
This is a coverup of the fact that 2000SG344 will hit Earth as was originally reported in year 2000. What is a more perfect cover than to actually plan out the whole mission under the guise of advancing science or preparing for Mars? Then, once independent scientists wise up, public can be reassured that NASA developed the technology to deflect the asteroid with a series of controlled, directed pocket nuke type charges.
It's funny that I live in a place that doesn't have a real crime problem, although it has a strict due process, respect or privacy and presumption of innocence. Maybe no thanks to the federal law but due to discretion by the police officers. I would be shocked if our local police department went combing through "commercially available" personal information of all residents of Foster City, CA residence looking for criminals.
I hear crime (individual+organized+government) is a lot higher in totalitarian countries where law enforcement doesn't show such self restraint. Christians, Buddhist monks and journalists are sent to reeducation camps, brutalized or simply disappear and are never heard of again.
The same techniques will likely be effective for identifying most effective protestors against current administration, or people that can be most effectively exploiting sexually, financially or politically. In fact, terrorists generally cover their tracks much better than innocent civilians.
One word - future. Ten years from now, Windows Server 2003 will not run on then current hardware and much of your specialized and homebrew applications will not run properly on the new OS. You will have to migrate your data to new solutions and pay massive retraining and software maintenance costs.
With Redhat, you will have an option of staying with any component of your existing solution. If enough other people are interested or you can justify hiring in-house programmers, you can get the whole old operating system running on new hardware. For a less radical solution, you will be able to maintain existing C, X11 and Gtk+ libraries to get unchanged application binaries running on a new OS. The more open source code you have in your disposal, especially with an active development community, the more flexible and inexpensive your future hardware/software migration going to be.
If O.J. Simpson is your role model in regards to handling matters of criminal and civil law, then you have in fact done a good job. He has done nothing illegal in the sense that he was found "not guilty" by the criminal jury and avoided paying a civil judgement. You keep talking about how skillful you were at running away from your creditors. If you have done nothing wrong, why did you have to run? If you obtained the load in good faith and were going to pay off as much of it as you were able, why not go for bankruptcy right away and compensate the creditors with sale of part of your property which is not a life necessity?