Many have cited the larger population size as a reason why plain pen-and-paper ballots with hand counting won't work in the United States even though it works in Canada, European countries, and other places.
Sure, the US has about ten times the population of Canada. But that also means they have access to ten times as many vote counters! What matters is the percentage of the population who would be interested in vote counting, not the absolute population size. I'm sure there are enough politically interested people who would be interested in counting. Have counters from each party doing the counting and cross-checking each other, and that's all you need. As long as the counting is done *locally* of course, so you don't have to fly or drive thousands of people to a centralized location.
A technical solution isn't always the best solution. This reminds me of the old story (I don't know if it's actually true) about the astronaut pen. NASA needed to find a way for astronauts to write in the weightlessness of space, but traditional pens wouldn't work because they relied on gravity to drag the ink towards the point of the pen. So they spent a million dollars to develop the astronaut pen that could write upside down or in weightlessness. The Russians when faced with the same problem, used a pencil.
If machines can produce goods and provide services so cheaply, then everything should be dirt cheap. Which means you'd need to work a fraction of the hours you work now to earn enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.
There will always be some element of work that people have to do, or paying customers will prefer that people do them. But in a robot-dominated workforce that would be a small percentage, say 10%. So what is needed is a system where people are employed 10% of the time, rather than 10% of the population being always employed and the other 90% unemployed -- everybody would be a short-term contractor rather than a long-term employee. With robots making everything so cheaply, we'd only need to work about 1 month a year to cover all expenses for the year. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to actually happen, as the top 10% will use their power to keep everything to themselves...
The government would also have robots working for them, so they could deploy those robots to provide basic goods and services for the people who don't have jobs.
There are many other things companies could do to save money instead of offshoring. But those things aren't happening because there isn't a fad driving them. Offshore outsourcing is skyrocketing not because it is a genuine way to realize net savings, but it's happening mainly because it's the latest management fad (like the dotcom fad that came before it). If they were interested in real savings instead of jumping on bandwagons, they should have done much more offshoring during the dotcom boom when Indian programmers were cheaper and American programmers were more expensive and very hard to find and keep.
Telecommuting is one such alternative. Instead of paying megabucks for office space for hundreds of developers and managers, get a small building with a few meeting rooms that people can use on the few occasions where they need to meet face to face, and let everybody telecommute. People would be willing to work for less if they can telecommute, and gobs of money would be saved on office real estate. Time zone issues would be gone or minor, and people would have the opportunity to meet face to face sometimes. But because offshoring has the bandwagon effect, they prefer to send the work 12,000 miles away even though they had a problem with sending it 12 miles across town.
Similarly, they could save a lot in maintenance and development costs if they just implemented some basic principles of software engineering and architecture - but they prefer to build hack-and-slap unmaintainable monolothic systems.
Instead of offshoring their call support centers, they could reduce the need for customers to call for support in the first place by getting a better QA team and having a longer testing cycle so they can produce a less buggy product.
And like you said, they could offshore to cheaper parts of America, which would not cost much more than the Indian offshore firms. Even though Indian programmer salaries are only about 10-20% of US salaries, their office real estate costs are high, and so are their telecom costs and other overheads, especially broadband. Plus there is the profit margin for the offshore firm, so the costs amount to as much as 50-60% of what local US developers would cost. They could easily get that level of savings by taking advantage of cheaper real estate and lower paid programmers in middle America. But that ain't gonna happen unless there is a bandwagon behind it.
Doom's simplicity is a major part of the reasons why it maintained high popularity for so long after it was released. Almost anybody familiar with video games could sit down and start playing it within 2 minutes; they didn't have to spend 20 hours training to learn the various controls and complexities. I loved that all I had to do is run and shoot in Doom. Having to learn crazy controls and manuevers in Unreal like jump-and-crouch-in-midair-and-shoot-while-doing-a- triple-somersault-with-a-half-twist turned me off of that game immediately.
Carmack is right. The growing complexity of modern games is what has kept me from buying recently produced games. I don't care if you call me a dumb user, because I have enough accomplishments and qualifications to know I'm not dumb. I work my brain hard enough every day at my job, so when I pick up a game I want to freaking PLAY and have fun and give the higher functions of my brain a rest, not work my brain some more. If I can't play well enough to enjoy the game in the first evening, forget it. A little puzzle here and there like in Tomb Raider is fine, but don't make me have to study some damn book and go through a bunch of skills training. I have better things to do with my time, and my brain doesn't want anything more taxing after it's already been stressed for 50 hours a week.
