After reading thrugh a few of the censored (call the spade black, for pity's sake) entries, I have to ask the question...
Why cover up the truth?
I don't get it. Sometime the truth hurts, but it's easier to deal with than the aftereffects of lying to cover up the truth. It's easier to say "OK, we're not perfect, we have diveristy issues to address" and deal with them than to stick heads in the sand and when something like this leaks out, proceed to conduct damage control.
It's easier to tell a consistent truth than a series of consistent lies.
Seems to me that this is the electronic equivalent of standing in the aisle at Borders and reading through a book. I agree with previous commetns that if somebody is looking for a particular bit of info, they will most likely search via Google or Yahoo. If they search on Amazon, I'd bet that there is a good chance that they are browsing for the book in order to purchase it.
As far as the comment about college students getting textbooks this way: guess what? If the professor knows it will get light use, chances are that the prof. will put the book on reserve in the library and the copiers will get a workout when the material is referenced.
Same point is for any book, really. If it can be found in your public library, the pertinent parts can be copied. I have yet to see a public library that didn't have a bank of copy machines.
Corporations (*AA, book publishers, authors, etc) need to take ADVANTAGE of the Electronic Age, not fight it. Money redirected from litigation towards innovation (products) and content (music, books) would make us all better.
Early Friday morning, February 27, 1998, Apple Computer made official what
the Newton cognoscenti had strongly suspected for six months: the Newton handheld
computing platform was dead.
The rather terse press release gave the basic facts: Apple will cease all
Newton OS hardware and software development, no more products will be made
after the existing stock is depleted, and Apple will continue to provide support
to users. Brief mention was made of development of a new low-cost Mac OS-based
mobile device in the future, but no details were offered. But the most galling
omission was the lack of an answer to the question on the minds of hundreds of
thousands of shocked, angry Newton owners: Why?
Before I attempt to answer this question, let's take a quick tour of the
mercurial five-year career of Newton. This will serve to prepare you for the
several explanations we will be considering.
A brief history of Newton During its turbulent five-year life, Newton technology was close to death
several times, yet always managed to survive. Department heads came and went,
but the essential concept of the personal digital assistant (PDA) was too
compelling to die easily: A small, inexpensive, pen-based computing device that
would accompany you everywhere, and that would learn enough about you to make
informed assumptions about how to help you keep track of the myriad little bits
of information we all must carry. It would be simple enough for anyone to use,
a true computer for the rest of us.
I was fortunate to participate in the Newton beta test program and to
co-author and deliver the training materials used to launch the product. The
moment I saw that beta unit my life changed, and I wasn't the only one. I
still remember the excitement of holding a pre-release Newton NotePad (as it
was labeled then) in my hands for the first time, said Clinton Logan, ace
developer for LandWare. Truly unique products like that don't come along
very often.
For those of us who bought into this vision, it seemed like the future was
arriving ahead of schedule. Like the buyers of the original 128K Macintosh, we
gladly paid the high price of admission just to participate in this achingly
cool dream that had taken physical form. We loved it and made it work for us in
ways unanticipated by its creators, which is the true measure of great computer
design.
What is Newton? Newton had an identity crisis from the very beginning. Former Apple CEO and
Newton champion John Sculley first showed the prototype to the press in Chicago
on May 1992, where he described not only the device but also their platform
strategy. A central theme in Apple's advertising and promotional materials at
the time repeatedly used the phrase What is Newton? Some have
suggested that Apple never actually answered this question to anyone's
satisfaction.
Consider the name change. The product was originally called the Newton
NotePad to suggest its personal assistive features, but that was later changed
to MessagePad to emphasize the product's communications capabilities.
We had always intended for Newton to be a platform, not just a
product, said former Newton Systems Group chief Gaston Bastiens, now CEO
of Lernout & Hauspie, an eminent speech recognition company.
Unfortunately, all the press took away with them was the handwriting
recognition aspect, which was over-emphasized. The whole thrust of Newton was
to be a personal communicator as well as a personal assistant. From a conceptual
point of view, John was absolutely right. The infrastructure for two-way
wireless at the time was not there; we all knew it was a couple of years away,
but it was always part of our platform strategy.
John Sculley generally gets both the credit and the blame for the origi
Well sure...MS is driven by marketing, not technological goals. Linux is driven by technical achievement. Linus has no financial incentive to speed the development of the kernel, so why rush it? Microsft, OTOH, has a product line that, despite what may be said in the press, seems to be driven by the marketing department and not the software engineers.
I'm not that heavy into Linux, but I do recall that the talk of the town was when the 2.4 kernel would come out. IIRC, it was delayed and delayed, but when it came out, it came out right.
