The future of the software market is clearly different to the market that existed before GNU&Co.
Customers make an investment in deploying software which ranges from equipment to training and maintenance infrastructure. These are the significant and notably "long term" investments.
This would imply that the wise customer would look not at the sticker price but also at the cost of the future investment when making a software purchase.
Unfortunately, given the behaviour of tech corporations over the last 20 years, this is the antithesis. Product development decisions are made based on profit margins and very seldom on helping the customer maintain their long term investments. Open source software however helps the customer maintain their investment by allowing them to take control of their future.
This is why Solaris will not succeed and has not succeeded in developing market share in the x86 market. Already is is obvious that Linux is a better product by virtually any meaningful measure.
Seriously, you can't seriously improve a language by telling people how to program with it.
You can write bad code in any language. I don't see how your statement and the prvious sentence can both be true unless you equate it to some individuals are capable of programming and some are not, but, at some point in time, we had to be "told" how to write programs which kind of invalidates your statement.
The other point is, there are a number of rules that you can use that if abided by will have fewer chances of error.
I'm currently unemployed and directly due to off-shoring. It sucks to be unemployed - trust me. However I think that it is really silly to put barriers in place.
No 1. You inevitably get what you pay for. After having lost my job, the company I worked for now has a team of people in asia and they cost far more than the team we had here in the valley and they have yet to deliver squat.
I think that these off-shore arrangements only work if you have a very strong cultural match between off-shore supplier and local organization or if it is managed very carefully. Very few US organizations are capable of pulling off such a feat and it is inevitable that most of these off-shoring relationships will result in huge craters.
The US tech recession is the result of the "perfect storm", a) Bubble pops, b) oversupply of skilled immigrants c) Oversupply of "cheap" skilled workers. So, a) the bubble popped and it's now starting to come out of recession, b) immigrant quotas have been curbed, and c) there is only so much you can outsource.
It will recover, just be prepared to hold out for a few more months (up to 12 months). Keep abreast of the skills you need with your spare time.
Incompetance of management. It is abhorrent to see how the information is provided to the decision makers yet the people without the knowledge end up overriding those with the knowledge.
These are some high profile events where the risks where well known.
Both Columbia and Challenger shuttle losses Here the engineering team informed management multiple of the risk and yet the management failed to act on the information provided.
The great blockouts of N.E. U.S.A. 1965 and 2003. The risks were well known yet the politics got in the way.
9/11 Terrorist attack - there were numerous signs and the FBI was too worried about politics rather than listening to their own people.
This is not unique to today but it is getting more and more difficult for people to understand.
In the technology industry I find myself "fighting" to unleash the truth and attacked because I simply state the facts as they are.
OK, too bad if a company messes up a product but sometimes it is significantly detrimental - take the Union Carbide toxic disater in Bhopal.
How do we effect a change for there to be more recognition for this ? The risk/reward trade-off for those with the knowledge are often dispropotionate : RISK: Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people. REWARD: A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.
That's it, I'm going to start collating references to stupid management decisions causing untold damage because of management ignorance. Please post your examples here.... I'm going to use it next time I get into a knowledge vs ignorance argument.
Microsoft publishes encryption device circumvention device in
this article.
I warn everyone that uses this to make sure they save the file below to "autorun.reg" an re-enable the SunComm encryption service
Save the contents between the snips as autorun.reg and run the file to re-enable the service making sure to change the value to 00000001. ----- snip ---- Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
It seems like the RIAA has figured it out, yet our public servants have yet to. If I had the authority I could waste most of the companies doing this blatant illegal activity in a heart beat. It's simple - follow the trail, and we're not talking needing some ancient American Indian tracker skills.
FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Step 1. Ask (demand) the five major credit card companies to set up multiple credit card numbers that have been marked as illegal tracking cards. In other words, purchases made on these cards indicate that the merchant account is for illegal activity.
Step 2. Filter through the spam (I can donate my spam right now - I get hundreds daily) and attempt to purchase anything using credit cards in Step 1.
Step 3. Demand the banks freeze funds in the merchant accounts that the credit cards have been charged to. (discontinue the use of these credit cards to avoid DOS retaliation activity).
