I agree
I just installed Ubuntu on a laptop at home, and it was a pleasant experience. Except that on installation, it hit a snag because the disk was fragmented, and I had to defrag several times before it would partition properly.
The thing was, it took a fair amount of searching to find out the problem, and it would have been nice if this fairly common problem had been addressed either in the literature, or in the installation programme itself. Once I sorted that out, the installation was a dream. Very impressive, given that it's free. It found everything, and my wi-fi, CD-ROM etc are all connected. Well, the wi-fi doesn't work with WEP, but maybe I need to work on that.
And it's true, if you just want to do the basic stuff in Ubuntu, it's all there, and the updates are automatic, and it probably would just work. I would consider giving this setup to my mother.
My problem is that now I want to do things like connect up my camera, and my phone, and my PDA, and it suddenly becomes a lot harder. I need to start digging around to find the script that manages the serial ports, and set up sync programmes, and work out what is the internal address of my syncML server. I'm used to having software that just does this for me - it detects hardware on the port, and works out what it is, and tells me what to do.
Now I'm aware that I paid nothing for Ubuntu, so I shouldn't be ungrateful. But what I would really like would be some more guidance about where to start. The Linux for beginners sites that I have found, tell me how to use the mouse, modify the desktop, and use the software that I have. The next level up just gives me a lot of complex information, that is a shade too complex for me.
So I heartily agree that Linux, and Ubuntu are OK for beginners, and for experts, there is a need for more support for the person who has already begun. That said, in the do-it-yourself spirit of the Linux community, maybe I should do it myself!
That's pretty much exactly what my wife said. She has always refused a Mac, because the Russian websites that she uses are only accessible from Internet Explorer on Windows. The fonts go weird on a Mac, and I haven't been able to sort it out.
Now that we can do Windows on a Mac, she wants the new Macbook, which she will run as a purely Windows machine. I doubt she will ever boot into MacOS. She wants an Apple Machine because it's prettier.
Everyone knows that Apple protects information about forthcoming products - that's why the rumour sites exist. So it's disingenuous for Jason to say that he didn't know that the information was a trade secret or confidential. If anyone should know that Apple doesn't want to publish this information, it should be someone who attracts readers to his site with the promise of access to that information.
They are trade secrets, because presumably that information would be useful to Apple's competitors. For instance, Dell, or Microsoft could plan competing product announcements for that day.
Also, if the news gets out that Apple is about to issue a new product, then sales of Apple's analogous products will fall. So Apple has to play a finely balanced game of only announcing new products when they can be sure of getting them to market on time.
All of these are major issues for Apple's business, and Apple has a right to decide what information release strategy is in its best interests. Obviously, there's a public right to know about corporate or individual malfeasance at Apple, but that is protected by whistle-blowing laws, and by the first amendment.
In a way, Apple is asserting its right to privacy here, in the same way that a celebrity would.
Having been in business (finance) for 15 years, I have been in a similar position to the CTO on occasion. The world is full of armchair quarterbacks, who are able to scratch a living in journalism and from writing books. Some of these people have real insights, some are just cobbling together platitudes on fashionable subjects. By and large, I tend to discount people who sell opinions on any subject, if they have never tried to make a living out of the implications of that opinion.
My feeling is that this CTO is in the position that well-meaning people are happily giving him advice all the time about what Amazon should be doing. He has limited resources in terms of time and money, so he needs a well-primed bullshit filter to make sure that he's not wasting his time. The first thing you do when talking to a consultant is to establish their bona fides, and to test them on the basis for their recommendations. You can start to believe their general statements, when you can see that their conclusions are based on real research and not thought experiments.
When someone is using the phrase "you just don't get (whatever subject)" I counter that it's up to them to convince me. There were lots of people putting crazy valuations on internet stocks in the late 90s. When you asked them how they justified the valuations, they would come up with over-optimistic projections about the amount of money that could be made from the net. Often they would assume that one company's revenues would be greater than the entire spending on that product category. Eventually the conversation would get to a stage where it was clear that they had no data to support their hypotheses, and they would wheel out the phrase "you just don't get it".