Now, MS has a big task at hand in generating a "for the masses" OS that works on a infinitely varying set of hardware combinations. With so much code needed to handle that much hardware diversity, of course there are going to be bugs and patch after patch after patch.
I'd also like to point out that I can download updates and patches from Red Hat on a nearly weekly basis, seemingly as often as I do with Microsoft.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that Windows is Swiss Cheese (while it does have a lot of holes, simple precautions such as virus scanning and firewalls can protect against a lot of exploits) and Linux is solid as a rock (which it certainly isn't).
Disclaimer: I'm not pro- or anti-Microsoft (I use Outlook and Mozilla Firebird, Word and OpenOffice), nor am I a programmer by any stretch of the imagination; I am pro-OS choice and favor what helps me get my job done the easiest.
I'm not so sure I would call it a formal press release...you won't generally find press releases posted on a newsgroup. It looks like it was meant as a informal "hey guys, didja hear what happened..." newsgroup post.
Seeing as how the phrase "under God" was added in the 1950s in response to the spread of "unholy" Communism, why not drop the phrase? It's not original, was added for purely political reasons, and can solve a lot of asinine problems if it is simply removed.
Am I doing the math wrong? From the charts, it shows 38.3MB/sec write speed...38.3MB/sec*3600sec/hour=137520MB/hr or roughly 137GB/hour. A far cry from 4GB/hour that you claim.
SunnComm Technologies Inc. (OTC: STEH), a leader in digital content security and enhancement for optical media, announced today that it intends to take legal action against the writer of a critical report titled: "Analysis of the MediaMax CD3 Copy-Prevention System." According to Peter Jacobs, SunnComm's CEO, "The conclusions contained in the Princeton University grad student's report issued last Monday were derived from incorrect assumptions by its author. The author did not ask for, or receive, SunnComm's MediaMax 'white paper' documentation available on the technology prior to concluding that 'MediaMax and similar copy-prevention systems are irreparably flawed...'"
When security is this weak and flawed, one doesn't NEED the white papers to prove it.
Perhaps SunnComm's CEO expected the grad student to assume that computers were as dumb as hammers and that most wouldn't know about things like TweakUI or the shify key.
"Security Through Obscurity"--yet more proof that it's a bad business model. Unless of course, SunnComm was waiting for somebody to come to this conclusion and that's where they wanted to make their money after all...
This may get around the "business relationship" part of the do not call list, but what if you give them a cell phone number? My understanding is that it is illegal to telemarket to a cellphone since the recipient gets charged for the call.
There is plenty of opportunity for IT work in the armed forces. I work for the DoD in an area that specializes in bringing fat pipes to remote military locations to keep the ships and soldiers connected in the digital battlefield. Practically all of the hardware we use is COTS hardware, such a Cisco routers and switches, plus more than a metric ton of Dell computers (the military seems to like Dell a helluvalot).
The Navy has a separate IT rate so it is available as a specialty.
There's also the Discover card guy who said to me "You currently have an introductory APR of 0% on balance transfers. Do you have any cards that have better than 0% APR?" to which I calmly replied "Yes."
Boy did that screw up his pitch.
Depends on the telemarketing firm...one thing I have learned from the news stories and "Action News" investigations is never to answer anything in the positive when a telemarketer calls.
Consider this: The telemarketer now has a recording of you saying "yes"...a unscrupled firm could now start billing you for all sorts of stuff, even for products and services that you never heard of, or they called about. You take them to court. They come to court armed with faux recordings of you saying "yes" to all sorts of bogus purchases.
Can you afford an expensive analyst who can prove the recordings to be fake?
OK, it may take more than a simple "yes" to start the ball rolling, but I'm not one to take a chance. I just hang up.
Thankfully it is illegal (so I've heard) to telemarket to a cellphone. I haven't gotten a telemarket call in years.
I've been driving a 2003 Prius since mid_march, and have to say that it is a fabulous idea. Most tanks are better-than-posted economy, it has the geek factor (got the GPS nav system in it), heavily reduced emissions (emission testing exempt in Virginia) plus with Virginia's "special clean fuel" plates (hybrids qualify for them here) I got an all-access pass to the HOV lanes at least through July 2004, no time/passenger restrictions.
For those who point out that fuel economy is not as good as some cars, I agree. You CAN get better mileage out of a Geo Metro than a Prius. However, your Geo will emit an infinitely greater amount of emissions than my Prius will when we're both stuck in traffic as my engine sits shut down. Plus, you get more car with the Prius than a Metro.
Heck, when I was in college, I could drive my Prius up the parking ramp on campus to the 3rd or 4th level if I was careful, and not run the engine at all. A light touch will get you up to 30-40 MPH from a dead stop before the engine will kick in. Try that with a regular car.
