As individual users move towards OO, small businesses move towards OO. As OO gets more common, more people feel like OO is an acceptable option. You see where I'm going with this.
Nowhere fast.
If your employer is part of Microsoft's Home Use Program then your personal copy of MS Office Professional is a $9.95 download for Windows or the Mac.
[U.S. - The price will be about the same, localized for just anywhere eles in the world. DVD media is available]
There are better deals to be had through your school.
MS Office Home & Student - for Windows & the Mac - remain comfortably in the top five or top ten software bestsellers at Amazon.com. It's unlikely you'll find a PC game other than Scrabble or Oregon Trail in the top one hundred.
Retail sales of MS Office are the tail the wags the dog.
We have public speaking courses where kids use powerpoint to do presentations, and use word regularly. Unfortunately we don't really teach any computing skills in those classes as much as we teach "application" skills
Using the application gives a student an immeadiate response. He can see how well he is progressing. The successful presenation provides a sense of accomplishment. I am not convinced that a purely thoretical approach would work at this level.
I am not really seeing people who invented anything transformational, so much as riding on top of the successful of transformational technologies. Bill Gates and Paul Allen?
Gates was there at the very beginnings of the microcomputer, with the Altair 8800 in 1975.
The first generation micros ran Microsoft BASIC. In 1977, Microsoft added FORTRAN to the mix and in 1978, COBOL. In 1979 Microsoft released MBASIC for the 16 bit Intel 8086. In 1980 the Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II.
The PC without development tools or software support is a circuit board in the lab. It does not change anything.
The MS-DOS PC was a viable commercial product before the cloning of the PC-BIOS.
If you insist on talking about something "transformational," why not consider the mass-market oriented disk based operating system that sold for $40 retail list ?
Bank of America Corporation is a financial services company, the largest bank holding company in the United States, by assets, and the second largest bank by market capitalization. Bank of America serves clients in more than 150 countries and has a relationship with 99% of the U.S. Fortune 500 companies and 83% of the Fortune Global 500. The company is a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and a component of both the S&P 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. As of 2010, Bank of America is the 5th largest company in the United States by total revenue, as well as the second largest non-oil company in the US (after Wal-Mart). In 2010, Forbes listed Bank of America as the 3rd "best" large company in the world. The bank's 2008 acquisition of Merrill Lynch made Bank of America the world's largest wealth manager and a major player in the investment banking industry. The company holds 12.2% of all U.S. deposits, as of August 2009, and is one of the Big Four Banks of the United States, along with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo -- its main competitors
The highway in this context means living within 1,000 feet of the heavily trafficked cross-town expressway.
The researchers theorized that the type and sheer quantity of chemicals distributed on highways are different from those on even the busiest city roadways.
at I want to know is, why are families with autistic children so keen on living near highways? I think it's because they're hoping their kid gets run over.
More likely it's because they can afford the rent.
Isn't the entire point of a jury to decide what is fact and what is not?
The jury's business is to make a decision based on the evidence presented in court.
Evidence that is - for the most part - open to public view. Evidence can be seen, discussed, and openly debated by all the participants in the trial.
Without that, what you have is a Star Chamber, answerable to no one.
As if the truth could be prejudicial.
The truth can be prejudicial.
In the old days, it was called "waving the bloody shirt."
What you want from the jury is the emotional response that clouds all reason.
But we already have a deterrent for when people break the law. Prosecute the cops who broke the law to obtain evidence and you no longer need the exclusionary rule, and so you no longer need to control what the jury knows. So you have better behaved cops, and better informed juries. It's a win for everyone.
The robot, Asimov wrote, was logical but not reasonable.
Historically, the cop was never prosecuted, never convicted on any substantial charge.
The geek might usefully ask himself how mobile the world at work or the world at home really is. The primary use of the smartphone, after all, remains the everyday, ordinary, telephone call.
Apple computer sales have been growing handsomely
All increases in sales look phenomenal when you start from a small enough base.