They could just as easily have said "oh ye of little faith". That's appropriate in a religious setting, but not where my clients' money is concerned. It's also my experience that people who have faith in irrational things tend to view any aggressive questioning as rude. I remember one of my analysts getting very upset when it was pointed out to her that her opinion on a particular company was at odds with her own facts - her only defence was to scream at me for being rude. Often if people have no real counter-arguments, they react to bad news and criticism by criticising the way it was delivered.
Erm, except that this is not a donation from Microsoft, it's a donation by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Obviously, Bill Gates is identified with Microsoft, and is its largest shareholder, but the two are different entities. Microsoft is a public corporation, run in the interests of its shareholders, and may well make donations as part of its PR. Its shareholders, who may well include the people who will pay your pension (or maybe not, depends on your situation), expect and encourage them to do this.
The charitable foundation is not expected to act in Microsoft's interest - it answers to a board of trustees, and is presumably regulated by the American equivalent of the UK charities commission. Presumably if it did start to make donations that were in Microsoft's interests, its tax-free status would come under scrutiny quite quickly.
When you're delivering firearms, you want to know when they are expected to turn up, so that you start worrying if they don't arrive on time. Under the current system, the receiving office only knows about the firearms shipment if the sending office enquires whether they have arrived yet, or if they actually arrive.
Superbowl night is also probably a big earner for the regional networks. And how do they explain to their viewers that they can't see one of the most popular events of the year, because the affiliates are on strike? How much sympathy do you think they'll get?
Re:Fly me to the Moon...
on
Space Tourism?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
A lot of the Russian money for the ISS has been siphoned out by Moscow bureaucrats, and the Russians are begging the US for extra funding. I don't think the US is that behind in its commitments - the articles I have read suggest that the Russians are behind. My guess is (based on plenty of direct experience of Russian industry and project management) that the Russian manufacturers have not seen any of the money allocated for the project, because it's been diverted to various consultancy companies and agencies. So the Russians can't deliver, because they can't buy material and parts, and the money has disappeared, so they are looking for other funding sources.
My Imate Jam will do this right now. So will the SonyEricsson P900. They are phones/PDAs, with MP3 players, and memory up to a gigabyte. If they can get that memory up to 4 megs, and improve their cameras to 3MP, then that's pretty much all you need in a box.
Have a look at "Until the End of the World" by Wim Wenders, which forecast all of this. Although he assumed that people would want videophones, which I doubt.
And there's also a good chance that the people who work for this company are paid low wages, which is acceptable to them, because they can maintain some sort of a standard of living by buying cheap imported goods.
The bottom line is that it is very hard to find any aspect of your life that is not significantly cheaper because of globalisation.
This will hurt users in the short run, as it will reduce competition. In the UK, the incumbent has to give access, and alternative ISPs are falling over themselves to undercut each other and provide better service. This move will clearly reduce choice. Even the Russian market is more open than that proposed by the FCC - the local anti-trust regulator recently won a court case requiring incumbents to give access to alternative DSL providers.
In the long run, though, this will hasten the implementation of Wi-Max and other wireless technologies, possibly by municipalities. These will be used for VoIP, and hey presto, the Baby Bells will be screwed. No doubt they will try to enlist the FCC's help on that too, but they are running out of arguments.
"The Waste Land" , by T.S. Eliot, published in 1923, IIRC, is one of the most prominent early examples of the "remix culture". At least a third of Eliot's text consists of quotes from other writers, including reviews on Wagner, popular songs, reformation playwrights, and translations of Eastern mystics. In today's terms, it would be a massive copyright violation, on the lines of the quote from the Rolling Stones that cost the Verve so much of their royalties from "Bittersweet Symphony".
My point is that there is a "high culture" version of this "remix culture" that has existed for a long time (classical musicians would often quote from each other). Perhaps acknowledgement of this might encourage legislators to accept that protection of the rights of older artists stifles the creativity of new ones. (This relates to the patent debate in a thread further down the front page).
Actually, the bottom line is that it is going to happen, one way or the other. Individuals may suffer from this, like the Verve, who lost the revenues from a hit album, but others will gain, like kids in poorer countries, who are not viable targets for US trial lawyers.