Do you pay a premium for the technology? Sure. Nobody said that environmentally-friendly was cheap.
But at the core of making a statement about what you believe is sometimes the necessity of making a sacrifice.
This is true, but by what right do you take the moral high ground when it affects those who depend on you for food, clothing, and shelter?
Let's put it in a different light. Suppose you find you and your family homeless for some arbitrary reason--why isn't important here. Now, you have two choices. Choice #1 is to steal food from the market square and clothing from the bazaar to keep your family fed and warm in the ensuing winter. Choice #2 says you do not steal, and you and your family dies of starvation and exposure.
You could hold the high moral ground and not do what you have to do to ensure your family's survival, and you all die from it. Your family didn't make the choice, but by golly they paid the price for YOUR moral stand.
This situation with SCO is parallel. If you are single with no dependants, then fine, make the sacrifice, since you only affect yourself. When your high moral fiber starts requiring sacrifices of others who have no say in the matter, that's wrong.
Yet one more reason why we should stick to paper ballots. I would support a full electronic vote if it could be secure, and given the current state of computer security in general, I don't believe this is possible.
SO...to mitigate the possibility of a non-human readable record being the only record of vote, why not do what Toyota and Honda are starting to do with cars--build hybrids.
Upon entering the voting line, instead of a ballot, the voter is issued a voting "ticket" which is fed into an electronic voting machine. The voter casts the vote, which is printed in a machine-readable form on paper, such as large-print, high contrast characters for OCR or magnetic ink (a la check scanners). This way, a uniform method of marking the ballot is achieved (no ambiguity in which circle is filled in/name circled/hole punched) and a consistently accurate (one hopes) means of machine counting them, not much different than the current optical readers. Plus, for a hand recount, the ballots are easy to read by manual means.
In the event of a misprint, the voter turns in the spoiled ballot to a voting official to get the machine reset for voting again. One could even go further and have the machine OCR and magnetically read as a sort of cross-check; if the cross-check fails, the ballot has VOID printed across it in big black letters and the voter is instructed to obtain a new voting ticket and vote again, citing the cross-check error.
Ahh, but the government does NOT own the roads. The roads are public property, paid for by taxpayers' money. The taxpayers are the owners of the road. Thus, as part of the road-owning public, I am fully entitled to drive my Toyota on any public road I choose.
Likewise, if I use a road that is paid for by a toll, then I am paying for the privledge of driving on the road, as I have paid my toll.
If I paid Microsoft a fee for using their IM network, then I should be allowed to use whatever IM client I choose, be it MSN Messenger or Trillian or Imici or Everybuddy or whatever.
Personally, I think the "privacy and security" excuse is just smoke to give their licensing plan some form of technical backbone, when all it really needs is marketing backbone. I'm sure they will license any IM client that is willing to pay for the service, after meeting some basic "security and privacy" criteria which, my guess is, will be better than MS's own client.
should the people who make roads get money from the people who make cars?
Bad analogy...the people who made the roads were paid to do so; Microsoft was not paid by anybody to build their IM network.
as soon as you open up the roads, you can't say (100 years later) that only fords can drive on them.
If Ford owned the road, then they sure as heck could do that. It's their property, they can do with it as they wish. If Microsoft wants to prevent any client other than a MS-licenced client from accessing their network, then so be it.
Put yourself in Microsoft's position for a minute (yes, I know it's a pianful thought, but try it anyway). Do you want somebody else to profit while you maintain the infrastructure at your own expense?
Consider this: You build a road and allow people to drive on it as long as they pay a toll. This toll pays you for the cost of maintaining the roadway. Now, some people don't want to pay the toll, so they simply drive through the toll gates; an easy thing to do, since you don't have any gate arms or anything to stop them. Eventually people simply stop paying the toll voluntarily, so you install gate arms to enforce the toll on the road.
MS simply put gate arms at the toll booth, forcing you to pay the toll, which in this case is a piece of your desktop for banner ads.
TRB: What about Debian GNU/Linux, which by default does not install any non-free software?
RMS: Non-free programs are not officially considered "part of Debian", but Debian does distribute them. The Debian web site describes non-free programs, and their ftp server distributes them. That's why we don't have links to their site on www.gnu.org.
I refer you to http://www.gnu.org/links/links.html and look under the "Collections of Free Software" section.
he article says that these licenses are specifying that they cannot be transferred. You can transfer the hardware because of the principle of first purchase (the idea that once you buy the physical object you can do with it as you please, like with books). The software license is still a license, and as much as it sucks, it came with an EULA.