If they don't want to make games for people who just want to sit down to play for an hour or two a week without much of a learning curve, it's mostly their loss. Give me something fun and simple (with a reasonable challenge) if I'm going to spend $30-$50 for a new game, otherwise I'll continue to pick up old games from eBay and bargain bins for $5-$10.
Now we can pay India $2 billion to do a space mission instead of spending $10 billion to do it with NASA! American astronauts better start finding another career real quick!
"I'll restate: If a developer chooses to sue SCO for copyright infringement, looking for royalties, my comment points out that SCO cannot say the GPL permits their use of it because in another case, they have declared that the GPL does NOT give the rights stated in the licence (as it is invalid). So, how is it that I said the developer gave up their copyright?"
OK, that's what you meant. I agree. I thought you were referring to the copyright holders of Linux and their ability to sue SCO for copyright infringement if the GPL is found invalid in court (not SCO's ability to say the GPL permits them to distribute copies).
If you release something under the GPL it does not mean you are giving up the copyright. Maybe you assigned the copyright to RMS or Linus or the FSF, but somebody still maintains the copyright. GPL software is copyrighted, but it allows you to make copies under certain conditions. Whether or not the GPL is valid, there is still a copyright holder and it ain't SCO.
Excellent point. The construction workers who built the place you live in won't continue to get paid for it as you live in the house for the next 50 years, even if they become destitute. What is so special about people who create almost completely NON-ESSENTIAL goods like novels and music that they should continue to get paid for life while the producers of life-saving goods like food, houses and cars don't?
Plaigarism is different from violating copyright. Even though Shakespeare and Beethoven's works are in the public domain, and you are free to copy and distribute them, you still can't legally claim that you wrote Hamlet or composed any of Beethoven's symphonies.
The savings from telecommuting could rival savings from offshore outsourcing, if the telecommuting is done en masse.
If they made the almost the entire IT department telecommute, they could reduce their real estate and other physical overhead costs drastically. They would just need a room for the servers, a few floating terminals lined up side by side like an Internet cafe (ie no space-hogging cubicles) for when people do come in to the office, and a set of meeting rooms so teams can meet once or twice a week.
It would also need a different approach to management and more strict rules regarding being at your home desk during office hours -- there is no good reason for not answering your phone for an hour, because you're not going to be away at somebody else's cubicle discussing anything.
Combine the reduced real estate costs with the reduced salaries that they can pay because people would accept less money in order to telecommute, and US employees wouldn't cost much more than Indian programmers when taking total costs into consideration. (Remember that although Indian salaries are only 10-20% of US salaries, their physical overheads are often the same or more than in the US - for example look at the office real estate costs in Bombay compared to Boston http://www.forbes.com/global/2002/0527/066sidebar1 _2.html. The result is that Indian programmers are 1/3 - 1/2 as expensive as an in-house US employee when counting total direct costs, not as low as 1/10 - 1/5.)
Then after you add in the undocumented and indirect costs associated with outsourcing that result from differences in language, time zone, and culture, and other factors like the relative lack of company-specific business knowledge, you're probably saving MORE by telecommuting than by outsourcing.
But outsourcing is popular now not because they are really interested in saving money; it is happening because it is the latest fad. If they were really interested in saving money, this big outsourcing wave should have been happening 5 years ago when American programmers were hard to find and expensive to keep, and Indian programmers were much less expensive than they are now. But no, the fad back then was to throw megabucks at anything that touched the Internet, and pay six figures for any semi-talented web programmer. They jumped on the dotcom bandwagon in pursuit of dubious profits... and we know what happened with that. Now they are jumping on the offshore bandwagon in pursuit of dubious savings.
Musicians make most of their money from performing live, not from CD sales. That applies whether they have a multi-platinum album or play in a local bar for $50/night. The $1 per CD that the artists receive is dwarfed by their concert income and endorsements. The current model where radio stations are paid to play certain artists and consumers pay $16 for something that costs $1 to make is unsustainable.