Step 4. Profit. All frozen funds are collected for prosecution under appropriate government statutes.
Step 5 (optional). Subpaoena all merchant account credit card activity and notify the credit card holders that the merchant they purchased their Viagra from is really an Al Qaida front....
The above technique is used for credit card purchases however, I have tracked down a number of companies offering "financial" services by submitting false identities and when they call for "Harrison Fjord" I take over the converstation with some sticky questions about their SPAM policy. It takes just a few of these and you can easily track down some very dubious commercial activity.
I am perplexed. The law enforcement activity goes after Sklyrov who has quite possibly never done any harm to anyone yet they can't seem to follow the easy steps above. I could argue that the money spent going after Lamo, Mitnick and even theoreticaly various alleged al-Qaida could be better spent on the public good by some simple detective work.
<Ding!> Headline for the next NYT article. IT HAS BEEN ALLEGED that terrorist funding is being aquired through the illegal activity of selling organ enlargement food supplements... All I need now is some way of delivering the message... I know SPAM !
The theory here is quite simple. Make it difficult to make money with SPAM and the reason for SPAM will cease.
Am I missing somthing ? Why is this such a difficult thing to do that the FBI or state law enforcement have not figured this out ? Is this a violation of some constitutional right, surely they nuked most of these in the last round with the "Patriot Act" ?
What exactly did SCO do wrong? I mean, if the code belongs to them, what is so bad about them wanting to be paid for it?
for ( i = 0; i < max; ++ i )
The line of code above belongs to me, I wrote it and everyone who has any similar code, including code resulting in compilation needs to pay me.
The poster of the parent article is herby given notice of infringement and $150,000 damages for each infringement. I estimate that $1e12 (1 trillion dollars) is a good starting point.
The point I'm trying to make is that Copyright laws are far more complex than you make it out to be. Firstly, being a civil suit, damages need to be assesed. If damage to SCO is immaterial, then SCO is far worse position now by revoking SGI's licence because it will be easily shown to the jury as extortion.
As a counter-example, if IBM had released some unique feature, say for example as O(1) scheduler, from the Unix code base, then SCO would have some reason to rattle a little.
I remeber a civil suit once where someone was being sued for service overcharges and once of the pieces of evidence was a $75 overcharge which was even in doubt. The judge turned to the claimant's attorney and said somthing like this, "you have spent half and hour of the court's time attempting to show a transgression of $75. Do you realize just how much that 30 minutes of court time costs ?".
The point is, the judicial system expects parties to be fair. If I make a claim against someone, it is not fair that I make it difficult or impossible for you to continue to do business.
Altmier's letter is an excellent defence for SGI in this case. It shows that a) the infringement was trivial and hence the actual damage is negligible, b) the transgression was corrected rapidly to minimize any pervieved issues and c) SGI was attempting to be as fair as possible. SCO on the other hand is threatening to revoke an irrevokable license and damage SGI's ability to do buisness. If SGI counter-sues for damages of lost revenue they will win because SCO is not acting in good faith.
There is more. "IP" comes in 2 flavours, Copyright and Patents. What SCO is claiming here is unclear. It seems like the wording is regarding patents but they cite Copyright infringements as evidence. Their message simply does not make any legal sense. I recall a discussion once between an attourney and an engineer regarding a legal matter. Typical engineer is trying to navigate to a solution around a county building assessor who was being particularly difficult. After listening to the engineer's brilliant alternatives the attourney says "wait, you forget somthing, the guy is a moron.". This story parallel's the case of SCO vs the world.
Regarding the article on your web site :
http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=news_ NewsRelease_09302003b
I feel that you have mischaracterized the role and value proposition of the "Open Source" community.
Firstly, there is nothing monopolistic about "Open Source" as your title so suggests. Absolutly anyone is able to build proprietary components on top of open source projects. There are a number of very successful proprietary products that are selling quite will on top of Open Source infrastructure. Also, there is a large amount of software that is available that is far more cost-effective (read free) hence lowering the costs substantially for the taxpayers. In my mind this is a clear mischaracterization of the natire of the "Freeware Initiative".