Does that mean, since the software is non-transferable, that you retain the software license? As one who already holds a license for the software, can you then buy a new unit and get the cost of the software subtracted? How about a used unit with a blank flash memory? After all, you already have a license for it.
(I'm not terribly network saavy, and have never seen a Cisco EULA nor worked directly with a Cisco router. Any Cisco knowledge I have is purely accidental.)
If Linux were found to be in violation of a patent, it would either have to remove that particular feature (thus weakening the software) or agree to whatever licensing the patent owner requests.
An odd concept...the author makes this statement as if "Linux" were some centralized entity that could remove the code. The closest that Linux comes to being a product of a certain entity is the various distros (Red Hat, SuSE, etc.) which just distribute code available to the public; they make their money on support services mainly, not the distribution of code itself.
How does "Linux" violate a patent? From where I sit, nobody "owns" Linux, it's just out there, waiting to be used by anybody who wants to use it. It's like air; owned by nobody, free for all who want it.
And how is a patented feature removed? If MS had patent-violating code (try not to laught too hard and stick with me here) it is easy to point to a responsible party responsible for removing the code. Who is the proverbial "it" that is responsible for removing the code from Linux? One could say the distributers are responsible, as they are the closest thing to a "Linux, Inc." However, they don't "own" the code; they distribute in a convenient form what is freely available to the public, in many cases at no charge (such as downloads from FTP sites). Red Hat may not have added a violating feature, so why should Red Hat be responsible for removing it or getting it licensed?
My largely ransom yet not incoherent thought on the topic.
A phrase just came to mind to describe SCO's tactic, one that I'm sure has been thought about but I've yet to see:
"Shotgun licensing"
It's like spam...throw out enough license demands and sooner or later, some poor bastard will bite. You make up for the lack if hits by sheer volume.
For the Conspiracy Theroists: SCO is demanding license fees from the US government at the behest of Microsoft, to make Microsoft software look cheap compared to Linux.
If *I* make it, I get to control it until my death. Period.
OK, I'll grant you that. For the individual, I can see where copyright until death can be a good thing. As has been stated, what is yours is yours. When I said that in some cases the copyright epiration would come less than 14 years, I was thinking cases such as the creator's death. It's hard to hold a copyright and benefit when you're dead.
The next argument I can see is the income from a copyrighted work supporting the family after the author's passing. Ponder this for a moment: in some cases, a retired worker's pension will go to the widow/widower on the retiree's death. I can see the same principle applying to a copyright if the "until death" time limit is used. A copyright on a income-producing work can be transferred to the spouse who then holds the copyright until their death. After that, it's in the public domain.
As far as copyright held by a corporation, I stand by the 14-year term. Generally you won't see a company seriously use a work to generate income for a long period of time, as times and cultures change.
Case in point: I have a particular CD that is a copy of one that my parents have. I couldn't buy it as it was only marketed for a short period of time and was no longer available and would not be made available by the publisher. Therefore, I should be free to copy it as desired. Now, to prevent copyright "stalking," I can understand where a time frame may be desired as it would prevent people from waiting for something to go into the public domain before obtaining it. In such a case, a 14-year copyright lifetime would be appropriate.
It's a fine line between protecting the artist and benefiting the public; a fine line that in the current time has been stretched, mangled, and generally jerked about nearly at will by big corporations with the ability to buy laws.
Seriously though, we live in a democracy, congress gets to set the limits it wants.
No, Congress is supposed to set the limits that best serve the public, i.e. what the PEOPLE want. And yes, it does need to be changed. You got the millions of dollars needed to lobby Congress? Neither do I. I do have the power to write to my reps incessantly to make my point heard. (In fact, I think that's what I'll do today...write to my new reps [just moved])
BTW, "life + 90 years" is NOT reasonable. The copyright law needs to revert back to the 14-year limit, with certain circumstances making that time frams SHORTER. To use everybody's favorite OS as an example, if I want to run Win95 for some reason and MS doesn't sell it anymore, than I should be free as the wind to make as many copies as I desire. It's not as if I'm taking away from their revenue stream, they weren't going to sell it to me anyway. (No jokes about forced upgrade paths, please.)
The same holds for music, books, movies, whatever. If I want a copy of a book or CD that the original copyright holder/publisher/etc. doesn't make available, then I should be free to make my own copy as I see fit, even if has been less than 14 years since the copyright took effect.
Slashdot Mirror
After reading thrugh a few of the censored (call the spade black, for pity's sake) entries, I have to ask the question...
Why cover up the truth?