Since musicians don't make that much from album sales anyway, they should get together and ditch the big record companies. CDs should be used as marketing tools to attract people to their concerts, not as high-markup artificially scarce items. They should sell CDs at a slight markup over its manufacturing cost, and allow people to copy them freely and put them on P2P networks. The more people hear it, the more will come to their concerts.
SCO should be sued for the damage they are doing to Linux distributors, and an injunction should be obtained to shut them up until they can show proof in court. One half-dead company must not be allowed to use the legal system to terrorize people all over the place.
"Do you seriously believe they don't patent the stuff they're inventing? Just to protect themselves? They'd be stupid if they didn't, and they aren't stupid."
What does Microsoft really invent? Most software patents aren't inventions, they're just a matter of who filed the patent first on some ancient or obvious idea.
Microsoft has patents, but they don't have a huge over-aggressive patent portfolio like IBM. This may convince them to go in that direction.
Microsoft may now decide to harness some of its billions to lobby for laws *against* software patents.
On the other hand, they may decide that they'll need to accumulate the most massive patent portfolio in order to have ammunition if faced with something similar again.
The problem with current micropayments is that they insist on making each payment into a financial transaction. I view an article for 3 cents, and they reel off a whole bag of accounting mumbo jumbo and all the other usual stuff that goes on with a financial transaction.
To be cost-effective, micropayments should be more like poker chips (albeit microscopic poker chips) - you pay for a set of chips, use them to do your business, and no actual money changes hands until amounts accumulate to a certain level and/or certain time intervals have passed. For example, let's say they use a system of "points", where 10 points cost 1 cent and points are sold in increments of $10. So you buy 20,000 points with your credit card or by sending a check to the "microbank".
Then when you purchase something, points are deducted from your account. Each purchase should not be processed as a financial transaction, just as each megabyte transferred from your web site is not made into a billable transaction; your hosting service just bills you at the end of the month for the total megs and gigs transferred. At some interval, the merchants and different microbanks settle their cumulative bills (merchants with too small of a points balance wouldn't get any cash yet).
If you want your money back, you can ask for a check and they send you one based on the points you have, after deducting a check processing fee (which could be bigger than the value of your points, so you'll have to just leave them there).
They also should have a provision that one person can use to send points to another. If the individuals want to exchange money for that (ie sell their points), it's up to them how they're going to transfer the cash.
Still, this would not work for someone who wants to buy just 10 cents worth of something and nothing else ever again. I don't think any system could be cost-effective for that kind of use, just as it would not be cost-effective for you or the phone company to bill you proportionately for just two local phone calls per month.
Until they stop all this DVD-DON/KEY+DOO-DOO and pick one format (or pick more than one, but agree and commit to those formats), I'm not buying any of these devices. Even if I buy a drive that is capable of all formats, each piece of media will still be in only one format. If I back up my files on DVD-R and that gets abandoned after DVD+R becomes the standard, the DVD-Rs will essentially become coasters if my all-capable drive breaks and I can't find a replacement that can do DVD-R.
I don't want to start a flame war, but I've been using Mozilla for a year (since 1.0), and with its popup blocking feature, I haven't seen one of those god-awful windows EVER.
They don't show up as an actual pop-up window; they are displayed as a graphic on a web page that looks just like a dialog box, often with an OK button, a blue-striped title bar and all. What gives them away is that when you scroll the web page, the box scrolls along with the page, so it becomes obvious that it isn't a real dialog box. But it is a lot easier to fool new computer users who aren't familiar with the trick, especially when the page has just loaded and they haven't scrolled yet.
The standard way of patenting in recent years has been to take [insert any ancient or commonplace activity here] and do it "on the Internet!"
Now these guys have created a revolutionary method for patenting! Just take [insert any ancient or commonplace activity here] and do it "internationally!"
> With that MSN IM translation patent, shouldn't it only cover that method translating IMs? So if you were to figure out another way to do it, you'd be in the clear? Or with the one-click patent, does that patent cover "A method of buying stuff on the internet (with one click)" or is it "A method of buying stuff with one click (and here's some software to do it)"? If you implemented one-click shopping via some other method, wouldn't you be in the clear?
