It was considered "evil" because it was Microsoft's attempt to leverage its proprietary desktop monopoly into a proprietary internet access monopoly. With IE at 90+ %, they've succeeded.
Integrating the browser into the DE is not a bad idea per se, provided you can solve stability and security problems. MS has actually shown that you can solve the stability problem (with Win2k/XP) and I hope Linux would be less vulnerable to security issues by design.
So integrating an open source browser based on open standards into an open source desktop environment is probably a "good thing". It achieves the (I think real) benefits of integration without incurring the cost to users that MS' monopoly did.
If SCO wins a single case in court about copyright violations, what's the point of cashing in your insurance to fight a battle that's already lost? And if SCO loses a single case in court about copyright violations, how can they go after someone else for the same (now non-valid) copyright violation?
My guess is nobody will really buy this insurance except those, like OSRM itself, who just want to make a statement. The real announcement here is that an audit of the Linux kernel was completed and that somebody's willing to put some money where their mouth is.
I grew up in Egypt, where the most reputable media is government owned and mostly toes the government line, and the opposition media is disposed to exaggerations, personal attacks, and plain inaccuracies. Ironically, this results in a news consumer who understands that he is "reading through a prism" of biases and always attempts to reconstruct 'the truth' (whatever that is) from fragmented and biased accounts. Nobody really accepts anything the media reports at face value.
Unfortunately, I'd say the majority of US news consumers are blissfully unaware of the fact that whatever they're reading or watching is not 'the truth', but some person's account of the truth, no matter how dedicated that person/reporter is to objectivity. My Firefox multi-tab "home page" includes both the NYT and the Wash. Post, and it's incredibly enlightning to see how the two papers *differ* in their headlines covering the same important stories. I don't say this to accuse either paper of bias, but to point out that bias is inevitable.
The US news consumer does have a real advantage: he has *access* to a wide variety of uncensored news sources and opinions in English, and it *is* possible to reconstruct a reasonable version of what's going on by polling a few different sources. I wonder how many people actually avail themseleves of this incredible opportunity.
Well, I wouldn't go *that* far but I agree with your general point that teachers are the key link. In my experience, both as a student and a teacher (college, graduate, some highschool), the single most important determinant of whether a kid pays attention in class is whether the teacher is excited about the material or not.
Enthusiasm is infectious, especially flowing from teachers, who are figures of authority even if they're not personally liked, to students. You could lecture about the most esoteric or objectly boring topic you can imagine, but if you (as a teacher) find it interesting, and convey this to your students, they'll come along for the ride.
There's a reasonable likelihood that yourname@Gmail.com will still be working 5 or 10 years from now, when you'll really need the 1 gig for the accumulated emails. I'd put the probability of "these guys" being around 10 years from now at approximately zero.
If you can explain the fundamental difference between the decision to buy a car made in Japan vs one made in the US on the one hand, and the decision to outsource a programming job to India vs hiring a US programmer, then you'll impress a whole bunch of economists and get yourself nominated for a Nobel prize...
Hint: There *is* no difference. It's all trade. The slashdot crowd is just having the same reaction US auto makers had to imports 10 or 20 years ago (and that steel manufacturers were having a year or two ago).
Everybody's a protectionist when their job is on the line, and that's perfectly reasonable. But please don't think there's anything *special* about outsourcing jobs that doesn't apply to every other sector of the economy.
AOL's business model is dead. Their attempt to *be* the internet has failed (remember all those TV commercials with 'AOL keyword' this and that? You don't see those anymore) for many reasons, including better search technology from Google and the proliferation of free content from competitors (Yahoo) and P2P.
The only reason people keep their AOL accounts is because they want to keep their email address.
All AOL represents to Microsoft is a user base. With the online access market saturated in the US, the only room to grow is by acquisition. I doubt there are many other busniess 'synergies' to this merger beyond that.
It doesn't matter what they did or did not pay! They still "acquired" the licenses, providing validation for SCO's claims.