I don't get it. Sometime the truth hurts, but it's easier to deal with than the aftereffects of lying to cover up the truth. It's easier to say "OK, we're not perfect, we have diveristy issues to address" and deal with them than to stick heads in the sand and when something like this leaks out, proceed to conduct damage control.
It's easier to tell a consistent truth than a series of consistent lies.
Seems to me that this is the electronic equivalent of standing in the aisle at Borders and reading through a book. I agree with previous commetns that if somebody is looking for a particular bit of info, they will most likely search via Google or Yahoo. If they search on Amazon, I'd bet that there is a good chance that they are browsing for the book in order to purchase it.
As far as the comment about college students getting textbooks this way: guess what? If the professor knows it will get light use, chances are that the prof. will put the book on reserve in the library and the copiers will get a workout when the material is referenced.
Same point is for any book, really. If it can be found in your public library, the pertinent parts can be copied. I have yet to see a public library that didn't have a bank of copy machines.
Corporations (*AA, book publishers, authors, etc) need to take ADVANTAGE of the Electronic Age, not fight it. Money redirected from litigation towards innovation (products) and content (music, books) would make us all better.
Probably...but all I had at the time was the article and not the link.
a ry .html
The link I found this morning...
http://www.pencomputing.com/frames/newton_obitu
From Pen Computing Magazine #22, June 1998
Why Did Apple Kill Newton?
(C)Copyright 1998 David MacNeill
Early Friday morning, February 27, 1998, Apple Computer made official what the Newton cognoscenti had strongly suspected for six months: the Newton handheld computing platform was dead.
The rather terse press release gave the basic facts: Apple will cease all Newton OS hardware and software development, no more products will be made after the existing stock is depleted, and Apple will continue to provide support to users. Brief mention was made of development of a new low-cost Mac OS-based mobile device in the future, but no details were offered. But the most galling omission was the lack of an answer to the question on the minds of hundreds of thousands of shocked, angry Newton owners: Why?
Before I attempt to answer this question, let's take a quick tour of the mercurial five-year career of Newton. This will serve to prepare you for the several explanations we will be considering.
A brief history of Newton
During its turbulent five-year life, Newton technology was close to death several times, yet always managed to survive. Department heads came and went, but the essential concept of the personal digital assistant (PDA) was too compelling to die easily: A small, inexpensive, pen-based computing device that would accompany you everywhere, and that would learn enough about you to make informed assumptions about how to help you keep track of the myriad little bits of information we all must carry. It would be simple enough for anyone to use, a true computer for the rest of us.
I was fortunate to participate in the Newton beta test program and to co-author and deliver the training materials used to launch the product. The moment I saw that beta unit my life changed, and I wasn't the only one. I still remember the excitement of holding a pre-release Newton NotePad (as it was labeled then) in my hands for the first time, said Clinton Logan, ace developer for LandWare. Truly unique products like that don't come along very often.
For those of us who bought into this vision, it seemed like the future was arriving ahead of schedule. Like the buyers of the original 128K Macintosh, we gladly paid the high price of admission just to participate in this achingly cool dream that had taken physical form. We loved it and made it work for us in ways unanticipated by its creators, which is the true measure of great computer design.
What is Newton ?
Newton had an identity crisis from the very beginning. Former Apple CEO and Newton champion John Sculley first showed the prototype to the press in Chicago on May 1992, where he described not only the device but also their platform strategy. A central theme in Apple's advertising and promotional materials at the time repeatedly used the phrase What is Newton? Some have suggested that Apple never actually answered this question to anyone's satisfaction.
Consider the name change. The product was originally called the Newton NotePad to suggest its personal assistive features, but that was later changed to MessagePad to emphasize the product's communications capabilities.
We had always intended for Newton to be a platform, not just a product, said former Newton Systems Group chief Gaston Bastiens, now CEO of Lernout & Hauspie, an eminent speech recognition company. Unfortunately, all the press took away with them was the handwriting recognition aspect, which was over-emphasized. The whole thrust of Newton was to be a personal communicator as well as a personal assistant. From a conceptual point of view, John was absolutely right. The infrastructure for two-way wireless at the time was not there; we all knew it was a couple of years away, but it was always part of our platform strategy.
John Sculley generally gets both the credit and the blame for the origi
Well sure...MS is driven by marketing, not technological goals. Linux is driven by technical achievement. Linus has no financial incentive to speed the development of the kernel, so why rush it? Microsft, OTOH, has a product line that, despite what may be said in the press, seems to be driven by the marketing department and not the software engineers.
I'm not that heavy into Linux, but I do recall that the talk of the town was when the 2.4 kernel would come out. IIRC, it was delayed and delayed, but when it came out, it came out right.
