This isn't about OpenOffice. It's about OpenDocument, which is nothing more than a file format. If you're going to complain about something, that's fine (this is Slashdot, after all) but it helps the Slashdot hive-mind function properly if we all complain about the same thing.
Actually, when you think about the fact that, by law, children have to be in school until the age of 18 everything they learn there is being forcibly taught to them. If they try to avoid going to school the State will return them there, against their will if need be. So, the question isn't whether children should be forcibly taught... they already are, for their good and the good of society. The question is: what should they be forced to learn? Well, for one thing, being taught that science and religion are equivalent is wrong. So I'm with the scientists on this one.
The State has a legitimate interest in providing a minimum of education its citizens, in order for those citizens to be useful. America was rather unusual in providing for public education to the degree that it did. And, like it or not, America has been served well for two hundred-odd years by its schools. It's only in recent years that that system has begun to falter, and one could argue that it's because the State has failed to maintain adequate standards that this is happening.
Regardless, this is such a basic issue (science vs. fundamentalism) that it shouldn't even be under discussion. It's ridiculous (and embarrassing) that the world's leading superpower is embroiled in an internecine "debate" such as this. I use the term loosely... it's hardly a debate when one side has all the guns and the other side is not only shooting blanks but doesn't know the difference.
The problem isn't the government or legal system attempting to forcibly influence student minds, so much as it is an ignorant minority that wishes to use the machinery of state to impose its ignorance upon others. The only way to put paid to these people and their misguided ideals is to put the spotlight on them, and make them justify themselves and their actions in public forums. And that is exactly what is happening.
One man's luxury is another man's given. Too much of each generation's limited span is consumed by having to relearn that which the previous generation already knew, and as time goes on that process (at least here in the United States) is becoming less nad less efficient. Frankly, if I could buy a dozen Ph.D cartridges at Best Buy and simply jack them into the back of my head I'd be thrilled.
If we could preserve knowledge in a way that could be directly accessed by our brains rather than painfully acquired via years of study the human race would advance in leaps and bounds. At least there would then be no excuse whatsoever for ignorance.
Do you have the slightest idea what you're talking about? Science is the very antithesis of zealotry. A zealot is one who sticks to his guns whether they're loaded or not, whereas a scientist who does the same is not a scientist. The scientific method, itself, does not deal in absolutes but the process itself must be held strictly accountable or it becomes useless. Worse, science subjected to religious and political dictates becomes dangerous because it can be used to support irrational tenets. In fact, it is because the scientific method is so powerful at discerning fallacy from reality that some people seek to corrupt it. So, if by "close minded" you mean that those of us who still have some critical-thinking skills at our command tend to reject religion disingenuously presented as science, then you're right.
Down through the ages, scientists who had the courage to speak out against the prevailing religious "I've made up my mind don't confuse me with the facts" groupthink were often persecuted by those whose minds had already established their own internal reality. The fact that this imaginary reality conflicted with what is didn't disturb them much, but did cause them to act against those who were only trying to understand the true nature of the Universe. There's a guy named Galileo that could explain this to you.
What it means is that the same mindset that brought you the Dark Ages is alive and well, and is living in Kansas.
Not at all. This has nothing to do with eminent domain, this has to do with military secrets, and how the ability to peg something as "classified" results in the effective theft of intellectual property.
Back in the sixties, a company my father started did a lot of government contract electronics design and manufacturing, mostly for the Navy (some Air Force.) Some of his designs were parsecs beyond what the Navy was currently using at the time, so good that the Navy simply classified them outright. Okay, that's a compliment in a way, but it meant that he couldn't tell anyone about his concepts, couldn't use them for anything himself, and couldn't market any products made with them unless the government chose to buy them from him. Which they didn't, because after stealing his IP they simply shopped it around to other vendors to get a better deal (or to somebody's brother-in-law, whatever.) After that experience, he learned to withhold key parts of specifications so even if they classified what he gave them it wouldn't do them any good. He pissed off more than a few Navy engineers that way, but his attitude was simple: if it's good enough for the Navy to steal it's good enough for them to pay the inventor a fair price.
This all happened was forty years ago, and given the turn our society and our government has taken since, I can't believe the situation has improved any. Really, working for the military is a risky business for any private-sector operation, no matter how you slice it. Money to be made, sure, but you gotta be careful.
They don't conflict at all. Gates was referring to the Apple turnovers that are popular in the lunchrooms on the Microsoft campus. Sparing no expense, they use only quality Macintosh Apples for their turnovers.