If the SCO license cost 1 penny, would you buy one? No? Not because you don't want to spend a penny, but because getting a license is pretty much an admission that SCO may be right.
The damage is done, and CA should be taken to task for their cowardly behavior.
I don't think this is a fair assessment of OCW. Some professors follow textbooks fairly closely and are unlikely to have extensive notes on the material. Other professors like to do their own thing and offer notes that are almost as comprehensive as textbooks.
In fact, just today I needed to look up some introductory finance concepts (diversification, CAPM) and didn't have a textbook handy. After searching fruitlessly on Google, I remembered OCW and found two excellent sets of notes from Sloan courses. Unlike other schools I know which keep even their crappy powerpoint slides under lock and key (username/password), MIT's offerings are nothing to scoff at.
I think you're right, but for the wrong reasons. "All data public" is not a world I want to live in. But I do want to live in a world where I *know* what part of my data is public, what part is semi-public, and what part is private. I also want to know under what conditions the data moves from one category to another.
For example, I know my name, phone number, and address are public (in the phone book). I know that my web surfing habits are private. I also know that I lose the privacy of web-surfing in case of a subpoena (Patriot Act not withstanding) or if I'm silly enough to allow spyware on my PC. I know that snapshots of my financial info are available to many businesses if I authorize them (credit checks if I apply for a loan/credit card, sometimes even for jobs/housing).
What I *don't* know is what a person who knows my public info can (legally) dig up about me without my consent. I'll bet I'd be surprised at how much they can find out. If background check software/services go retail, everyone will become aware of the limits of their privacy, and that's why this is a "Good Thing".
Thanks for the correction, although the vast majority of content on OpinionJournal is free. You may be right about the reason why there are subscriber-only editorials on OpinionJournal. My guess, however, is that it's a natural way to drive some subscriptions for the WSJ. After all, it would be strange to have a free site and a paid site, and not have something to drive traffic from the one to the other.
Many sites with a free/premium content mix do this sort of thing. I suspect that there's a tendency for editorials/opinions (and general news) to appear in the free section (high elasticity), while the more specialized stuff (low elasticity) appears in the premium area.
There are important differences between the services offered by the Wall Street Journal online and the Washington Post online that would allow the first to charge a subscription and the second not to. The WSJ offers relatively unique business-specific information and has no close competitors. Their news and analysis are essential to conducting business, at least in the US. By contrast, the Washington Post offers excellent coverage of general news, but with many close substitutes such as the NYT, CNN, and the BBC among others. Some of those competitors unlikely to ever charge an online subscription (CNN, BBC), so the Washington Post can't either (isn't it nice when competition works?)
It's all about demand elasticity. The freely available NYT charges a fee to access their archived articles because those who use that service are typically involved in some research project, and their demand for information is inelastic (not too many substitutes for the NYT's extensive archives). On the other hand, The for-pay WSJ makes its editorial content available for free at opinionjournal.com, because nobody would pay to read editorials; as they say, opinions are like a-holes, everybody's got one.
When you're buying a car, do you test-drive every model by every manufacturer before you feel you can praise/pan the car? Can't you rely on public consensus, friends' opinions, reviewers' articles, etc.?
And how can I take a *whole* letter out of context?! The letter says what it says.
Bottom line: The freenet project was registered on Sourceforge at the end of 1999. It's gotten a lot of publicity and support. Four years later, all we have is a network that works "really good, really bad, or somewhere in between" according to you, and a network whose performance has "inexplicably deteriorated" since "about July 2003" according to Clarke. The developers think they're on the brink of a solution. I hope they're right, but that doesn't mean I'm not disappointed with what we have in our hands now, four years since the project started.
Comparisons to Debian are unfair. Debian stable works as advertised. Freenet 0.5.2.1 apparently doesn't. And I don't understand the 'conservative' security model you're referring to: This is a network, not a standalone application. What good is it for people concerned about security to run 0.5.2.1 (stable) while the rest of the network is updating to nightlies and snapshots? Isn't the network as weak as its weakest link?