Now, MS has a big task at hand in generating a "for the masses" OS that works on a infinitely varying set of hardware combinations. With so much code needed to handle that much hardware diversity, of course there are going to be bugs and patch after patch after patch.
I'd also like to point out that I can download updates and patches from Red Hat on a nearly weekly basis, seemingly as often as I do with Microsoft.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that Windows is Swiss Cheese (while it does have a lot of holes, simple precautions such as virus scanning and firewalls can protect against a lot of exploits) and Linux is solid as a rock (which it certainly isn't).
Disclaimer: I'm not pro- or anti-Microsoft (I use Outlook and Mozilla Firebird, Word and OpenOffice), nor am I a programmer by any stretch of the imagination; I am pro-OS choice and favor what helps me get my job done the easiest.
I'm not so sure I would call it a formal press release...you won't generally find press releases posted on a newsgroup. It looks like it was meant as a informal "hey guys, didja hear what happened..." newsgroup post.
Seeing as how the phrase "under God" was added in the 1950s in response to the spread of "unholy" Communism, why not drop the phrase? It's not original, was added for purely political reasons, and can solve a lot of asinine problems if it is simply removed.
Am I doing the math wrong? From the charts, it shows 38.3MB/sec write speed...38.3MB/sec*3600sec/hour=137520MB/hr or roughly 137GB/hour. A far cry from 4GB/hour that you claim.
SunnComm Technologies Inc. (OTC: STEH), a leader in digital content security and enhancement for optical media, announced today that it intends to take legal action against the writer of a critical report titled: "Analysis of the MediaMax CD3 Copy-Prevention System." According to Peter Jacobs, SunnComm's CEO, "The conclusions contained in the Princeton University grad student's report issued last Monday were derived from incorrect assumptions by its author. The author did not ask for, or receive, SunnComm's MediaMax 'white paper' documentation available on the technology prior to concluding that 'MediaMax and similar copy-prevention systems are irreparably flawed ...'"
When security is this weak and flawed, one doesn't NEED the white papers to prove it.
Perhaps SunnComm's CEO expected the grad student to assume that computers were as dumb as hammers and that most wouldn't know about things like TweakUI or the shify key.
"Security Through Obscurity"--yet more proof that it's a bad business model. Unless of course, SunnComm was waiting for somebody to come to this conclusion and that's where they wanted to make their money after all...
This may get around the "business relationship" part of the do not call list, but what if you give them a cell phone number? My understanding is that it is illegal to telemarket to a cellphone since the recipient gets charged for the call.
Just a thought...
There is plenty of opportunity for IT work in the armed forces. I work for the DoD in an area that specializes in bringing fat pipes to remote military locations to keep the ships and soldiers connected in the digital battlefield. Practically all of the hardware we use is COTS hardware, such a Cisco routers and switches, plus more than a metric ton of Dell computers (the military seems to like Dell a helluvalot).
The Navy has a separate IT rate so it is available as a specialty.
OK, I admit it...I didn't get what "repine" was supposed to be...so beat me with a wet noodle.
There's also the Discover card guy who said to me "You currently have an introductory APR of 0% on balance transfers. Do you have any cards that have better than 0% APR?" to which I calmly replied "Yes."
Boy did that screw up his pitch.
Depends on the telemarketing firm...one thing I have learned from the news stories and "Action News" investigations is never to answer anything in the positive when a telemarketer calls.
Consider this: The telemarketer now has a recording of you saying "yes"...a unscrupled firm could now start billing you for all sorts of stuff, even for products and services that you never heard of, or they called about. You take them to court. They come to court armed with faux recordings of you saying "yes" to all sorts of bogus purchases.
Can you afford an expensive analyst who can prove the recordings to be fake?
OK, it may take more than a simple "yes" to start the ball rolling, but I'm not one to take a chance. I just hang up.
Thankfully it is illegal (so I've heard) to telemarket to a cellphone. I haven't gotten a telemarket call in years.
I've been driving a 2003 Prius since mid_march, and have to say that it is a fabulous idea. Most tanks are better-than-posted economy, it has the geek factor (got the GPS nav system in it), heavily reduced emissions (emission testing exempt in Virginia) plus with Virginia's "special clean fuel" plates (hybrids qualify for them here) I got an all-access pass to the HOV lanes at least through July 2004, no time/passenger restrictions.
For those who point out that fuel economy is not as good as some cars, I agree. You CAN get better mileage out of a Geo Metro than a Prius. However, your Geo will emit an infinitely greater amount of emissions than my Prius will when we're both stuck in traffic as my engine sits shut down. Plus, you get more car with the Prius than a Metro.