If they are going to be overzealous, or similarly idiotic, they will do this regardless of what you tell them. However, if their misguided policies stem from ignorance, rather than innate fascism, then you could do a lot of good.
So if I were you, to keep my conscience clear, I would draw up a list of problems, and give their solutions. At the same time, make it clear that there will be more problems, unless they adopt procedures that will make their network more secure. You should structure the document so that the importance of procedures is stressed upfront, then go to the nitty gritty. Then you should include a list of problems that you expect to arise, unless they approach the security problem differently.
I'm not a sysadmin, so I can't give you any concrete technical advice. In general, security works best when there are multiple perimeters, and when there are plenty of opportunities for those perimeters to be tested. So that means multiple layers of passwords for the important stuff, and it means that there should be a system for information about security breaches to be reported without prejudice.
It seems to me that the situation you are describing would be a perfect environment where academics could take their discoveries and apply them in business. As you say: "if someone wants such-and-such a product, or needs such-and-such information, then the lecturer will adapt what they are doing to fit". This means that the academics in their ivory towers get plenty of exposure to the real world - I can't believe that in a university, there is no contact between the academics who get funding from business and those who get government funding to do academic research. It looks to me like the channels running from the academy to business are fairly well open.
I started my working life in a UK university, as a lowly research assistant on a government funded project. Both my parents are academics, and this is what I wanted to do with my life. However, I quickly realised that an academic salary would never allow me to buy a decent house in the town where I was living. And this was ten years ago. I was working in economics, and we did a fair amount of external consulting work. So I have some experience of what you are talking about, although I am sure that things are different in science and engineering.
I then went to work in finance, and to be honest, this is one area where the British are quite good at applying the results of academic research to making money. It's a bit more abstract than science, of course, but quite important for the British economy. I would argue, based on a fairly narrow experience, that the issue is not the academics, but the businesses. True, I have seen some very hamfisted attempts at business by academics, but at least they are trying. There is an image of academics refusing to sully their hands with business, but my experience is that in the UK at least, they will do anything to make a buck. I think the problem is more with a lack of innovation by business - UK businesses don't invest that much in R and D, although I know that there are exceptions. This is in marked contrast to the US model, where companies are expected to innovate, and failure is not a disaster. UK industries tend to stay in comfortable niches (again, in general). I suspect that MLE Europe failed because of its own mismanagement, but that doesn't mean that universities are unable, in principle, to build mutually profitable links with business.
You are right, from a moral philosophical perspective. However, i suspect that these employees had quite strict non-compete agreements with CIBC. They violated these agreements, especially by trying to persuade their soon-to-be-former colleagues to join them. These emails are incriminating because they show that the defectors actively persuaded other employees to join them, and left a smoking gun behind them. It's a breach-of-contract case, not an abuse of loyalty.
And he is probably number one in the world in terms of rolling back civil liberties. Note that I say rolling back - there are a lot of places worse than Russia, but they have been that way from a long time. Russia is actively moving back towards totalitarianism.
I live in Russia, but have spent most of my adult life in the UK. When I go back to the UK, it is such a weight off my shoulders knowing that as I leave the house, I do not have to worry about whether I have all my documents with me. At the moment, this includes: passport, visa, immigration card and work permit. In theory, I am in breach of the law, because my registration stamp is in my passport, and not on my immigration card. Of course, if the stamp were on my immigration card, there would be questions about why it is not in my passport.
Of course, foreigners have to register in the UK as well. But it's a lot easier to get the requisite stamps, and there is no requirement to present these documents to any policeman on demand. Whereas in Russia, policemen gather outside bars frequented by foreigners, in order to check their documents and extract a little late-night "foreigner tax". It's all about implementation - without safeguards, the system will certainly be abused. But better not to have the system in the first place.
Exactly - isn't the point that with an open source project, with a team of developers and users, this backdoor was identified within a couple of days? Whereas with a closed source project, the problem could have gone unnoticed for some time.
Or worse, it could have been noticed, and left unmentioneded, in the hope that no one would notice, and it would go away by itself. You don't hear about open source projects using the DMCA to get whisteblowers to shut up, do you?