Full Disclosure: I've never installed Freenet, but I've been following its development closely since its inception. I'm subscribed to the notification of new releases from Sourceforge...
And therein lies the problem. The last release on that page is dated July 17, 2003. And by Clarke's own admission in his 'State of the Freenet' letter, it doesn't work very well. He *thinks* this new algorithm will solve the problems, but nobody knows that for sure.
Projects that deliver results have an easier time attracting donations *and* volunteer developers. Sourceforge lists 4 project admins and (count them!) 60 developers! Is Freenet so hard that this many programmers can't deliver a working version in close to a year?!
The goals of Freenet are lofty, and for that maybe they deserve more patience, but when does the community just cut and run?
Why do people keep asking this question when the real question is: Why did they *change* the license in the first place? It seems to me that if you're changing a license so that it's no longer compatible with the GPL (which is a standard in open source), it's incumbent upon *you* to give compelling reasons for your change!
I think the article by Barr misrepresents what the WSIS declaration says. At best, he's confusing what the declaration actually says with what the US representatives may have wanted it to say (or at least what *he* thinks they wanted it to say!). The declaration includes plain language about
1. The importance of public domain: "A rich public domain is an essential element for the growth of the Information Society, creating multiple benefits such as an educated public, new jobs, innovation, business opportunities, and the advancement of sciences. Information in the public domain should be easily accessible to support the Information Society, and protected from misappropriation."
2. The role of open source: "Access to information and knowledge can be promoted by increasing awareness among all stakeholders of the possibilities offered by different software models, including proprietary, opensource and free software, in order to increase competition, access by users, diversity of choice, and to enable all users to develop solutions which best meet their requirements."
3. The only mention of Intellectual Property in the declaration is followed by noting the importance of knowledge dissemination: "Intellectual Property protection is important to encourage innovation and creativity in the Information Society; similarly, the wide dissemination, diffusion, and sharing of knowledge is important to encourage innovation and creativity."
But who am I to spoil the fun of everyone straw-manning the declaration?
Let me suggest an answer to "What comes after knowledge" using a hypothetical situation. Suppose an entrepreneur claims he has developed 'technology' that generates code of equivalent quality to what is being written at half the cost of human programmers. Many current programmers would find themselves out of a job, and there would be substantial turmoil in the programmer labor market. But how many people would call for a 'ban' on this new 'technology'? How seriously would these people be taken? Would such a ban be useful for the US economy as a whole? (of course, 'technology' here is outsourcing, but could just as easily be a new advance in Artificial Intelligence! This example is liberally adapted from one used to justify free trade, but I can't think of the original source for attribution)
The fact is, 'technology' has been causing this kind of labor market turmoil since the industrial revolution. And it's not true that lost jobs in the past didn't require a huge knowledge investment; I'm sure it took quite a bit of expertise and knowledge for a worker to put an automobile together before Henry Ford invented mass production. But I doubt we'd argue that mass production wasn't good for the US.
So in addition to the main point in my parent post, that outsourcing and free trade are hardly different, I'd add that outsourcing/free trade can always be reinterpreted as 'technological progress', and when people advance arguments against one, they should be willing to advance the same arguments against the other.
'Job outsourcing' has become the buzzword of every one who is, or claims to be, concerned with the US employment picture. Last week, N. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of the US council of economic advisers, committed a cardinal sin by declaring that "Outsourcing is a growing phenomenon, but it's something that we should realize is probably a plus for the economy in the long run". Both republican and democratic politicians asked for his head (just do a search on 'mankiw' in google news).
But Mankiw is right (notwithstanding the old adage that in the long run, we are all dead!). There's not one dime's worth of difference in principle between 'outsourcing', which many hate, and 'free trade' which seems to have become the acceptable norm in American politics. Outsourcing is simply the extension of free trade from the goods markets to the service markets. It represents a shrinking of what economists call the 'nontradable sector', goods and services that are by nature are difficult/impossible to trade. Any defense of free trade policies (and there are many convincing ones) applies equally well to job outsourcing.