Secondly, you unfortunately omit the data regarding the "boondoggle" you're referring to. You will find studies which claim "Freeware Initiative" solutions may cost more but invariably these studies have virtually no basis in fact. I personally can vouch that "Open Source" solutions are far more cost effective and reliable that many well regarded closed source initiatives.
Thirdly, in my mind, Massachusetts is highly regarded by many for it's technology and the Microsoft lawsuit was a total and utter disaster for the citizens of this country. Massachusetts is the shining light in holding the values of it's citizens above the values of corporate greed.
Lastly, if Massachusetts tax payers do end paying for developent of new "features" or "producrts", each and every tax payer will also have the opportunity to directly benefit from that development and not some proprietary product that has no interest in providing for the tax payer.
As the information age unfolds, the processes and systems adoped by the govenment must be able to be scrutinized by it's citizens. If these systems are proprietary and closed, this will not be achievable and a loss of faith in the government will result. The move by the MA government is laudible and inevitable for a free and democratic society.
The CCAGW, as an purported advocate of the citizen, should start looking more closely at the wishes of it's citizens and not be seen as a voice for corporate greed, otherwise the purpose of CCAGW's existance may evaporate.
The W2003 server installations come mainly from colos and dedicated colo sites. These guys have considerable monthly turnover of customers and can redeploy a server at whim. All this number shows is that the servers at these sites are *fluid* and some got redeployed. There is nothing meaningful in this data unless you can correlate it with more meaningful data. On the other hand, it is bad news for Solaris because these big colo sites don't normally offer Solaris so the Solaris conversions are more likely a true conversion.
I don't understand why AMD is not interested in producing a compiler (even by contributing to GCC) that would help them produce similar results.
Simple - they don't really need to. The reason why intel needs to work on it is because of the huge pipeline in the p4. The Athlon 64 is a speculatively executed multiple issue register renaming type that does much of the hard work on schduling instructions dynamically so it will run p4 optimized code just as well as p3 optimized code. The A64 design limits the clock speed BUT it does far more useful work per cycle than a P4. Intel played the MHz game and found themselves floundering in the Itanium and had to concede that MHz isn't everything. The A64 is simply a well designed fire breathing CPU.
If IBM did not add this claim, it would have diminished claims it made in an earlier filing.
Note that earlier IBM had filed that SCO was in violation becuase it had shipped the code it was saying that had been illegally added.
What would happen if the judge had asked IBM, "if this is the case where is this code that you claim you wrote that is now being shipped by SCO and why are you not screaming about it ?".
I think they are just dotting 'i's. They have full intention of involking the GPL.
Why on Earth don't they put in a second gear? The speed freaks could stop whining about the top speed being a lousy 100 MPH, like they spend more than 1 hour a year at that speed.
Have you driven on the freeways in Germany ?
I did spend over an hour at 180kmph with a little iddy bitty rental. I had the pleasure of being passed countless times by the black benz smear... and I'm not even a speed freak !
You're wrong. In fact, there is a great need to write about it now because it may end up being the only way to enact change in the future. America's history is a violent one, and the RIAA seems to have forgotten that. They bullied a 12 year old girl for money (quite a lot, in fact); in my neighborhood that kind of thing will get any number of people on your ass and they will make you stop.
This is killing a person for *money* we're talking about.I'm sorry, but I think human life, even that of my enemy, is far too precious to kill for MONEY.
Now, there is a fate far worse than death ! How about the imminent demise of the RIAA ?
I predict it. The RIAA is now tainted goods.
Very few people will want to be affiliated with tem. It is inevitable.
it's like calling a murder 'manslaughter', the end result is the same. Either way, wheather you call it copyright infringement, copyright violation, or theft, it still is the loss of a sale for the label and the artist.
This is where we disagree. I don't think that everyone who has downloaded would buy the music they downloaded and some people who download do buy the CD but would have never have known about the CD had they not downloaded it. The other most interesting point is that some music can't be purchased at all. The only method of acessing the music is downloading it.
Copyright infringement is VERY different to theft.
last time I checked, theft is not common and reasonable behavior.