Heck, when I was in college, I could drive my Prius up the parking ramp on campus to the 3rd or 4th level if I was careful, and not run the engine at all. A light touch will get you up to 30-40 MPH from a dead stop before the engine will kick in. Try that with a regular car.
Do you pay a premium for the technology? Sure. Nobody said that environmentally-friendly was cheap.
But at the core of making a statement about what you believe is sometimes the necessity of making a sacrifice.
This is true, but by what right do you take the moral high ground when it affects those who depend on you for food, clothing, and shelter?
Let's put it in a different light. Suppose you find you and your family homeless for some arbitrary reason--why isn't important here. Now, you have two choices. Choice #1 is to steal food from the market square and clothing from the bazaar to keep your family fed and warm in the ensuing winter. Choice #2 says you do not steal, and you and your family dies of starvation and exposure.
You could hold the high moral ground and not do what you have to do to ensure your family's survival, and you all die from it. Your family didn't make the choice, but by golly they paid the price for YOUR moral stand.
This situation with SCO is parallel. If you are single with no dependants, then fine, make the sacrifice, since you only affect yourself. When your high moral fiber starts requiring sacrifices of others who have no say in the matter, that's wrong.
Yet one more reason why we should stick to paper ballots. I would support a full electronic vote if it could be secure, and given the current state of computer security in general, I don't believe this is possible.
SO...to mitigate the possibility of a non-human readable record being the only record of vote, why not do what Toyota and Honda are starting to do with cars--build hybrids.
Upon entering the voting line, instead of a ballot, the voter is issued a voting "ticket" which is fed into an electronic voting machine. The voter casts the vote, which is printed in a machine-readable form on paper, such as large-print, high contrast characters for OCR or magnetic ink (a la check scanners). This way, a uniform method of marking the ballot is achieved (no ambiguity in which circle is filled in/name circled/hole punched) and a consistently accurate (one hopes) means of machine counting them, not much different than the current optical readers. Plus, for a hand recount, the ballots are easy to read by manual means.
In the event of a misprint, the voter turns in the spoiled ballot to a voting official to get the machine reset for voting again. One could even go further and have the machine OCR and magnetically read as a sort of cross-check; if the cross-check fails, the ballot has VOID printed across it in big black letters and the voter is instructed to obtain a new voting ticket and vote again, citing the cross-check error.
That's my idea for the day.
Ahh, but the government does NOT own the roads. The roads are public property, paid for by taxpayers' money. The taxpayers are the owners of the road. Thus, as part of the road-owning public, I am fully entitled to drive my Toyota on any public road I choose.
Likewise, if I use a road that is paid for by a toll, then I am paying for the privledge of driving on the road, as I have paid my toll.
If I paid Microsoft a fee for using their IM network, then I should be allowed to use whatever IM client I choose, be it MSN Messenger or Trillian or Imici or Everybuddy or whatever.
Personally, I think the "privacy and security" excuse is just smoke to give their licensing plan some form of technical backbone, when all it really needs is marketing backbone. I'm sure they will license any IM client that is willing to pay for the service, after meeting some basic "security and privacy" criteria which, my guess is, will be better than MS's own client.
should the people who make roads get money from the people who make cars?
Bad analogy...the people who made the roads were paid to do so; Microsoft was not paid by anybody to build their IM network.
as soon as you open up the roads, you can't say (100 years later) that only fords can drive on them.
If Ford owned the road, then they sure as heck could do that. It's their property, they can do with it as they wish. If Microsoft wants to prevent any client other than a MS-licenced client from accessing their network, then so be it.
Put yourself in Microsoft's position for a minute (yes, I know it's a pianful thought, but try it anyway). Do you want somebody else to profit while you maintain the infrastructure at your own expense?
Consider this: You build a road and allow people to drive on it as long as they pay a toll. This toll pays you for the cost of maintaining the roadway. Now, some people don't want to pay the toll, so they simply drive through the toll gates; an easy thing to do, since you don't have any gate arms or anything to stop them. Eventually people simply stop paying the toll voluntarily, so you install gate arms to enforce the toll on the road.
MS simply put gate arms at the toll booth, forcing you to pay the toll, which in this case is a piece of your desktop for banner ads.
He also said the following:
TRB: What about Debian GNU/Linux, which by default does not install any non-free software?
RMS: Non-free programs are not officially considered "part of Debian", but Debian does distribute them. The Debian web site describes non-free programs, and their ftp server distributes them. That's why we don't have links to their site on www.gnu.org.
I refer you to http://www.gnu.org/links/links.html and look under the "Collections of Free Software" section.