I made no such argument whatsoever, so please don't put words in my mouth. I simply complained that the parent poster was in error. Your argument can be summed up with: "The Internet should be globally controlled because, well, it just should be that's all." Sounds all nice and warm and just friendly somehow, doesn't it. Of course, there's the question of who would exercise that control, and for that matter the larger question of how anything can be "globally controlled" in the first place, if by that we mean "every nation doing what it wants to their part of the system", because that's what would happen. Forget worldwide access to knowledge: the Internet would become little more than a bunch of old-style Compuserves so far as the average user is concerned.
Getting back to the issue of money... we have the most to lose by Europe screwing DNS up: that gives us little motivation to give up control of those servers. Matter of fact, Europe has a lot to lose if it screws DNS up. Furthermore, considering that it is Europe that wants to confiscate our root servers, I think your comment would better be phrased as follows:
"If the European Union wants their own EUNet, then they can cut the wires to the rest of the world and go back to their isolationism. The United States will generally be happier that way."
Matter of fact, prior to World War II the United States was remarkably isolationist. We were a lot happier too, I think. Maybe this Global Economy thing isn't all it's cracked up to be. And if the rest of you hadn't jumped on the bandwagon and decided to run the Internet around the world, I personally would have been perfectly happy with a USANet.
Truth is, it is the EU that is threatening to "cut the wires" (in a virtual sense, by risking damage to, or applying politically-motivated control of, the Domain Name System) and take that which doesn't belong to it. The root servers aren't EU property. They belong to a U.S. corporation, so taking control of them unilaterally is simply wrong. Sugar-coat it any way you like, but it's still a matter of confiscation. Stealing, even, for political gain. Chew on that for a while, and see if you still feel so virtuous.
The Internet simply gets packets from here to there, and the United States has little control over that. The DNS protocols themselves are just a convenience layer, but they've become an important layer and it was the U.S. that put it there. We've never said that Europe couldn't build it's own Domain Name System, nor could we stop that if we wanted to, but everybody was happy to make use of what the United States (as always) provided for free. The EU leadership now wants control of this particular system because it's the one everybody uses, and to own it is power. To that I say... tough. We never made any guarantees whatsoever regarding those machines, we let everyone use them for any purpose, and never placed any limits on who could use them. We still are not, I might add. But if you foolishly built your economies and business methods around them... tough again. Like I said, no guarantees. You're free to duplicate them at any time and go your own way, but ripping us off while simultaneously crying "it's for the common good" is hypocrisy at best.
But when you get right down to it, the DNS systems that service Europe are already in Europe. So the question of who ultimately controls them is obvious: the nation that physically possesses the equipment. The "who controls the Internet" baloney that the EU's leaders are spewing is just political posturing of no real consequence in terms of the Internet's usability or reliability, unless they follow through with this stupidity and manage to fragment the system. I hope they do. When the day comes that you get a permanent 404 trying to get to Slashdot because some censorious governmental busybody somewhere found the content objectionable, maybe you'll realize just how bad an idea this really is.
The registry isn't exactly new... Windows 3.1 had one, I believe. But it was a stupid idea from the start. I understand that Vista is going to be putting more "protections" in place to reduce registry abuse, but nevertheless like Windows File Protection it's just a hack on top of a hack.
The only legitimate (and I'm using the term loosely) function that the Registry performs is to make it virtually impossible to move a major application from one machine to another without running the actual installation program. In effect, it's an intrinsic anti-piracy technique. Sometimes I think that's the only reason that it's still there.
What do you mean, "you don't have to use it?" You have to use it to boot your system. If it's corrupted you're toast. If the backup is corrupted, you're toast. And getting back into Windows is pointless if you've managed to lose all the information your various applications, drivers, and operating system upgrades have put there. Personally, I ZIP the contents of the registry folder off to a network drive every so often (and especially after I install or remove an application) because Windows cannot be trusted to know when the registry is clean and when it is safe to make that automatic backup. Just getting to your desktop means nothing.
The grandparent is absolutely correct. The fact that the registry is some kind of "database" is irrelevant. It is a single point of failure, and a bad one at that. Microsoft put pretty much every egg required to run Windows into one basket, and for years has encouraged application developers to do the same for their own products. Put it this way: a single record being corrupted in your phone list database means you lose a few phone numbers. A single trashed record in the registry can hose your entire system, destabilize it, or cause application failures. As a developer of high-reliability industrial data acquisition systems, I consider the registry to be dangerous by definition.