I hear what you're saying, but I have been vacillating about buying a PS2 for a long time now. I am happy with the games that I can play on my computer, and don't need the DVD capability that much. I was about to buy a PS2, but will now definitely buy this, as it looks much cooler!
Although you are right that foreign companies can have a listing on a US exchange, the disclosure and corporate governance requirements for foreign listers are less than for US corporations. This in turn may disqualify some ERISA type accounts from investing in this type of security. So in order to maximise your exposure to a full range of US investors, you need the US registration and listing.
I suspect that this is not the reason that Dell is onshore, though. As a US company, they can get orders from the US government, and their brand would probably be damaged if they changed their domicile or registration to a non-US one.
[quote}
Crickey mate! Only a drongo with reckon that the poms and the septics are the only places bonza enough to have a yarn in English.
[/quote]
My dear fellow, I think you have just made the point perfectly.
I have managed to get a Hitachi Eplate to work with a Wi-fi connection. It has a CF and a PCMCIA card. It uses an old, and somewhat obscure version of Windows CE, so there are not a lot of programs around, but it has Word, Excel, and (I think) Powerpoint built in, and a video out port. I doubt that VoIP would be an option, given the lack of program availability.
You can get one on Ebay for $300, or less, and it does a lot of what you want. I agree that what you describe is an attractive package (very similar to what is used in the film "Until the End of the World", which I recommend as a vision of the future), but I don't see anyone producing it any time soon.
Monopolies only apply to single companies, not to an industry association. No single company can seriously be said to have a monopoly over selling music to the general public, nor is any single company using its market position to create an uneven marketplace. So there's not really a case for anti-trust policy, because it's just an industry association acting on behalf of its members, not a single company acting exclusively in its own interests, against the others.
I'm sure that independent record companies have complaints about the difficulty of setting themselves up, and probably can point to various anticompetitive practices, but there doesn't seem to be the widespread abuse on the lines of Microsoft. For instance, I've never heard of any of any individual company, nor the **AAs going to record shops and chains and saying "You can't sell our product if you include content from these independents". I have also not heard about any of the **AA refusing membership to new companies or independents.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree I just installed Ubuntu on a laptop at home, and it was a pleasant experience. Except that on installation, it hit a snag because the disk was fragmented, and I had to defrag several times before it would partition properly. The thing was, it took a fair amount of searching to find out the problem, and it would have been nice if this fairly common problem had been addressed either in the literature, or in the installation programme itself. Once I sorted that out, the installation was a dream. Very impressive, given that it's free. It found everything, and my wi-fi, CD-ROM etc are all connected. Well, the wi-fi doesn't work with WEP, but maybe I need to work on that. And it's true, if you just want to do the basic stuff in Ubuntu, it's all there, and the updates are automatic, and it probably would just work. I would consider giving this setup to my mother. My problem is that now I want to do things like connect up my camera, and my phone, and my PDA, and it suddenly becomes a lot harder. I need to start digging around to find the script that manages the serial ports, and set up sync programmes, and work out what is the internal address of my syncML server. I'm used to having software that just does this for me - it detects hardware on the port, and works out what it is, and tells me what to do. Now I'm aware that I paid nothing for Ubuntu, so I shouldn't be ungrateful. But what I would really like would be some more guidance about where to start. The Linux for beginners sites that I have found, tell me how to use the mouse, modify the desktop, and use the software that I have. The next level up just gives me a lot of complex information, that is a shade too complex for me. So I heartily agree that Linux, and Ubuntu are OK for beginners, and for experts, there is a need for more support for the person who has already begun. That said, in the do-it-yourself spirit of the Linux community, maybe I should do it myself!
That's pretty much exactly what my wife said. She has always refused a Mac, because the Russian websites that she uses are only accessible from Internet Explorer on Windows. The fonts go weird on a Mac, and I haven't been able to sort it out.
Now that we can do Windows on a Mac, she wants the new Macbook, which she will run as a purely Windows machine. I doubt she will ever boot into MacOS. She wants an Apple Machine because it's prettier.
Thank you for a very interesting post.