2. it is a good opportunity for them to pull the old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
The WebM video scarcely exists outside a YouTube transcode. H.264 is in a lot of places in the world beyond the web that you will find Windows. For a sampling, try Google Shopping for "H.264." 67,000 hits.
Is "Celebrates" the correct word to use in this context?
Yes.
It is 1960 and your Fortune 500 clients want programs they can read.
Programs they can trust.
Their area of expertise is corporate accounting, business methods and procedures.
Practices which have evolved over hundreds of years and practices which the newly minted mainframe programmer is not going to master overnight.
COBOL syntax has often been criticized for its verbosity. However, proponents are quick to note that this was an intentional part of the language design and considered by many to be one of the COBOL's strengths. One of the design goals of COBOL was for COBOL code to be readable and understandable to non-programmers such as managers, supervisors and users. This is why COBOL has a very English-like syntax and structural elements--including: nouns, verbs, clauses, sentences, sections, and divisions. Consequently, COBOL is considered by at least one source to be "the most readable, understandable and self-documenting programming language in use today...." Not only does this readability generally assist the maintenance process but the older a program gets the more valuable this readability becomes." Additionally, traditional COBOL is a simple language with a limited scope of function (with no pointers, no user-defined types, and no user-defined functions), encouraging a straightforward coding style. This has made it well-suited to its primary domain of business computing--where the program complexity lies in the business rules that need to be encoded rather than sophisticated algorithms or data structures. And because the standard does not belong to any particular vendor, programs written in COBOL are highly portable. The language can be used on a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. And the rigid hierarchical structure restricts the definition of external references to the Environment Division, which simplifies platform changes.COBOL
Netflix streaming works on PS3, Xbox, wii, mac, windows, iphone, ipad, a number of set-top TV boxes like the Roku and the WD ones, several TVs with integrated instant watch, and several Blu-Ray players. They're trying to get as many eyes in front of their product as they can.
The real story here, I think, is the extinction of the traditional Linux distribution as a client OS for the home user. OSX and the iOS are successful. Windows 7 is successful. Android is successful - and there is probably room for Chrome.
None of these operating systems have a problem with protected content - and none are suffering from lackluster OEM support.
But Linux - as the geek understands it - is slipping below the radar even in countries even in places where the FOSS zealot can tout his biggest success stories. StatCounter offers a good -free- global view with full breakdown by counries and regions.
If I get a few thousand of my friends to drive down a road at a particular time to create a traffic jam, is that a crime? I'm really asking...
Of course it is.
You have launched a conspiracy to deny others the right to travel without interference and delay. You and your friends are obstructing the public roads with potentially life-threatening consequences.
Police. Ambulance services. Fire and rescue...
It won't matter if you are a thousand miles away when someone gets hurt.
It's your game. Your ball.
Conspiracy law usually does not require proof of specific intent by the defendants to injure any specific person to establish an illegal agreement. Instead, usually the law only requires the conspirators have agreed to engage in a certain illegal act. This is sometimes described as a "general intent" to violate the law. The conspirators can be guilty even if they do not know the identity of the other members of the conspiracy.Conspiracy (crime)
Dred Scott may have been an immoral ruling, but it was also legally correct. Under the Union Constitution, each member state had freedom to decide if blacks were Citizens or Property. The justices did what they were supposed to do: Enforce the law as written. It was upto the Congress/States to change the law (via amendment) not the courts.