We don't use the registry any more than we have to because a. it is fundamentally flaky and b. readily exposes potentially important data to other applications and c. storing data in the registry doesn't leave our customers any convenient way to back up their data. I've been burned too many times by this particular Microsoft abortion and if I can avoid it I do. I don't care what Microsoft says about using the registry being recommended practice... it's a bad recommendation.
A significant percentage of Windows failures (from BSODs on down) are due solely to registry access malfunctions or corruption. About half the time, trying to use that automatically-generated backup doesn't work because by the time the problem is perceptible Windows has already copied it to the backup.
Like it or not, the registry is a major factor in overall operating system instability in every version of Microsoft Windows to date. If that is the new millenium, I'll take the old one.
And what the grandparent poster also neglected to mention (and most do, because it sounds so much cooler to say that the U.S. is the only country that "nuked" someone, the implication being that we did it irresponsibly just to see the big flash of light and murder a bunch of innocent civilians because we're, you know, like, evil) is that the fire raids leading up to the dropping of Fatman and Littleboy actually caused substantially more devastation and loss of life. I mean, I understand that napalm is a mere "conventional weapon", hardly worth mentioning in comparison to atomic munitions. But when you drop thousands of tons of the stuff on cities built of bamboo and paper... well. That would have put paid to any ordinary enemy. But the Japanese stood up to the fire raids! After entire square miles of cityscape were leveled, they still wouldn't surrender.
More recent historians claim that the Japanese diplomats did, in fact, try to surrender before the bombs were dropped but had their entreaties rebuffed. I don't know if that's true or not. If it's not, dropping those weapons was justified, I think. If it was true, if they did try to surrender... some serious questions should have been asked. But it's hard to second-guess history.
Uh... when did Europe become a single nation? You have a bunch of corrupt, irrational overlords that you deliberately put in power (and I've still not heard a good reason as to why) but you're still a pretty fractious bunch. Not a single nation by any means, so saying that the EU outproduced the US is rather unfair. Kind of like me saying that Mexico, Canada and the United States displaced Germany or France or whoever.. What you're really saying (and this doesn't sound as good from the European perspective) is that it took the combined economic power of the entire European Union to displace the United States. Even now, not one of you could hold a candle to California's economic output, much less the whole country. All I'm saying is, compare apples to oranges.
Yes, but the fact that there is a competitive advantage to Google's service shouldn't be lost on them either. But it probably will be. It's a pretty consistent them among the various organized copyright holders in this country, you know. They feel threatened by anything new (note that this does not mean that they are actually in any danger.) For example, movie studios made out like bandits when the videocassette became popular, in spite of the fact that they tried to make the VCR illegal! Yes, they did take advantage of the technology to milk billions more from their customers, but only after they were forced by the Supreme Court to just deal with it. The same thing is happening here. A technological phase-change is finally being forced upon the publishing industry, and like the MPAA before them, they do not like it. And that's too bad. Let them learn to deal with it. If they spend a few less dollars on lawyers and a few more dollars on good management with a litle vision, they'll survive and make more money. If not... they deserve what happens to them. In either event, the technology will benefit a hell of a lot of people, and shouldn't be discarded or made illegal simply because a few corrupt, monolithic corporations have a snit.
Fast forward several years and... SURPRISE! Now that people are used to giving up their rights it was much easier to pass the original intent of the law. So now the law was revised and the police *CAN* pull you over and ticket you for not wearing a seatbelt... even for no other reason. I would never get in a car without wearning a seatbelt, regardless of any laws... but that is not the point.
Yah... they pulled that here in Illinois too. The hue-and-cry over the original seat-belt law was deafening, but years later, when they finally decided to make it a primary offense... hardly anyone seemed to notice. Incrementalism at work, I guess.
Say, has anyone seen my saucepan? You know, the one with the frog in it.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't about OpenOffice. It's about OpenDocument, which is nothing more than a file format. If you're going to complain about something, that's fine (this is Slashdot, after all) but it helps the Slashdot hive-mind function properly if we all complain about the same thing.
Well, let's see ... Lieutenant Uhura, Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Janice Rand, for starters.
Actually, when you think about the fact that, by law, children have to be in school until the age of 18 everything they learn there is being forcibly taught to them. If they try to avoid going to school the State will return them there, against their will if need be. So, the question isn't whether children should be forcibly taught ... they already are, for their good and the good of society. The question is: what should they be forced to learn? Well, for one thing, being taught that science and religion are equivalent is wrong. So I'm with the scientists on this one.