Everyone knows that Apple protects information about forthcoming products - that's why the rumour sites exist. So it's disingenuous for Jason to say that he didn't know that the information was a trade secret or confidential. If anyone should know that Apple doesn't want to publish this information, it should be someone who attracts readers to his site with the promise of access to that information.
They are trade secrets, because presumably that information would be useful to Apple's competitors. For instance, Dell, or Microsoft could plan competing product announcements for that day.
Also, if the news gets out that Apple is about to issue a new product, then sales of Apple's analogous products will fall. So Apple has to play a finely balanced game of only announcing new products when they can be sure of getting them to market on time.
All of these are major issues for Apple's business, and Apple has a right to decide what information release strategy is in its best interests. Obviously, there's a public right to know about corporate or individual malfeasance at Apple, but that is protected by whistle-blowing laws, and by the first amendment.
In a way, Apple is asserting its right to privacy here, in the same way that a celebrity would.
Having been in business (finance) for 15 years, I have been in a similar position to the CTO on occasion. The world is full of armchair quarterbacks, who are able to scratch a living in journalism and from writing books. Some of these people have real insights, some are just cobbling together platitudes on fashionable subjects. By and large, I tend to discount people who sell opinions on any subject, if they have never tried to make a living out of the implications of that opinion.
My feeling is that this CTO is in the position that well-meaning people are happily giving him advice all the time about what Amazon should be doing. He has limited resources in terms of time and money, so he needs a well-primed bullshit filter to make sure that he's not wasting his time. The first thing you do when talking to a consultant is to establish their bona fides, and to test them on the basis for their recommendations. You can start to believe their general statements, when you can see that their conclusions are based on real research and not thought experiments.
When someone is using the phrase "you just don't get (whatever subject)" I counter that it's up to them to convince me. There were lots of people putting crazy valuations on internet stocks in the late 90s. When you asked them how they justified the valuations, they would come up with over-optimistic projections about the amount of money that could be made from the net. Often they would assume that one company's revenues would be greater than the entire spending on that product category. Eventually the conversation would get to a stage where it was clear that they had no data to support their hypotheses, and they would wheel out the phrase "you just don't get it".
They could just as easily have said "oh ye of little faith". That's appropriate in a religious setting, but not where my clients' money is concerned. It's also my experience that people who have faith in irrational things tend to view any aggressive questioning as rude. I remember one of my analysts getting very upset when it was pointed out to her that her opinion on a particular company was at odds with her own facts - her only defence was to scream at me for being rude. Often if people have no real counter-arguments, they react to bad news and criticism by criticising the way it was delivered.
Erm, except that this is not a donation from Microsoft, it's a donation by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Obviously, Bill Gates is identified with Microsoft, and is its largest shareholder, but the two are different entities. Microsoft is a public corporation, run in the interests of its shareholders, and may well make donations as part of its PR. Its shareholders, who may well include the people who will pay your pension (or maybe not, depends on your situation), expect and encourage them to do this.
The charitable foundation is not expected to act in Microsoft's interest - it answers to a board of trustees, and is presumably regulated by the American equivalent of the UK charities commission. Presumably if it did start to make donations that were in Microsoft's interests, its tax-free status would come under scrutiny quite quickly.
When you're delivering firearms, you want to know when they are expected to turn up, so that you start worrying if they don't arrive on time. Under the current system, the receiving office only knows about the firearms shipment if the sending office enquires whether they have arrived yet, or if they actually arrive.
Superbowl night is also probably a big earner for the regional networks. And how do they explain to their viewers that they can't see one of the most popular events of the year, because the affiliates are on strike? How much sympathy do you think they'll get?
A lot of the Russian money for the ISS has been siphoned out by Moscow bureaucrats, and the Russians are begging the US for extra funding. I don't think the US is that behind in its commitments - the articles I have read suggest that the Russians are behind. My guess is (based on plenty of direct experience of Russian industry and project management) that the Russian manufacturers have not seen any of the money allocated for the project, because it's been diverted to various consultancy companies and agencies. So the Russians can't deliver, because they can't buy material and parts, and the money has disappeared, so they are looking for other funding sources.
My Imate Jam will do this right now. So will the SonyEricsson P900. They are phones/PDAs, with MP3 players, and memory up to a gigabyte. If they can get that memory up to 4 megs, and improve their cameras to 3MP, then that's pretty much all you need in a box.