I don't mean to be callous about job losses. It was regrettable when the buggywhip makers lost their jobs to technological advances. It was regrettable when auto workers lost their jobs in the 80s to the Japanese carmakers. And it is regrettable when US programmers lose jobs to their Indian counterparts. But life goes on, the US employment picture will improve, and the complaints about 'outsourcing' will disappear until the next spike in US unemployment a few (hopefully many!) years from now. It's the way free trade works.
Re:Forgive my ignorance...
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You're right, but that's part of the price of online anonymity in general. Ubiquitous, open, WiFi in the US also means P2P without RIAA subpoenas (I'm sure that doesn't sound too bad to some people!) and whistleblowers without lawsuits to disclose their identities. Globally, it would mean the end of censorship and the redundancy of something like Freenet.
Maybe it's my libertarian instincts, but universal anonymous internet access seems worth the price you mentioned.
When they cracked down on the K-Lite client and website, many people thought they were shooting themselves in the foot, since many of the bigger 'hubs' were probably running K-Lite and wouldn't switch to a spyware-riddled client.
Now it makes sense as a first (necessary) step in their intention to sue the **AA.
I guess it's flattering to be greeted by your own words when you click on a story, but it doesn't change the fact that this person, Sarojin, completely plagiarized what I wrote a few months back on another desktop Linux story. He did go through the effort of changing my "Red Hat on a K6-2" to his "Mandrake on a P2-450", but I'm not sure why he bothered...
I wish I could prove this, but I can't list any comments beyond my last 24. Honestly, why would I accuse someone I don't know of plagiarism if it weren't true?
Slashdot Mirror
How can you, on the one hand, say the GPL doesn't require X, then, on the other, declare that it's un-free because it requires X?!
It was considered "evil" because it was Microsoft's attempt to leverage its proprietary desktop monopoly into a proprietary internet access monopoly. With IE at 90+ %, they've succeeded.
Integrating the browser into the DE is not a bad idea per se, provided you can solve stability and security problems. MS has actually shown that you can solve the stability problem (with Win2k/XP) and I hope Linux would be less vulnerable to security issues by design.
So integrating an open source browser based on open standards into an open source desktop environment is probably a "good thing". It achieves the (I think real) benefits of integration without incurring the cost to users that MS' monopoly did.
If SCO wins a single case in court about copyright violations, what's the point of cashing in your insurance to fight a battle that's already lost? And if SCO loses a single case in court about copyright violations, how can they go after someone else for the same (now non-valid) copyright violation?
My guess is nobody will really buy this insurance except those, like OSRM itself, who just want to make a statement. The real announcement here is that an audit of the Linux kernel was completed and that somebody's willing to put some money where their mouth is.
I grew up in Egypt, where the most reputable media is government owned and mostly toes the government line, and the opposition media is disposed to exaggerations, personal attacks, and plain inaccuracies. Ironically, this results in a news consumer who understands that he is "reading through a prism" of biases and always attempts to reconstruct 'the truth' (whatever that is) from fragmented and biased accounts. Nobody really accepts anything the media reports at face value.
Unfortunately, I'd say the majority of US news consumers are blissfully unaware of the fact that whatever they're reading or watching is not 'the truth', but some person's account of the truth, no matter how dedicated that person/reporter is to objectivity. My Firefox multi-tab "home page" includes both the NYT and the Wash. Post, and it's incredibly enlightning to see how the two papers *differ* in their headlines covering the same important stories. I don't say this to accuse either paper of bias, but to point out that bias is inevitable.
The US news consumer does have a real advantage: he has *access* to a wide variety of uncensored news sources and opinions in English, and it *is* possible to reconstruct a reasonable version of what's going on by polling a few different sources. I wonder how many people actually avail themseleves of this incredible opportunity.