From the Wikipedia:
According to the Court, the authors of the Constitution had viewed all blacks as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. The Court also presented a parade of horribles argument as to the feared results of granting Mr. Scott's petition: "It would give to persons of the negro race,...the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased,...the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went." Scott was not a citizen of Missouri, and the federal courts therefore lacked jurisdiction to hear the dispute. Despite the conclusion that the Court lacked jurisdiction, however, it went on to hold (in what Republicans would label its "obiter dictum" that Scott was not a free man, even though he had resided for a time in Minnesota (then called the Wisconsin Territory). The Court held that the provisions of the Missouri Compromise declaring it to be free territory were beyond Congress's power to enact. The Court rested its decision on the grounds that Congress's power to acquire territories and create governments within those territories was limited. They held that the Fifth Amendment barred any law that would deprive a slaveholder of his property, such as his slaves, because he had brought them into a free territory. The Court went on to state -- although the issue was not before the Court -- that the territorial legislatures had no power to ban slavery. The ruling also asserted that neither slaves "nor their descendants, were embraced in any of the other provisions of the Constitution" that protected non-citizens. This was only the second time in United States history that the Supreme Court had found an act of Congress to be unconstitutional. (The first time was 54 years earlier in Marbury v. Madison).
The dissents by Curtis and McLean also attacked the Court's overturning of the Missouri Compromise on its merits, noting both that it was not necessary to decide the question, and also that none of the authors of the Constitution had ever objected on constitutional grounds to the United States Congress' adoption of the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Continental Congress, or the subsequent acts that barred slavery north of 3630' N.
Nor, these justices argued, was there any Constitutional basis for the claim that blacks could not be citizens. At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, black men could vote in ten of the thirteen states. This made them citizens not only of their states but of the United States. (By the time of the Dred Scott ruling, however, five of the ten states that allowed black men to vote had either restricted this right in some way or completely withheld it.) Therefore, Justice McLean concluded that the argument that Scott was not a citizen was "more a matter of taste than of law."Dred Scott v. Sandford
The Dred Scott decision (1857) destroyed whatever constitutional framework remained for a national political settlement.
All this means is that export product produced in wholesale lots for overseas buyers cannot be re-exported for retail sale in the U.S. without the consent of the manufacturer. If you want to stock genuine Omega watches, with genuine Omega logos, product designed by Omega for the American market, you must deal with Omega's U.S. distributors.
It's a classic example of Civil Disobedience not unlike refusing to sit in the back of a bus - and when many people do it in large numbers, it changes policies
Civil Disobedience is never anonymous.
The entire purpose of the thing is to put names and faces to those who are prepared to risk jail or death for what they believe.
...by making it easier for them to end their enemies' lives. You haven't saved any net lives, just switched which side lost the lives.
Which is what war is all about:
I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country....
Believe it or not, some people prefer obtaining their content legally. Or just don't want to risk getting sued, or in trouble with their ISP.
The Netflix client is built into your HDTV, DVD and Blu-Ray player, your video game console. You don't need to nurse a P2P download. You don't need to maintain a media server. You don't need the amateur's DVD rip.
Microsoft realized how dependent OSS projects are on advertising, and tried to find a good way to hurt them? Though rather pointless, as the people who visit sites like Slashdot aren't going to be running IE anyway.
But your employer may be more comfortable with a company that sells a product and not the user.*
It's an attitude that can filter down to others.
* - "With business users, IE6 share has dropped even more substantially as IE8 has the largest usage share of any browser in businesses with 34.1% usage share versus 10.3% for IE6 worldwide in NovemberThe Decline of Internet Explorer 6.0
What about file shearing old games that are not for sale anymore? and no used copy's on ebay does not count or even the old copy in the bargain bin at the store.
Name one.
Gog.com is releasing old games updated for XP, 32/64 Bit Vista and Win 7 on an accelerated schedule - and Gog is not alone in this.
The price of the ready-to-run - and DRM free - classic like Planescape: Torment or Duke Nukem 3D is typically under $10. Most support existing mods for high resolution graphics, wide screen support and so on.
Most come fully patched with free PDF manuals, MP3 soundtracks and other goodies.
Henry Ford didn't get rich by inventing the automobile. Someone else did that. He didn't even get rich by inventing the assembly line. Someone else did that, too. He got rich by extending credit to his customers: he invented the car payment.
Henry Ford's Greenfield Village does not have a bank.
Ford was middle-aged in 1900 and - like Sears, Roebuck - had entered a market where consumer credit was rare and suspect.