Can you cite a "theft" violation in this matter according to the law ? You may be able to find a copyright violation, but theft is a different thing.
This is conceptually where things break down from a social standpoint. Many (most) people do not believe there is any theft. Hence calling it theft is only going to confuse the situation.
I would stop calling it theft and start calling it what it is - copyright violation that indirectly hurts musicians.
I suspect that there must be a legal document that outlines the minimum requirements for an election system. I suspect that many of these systems being proposed simply to not qualify if a proper analysis is done. Why are the states going down this path without first doing a thorough analysis ?
I suspect that there is a way to create an electronic voting system that will comply, I certainly don't think it can be proprietary. If anywhere it was mandated that a system be open to public scrutiny, this is it !
PHB says, "oh, no problem, just stay late tonight until you can finish everything. if it's not done you have plenty of time this weekend."/true story
How much were you being paid ? If it's not worth it then I'd quit. (well actually, I'm a chronic work-a-holic so I'd probably do it anyway).
Stock answer to this one is: "Great, what time will you be here on Sunday so we can meet and go over the issues ?". PHB get's clue or is a lost cause.
*Sometimes* it's important to the company to get somthing done on a weekend. VERY rarely. If PHB does not show massive amounts of appreciation (read bonus) for this kind of work, you need a new PHB.
overworked IT engineer - "No problem, which one of A,B,C,D,.... W would you like me to hold off on while I do X ?"
PHB... goes away and does not come back until it's more important that A...W
Scenario 2
Customer - "I have this way out idea that will really be cool to do !"
Overworked engineer saya - "Fantastic, you know, we have a procedure for new projects, go fill in the form and we'll prioritize it".
Customer goes away and forgets the crazy idea.
Most of the ways to deal with anyone it to give them your problem. If you do this then you filter most of the nonsense. The golden rule is to never say no but to "Prioritize"! No-one will ever complain that you don't do your job if you are "prioritizing!".
Slashdot Mirror
Volume bandwidth prices are near $0.10 per gigabyte.
I figure so far this has cost them around $400.
I don't think they're reaching for their pocket for change just yet.
The future of the software market is clearly different to the market that existed before GNU&Co.
Customers make an investment in deploying software which ranges from equipment to training and maintenance infrastructure. These are the significant and notably "long term" investments.
This would imply that the wise customer would look not at the sticker price but also at the cost of the future investment when making a software purchase.
Unfortunately, given the behaviour of tech corporations over the last 20 years, this is the antithesis. Product development decisions are made based on profit margins and very seldom on helping the customer maintain their long term investments. Open source software however helps the customer maintain their investment by allowing them to take control of their future.
This is why Solaris will not succeed and has not succeeded in developing market share in the x86 market. Already is is obvious that Linux is a better product by virtually any meaningful measure.
You can write bad code in any language. I don't see how your statement and the prvious sentence can both be true unless you equate it to some individuals are capable of programming and some are not, but, at some point in time, we had to be "told" how to write programs which kind of invalidates your statement.
The other point is, there are a number of rules that you can use that if abided by will have fewer chances of error.
Maybe I missed your point.
An important customer of theirs called me yesterday and talked about it. They are so dead.
I'm currently unemployed and directly due to off-shoring. It sucks to be unemployed - trust me. However I think that it is really silly to put barriers in place.
No 1. You inevitably get what you pay for. After having lost my job, the company I worked for now has a team of people in asia and they cost far more than the team we had here in the valley and they have yet to deliver squat.
I think that these off-shore arrangements only work if you have a very strong cultural match between off-shore supplier and local organization or if it is managed very carefully. Very few US organizations are capable of pulling off such a feat and it is inevitable that most of these off-shoring relationships will result in huge craters.
The US tech recession is the result of the "perfect storm", a) Bubble pops, b) oversupply of skilled immigrants c) Oversupply of "cheap" skilled workers. So, a) the bubble popped and it's now starting to come out of recession, b) immigrant quotas have been curbed, and c) there is only so much you can outsource.
It will recover, just be prepared to hold out for a few more months (up to 12 months). Keep abreast of the skills you need with your spare time.