"inherently vicious and sadistic people"
Well, I wouldn't go *that* far but I agree with your general point that teachers are the key link. In my experience, both as a student and a teacher (college, graduate, some highschool), the single most important determinant of whether a kid pays attention in class is whether the teacher is excited about the material or not.
Enthusiasm is infectious, especially flowing from teachers, who are figures of authority even if they're not personally liked, to students. You could lecture about the most esoteric or objectly boring topic you can imagine, but if you (as a teacher) find it interesting, and convey this to your students, they'll come along for the ride.
There's a reasonable likelihood that yourname@Gmail.com will still be working 5 or 10 years from now, when you'll really need the 1 gig for the accumulated emails. I'd put the probability of "these guys" being around 10 years from now at approximately zero.
If you can explain the fundamental difference between the decision to buy a car made in Japan vs one made in the US on the one hand, and the decision to outsource a programming job to India vs hiring a US programmer, then you'll impress a whole bunch of economists and get yourself nominated for a Nobel prize ...
Hint: There *is* no difference. It's all trade. The slashdot crowd is just having the same reaction US auto makers had to imports 10 or 20 years ago (and that steel manufacturers were having a year or two ago).
Everybody's a protectionist when their job is on the line, and that's perfectly reasonable. But please don't think there's anything *special* about outsourcing jobs that doesn't apply to every other sector of the economy.
AOL's business model is dead. Their attempt to *be* the internet has failed (remember all those TV commercials with 'AOL keyword' this and that? You don't see those anymore) for many reasons, including better search technology from Google and the proliferation of free content from competitors (Yahoo) and P2P.
The only reason people keep their AOL accounts is because they want to keep their email address.
All AOL represents to Microsoft is a user base. With the online access market saturated in the US, the only room to grow is by acquisition. I doubt there are many other busniess 'synergies' to this merger beyond that.
It doesn't matter what they did or did not pay! They still "acquired" the licenses, providing validation for SCO's claims.
If the SCO license cost 1 penny, would you buy one? No? Not because you don't want to spend a penny, but because getting a license is pretty much an admission that SCO may be right.
The damage is done, and CA should be taken to task for their cowardly behavior.
I don't think this is a fair assessment of OCW. Some professors follow textbooks fairly closely and are unlikely to have extensive notes on the material. Other professors like to do their own thing and offer notes that are almost as comprehensive as textbooks.
In fact, just today I needed to look up some introductory finance concepts (diversification, CAPM) and didn't have a textbook handy. After searching fruitlessly on Google, I remembered OCW and found two excellent sets of notes from Sloan courses. Unlike other schools I know which keep even their crappy powerpoint slides under lock and key (username/password), MIT's offerings are nothing to scoff at.
Contract law. When I signed up with my ISP, there was a privacy agreement that they're not free to violate.
I think you're right, but for the wrong reasons. "All data public" is not a world I want to live in. But I do want to live in a world where I *know* what part of my data is public, what part is semi-public, and what part is private. I also want to know under what conditions the data moves from one category to another.
For example, I know my name, phone number, and address are public (in the phone book). I know that my web surfing habits are private. I also know that I lose the privacy of web-surfing in case of a subpoena (Patriot Act not withstanding) or if I'm silly enough to allow spyware on my PC. I know that snapshots of my financial info are available to many businesses if I authorize them (credit checks if I apply for a loan/credit card, sometimes even for jobs/housing).
What I *don't* know is what a person who knows my public info can (legally) dig up about me without my consent. I'll bet I'd be surprised at how much they can find out. If background check software/services go retail, everyone will become aware of the limits of their privacy, and that's why this is a "Good Thing".
Thanks for the correction, although the vast majority of content on OpinionJournal is free. You may be right about the reason why there are subscriber-only editorials on OpinionJournal. My guess, however, is that it's a natural way to drive some subscriptions for the WSJ. After all, it would be strange to have a free site and a paid site, and not have something to drive traffic from the one to the other.