What Ford did have was a car that didn't need a paved road. That didn't need an auto garage or a gas station at every crossroads. None of which were to be found outside the city limits.
The operating costs for a Ford was about a penny a mile in the early days. Cheaper than walking, if you considered the replacement costs of a good pair of boots. Much cheaper, faster and more flexible, and with much greater range, than the typical streetcar line or interurban electric.
Beginning about 1905, Ford began paying about double the going industrial wage. That made cars - and homes - affordable to his own workers, as well as quaranteeing him a steady, reliable labor force.
The successful assembly line isn't just about tech, it's about people.
And then, they use it for investing your retirement savings, in.com stock or CDOs. At the same time, they pay themselves at lot of gratification and bonus. And then, you are very surprised that your money is gone.
Inflammatory generalizations - presented as gospel truth - are not "Insightful."
Slashdot Mirror
As individual users move towards OO, small businesses move towards OO. As OO gets more common, more people feel like OO is an acceptable option. You see where I'm going with this.
Nowhere fast.
If your employer is part of Microsoft's Home Use Program then your personal copy of MS Office Professional is a $9.95 download for Windows or the Mac.
[U.S. - The price will be about the same, localized for just anywhere eles in the world. DVD media is available]
Microsoft Office Professional Academic is $80 direct from Microsoft with student ID.
There are better deals to be had through your school.
MS Office Home & Student - for Windows & the Mac - remain comfortably in the top five or top ten software bestsellers at Amazon.com. It's unlikely you'll find a PC game other than Scrabble or Oregon Trail in the top one hundred.
Retail sales of MS Office are the tail the wags the dog.
Getting Started with Open Office .org 3: OpenOffice.org 3.0 by the OO.org team is #67,694 in books at Amazon.com.
Amazon.com stocks 742 books on Microsoft Office 2010 products alone.
49 books on OpenOffice.org, all versions, all topics.
We have public speaking courses where kids use powerpoint to do presentations, and use word regularly. Unfortunately we don't really teach any computing skills in those classes as much as we teach "application" skills
Using the application gives a student an immeadiate response. He can see how well he is progressing. The successful presenation provides a sense of accomplishment. I am not convinced that a purely thoretical approach would work at this level.
you DO know that gates bought MSDOS and didnt actually write it ?
Kildall's relationship with IBM seems to have gone off-track from the start and CP/M-86 was - let us say - not quick out of the gate.
Everyone and his brother was trying to clone CP/M for the 8086.
The obvious upgrade path for the business-oriented micro.
Microsoft promised to deliver something serviceable in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC.
There was no need to re-invent the wheel, just hammer it into shape.
Any site that asks for my email address right away, forget it.
You are tracing your ancestry - on sites where others are trying to pin you and your folks into place - and you are worried about an e-mail address?
I am not really seeing people who invented anything transformational, so much as riding on top of the successful of transformational technologies. Bill Gates and Paul Allen?
Gates was there at the very beginnings of the microcomputer, with the Altair 8800 in 1975.
The first generation micros ran Microsoft BASIC. In 1977, Microsoft added FORTRAN to the mix and in 1978, COBOL. In 1979 Microsoft released MBASIC for the 16 bit Intel 8086. In 1980 the Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II.
The PC without development tools or software support is a circuit board in the lab. It does not change anything.
The MS-DOS PC was a viable commercial product before the cloning of the PC-BIOS.
If you insist on talking about something "transformational," why not consider the mass-market oriented disk based operating system that sold for $40 retail list ?
The OEM Windows system install?
Fun facts about the Bank of America:
Bank of America Corporation is a financial services company, the largest bank holding company in the United States, by assets, and the second largest bank by market capitalization. Bank of America serves clients in more than 150 countries and has a relationship with 99% of the U.S. Fortune 500 companies and 83% of the Fortune Global 500. The company is a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and a component of both the S&P 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. As of 2010, Bank of America is the 5th largest company in the United States by total revenue, as well as the second largest non-oil company in the US (after Wal-Mart). In 2010, Forbes listed Bank of America as the 3rd "best" large company in the world. The bank's 2008 acquisition of Merrill Lynch made Bank of America the world's largest wealth manager and a major player in the investment banking industry. The company holds 12.2% of all U.S. deposits, as of August 2009, and is one of the Big Four Banks of the United States, along with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo -- its main competitors
Bank of America deposits in June 2009:
$817,989,321,000. The Largest Banks In The U.S.