I believe that is how it is supposed to work. And indeed when many patent infringement cases have actually gone to court, either the patent got thrown out altogether, or the defendant was found not to be infringing because there were differences in the details of their method, like the British Telecom hyperlink patent case.
The two major reasons why patent holders can get away with suing anybody who does something remotely similar are: (1) Technically ignorant juries. There is no way eBay would have lost the case if the jury was technically competent and had common sense. (2) The lack of funds to fight it out in court. Even if the patent would get thrown out after a court challenge, many small companies cannot afford the cost of litigation so they cave in and pay up the license fee.
Rather than promoting innovation, software and business patents have become nothing more than a legalized form of extortion.
A major economic problem with outsourcing is that it decreases net exports, since with outsourcing you are essentially importing software. Remember the Y = C+I+G+NX equation?
Another problem is that outsourcing isn't an automatic money-saving tool like most executives think it is (or maybe they don't believe it is automatic but they will convince everybody it's so if that will increase their bonuses). It does take a certain type of management skill for it to work well enough that you actually save money. It can work easily with manufacturing T-shirts because the requirements for how to do that don't have to be communicated across the ocean every week, but software development is not so simple.
Some American companies are actually spending MORE because of the increased communication effort and decreased quality. With companies that don't know which projects to choose for outsourcing or how to manage projects remotely, the company doesn't enjoy any extra profits, and the consumers don't get cheaper products or services.
So true. The VW Jetta became really crappy when they started producing them in Mexico. I almost bought one until I researched the reviews over the years. You won't get them to last like the Jettas of twelve years ago.
When people refer to "security through obscurity" they are referring to the algorithms, not the keys.
Obscuring algorithms is not very helpful because it is not that difficult for a skilled attacker to discover the algorithms via various reverse engineering and cryptanalysis techniques.
A properly secure system is one where they know the algorithms but still can't break in without the key. If it becomes significantly easier to break in when somebody finds out the algorithm, the encryption scheme isn't a secure one because a skilled attacker will discover the algorithm anyway regardless of how you try to mask it.
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Many have cited the larger population size as a reason why plain pen-and-paper ballots with hand counting won't work in the United States even though it works in Canada, European countries, and other places.
Sure, the US has about ten times the population of Canada. But that also means they have access to ten times as many vote counters! What matters is the percentage of the population who would be interested in vote counting, not the absolute population size. I'm sure there are enough politically interested people who would be interested in counting. Have counters from each party doing the counting and cross-checking each other, and that's all you need. As long as the counting is done *locally* of course, so you don't have to fly or drive thousands of people to a centralized location.
A technical solution isn't always the best solution. This reminds me of the old story (I don't know if it's actually true) about the astronaut pen. NASA needed to find a way for astronauts to write in the weightlessness of space, but traditional pens wouldn't work because they relied on gravity to drag the ink towards the point of the pen. So they spent a million dollars to develop the astronaut pen that could write upside down or in weightlessness. The Russians when faced with the same problem, used a pencil.
It won't be long before Microsoft sues them over the name similarity...
If machines can produce goods and provide services so cheaply, then everything should be dirt cheap. Which means you'd need to work a fraction of the hours you work now to earn enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.
...
There will always be some element of work that people have to do, or paying customers will prefer that people do them. But in a robot-dominated workforce that would be a small percentage, say 10%. So what is needed is a system where people are employed 10% of the time, rather than 10% of the population being always employed and the other 90% unemployed -- everybody would be a short-term contractor rather than a long-term employee. With robots making everything so cheaply, we'd only need to work about 1 month a year to cover all expenses for the year. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to actually happen, as the top 10% will use their power to keep everything to themselves
The government would also have robots working for them, so they could deploy those robots to provide basic goods and services for the people who don't have jobs.
There are many other things companies could do to save money instead of offshoring. But those things aren't happening because there isn't a fad driving them. Offshore outsourcing is skyrocketing not because it is a genuine way to realize net savings, but it's happening mainly because it's the latest management fad (like the dotcom fad that came before it). If they were interested in real savings instead of jumping on bandwagons, they should have done much more offshoring during the dotcom boom when Indian programmers were cheaper and American programmers were more expensive and very hard to find and keep.