Many sites with a free/premium content mix do this sort of thing. I suspect that there's a tendency for editorials/opinions (and general news) to appear in the free section (high elasticity), while the more specialized stuff (low elasticity) appears in the premium area.
There are important differences between the services offered by the Wall Street Journal online and the Washington Post online that would allow the first to charge a subscription and the second not to. The WSJ offers relatively unique business-specific information and has no close competitors. Their news and analysis are essential to conducting business, at least in the US. By contrast, the Washington Post offers excellent coverage of general news, but with many close substitutes such as the NYT, CNN, and the BBC among others. Some of those competitors unlikely to ever charge an online subscription (CNN, BBC), so the Washington Post can't either (isn't it nice when competition works?)
It's all about demand elasticity. The freely available NYT charges a fee to access their archived articles because those who use that service are typically involved in some research project, and their demand for information is inelastic (not too many substitutes for the NYT's extensive archives). On the other hand, The for-pay WSJ makes its editorial content available for free at opinionjournal.com, because nobody would pay to read editorials; as they say, opinions are like a-holes, everybody's got one.
When you're buying a car, do you test-drive every model by every manufacturer before you feel you can praise/pan the car? Can't you rely on public consensus, friends' opinions, reviewers' articles, etc.?
And how can I take a *whole* letter out of context?! The letter says what it says.
Bottom line: The freenet project was registered on Sourceforge at the end of 1999. It's gotten a lot of publicity and support. Four years later, all we have is a network that works "really good, really bad, or somewhere in between" according to you, and a network whose performance has "inexplicably deteriorated" since "about July 2003" according to Clarke. The developers think they're on the brink of a solution. I hope they're right, but that doesn't mean I'm not disappointed with what we have in our hands now, four years since the project started.
Comparisons to Debian are unfair. Debian stable works as advertised. Freenet 0.5.2.1 apparently doesn't. And I don't understand the 'conservative' security model you're referring to: This is a network, not a standalone application. What good is it for people concerned about security to run 0.5.2.1 (stable) while the rest of the network is updating to nightlies and snapshots? Isn't the network as weak as its weakest link?
Full Disclosure: I've never installed Freenet, but I've been following its development closely since its inception. I'm subscribed to the notification of new releases from Sourceforge ...
And therein lies the problem. The last release on that page is dated July 17, 2003. And by Clarke's own admission in his 'State of the Freenet' letter, it doesn't work very well. He *thinks* this new algorithm will solve the problems, but nobody knows that for sure.
Projects that deliver results have an easier time attracting donations *and* volunteer developers. Sourceforge lists 4 project admins and (count them!) 60 developers! Is Freenet so hard that this many programmers can't deliver a working version in close to a year?!
The goals of Freenet are lofty, and for that maybe they deserve more patience, but when does the community just cut and run?
Why do people keep asking this question when the real question is: Why did they *change* the license in the first place? It seems to me that if you're changing a license so that it's no longer compatible with the GPL (which is a standard in open source), it's incumbent upon *you* to give compelling reasons for your change!
You know, I went one step beyond RTFA and clicked the link to the actual WSIS declaration of principles here:
1 16 1|1160.asp
http://www.itu.int/wsis/documents/doc_multi-en-
I think the article by Barr misrepresents what the WSIS declaration says. At best, he's confusing what the declaration actually says with what the US representatives may have wanted it to say (or at least what *he* thinks they wanted it to say!). The declaration includes plain language about
1. The importance of public domain: "A rich public domain is an essential element for the growth of the Information Society, creating multiple benefits such as an educated public, new jobs, innovation, business opportunities, and the advancement of sciences. Information in the public domain should be easily accessible to support the Information Society, and protected from misappropriation."
2. The role of open source: "Access to information and knowledge can be promoted by increasing awareness among all stakeholders of the possibilities offered by different software models, including proprietary, opensource and free software, in order to increase competition, access by users, diversity of choice, and to enable all users to develop solutions which best meet their requirements."