The highway in this context means living within 1,000 feet of the heavily trafficked cross-town expressway.
The researchers theorized that the type and sheer quantity of chemicals distributed on highways are different from those on even the busiest city roadways.
at I want to know is, why are families with autistic children so keen on living near highways? I think it's because they're hoping their kid gets run over.
More likely it's because they can afford the rent.
Isn't the entire point of a jury to decide what is fact and what is not?
The jury's business is to make a decision based on the evidence presented in court.
Evidence that is - for the most part - open to public view. Evidence can be seen, discussed, and openly debated by all the participants in the trial.
Without that, what you have is a Star Chamber, answerable to no one.
As if the truth could be prejudicial.
The truth can be prejudicial.
In the old days, it was called "waving the bloody shirt."
What you want from the jury is the emotional response that clouds all reason.
But we already have a deterrent for when people break the law. Prosecute the cops who broke the law to obtain evidence and you no longer need the exclusionary rule, and so you no longer need to control what the jury knows. So you have better behaved cops, and better informed juries. It's a win for everyone.
The robot, Asimov wrote, was logical but not reasonable.
Historically, the cop was never prosecuted, never convicted on any substantial charge.
they are becoming increasingly irrelevant on the desktop as people are using mobile devices more and more for their needs
Operating System Market Share
Windows 91%
OSX 5%
iOS 1.36%
Linux 0.93%
Android 0.31%
Symbian 0.26%
BlackBerry 0.11%
For the global breakdown by country and region: Mobile vs. Desktop
"9 To 5"
"7 to 11" "Do you know where your children are?"
The geek might usefully ask himself how mobile the world at work or the world at home really is. The primary use of the smartphone, after all, remains the everyday, ordinary, telephone call.
Apple computer sales have been growing handsomely
All increases in sales look phenomenal when you start from a small enough base.
2. it is a good opportunity for them to pull the old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
The WebM video scarcely exists outside a YouTube transcode. H.264 is in a lot of places in the world beyond the web that you will find Windows. For a sampling, try Google Shopping for "H.264." 67,000 hits.
Is "Celebrates" the correct word to use in this context?
Yes.
It is 1960 and your Fortune 500 clients want programs they can read.
Programs they can trust.
Their area of expertise is corporate accounting, business methods and procedures.
Practices which have evolved over hundreds of years and practices which the newly minted mainframe programmer is not going to master overnight.
COBOL syntax has often been criticized for its verbosity. However, proponents are quick to note that this was an intentional part of the language design and considered by many to be one of the COBOL's strengths. One of the design goals of COBOL was for COBOL code to be readable and understandable to non-programmers such as managers, supervisors and users. This is why COBOL has a very English-like syntax and structural elements--including: nouns, verbs, clauses, sentences, sections, and divisions.
Consequently, COBOL is considered by at least one source to be "the most readable, understandable and self-documenting programming language in use today...." Not only does this readability generally assist the maintenance process but the older a program gets the more valuable this readability becomes."
Additionally, traditional COBOL is a simple language with a limited scope of function (with no pointers, no user-defined types, and no user-defined functions), encouraging a straightforward coding style. This has made it well-suited to its primary domain of business computing--where the program complexity lies in the business rules that need to be encoded rather than sophisticated algorithms or data structures. And because the standard does not belong to any particular vendor, programs written in COBOL are highly portable. The language can be used on a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. And the rigid hierarchical structure restricts the definition of external references to the Environment Division, which simplifies platform changes. COBOL
Netflix streaming works on PS3, Xbox, wii, mac, windows, iphone, ipad, a number of set-top TV boxes like the Roku and the WD ones, several TVs with integrated instant watch, and several Blu-Ray players. They're trying to get as many eyes in front of their product as they can.