Telecommuting is one such alternative. Instead of paying megabucks for office space for hundreds of developers and managers, get a small building with a few meeting rooms that people can use on the few occasions where they need to meet face to face, and let everybody telecommute. People would be willing to work for less if they can telecommute, and gobs of money would be saved on office real estate. Time zone issues would be gone or minor, and people would have the opportunity to meet face to face sometimes. But because offshoring has the bandwagon effect, they prefer to send the work 12,000 miles away even though they had a problem with sending it 12 miles across town.
Similarly, they could save a lot in maintenance and development costs if they just implemented some basic principles of software engineering and architecture - but they prefer to build hack-and-slap unmaintainable monolothic systems.
Instead of offshoring their call support centers, they could reduce the need for customers to call for support in the first place by getting a better QA team and having a longer testing cycle so they can produce a less buggy product.
And like you said, they could offshore to cheaper parts of America, which would not cost much more than the Indian offshore firms. Even though Indian programmer salaries are only about 10-20% of US salaries, their office real estate costs are high, and so are their telecom costs and other overheads, especially broadband. Plus there is the profit margin for the offshore firm, so the costs amount to as much as 50-60% of what local US developers would cost. They could easily get that level of savings by taking advantage of cheaper real estate and lower paid programmers in middle America. But that ain't gonna happen unless there is a bandwagon behind it.
Doom's simplicity is a major part of the reasons why it maintained high popularity for so long after it was released. Almost anybody familiar with video games could sit down and start playing it within 2 minutes; they didn't have to spend 20 hours training to learn the various controls and complexities. I loved that all I had to do is run and shoot in Doom. Having to learn crazy controls and manuevers in Unreal like jump-and-crouch-in-midair-and-shoot-while-doing-a- triple-somersault-with-a-half-twist turned me off of that game immediately.
Carmack is right. The growing complexity of modern games is what has kept me from buying recently produced games. I don't care if you call me a dumb user, because I have enough accomplishments and qualifications to know I'm not dumb. I work my brain hard enough every day at my job, so when I pick up a game I want to freaking PLAY and have fun and give the higher functions of my brain a rest, not work my brain some more. If I can't play well enough to enjoy the game in the first evening, forget it. A little puzzle here and there like in Tomb Raider is fine, but don't make me have to study some damn book and go through a bunch of skills training. I have better things to do with my time, and my brain doesn't want anything more taxing after it's already been stressed for 50 hours a week.
If they don't want to make games for people who just want to sit down to play for an hour or two a week without much of a learning curve, it's mostly their loss. Give me something fun and simple (with a reasonable challenge) if I'm going to spend $30-$50 for a new game, otherwise I'll continue to pick up old games from eBay and bargain bins for $5-$10.
Now we can pay India $2 billion to do a space mission instead of spending $10 billion to do it with NASA! American astronauts better start finding another career real quick!
"I'll restate: If a developer chooses to sue SCO for copyright infringement, looking for royalties, my comment points out that SCO cannot say the GPL permits their use of it because in another case, they have declared that the GPL does NOT give the rights stated in the licence (as it is invalid). So, how is it that I said the developer gave up their copyright?"
OK, that's what you meant. I agree. I thought you were referring to the copyright holders of Linux and their ability to sue SCO for copyright infringement if the GPL is found invalid in court (not SCO's ability to say the GPL permits them to distribute copies).
If you release something under the GPL it does not mean you are giving up the copyright. Maybe you assigned the copyright to RMS or Linus or the FSF, but somebody still maintains the copyright. GPL software is copyrighted, but it allows you to make copies under certain conditions. Whether or not the GPL is valid, there is still a copyright holder and it ain't SCO.
"software patents are the only tools which exist which enable you to protect YOUR inventions against the giants."
No, that's what copyrights and trade secrets are for.
If Microsoft wrote their own code to solve the same problem without ever seeing my code, they should have the right to sell what they built.
Excellent point. The construction workers who built the place you live in won't continue to get paid for it as you live in the house for the next 50 years, even if they become destitute. What is so special about people who create almost completely NON-ESSENTIAL goods like novels and music that they should continue to get paid for life while the producers of life-saving goods like food, houses and cars don't?
Plaigarism is different from violating copyright. Even though Shakespeare and Beethoven's works are in the public domain, and you are free to copy and distribute them, you still can't legally claim that you wrote Hamlet or composed any of Beethoven's symphonies.