Have a look at "Until the End of the World" by Wim Wenders, which forecast all of this. Although he assumed that people would want videophones, which I doubt.
And there's also a good chance that the people who work for this company are paid low wages, which is acceptable to them, because they can maintain some sort of a standard of living by buying cheap imported goods.
The bottom line is that it is very hard to find any aspect of your life that is not significantly cheaper because of globalisation.
This will hurt users in the short run, as it will reduce competition. In the UK, the incumbent has to give access, and alternative ISPs are falling over themselves to undercut each other and provide better service. This move will clearly reduce choice. Even the Russian market is more open than that proposed by the FCC - the local anti-trust regulator recently won a court case requiring incumbents to give access to alternative DSL providers.
In the long run, though, this will hasten the implementation of Wi-Max and other wireless technologies, possibly by municipalities. These will be used for VoIP, and hey presto, the Baby Bells will be screwed. No doubt they will try to enlist the FCC's help on that too, but they are running out of arguments.
"The Waste Land" , by T.S. Eliot, published in 1923, IIRC, is one of the most prominent early examples of the "remix culture". At least a third of Eliot's text consists of quotes from other writers, including reviews on Wagner, popular songs, reformation playwrights, and translations of Eastern mystics. In today's terms, it would be a massive copyright violation, on the lines of the quote from the Rolling Stones that cost the Verve so much of their royalties from "Bittersweet Symphony".
My point is that there is a "high culture" version of this "remix culture" that has existed for a long time (classical musicians would often quote from each other). Perhaps acknowledgement of this might encourage legislators to accept that protection of the rights of older artists stifles the creativity of new ones. (This relates to the patent debate in a thread further down the front page).
Actually, the bottom line is that it is going to happen, one way or the other. Individuals may suffer from this, like the Verve, who lost the revenues from a hit album, but others will gain, like kids in poorer countries, who are not viable targets for US trial lawyers.
If they are going to be overzealous, or similarly idiotic, they will do this regardless of what you tell them. However, if their misguided policies stem from ignorance, rather than innate fascism, then you could do a lot of good.
So if I were you, to keep my conscience clear, I would draw up a list of problems, and give their solutions. At the same time, make it clear that there will be more problems, unless they adopt procedures that will make their network more secure. You should structure the document so that the importance of procedures is stressed upfront, then go to the nitty gritty. Then you should include a list of problems that you expect to arise, unless they approach the security problem differently.
I'm not a sysadmin, so I can't give you any concrete technical advice. In general, security works best when there are multiple perimeters, and when there are plenty of opportunities for those perimeters to be tested. So that means multiple layers of passwords for the important stuff, and it means that there should be a system for information about security breaches to be reported without prejudice.
It seems to me that the situation you are describing would be a perfect environment where academics could take their discoveries and apply them in business. As you say: "if someone wants such-and-such a product, or needs such-and-such information, then the lecturer will adapt what they are doing to fit". This means that the academics in their ivory towers get plenty of exposure to the real world - I can't believe that in a university, there is no contact between the academics who get funding from business and those who get government funding to do academic research. It looks to me like the channels running from the academy to business are fairly well open.
I started my working life in a UK university, as a lowly research assistant on a government funded project. Both my parents are academics, and this is what I wanted to do with my life. However, I quickly realised that an academic salary would never allow me to buy a decent house in the town where I was living. And this was ten years ago. I was working in economics, and we did a fair amount of external consulting work. So I have some experience of what you are talking about, although I am sure that things are different in science and engineering.
I then went to work in finance, and to be honest, this is one area where the British are quite good at applying the results of academic research to making money. It's a bit more abstract than science, of course, but quite important for the British economy. I would argue, based on a fairly narrow experience, that the issue is not the academics, but the businesses. True, I have seen some very hamfisted attempts at business by academics, but at least they are trying. There is an image of academics refusing to sully their hands with business, but my experience is that in the UK at least, they will do anything to make a buck. I think the problem is more with a lack of innovation by business - UK businesses don't invest that much in R and D, although I know that there are exceptions. This is in marked contrast to the US model, where companies are expected to innovate, and failure is not a disaster. UK industries tend to stay in comfortable niches (again, in general). I suspect that MLE Europe failed because of its own mismanagement, but that doesn't mean that universities are unable, in principle, to build mutually profitable links with business.