3. The only mention of Intellectual Property in the declaration is followed by noting the importance of knowledge dissemination: "Intellectual Property protection is important to encourage innovation and creativity in the Information Society; similarly, the wide dissemination, diffusion, and sharing of knowledge is important to encourage innovation and creativity."
But who am I to spoil the fun of everyone straw-manning the declaration?
Let me suggest an answer to "What comes after knowledge" using a hypothetical situation. Suppose an entrepreneur claims he has developed 'technology' that generates code of equivalent quality to what is being written at half the cost of human programmers. Many current programmers would find themselves out of a job, and there would be substantial turmoil in the programmer labor market. But how many people would call for a 'ban' on this new 'technology'? How seriously would these people be taken? Would such a ban be useful for the US economy as a whole? (of course, 'technology' here is outsourcing, but could just as easily be a new advance in Artificial Intelligence! This example is liberally adapted from one used to justify free trade, but I can't think of the original source for attribution)
The fact is, 'technology' has been causing this kind of labor market turmoil since the industrial revolution. And it's not true that lost jobs in the past didn't require a huge knowledge investment; I'm sure it took quite a bit of expertise and knowledge for a worker to put an automobile together before Henry Ford invented mass production. But I doubt we'd argue that mass production wasn't good for the US.
So in addition to the main point in my parent post, that outsourcing and free trade are hardly different, I'd add that outsourcing/free trade can always be reinterpreted as 'technological progress', and when people advance arguments against one, they should be willing to advance the same arguments against the other.
'Job outsourcing' has become the buzzword of every one who is, or claims to be, concerned with the US employment picture. Last week, N. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of the US council of economic advisers, committed a cardinal sin by declaring that "Outsourcing is a growing phenomenon, but it's something that we should realize is probably a plus for the economy in the long run". Both republican and democratic politicians asked for his head (just do a search on 'mankiw' in google news).
But Mankiw is right (notwithstanding the old adage that in the long run, we are all dead!). There's not one dime's worth of difference in principle between 'outsourcing', which many hate, and 'free trade' which seems to have become the acceptable norm in American politics. Outsourcing is simply the extension of free trade from the goods markets to the service markets. It represents a shrinking of what economists call the 'nontradable sector', goods and services that are by nature are difficult/impossible to trade. Any defense of free trade policies (and there are many convincing ones) applies equally well to job outsourcing.
I don't mean to be callous about job losses. It was regrettable when the buggywhip makers lost their jobs to technological advances. It was regrettable when auto workers lost their jobs in the 80s to the Japanese carmakers. And it is regrettable when US programmers lose jobs to their Indian counterparts. But life goes on, the US employment picture will improve, and the complaints about 'outsourcing' will disappear until the next spike in US unemployment a few (hopefully many!) years from now. It's the way free trade works.
You're right, but that's part of the price of online anonymity in general. Ubiquitous, open, WiFi in the US also means P2P without RIAA subpoenas (I'm sure that doesn't sound too bad to some people!) and whistleblowers without lawsuits to disclose their identities. Globally, it would mean the end of censorship and the redundancy of something like Freenet.
Maybe it's my libertarian instincts, but universal anonymous internet access seems worth the price you mentioned.
When they cracked down on the K-Lite client and website, many people thought they were shooting themselves in the foot, since many of the bigger 'hubs' were probably running K-Lite and wouldn't switch to a spyware-riddled client.
Now it makes sense as a first (necessary) step in their intention to sue the **AA.
Thanks! At least one person knows the truth :)
Oh well, maybe he needs the karma. Hell of a way to get it though!
I guess it's flattering to be greeted by your own words when you click on a story, but it doesn't change the fact that this person, Sarojin, completely plagiarized what I wrote a few months back on another desktop Linux story. He did go through the effort of changing my "Red Hat on a K6-2" to his "Mandrake on a P2-450", but I'm not sure why he bothered ...
...
I wish I could prove this, but I can't list any comments beyond my last 24. Honestly, why would I accuse someone I don't know of plagiarism if it weren't true?
Shame on you, Mr. Sarojin