... it's hardly a debate when one side has all the guns and the other side is not only shooting blanks but doesn't know the difference.
The State has a legitimate interest in providing a minimum of education its citizens, in order for those citizens to be useful. America was rather unusual in providing for public education to the degree that it did. And, like it or not, America has been served well for two hundred-odd years by its schools. It's only in recent years that that system has begun to falter, and one could argue that it's because the State has failed to maintain adequate standards that this is happening.
Regardless, this is such a basic issue (science vs. fundamentalism) that it shouldn't even be under discussion. It's ridiculous (and embarrassing) that the world's leading superpower is embroiled in an internecine "debate" such as this. I use the term loosely
The problem isn't the government or legal system attempting to forcibly influence student minds, so much as it is an ignorant minority that wishes to use the machinery of state to impose its ignorance upon others. The only way to put paid to these people and their misguided ideals is to put the spotlight on them, and make them justify themselves and their actions in public forums. And that is exactly what is happening.
One man's luxury is another man's given. Too much of each generation's limited span is consumed by having to relearn that which the previous generation already knew, and as time goes on that process (at least here in the United States) is becoming less nad less efficient. Frankly, if I could buy a dozen Ph.D cartridges at Best Buy and simply jack them into the back of my head I'd be thrilled.
If we could preserve knowledge in a way that could be directly accessed by our brains rather than painfully acquired via years of study the human race would advance in leaps and bounds. At least there would then be no excuse whatsoever for ignorance.
I hope they don't use it for diplomatic purposes, though:
U.S. Official discussing a movie: "In that case, I'd have to say that it bombed royally."
Foreign dignitary upon hearing translation: "Look out! He's got a bomb in his case and he's trying to kill the King!"
Do you have the slightest idea what you're talking about? Science is the very antithesis of zealotry. A zealot is one who sticks to his guns whether they're loaded or not, whereas a scientist who does the same is not a scientist. The scientific method, itself, does not deal in absolutes but the process itself must be held strictly accountable or it becomes useless. Worse, science subjected to religious and political dictates becomes dangerous because it can be used to support irrational tenets. In fact, it is because the scientific method is so powerful at discerning fallacy from reality that some people seek to corrupt it. So, if by "close minded" you mean that those of us who still have some critical-thinking skills at our command tend to reject religion disingenuously presented as science, then you're right.
Down through the ages, scientists who had the courage to speak out against the prevailing religious "I've made up my mind don't confuse me with the facts" groupthink were often persecuted by those whose minds had already established their own internal reality. The fact that this imaginary reality conflicted with what is didn't disturb them much, but did cause them to act against those who were only trying to understand the true nature of the Universe. There's a guy named Galileo that could explain this to you.
What it means is that the same mindset that brought you the Dark Ages is alive and well, and is living in Kansas.
Dude ... that's the funniest thing I've read all weekend. Fortunately I had just set my coffee down.
Nah ... the first modders were two bacteria that decided to try fusion instead of fission. Not that many Slashdotters know much about fusion.
No, he contracted to design some equipment, they simply classified it and told him to stuff it. Payment wasn't part of the equation.
Actually no, it's a distro tailored specifically for customer-service operations at SBC, as in "Runaround Sue".
Not at all. This has nothing to do with eminent domain, this has to do with military secrets, and how the ability to peg something as "classified" results in the effective theft of intellectual property.
Back in the sixties, a company my father started did a lot of government contract electronics design and manufacturing, mostly for the Navy (some Air Force.) Some of his designs were parsecs beyond what the Navy was currently using at the time, so good that the Navy simply classified them outright. Okay, that's a compliment in a way, but it meant that he couldn't tell anyone about his concepts, couldn't use them for anything himself, and couldn't market any products made with them unless the government chose to buy them from him. Which they didn't, because after stealing his IP they simply shopped it around to other vendors to get a better deal (or to somebody's brother-in-law, whatever.) After that experience, he learned to withhold key parts of specifications so even if they classified what he gave them it wouldn't do them any good. He pissed off more than a few Navy engineers that way, but his attitude was simple: if it's good enough for the Navy to steal it's good enough for them to pay the inventor a fair price.
This all happened was forty years ago, and given the turn our society and our government has taken since, I can't believe the situation has improved any. Really, working for the military is a risky business for any private-sector operation, no matter how you slice it. Money to be made, sure, but you gotta be careful.
I agree, and may we add two additional weasel words, "rampant" and "piracy" to the list?
Thanks.