Incompetance of management. It is abhorrent to see how the information is provided to the decision makers yet the people without the knowledge end up overriding those with the knowledge.
These are some high profile events where the risks where well known.
Both Columbia and Challenger shuttle losses
Here the engineering team informed management multiple of the risk and yet the management failed to act on the information provided.
The great blockouts of N.E. U.S.A. 1965 and 2003. The risks were well known yet the politics got in the way.
9/11 Terrorist attack - there were numerous signs and the FBI was too worried about politics rather than listening to their own people.
This is not unique to today but it is getting more and more difficult for people to understand.
In the technology industry I find myself "fighting" to unleash the truth and attacked because I simply state the facts as they are.
OK, too bad if a company messes up a product but sometimes it is significantly detrimental - take the Union Carbide toxic disater in Bhopal.
How do we effect a change for there to be more recognition for this ? The risk/reward trade-off for those with the knowledge are often dispropotionate : RISK: Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people. REWARD: A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.
That's it, I'm going to start collating references to stupid management decisions causing untold damage because of management ignorance. Please post your examples here.... I'm going to use it next time I get into a knowledge vs ignorance argument.
Microsoft publishes encryption device circumvention device in this article.
I warn everyone that uses this to make sure they save the file below to "autorun.reg" an re-enable the SunComm encryption service
Make sure you change Autorun amd set it to 1 otherwise you will be violating the DMCA.YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
It seems like the RIAA has figured it out, yet our public servants have yet to. If I had the authority I could waste most of the companies doing this blatant illegal activity in a heart beat.
It's simple - follow the trail, and we're not talking needing some ancient American Indian tracker skills.
FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Step 1. Ask (demand) the five major credit card companies to set up multiple credit card numbers that have been marked as illegal tracking cards. In other words, purchases made on these cards indicate that the merchant account is for illegal activity.
Step 2. Filter through the spam (I can donate my spam right now - I get hundreds daily) and attempt to purchase anything using credit cards in Step 1.
Step 3. Demand the banks freeze funds in the merchant accounts that the credit cards have been charged to. (discontinue the use of these credit cards to avoid DOS retaliation activity).
Step 4. Profit. All frozen funds are collected for prosecution under appropriate government statutes.
Step 5 (optional). Subpaoena all merchant account credit card activity and notify the credit card holders that the merchant they purchased their Viagra from is really an Al Qaida front....
The above technique is used for credit card purchases however, I have tracked down a number of companies offering "financial" services by submitting false identities and when they call for "Harrison Fjord" I take over the converstation with some sticky questions about their SPAM policy. It takes just a few of these and you can easily track down some very dubious commercial activity.
I am perplexed. The law enforcement activity goes after Sklyrov who has quite possibly never done any harm to anyone yet they can't seem to follow the easy steps above. I could argue that the money spent going after Lamo, Mitnick and even theoreticaly various alleged al-Qaida could be better spent on the public good by some simple detective work.
<Ding!> Headline for the next NYT article. IT HAS BEEN ALLEGED that terrorist funding is being aquired through the illegal activity of selling organ enlargement food supplements ... All I need now is some way of delivering the message ... I know SPAM !
The theory here is quite simple. Make it difficult to make money with SPAM and the reason for SPAM will cease.
Am I missing somthing ? Why is this such a difficult thing to do that the FBI or state law enforcement have not figured this out ? Is this a violation of some constitutional right, surely they nuked most of these in the last round with the "Patriot Act" ?
for ( i = 0; i < max; ++ i )
The line of code above belongs to me, I wrote it and everyone who has any similar code, including code resulting in compilation needs to pay me.
The poster of the parent article is herby given notice of infringement and $150,000 damages for each infringement. I estimate that $1e12 (1 trillion dollars) is a good starting point.
The point I'm trying to make is that Copyright laws are far more complex than you make it out to be. Firstly, being a civil suit, damages need to be assesed. If damage to SCO is immaterial, then SCO is far worse position now by revoking SGI's licence because it will be easily shown to the jury as extortion.