You are right, from a moral philosophical perspective. However, i suspect that these employees had quite strict non-compete agreements with CIBC. They violated these agreements, especially by trying to persuade their soon-to-be-former colleagues to join them. These emails are incriminating because they show that the defectors actively persuaded other employees to join them, and left a smoking gun behind them. It's a breach-of-contract case, not an abuse of loyalty.
And he is probably number one in the world in terms of rolling back civil liberties. Note that I say rolling back - there are a lot of places worse than Russia, but they have been that way from a long time. Russia is actively moving back towards totalitarianism.
I live in Russia, but have spent most of my adult life in the UK. When I go back to the UK, it is such a weight off my shoulders knowing that as I leave the house, I do not have to worry about whether I have all my documents with me. At the moment, this includes: passport, visa, immigration card and work permit. In theory, I am in breach of the law, because my registration stamp is in my passport, and not on my immigration card. Of course, if the stamp were on my immigration card, there would be questions about why it is not in my passport.
Of course, foreigners have to register in the UK as well. But it's a lot easier to get the requisite stamps, and there is no requirement to present these documents to any policeman on demand. Whereas in Russia, policemen gather outside bars frequented by foreigners, in order to check their documents and extract a little late-night "foreigner tax". It's all about implementation - without safeguards, the system will certainly be abused. But better not to have the system in the first place.
Exactly - isn't the point that with an open source project, with a team of developers and users, this backdoor was identified within a couple of days? Whereas with a closed source project, the problem could have gone unnoticed for some time.
Or worse, it could have been noticed, and left unmentioneded, in the hope that no one would notice, and it would go away by itself. You don't hear about open source projects using the DMCA to get whisteblowers to shut up, do you?
I hear what you're saying, but I have been vacillating about buying a PS2 for a long time now. I am happy with the games that I can play on my computer, and don't need the DVD capability that much. I was about to buy a PS2, but will now definitely buy this, as it looks much cooler!
Fascinating. 1 cubic metre is roughly equivalent to 10 square feet?
Although you are right that foreign companies can have a listing on a US exchange, the disclosure and corporate governance requirements for foreign listers are less than for US corporations. This in turn may disqualify some ERISA type accounts from investing in this type of security. So in order to maximise your exposure to a full range of US investors, you need the US registration and listing.
I suspect that this is not the reason that Dell is onshore, though. As a US company, they can get orders from the US government, and their brand would probably be damaged if they changed their domicile or registration to a non-US one.
[quote} Crickey mate! Only a drongo with reckon that the poms and the septics are the only places bonza enough to have a yarn in English. [/quote] My dear fellow, I think you have just made the point perfectly.
I have managed to get a Hitachi Eplate to work with a Wi-fi connection. It has a CF and a PCMCIA card. It uses an old, and somewhat obscure version of Windows CE, so there are not a lot of programs around, but it has Word, Excel, and (I think) Powerpoint built in, and a video out port. I doubt that VoIP would be an option, given the lack of program availability.
You can get one on Ebay for $300, or less, and it does a lot of what you want. I agree that what you describe is an attractive package (very similar to what is used in the film "Until the End of the World", which I recommend as a vision of the future), but I don't see anyone producing it any time soon.
Monopolies only apply to single companies, not to an industry association. No single company can seriously be said to have a monopoly over selling music to the general public, nor is any single company using its market position to create an uneven marketplace. So there's not really a case for anti-trust policy, because it's just an industry association acting on behalf of its members, not a single company acting exclusively in its own interests, against the others.
I'm sure that independent record companies have complaints about the difficulty of setting themselves up, and probably can point to various anticompetitive practices, but there doesn't seem to be the widespread abuse on the lines of Microsoft. For instance, I've never heard of any of any individual company, nor the **AAs going to record shops and chains and saying "You can't sell our product if you include content from these independents". I have also not heard about any of the **AA refusing membership to new companies or independents.