They don't conflict at all. Gates was referring to the Apple turnovers that are popular in the lunchrooms on the Microsoft campus. Sparing no expense, they use only quality Macintosh Apples for their turnovers.
I'm a Slaker, she's a Slaker, he's a Slaker ... wouldn't you like to be a Slaker too!
(chorus be a Slaker ... drink like a Slaker)
That must be what kept that one Farscape character's head from exploding.
I made no such argument whatsoever, so please don't put words in my mouth. I simply complained that the parent poster was in error. Your argument can be summed up with: "The Internet should be globally controlled because, well, it just should be that's all." Sounds all nice and warm and just friendly somehow, doesn't it. Of course, there's the question of who would exercise that control, and for that matter the larger question of how anything can be "globally controlled" in the first place, if by that we mean "every nation doing what it wants to their part of the system", because that's what would happen. Forget worldwide access to knowledge: the Internet would become little more than a bunch of old-style Compuserves so far as the average user is concerned.
... we have the most to lose by Europe screwing DNS up: that gives us little motivation to give up control of those servers. Matter of fact, Europe has a lot to lose if it screws DNS up. Furthermore, considering that it is Europe that wants to confiscate our root servers, I think your comment would better be phrased as follows:
... tough. We never made any guarantees whatsoever regarding those machines, we let everyone use them for any purpose, and never placed any limits on who could use them. We still are not, I might add. But if you foolishly built your economies and business methods around them ... tough again. Like I said, no guarantees. You're free to duplicate them at any time and go your own way, but ripping us off while simultaneously crying "it's for the common good" is hypocrisy at best.
Getting back to the issue of money
"If the European Union wants their own EUNet, then they can cut the wires to the rest of the world and go back to their isolationism. The United States will generally be happier that way."
Matter of fact, prior to World War II the United States was remarkably isolationist. We were a lot happier too, I think. Maybe this Global Economy thing isn't all it's cracked up to be. And if the rest of you hadn't jumped on the bandwagon and decided to run the Internet around the world, I personally would have been perfectly happy with a USANet.
Truth is, it is the EU that is threatening to "cut the wires" (in a virtual sense, by risking damage to, or applying politically-motivated control of, the Domain Name System) and take that which doesn't belong to it. The root servers aren't EU property. They belong to a U.S. corporation, so taking control of them unilaterally is simply wrong. Sugar-coat it any way you like, but it's still a matter of confiscation. Stealing, even, for political gain. Chew on that for a while, and see if you still feel so virtuous.
The Internet simply gets packets from here to there, and the United States has little control over that. The DNS protocols themselves are just a convenience layer, but they've become an important layer and it was the U.S. that put it there. We've never said that Europe couldn't build it's own Domain Name System, nor could we stop that if we wanted to, but everybody was happy to make use of what the United States (as always) provided for free. The EU leadership now wants control of this particular system because it's the one everybody uses, and to own it is power. To that I say
But when you get right down to it, the DNS systems that service Europe are already in Europe. So the question of who ultimately controls them is obvious: the nation that physically possesses the equipment. The "who controls the Internet" baloney that the EU's leaders are spewing is just political posturing of no real consequence in terms of the Internet's usability or reliability, unless they follow through with this stupidity and manage to fragment the system. I hope they do. When the day comes that you get a permanent 404 trying to get to Slashdot because some censorious governmental busybody somewhere found the content objectionable, maybe you'll realize just how bad an idea this really is.
The registry isn't exactly new ... Windows 3.1 had one, I believe. But it was a stupid idea from the start. I understand that Vista is going to be putting more "protections" in place to reduce registry abuse, but nevertheless like Windows File Protection it's just a hack on top of a hack.
The only legitimate (and I'm using the term loosely) function that the Registry performs is to make it virtually impossible to move a major application from one machine to another without running the actual installation program. In effect, it's an intrinsic anti-piracy technique. Sometimes I think that's the only reason that it's still there.
What do you mean, "you don't have to use it?" You have to use it to boot your system. If it's corrupted you're toast. If the backup is corrupted, you're toast. And getting back into Windows is pointless if you've managed to lose all the information your various applications, drivers, and operating system upgrades have put there. Personally, I ZIP the contents of the registry folder off to a network drive every so often (and especially after I install or remove an application) because Windows cannot be trusted to know when the registry is clean and when it is safe to make that automatic backup. Just getting to your desktop means nothing.
... it's a bad recommendation.
.INI files, anyone?