As a counter-example, if IBM had released some unique feature, say for example as O(1) scheduler, from the Unix code base, then SCO would have some reason to rattle a little.
I remeber a civil suit once where someone was being sued for service overcharges and once of the pieces of evidence was a $75 overcharge which was even in doubt. The judge turned to the claimant's attorney and said somthing like this, "you have spent half and hour of the court's time attempting to show a transgression of $75. Do you realize just how much that 30 minutes of court time costs ?".
The point is, the judicial system expects parties to be fair. If I make a claim against someone, it is not fair that I make it difficult or impossible for you to continue to do business.
Altmier's letter is an excellent defence for SGI in this case. It shows that a) the infringement was trivial and hence the actual damage is negligible, b) the transgression was corrected rapidly to minimize any pervieved issues and c) SGI was attempting to be as fair as possible. SCO on the other hand is threatening to revoke an irrevokable license and damage SGI's ability to do buisness. If SGI counter-sues for damages of lost revenue they will win because SCO is not acting in good faith.
There is more. "IP" comes in 2 flavours, Copyright and Patents. What SCO is claiming here is unclear. It seems like the wording is regarding patents but they cite Copyright infringements as evidence. Their message simply does not make any legal sense. I recall a discussion once between an attourney and an engineer regarding a legal matter. Typical engineer is trying to navigate to a solution around a county building assessor who was being particularly difficult. After listening to the engineer's brilliant alternatives the attourney says "wait, you forget somthing, the guy is a moron.". This story parallel's the case of SCO vs the world.
http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=news
I feel that you have mischaracterized the role and value proposition of the "Open Source" community.
Firstly, there is nothing monopolistic about "Open Source" as your title so suggests. Absolutly anyone is able to build proprietary components on top of open source projects. There are a number of very successful proprietary products that are selling quite will on top of Open Source infrastructure. Also, there is a large amount of software that is available that is far more cost-effective (read free) hence lowering the costs substantially for the taxpayers. In my mind this is a clear mischaracterization of the natire of the "Freeware Initiative".
Secondly, you unfortunately omit the data regarding the "boondoggle" you're referring to. You will find studies which claim "Freeware Initiative" solutions may cost more but invariably these studies have virtually no basis in fact. I personally can vouch that "Open Source" solutions are far more cost effective and reliable that many well regarded closed source initiatives.
Thirdly, in my mind, Massachusetts is highly regarded by many for it's technology and the Microsoft lawsuit was a total and utter disaster for the citizens of this country. Massachusetts is the shining light in holding the values of it's citizens above the values of corporate greed.
Lastly, if Massachusetts tax payers do end paying for developent of new "features" or "producrts", each and every tax payer will also have the opportunity to directly benefit from that development and not some proprietary product that has no interest in providing for the tax payer.
As the information age unfolds, the processes and systems adoped by the govenment must be able to be scrutinized by it's citizens. If these systems are proprietary and closed, this will not be achievable and a loss of faith in the government will result. The move by the MA government is laudible and inevitable for a free and democratic society.
The CCAGW, as an purported advocate of the citizen, should start looking more closely at the wishes of it's citizens and not be seen as a voice for corporate greed, otherwise the purpose of CCAGW's existance may evaporate.
Cygwin has progressively become much better.
You should give it a try now. I just toyed with hard links and they seem to work correctly.
With cygwin you get true UNIX compatability and hundreds of unilities including ssh and X terminal sessions.
The W2003 server installations come mainly from colos and dedicated colo sites. These guys have considerable monthly turnover of customers and can redeploy a server at whim. All this number shows is that the servers at these sites are *fluid* and some got redeployed. There is nothing meaningful in this data unless you can correlate it with more meaningful data. On the other hand, it is bad news for Solaris because these big colo sites don't normally offer Solaris so the Solaris conversions are more likely a true conversion.
Simple - they don't really need to. The reason why intel needs to work on it is because of the huge pipeline in the p4. The Athlon 64 is a speculatively executed multiple issue register renaming type that does much of the hard work on schduling instructions dynamically so it will run p4 optimized code just as well as p3 optimized code. The A64 design limits the clock speed BUT it does far more useful work per cycle than a P4. Intel played the MHz game and found themselves floundering in the Itanium and had to concede that MHz isn't everything. The A64 is simply a well designed fire breathing CPU.