The real story here, I think, is the extinction of the traditional Linux distribution as a client OS for the home user. OSX and the iOS are successful. Windows 7 is successful. Android is successful - and there is probably room for Chrome.
None of these operating systems have a problem with protected content - and none are suffering from lackluster OEM support.
But Linux - as the geek understands it - is slipping below the radar even in countries even in places where the FOSS zealot can tout his biggest success stories. StatCounter offers a good -free- global view with full breakdown by counries and regions.
If I get a few thousand of my friends to drive down a road at a particular time to create a traffic jam, is that a crime? I'm really asking...
Of course it is.
You have launched a conspiracy to deny others the right to travel without interference and delay. You and your friends are obstructing the public roads with potentially life-threatening consequences.
Police. Ambulance services. Fire and rescue...
It won't matter if you are a thousand miles away when someone gets hurt.
It's your game. Your ball.
Conspiracy law usually does not require proof of specific intent by the defendants to injure any specific person to establish an illegal agreement. Instead, usually the law only requires the conspirators have agreed to engage in a certain illegal act. This is sometimes described as a "general intent" to violate the law.
The conspirators can be guilty even if they do not know the identity of the other members of the conspiracy. Conspiracy (crime)
Your tone implies you consider this acceptable; I'd be interested to know why?
Products produced for overseas sales may be designed and manufactured to different standards.
The maufactuer has a problem when a deep discount retailer trades on a brand name better known for its high-end product.
The customer has a problem when he looks for service and support.
Dred Scott may have been an immoral ruling, but it was also legally correct. Under the Union Constitution, each member state had freedom to decide if blacks were Citizens or Property. The justices did what they were supposed to do: Enforce the law as written. It was upto the Congress/States to change the law (via amendment) not the courts.
From the Wikipedia:
According to the Court, the authors of the Constitution had viewed all blacks as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. The Court also presented a parade of horribles argument as to the feared results of granting Mr. Scott's petition: ...the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, ...the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went." Scott was not a citizen of Missouri, and the federal courts therefore lacked jurisdiction to hear the dispute.
"It would give to persons of the negro race,
Despite the conclusion that the Court lacked jurisdiction, however, it went on to hold (in what Republicans would label its "obiter dictum" that Scott was not a free man, even though he had resided for a time in Minnesota (then called the Wisconsin Territory). The Court held that the provisions of the Missouri Compromise declaring it to be free territory were beyond Congress's power to enact. The Court rested its decision on the grounds that Congress's power to acquire territories and create governments within those territories was limited. They held that the Fifth Amendment barred any law that would deprive a slaveholder of his property, such as his slaves, because he had brought them into a free territory. The Court went on to state -- although the issue was not before the Court -- that the territorial legislatures had no power to ban slavery. The ruling also asserted that neither slaves "nor their descendants, were embraced in any of the other provisions of the Constitution" that protected non-citizens.
This was only the second time in United States history that the Supreme Court had found an act of Congress to be unconstitutional. (The first time was 54 years earlier in Marbury v. Madison).
The dissents by Curtis and McLean also attacked the Court's overturning of the Missouri Compromise on its merits, noting both that it was not necessary to decide the question, and also that none of the authors of the Constitution had ever objected on constitutional grounds to the United States Congress' adoption of the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Continental Congress, or the subsequent acts that barred slavery north of 3630' N.
Nor, these justices argued, was there any Constitutional basis for the claim that blacks could not be citizens. At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, black men could vote in ten of the thirteen states. This made them citizens not only of their states but of the United States. (By the time of the Dred Scott ruling, however, five of the ten states that allowed black men to vote had either restricted this right in some way or completely withheld it.) Therefore, Justice McLean concluded that the argument that Scott was not a citizen was "more a matter of taste than of law." Dred Scott v. Sandford
The Dred Scott decision (1857) destroyed whatever constitutional framework remained for a national political settlement.