The savings from telecommuting could rival savings from offshore outsourcing, if the telecommuting is done en masse.
1 _2.html. The result is that Indian programmers are 1/3 - 1/2 as expensive as an in-house US employee when counting total direct costs, not as low as 1/10 - 1/5.)
... and we know what happened with that. Now they are jumping on the offshore bandwagon in pursuit of dubious savings.
If they made the almost the entire IT department telecommute, they could reduce their real estate and other physical overhead costs drastically. They would just need a room for the servers, a few floating terminals lined up side by side like an Internet cafe (ie no space-hogging cubicles) for when people do come in to the office, and a set of meeting rooms so teams can meet once or twice a week.
It would also need a different approach to management and more strict rules regarding being at your home desk during office hours -- there is no good reason for not answering your phone for an hour, because you're not going to be away at somebody else's cubicle discussing anything.
Combine the reduced real estate costs with the reduced salaries that they can pay because people would accept less money in order to telecommute, and US employees wouldn't cost much more than Indian programmers when taking total costs into consideration. (Remember that although Indian salaries are only 10-20% of US salaries, their physical overheads are often the same or more than in the US - for example look at the office real estate costs in Bombay compared to Boston http://www.forbes.com/global/2002/0527/066sidebar
Then after you add in the undocumented and indirect costs associated with outsourcing that result from differences in language, time zone, and culture, and other factors like the relative lack of company-specific business knowledge, you're probably saving MORE by telecommuting than by outsourcing.
But outsourcing is popular now not because they are really interested in saving money; it is happening because it is the latest fad. If they were really interested in saving money, this big outsourcing wave should have been happening 5 years ago when American programmers were hard to find and expensive to keep, and Indian programmers were much less expensive than they are now. But no, the fad back then was to throw megabucks at anything that touched the Internet, and pay six figures for any semi-talented web programmer. They jumped on the dotcom bandwagon in pursuit of dubious profits
Musicians make most of their money from performing live, not from CD sales. That applies whether they have a multi-platinum album or play in a local bar for $50/night. The $1 per CD that the artists receive is dwarfed by their concert income and endorsements. The current model where radio stations are paid to play certain artists and consumers pay $16 for something that costs $1 to make is unsustainable.
Since musicians don't make that much from album sales anyway, they should get together and ditch the big record companies. CDs should be used as marketing tools to attract people to their concerts, not as high-markup artificially scarce items. They should sell CDs at a slight markup over its manufacturing cost, and allow people to copy them freely and put them on P2P networks. The more people hear it, the more will come to their concerts.
SCO should be sued for the damage they are doing to Linux distributors, and an injunction should be obtained to shut them up until they can show proof in court. One half-dead company must not be allowed to use the legal system to terrorize people all over the place.
"Do you seriously believe they don't patent the stuff they're inventing? Just to protect themselves? They'd be stupid if they didn't, and they aren't stupid."
What does Microsoft really invent? Most software patents aren't inventions, they're just a matter of who filed the patent first on some ancient or obvious idea.
Microsoft has patents, but they don't have a huge over-aggressive patent portfolio like IBM. This may convince them to go in that direction.
Microsoft may now decide to harness some of its billions to lobby for laws *against* software patents.
On the other hand, they may decide that they'll need to accumulate the most massive patent portfolio in order to have ammunition if faced with something similar again.
The problem with current micropayments is that they insist on making each payment into a financial transaction. I view an article for 3 cents, and they reel off a whole bag of accounting mumbo jumbo and all the other usual stuff that goes on with a financial transaction.
To be cost-effective, micropayments should be more like poker chips (albeit microscopic poker chips) - you pay for a set of chips, use them to do your business, and no actual money changes hands until amounts accumulate to a certain level and/or certain time intervals have passed. For example, let's say they use a system of "points", where 10 points cost 1 cent and points are sold in increments of $10. So you buy 20,000 points with your credit card or by sending a check to the "microbank".
Then when you purchase something, points are deducted from your account. Each purchase should not be processed as a financial transaction, just as each megabyte transferred from your web site is not made into a billable transaction; your hosting service just bills you at the end of the month for the total megs and gigs transferred. At some interval, the merchants and different microbanks settle their cumulative bills (merchants with too small of a points balance wouldn't get any cash yet).