I cannot wait for SCO to be dead so the Free Software/Open Source software community can concentrate on something with relevance, like...software :)
he article says that these licenses are specifying that they cannot be transferred. You can transfer the hardware because of the principle of first purchase (the idea that once you buy the physical object you can do with it as you please, like with books). The software license is still a license, and as much as it sucks, it came with an EULA.
Does that mean, since the software is non-transferable, that you retain the software license? As one who already holds a license for the software, can you then buy a new unit and get the cost of the software subtracted? How about a used unit with a blank flash memory? After all, you already have a license for it.
(I'm not terribly network saavy, and have never seen a Cisco EULA nor worked directly with a Cisco router. Any Cisco knowledge I have is purely accidental.)
If Linux were found to be in violation of a patent, it would either have to remove that particular feature (thus weakening the software) or agree to whatever licensing the patent owner requests.
An odd concept...the author makes this statement as if "Linux" were some centralized entity that could remove the code. The closest that Linux comes to being a product of a certain entity is the various distros (Red Hat, SuSE, etc.) which just distribute code available to the public; they make their money on support services mainly, not the distribution of code itself.
How does "Linux" violate a patent? From where I sit, nobody "owns" Linux, it's just out there, waiting to be used by anybody who wants to use it. It's like air; owned by nobody, free for all who want it.
And how is a patented feature removed? If MS had patent-violating code (try not to laught too hard and stick with me here) it is easy to point to a responsible party responsible for removing the code. Who is the proverbial "it" that is responsible for removing the code from Linux? One could say the distributers are responsible, as they are the closest thing to a "Linux, Inc." However, they don't "own" the code; they distribute in a convenient form what is freely available to the public, in many cases at no charge (such as downloads from FTP sites). Red Hat may not have added a violating feature, so why should Red Hat be responsible for removing it or getting it licensed?
My largely ransom yet not incoherent thought on the topic.
A phrase just came to mind to describe SCO's tactic, one that I'm sure has been thought about but I've yet to see:
"Shotgun licensing"
It's like spam...throw out enough license demands and sooner or later, some poor bastard will bite. You make up for the lack if hits by sheer volume.
For the Conspiracy Theroists: SCO is demanding license fees from the US government at the behest of Microsoft, to make Microsoft software look cheap compared to Linux.
Just a spontaneous thought...
If *I* make it, I get to control it until my death. Period.
OK, I'll grant you that. For the individual, I can see where copyright until death can be a good thing. As has been stated, what is yours is yours. When I said that in some cases the copyright epiration would come less than 14 years, I was thinking cases such as the creator's death. It's hard to hold a copyright and benefit when you're dead.
The next argument I can see is the income from a copyrighted work supporting the family after the author's passing. Ponder this for a moment: in some cases, a retired worker's pension will go to the widow/widower on the retiree's death. I can see the same principle applying to a copyright if the "until death" time limit is used. A copyright on a income-producing work can be transferred to the spouse who then holds the copyright until their death. After that, it's in the public domain.
As far as copyright held by a corporation, I stand by the 14-year term. Generally you won't see a company seriously use a work to generate income for a long period of time, as times and cultures change.
Case in point: I have a particular CD that is a copy of one that my parents have. I couldn't buy it as it was only marketed for a short period of time and was no longer available and would not be made available by the publisher. Therefore, I should be free to copy it as desired. Now, to prevent copyright "stalking," I can understand where a time frame may be desired as it would prevent people from waiting for something to go into the public domain before obtaining it. In such a case, a 14-year copyright lifetime would be appropriate.
It's a fine line between protecting the artist and benefiting the public; a fine line that in the current time has been stretched, mangled, and generally jerked about nearly at will by big corporations with the ability to buy laws.
Seriously though, we live in a democracy, congress gets to set the limits it wants.
No, Congress is supposed to set the limits that best serve the public, i.e. what the PEOPLE want. And yes, it does need to be changed. You got the millions of dollars needed to lobby Congress? Neither do I. I do have the power to write to my reps incessantly to make my point heard. (In fact, I think that's what I'll do today...write to my new reps [just moved])
BTW, "life + 90 years" is NOT reasonable. The copyright law needs to revert back to the 14-year limit, with certain circumstances making that time frams SHORTER. To use everybody's favorite OS as an example, if I want to run Win95 for some reason and MS doesn't sell it anymore, than I should be free as the wind to make as many copies as I desire. It's not as if I'm taking away from their revenue stream, they weren't going to sell it to me anyway. (No jokes about forced upgrade paths, please.)
The same holds for music, books, movies, whatever. If I want a copy of a book or CD that the original copyright holder/publisher/etc. doesn't make available, then I should be free to make my own copy as I see fit, even if has been less than 14 years since the copyright took effect.
"Intellectual Property" my ass.