Note that earlier IBM had filed that SCO was in violation becuase it had shipped the code it was saying that had been illegally added.
What would happen if the judge had asked IBM, "if this is the case where is this code that you claim you wrote that is now being shipped by SCO and why are you not screaming about it ?".
I think they are just dotting 'i's. They have full intention of involking the GPL.
Have you driven on the freeways in Germany ?
I did spend over an hour at 180kmph with a little iddy bitty rental. I had the pleasure of being passed countless times by the black benz smear ... and I'm not even a speed freak !
I'd be willing to help add a patch to Bind 9 to check for DNS responses that are "from verisign's redirection" and respond with an empty response.
This is REALLY quite annoying for a 3 pinky typist like me !
Smacking the guy for being so callous is almost ok in my book. Putting a slug in his body is not.
Now channel that negative spirit into some positive letters to some choice individuals.
Join boycott-riaa.org.
Demand that everyone you do business with consider being an RIAA free zone.
Lobby you local government, state government and federal government to become RIAA free zones.
Lobby to have the Copyright laws changed - revoke the amendments in the last 50 years. Repeal the DMCA.
.... I can go on and on with things that need to be done and will be easily done now that the RIAA has so missed the mark 261 times.
This is killing a person for *money* we're talking about.I'm sorry, but I think human life, even that of my enemy, is far too precious to kill for MONEY.
Now, there is a fate far worse than death ! How about the imminent demise of the RIAA ?
I predict it. The RIAA is now tainted goods. Very few people will want to be affiliated with tem. It is inevitable.
There is absolutley no need for violence here and even less need to write about it. Please keep your sentiments of use of firearms to youself.
Besides, the RIAA just shot thselves in the head 261 times yesterday, they beat you to it !
This is where we disagree. I don't think that everyone who has downloaded would buy the music they downloaded and some people who download do buy the CD but would have never have known about the CD had they not downloaded it. The other most interesting point is that some music can't be purchased at all. The only method of acessing the music is downloading it.
Copyright infringement is VERY different to theft.
Can you cite a "theft" violation in this matter according to the law ? You may be able to find a copyright violation, but theft is a different thing.
This is conceptually where things break down from a social standpoint. Many (most) people do not believe there is any theft. Hence calling it theft is only going to confuse the situation.
I would stop calling it theft and start calling it what it is - copyright violation that indirectly hurts musicians.
I suspect that there must be a legal document that outlines the minimum requirements for an election system. I suspect that many of these systems being proposed simply to not qualify if a proper analysis is done. Why are the states going down this path without first doing a thorough analysis ?
I suspect that there is a way to create an electronic voting system that will comply, I certainly don't think it can be proprietary. If anywhere it was mandated that a system be open to public scrutiny, this is it !
How much were you being paid ? If it's not worth it then I'd quit. (well actually, I'm a chronic work-a-holic so I'd probably do it anyway).
Stock answer to this one is: "Great, what time will you be here on Sunday so we can meet and go over the issues ?". PHB get's clue or is a lost cause.
*Sometimes* it's important to the company to get somthing done on a weekend. VERY rarely. If PHB does not show massive amounts of appreciation (read bonus) for this kind of work, you need a new PHB.
The right way is to propose and alternative.
Scenario 2
PHB says - "I want X done asap".
overworked IT engineer - "No problem, which one of A,B,C,D, .... W would you like me to hold off on while I do X ?"
PHB ... goes away and does not come back until it's more important that A...W
Scenario 2
Customer - "I have this way out idea that will really be cool to do !"
Overworked engineer saya - "Fantastic, you know, we have a procedure for new projects, go fill in the form and we'll prioritize it".
Customer goes away and forgets the crazy idea.
Most of the ways to deal with anyone it to give them your problem. If you do this then you filter most of the nonsense. The golden rule is to never say no but to "Prioritize"! No-one will ever complain that you don't do your job if you are "prioritizing!".