All this means is that export product produced in wholesale lots for overseas buyers cannot be re-exported for retail sale in the U.S. without the consent of the manufacturer. If you want to stock genuine Omega watches, with genuine Omega logos, product designed by Omega for the American market, you must deal with Omega's U.S. distributors.
It's a classic example of Civil Disobedience not unlike refusing to sit in the back of a bus - and when many people do it in large numbers, it changes policies
Civil Disobedience is never anonymous.
The entire purpose of the thing is to put names and faces to those who are prepared to risk jail or death for what they believe.
There really should be a license requirement for using computers on the internet - you don't let unlicensed drivers on the road, do you?
The doctor is licensed. The accountant. The lawyer. The mechanical engineer.
Each are held to standards of professional competence and integrity.
But not the programmer. Not the geek.
...by making it easier for them to end their enemies' lives. You haven't saved any net lives, just switched which side lost the lives.
Which is what war is all about:
I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country. ...
- George S Patton.
If she had done the same thing without a computer I bet she would see less than 1/2 the jail time.
It always surprises the geek when one of his own has to serve hard time.
The real punishment here, of course, is the long term consequences of conviction on a felony charge.
Believe it or not, some people prefer obtaining their content legally. Or just don't want to risk getting sued, or in trouble with their ISP.
The Netflix client is built into your HDTV, DVD and Blu-Ray player, your video game console. You don't need to nurse a P2P download. You don't need to maintain a media server. You don't need the amateur's DVD rip.
Microsoft realized how dependent OSS projects are on advertising, and tried to find a good way to hurt them? Though rather pointless, as the people who visit sites like Slashdot aren't going to be running IE anyway.
But your employer may be more comfortable with a company that sells a product and not the user.*
It's an attitude that can filter down to others.
* - "With business users, IE6 share has dropped even more substantially as IE8 has the largest usage share of any browser in businesses with 34.1% usage share versus 10.3% for IE6 worldwide in November The Decline of Internet Explorer 6.0
What about file shearing old games that are not for sale anymore? and no used copy's on ebay does not count or even the old copy in the bargain bin at the store.
Name one.
Gog.com is releasing old games updated for XP, 32/64 Bit Vista and Win 7 on an accelerated schedule - and Gog is not alone in this.
The price of the ready-to-run - and DRM free - classic like Planescape: Torment or Duke Nukem 3D is typically under $10. Most support existing mods for high resolution graphics, wide screen support and so on.
Most come fully patched with free PDF manuals, MP3 soundtracks and other goodies.
Henry Ford didn't get rich by inventing the automobile. Someone else did that. He didn't even get rich by inventing the assembly line. Someone else did that, too. He got rich by extending credit to his customers: he invented the car payment.
Henry Ford's Greenfield Village does not have a bank.
Ford was middle-aged in 1900 and - like Sears, Roebuck - had entered a market where consumer credit was rare and suspect.
What Ford did have was a car that didn't need a paved road. That didn't need an auto garage or a gas station at every crossroads. None of which were to be found outside the city limits.
The operating costs for a Ford was about a penny a mile in the early days. Cheaper than walking, if you considered the replacement costs of a good pair of boots. Much cheaper, faster and more flexible, and with much greater range, than the typical streetcar line or interurban electric.
Beginning about 1905, Ford began paying about double the going industrial wage. That made cars - and homes - affordable to his own workers, as well as quaranteeing him a steady, reliable labor force.
The successful assembly line isn't just about tech, it's about people.
And then, they use it for investing your retirement savings, in .com stock or CDOs. At the same time, they pay themselves at lot of gratification and bonus. And then, you are very surprised that your money is gone.
Inflammatory generalizations - presented as gospel truth - are not "Insightful."
I thought the whole "managers can write code thing" died with COBOL.
COBOL wasn't so much about managers writing code as it was about accountants reading and auditing code.