The grandparent is absolutely correct. The fact that the registry is some kind of "database" is irrelevant. It is a single point of failure, and a bad one at that. Microsoft put pretty much every egg required to run Windows into one basket, and for years has encouraged application developers to do the same for their own products. Put it this way: a single record being corrupted in your phone list database means you lose a few phone numbers. A single trashed record in the registry can hose your entire system, destabilize it, or cause application failures. As a developer of high-reliability industrial data acquisition systems, I consider the registry to be dangerous by definition.
We don't use the registry any more than we have to because a. it is fundamentally flaky and b. readily exposes potentially important data to other applications and c. storing data in the registry doesn't leave our customers any convenient way to back up their data. I've been burned too many times by this particular Microsoft abortion and if I can avoid it I do. I don't care what Microsoft says about using the registry being recommended practice
A significant percentage of Windows failures (from BSODs on down) are due solely to registry access malfunctions or corruption. About half the time, trying to use that automatically-generated backup doesn't work because by the time the problem is perceptible Windows has already copied it to the backup.
Like it or not, the registry is a major factor in overall operating system instability in every version of Microsoft Windows to date. If that is the new millenium, I'll take the old one.
So far nobody has found a solution.
Finding that "wily programmer" and kneecapping the bastard might help.
And what the grandparent poster also neglected to mention (and most do, because it sounds so much cooler to say that the U.S. is the only country that "nuked" someone, the implication being that we did it irresponsibly just to see the big flash of light and murder a bunch of innocent civilians because we're, you know, like, evil) is that the fire raids leading up to the dropping of Fatman and Littleboy actually caused substantially more devastation and loss of life. I mean, I understand that napalm is a mere "conventional weapon", hardly worth mentioning in comparison to atomic munitions. But when you drop thousands of tons of the stuff on cities built of bamboo and paper ... well. That would have put paid to any ordinary enemy. But the Japanese stood up to the fire raids! After entire square miles of cityscape were leveled, they still wouldn't surrender.
... some serious questions should have been asked. But it's hard to second-guess history.
More recent historians claim that the Japanese diplomats did, in fact, try to surrender before the bombs were dropped but had their entreaties rebuffed. I don't know if that's true or not. If it's not, dropping those weapons was justified, I think. If it was true, if they did try to surrender
Uh ... when did Europe become a single nation? You have a bunch of corrupt, irrational overlords that you deliberately put in power (and I've still not heard a good reason as to why) but you're still a pretty fractious bunch. Not a single nation by any means, so saying that the EU outproduced the US is rather unfair. Kind of like me saying that Mexico, Canada and the United States displaced Germany or France or whoever.. What you're really saying (and this doesn't sound as good from the European perspective) is that it took the combined economic power of the entire European Union to displace the United States. Even now, not one of you could hold a candle to California's economic output, much less the whole country. All I'm saying is, compare apples to oranges.
Yes, but the fact that there is a competitive advantage to Google's service shouldn't be lost on them either. But it probably will be. It's a pretty consistent them among the various organized copyright holders in this country, you know. They feel threatened by anything new (note that this does not mean that they are actually in any danger.) For example, movie studios made out like bandits when the videocassette became popular, in spite of the fact that they tried to make the VCR illegal! Yes, they did take advantage of the technology to milk billions more from their customers, but only after they were forced by the Supreme Court to just deal with it. The same thing is happening here. A technological phase-change is finally being forced upon the publishing industry, and like the MPAA before them, they do not like it. And that's too bad. Let them learn to deal with it. If they spend a few less dollars on lawyers and a few more dollars on good management with a litle vision, they'll survive and make more money. If not ... they deserve what happens to them. In either event, the technology will benefit a hell of a lot of people, and shouldn't be discarded or made illegal simply because a few corrupt, monolithic corporations have a snit.
Yes, and that will be coming to a bookstore near you, when they start shrinkwrapping the things and putting nasty EULAs in them.
Combine this with a bit of mechanical aptititude and the man must have been like a one man DARPA.
Well, at least now we know where Arcnet came from.
Fast forward several years and... SURPRISE! Now that people are used to giving up their rights it was much easier to pass the original intent of the law. So now the law was revised and the police *CAN* pull you over and ticket you for not wearing a seatbelt... even for no other reason. I would never get in a car without wearning a seatbelt, regardless of any laws... but that is not the point.
... they pulled that here in Illinois too. The hue-and-cry over the original seat-belt law was deafening, but years later, when they finally decided to make it a primary offense ... hardly anyone seemed to notice. Incrementalism at work, I guess.
Yah
Say, has anyone seen my saucepan? You know, the one with the frog in it.