If you want your money back, you can ask for a check and they send you one based on the points you have, after deducting a check processing fee (which could be bigger than the value of your points, so you'll have to just leave them there).
They also should have a provision that one person can use to send points to another. If the individuals want to exchange money for that (ie sell their points), it's up to them how they're going to transfer the cash.
Still, this would not work for someone who wants to buy just 10 cents worth of something and nothing else ever again. I don't think any system could be cost-effective for that kind of use, just as it would not be cost-effective for you or the phone company to bill you proportionately for just two local phone calls per month.
Until they stop all this DVD-DON/KEY+DOO-DOO and pick one format (or pick more than one, but agree and commit to those formats), I'm not buying any of these devices. Even if I buy a drive that is capable of all formats, each piece of media will still be in only one format. If I back up my files on DVD-R and that gets abandoned after DVD+R becomes the standard, the DVD-Rs will essentially become coasters if my all-capable drive breaks and I can't find a replacement that can do DVD-R.
I don't want to start a flame war, but I've been using Mozilla for a year (since 1.0), and with its popup blocking feature, I haven't seen one of those god-awful windows EVER.
They don't show up as an actual pop-up window; they are displayed as a graphic on a web page that looks just like a dialog box, often with an OK button, a blue-striped title bar and all. What gives them away is that when you scroll the web page, the box scrolls along with the page, so it becomes obvious that it isn't a real dialog box. But it is a lot easier to fool new computer users who aren't familiar with the trick, especially when the page has just loaded and they haven't scrolled yet.
The standard way of patenting in recent years has been to take [insert any ancient or commonplace activity here] and do it "on the Internet!"
Now these guys have created a revolutionary method for patenting! Just take [insert any ancient or commonplace activity here] and do it "internationally!"
> With that MSN IM translation patent, shouldn't it only cover that method translating IMs? So if you were to figure out another way to do it, you'd be in the clear? Or with the one-click patent, does that patent cover "A method of buying stuff on the internet (with one click)" or is it "A method of buying stuff with one click (and here's some software to do it)"? If you implemented one-click shopping via some other method, wouldn't you be in the clear?
I believe that is how it is supposed to work. And indeed when many patent infringement cases have actually gone to court, either the patent got thrown out altogether, or the defendant was found not to be infringing because there were differences in the details of their method, like the British Telecom hyperlink patent case.
The two major reasons why patent holders can get away with suing anybody who does something remotely similar are: (1) Technically ignorant juries. There is no way eBay would have lost the case if the jury was technically competent and had common sense. (2) The lack of funds to fight it out in court. Even if the patent would get thrown out after a court challenge, many small companies cannot afford the cost of litigation so they cave in and pay up the license fee.
Rather than promoting innovation, software and business patents have become nothing more than a legalized form of extortion.
A major economic problem with outsourcing is that it decreases net exports, since with outsourcing you are essentially importing software. Remember the Y = C+I+G+NX equation?
Another problem is that outsourcing isn't an automatic money-saving tool like most executives think it is (or maybe they don't believe it is automatic but they will convince everybody it's so if that will increase their bonuses). It does take a certain type of management skill for it to work well enough that you actually save money. It can work easily with manufacturing T-shirts because the requirements for how to do that don't have to be communicated across the ocean every week, but software development is not so simple.
Some American companies are actually spending MORE because of the increased communication effort and decreased quality. With companies that don't know which projects to choose for outsourcing or how to manage projects remotely, the company doesn't enjoy any extra profits, and the consumers don't get cheaper products or services.
So true. The VW Jetta became really crappy when they started producing them in Mexico. I almost bought one until I researched the reviews over the years. You won't get them to last like the Jettas of twelve years ago.
When people refer to "security through obscurity" they are referring to the algorithms, not the keys.
Obscuring algorithms is not very helpful because it is not that difficult for a skilled attacker to discover the algorithms via various reverse engineering and cryptanalysis techniques.
A properly secure system is one where they know the algorithms but still can't break in without the key. If it becomes significantly easier to break in when somebody finds out the algorithm, the encryption scheme isn't a secure one because a skilled attacker will discover the algorithm anyway regardless of how you try to mask it.