Why should they have to go through these 'few simple steps' in the first place? Firstly, as several people have mentioned, your script doesn't often work as the telemarketers just hang up or simply ignore what you've said.
Secondly, you are taking up peoples private time to offer them something which they have almost certainly received in the past. You say you enter into the system the callee's response (e.g. not interested)...what exactly makes your bosses think that if someone is not interested in double glazing they will suddenly become interested in two weeks. In fact, what makes your bosses think that if they are interested they won't just go to a window shop or look on the net, rather than waiting for some nice company to ring them pre-emptively. Please understand I'm not taking this out on you personally...it's more the whole culture of telemarketing.
Living in the UK, we've had the Telephone Preference Service (equivalent of your NDNCR) for some time. Since I signed up for it about a year ago, I have had one telemarketing call (as opposed to about 2 a week beforehand). That particular person hung up pretty quickly when I threatened to sue him for 5000!
IANAL, but this is my understanding of the situation:
Technically, what you have bought is the CDs (or floppys or whatever) and possibly the manuals that come along with them. You can do whatever you want with these things, as long as it doesn't violate any laws. However, in order to use the product, you have to make a copy of at least part of it on your computer. This is governed by copyright law. Your purchase of the media doesn't grant you the right to make copies, your agreement to the licence does.
Of course, this is not what most people would think of when purchasing and installing software, but it could give a legal basis to the software companies (assuming of course that the end-user had a reasonable opportunity to read the licence before agreeing to it). In fact, the GPL relies on a similar mechanism.
...far more than current methods of virus transmission. What happens if a bug slips through testing which, say, messes with the TCP/IP stack? Then you have practically every home computer in the world unable to access the Net to get the fix. Or even worse, it could just muck up some kernel function, then the computer would be completely unusable. It will happen sooner or later.
Another thing: IANANG (network guru) but what would be the effect on, international Internet links if, say, every single computer in Europe tries to fetch a 20 MB file at the same time? At least the way things are now the load is distributed!
A reasonable advocate would be working on a method to right now to find coders who have NEVER seen either the SCO code, the licensed IBM code or the stolen Linux code and begin a process of writing true black-box replacements.
Leaving aside the rest of your post, which I'm sure somebody will pick up on, the problem is this suggestion is that no-one knows what those sections of code are! At least, no-one who hasn't signed the NDA which (IIRC) no-one has seen either.
No. Home users only upgrade when they buy a new pc. Most of my non-geeky friends run Windows 95.
Perhaps, but they will eventually upgrade to newer versions of Windows, if only so that they can still keep playing the newest games. Perhaps not in the next few years, but eventually Microsoft will get that revenue (so long as they don't install pirate versions!)
There's a crucial difference between music piracy and software piracy. Don't forget, for the vast majority of home computer users (the majority do not read Slashdot) Windows is the only option. Furthermore, sooner or later they will upgrade, if only to be able to run other software.
In other words, Microsoft gets no free publicity out of piracy, because it has pretty much saturated the market and very few people are now switching from other OSen to Microsoft, certainly not in the home user sector where the majority of piracy takes place
On the other hand, in the music industry there is a great deal more choice. People don't buy music out of necessity or because there is no other choice, but because they like it. In this situation there is a real benefit to giving away the product free. See the Baen Free Library for a more detailed rationale.
...in the first film, the Oracle tell Neo that he isn't the one - Neo just doesn't tell anyone else this. I'm not exactly sure how Neo's powers would be explained, but I have a feeling the "melding" with Smith may very well be to blame.
Firstly, the Oracle never actually says that Neo isn't the One. From memory:
Oracle: But you already know what I'm going to tell you.
Neo: I'm not the One.
Oracle: Sorry, kid. You look like you're waiting for something. Your next life, maybe?
She never specifically says that he isn't the One. Most people interpret the 'next life' comment as referring to when he dies, then comes back to life again, and takes on the powers of the One.
And this leads on to my second point: the 'melding' with Smith doesn't happen until after Neo becomes the One.
But your point is still a good one. Perhaps some of Neo's powers got transferred to Smith when he 'destroyed' him in the first film?
I think people will collectively draw a line in the sand when this kind of technology gets too overboard.
But what happens if it gets to the point where it is impossible to buy anything which isn't tagged. All it needs is for the major players in the market to come together to decide on this, and it becomes a de facto standard. Kind of like what Microsoft is/was trying to do with DRM. And if current trends continue, the government won't even try to stop them, they're more likely just to ask for a share of the pie (e.g. tracking data will be made available to law enforcement agencies).
The next stage is to integrate components of the Eienstein system to take into account the distortion of space between signal tranmittance and reception.
Actually, I seem to remember that the GPS system does make use of general relativity for precisely this reason, because the timing signal has to be so accurate. Presumably Galileo will have to do the same thing.
Seeing part of the picture is better than none of the picture.
How do we know that SCO hasn't grabbed the code they show us straight from the Linux kernel source tree, circa 1995?
The only way they can prove their case is to demonstrate that a source tree including the offending files compiles to a binary identical to one from a date before those features were added to Linux.
Of course, that doesn't even begin to address the fact that different programmers often solve the same issues in very similar ways...but then, we know they never had a case to begin with anyway.
If their case is "there is code we own that is copied in linux", then wouldn't they have to show you the code that was copied?
Yes, but there's more. To prove that Linux stole code off them, you would have to have access to their whole source tree.
The only possible way to prove that IBM stole SCO's code is as follows:
Produce source code which was allegedly in SCO before it was in Linux
Prove the date it was added to Linux (this is easy, as source code from all the previous versions is archived)
Prove the date it was in SCO
The only way to do the last one is to compile a whole version of SCO from, say, 1995, using the code they submit, and compare it against an actual binary from 1995. You can only do this if you have access to all the source code for that release -- so this NDA is even more worthless!
If it was all a simulation, why would the people running the simulation care at all what people thought?
That depends on the purpose of the simulation. If the idea is to keep as many humans alive as possible (e.g. for a power plant or processing farm) then you don't want a group of subversives causing disturbances, because that is likely to lead to people being killed. So you either control/kill the subversives to protect the majority, or you provide a 'buffer zone' as has been suggested so that you still get to use them as batteries or computers or whatever, but you have them isolated from the majority so they can't cause any problems.
Incorrect. All that needs to be simulated is what you actually perceive. In modern games, the engine calculates what can and can't be seen and doesn't draw the things that can't be seen. A simulation would use a much more sophisticated version of that algorithm. If you're looking through a microscope, microbes are individual simulated. If you aren't looking through the microscope, then they aren't simulated, or are simulated in the aggregate to calculate gross effects that might be perceivable (such as tainted meat causing food poisoning.)
This is the premise of Stephen Baxter's short story 'Phase Space'. It was some time since I read it, but the idea was that all humanity lives in a simulation which does exactly what you describe, and simulates only what we are looking at at the time. The 'hardware' behind the simulation gets more and more complicated over time to cope with our increased understanding of the universe.
Eventually, the simulated universe ends because some human suspects this and fires a laser beam at Alpha Centuri to prove it. He reasons that it would be impossible for the simulation to expand to fill such a large volume that quickly, and so the laser beam wouldn'd bounce back...unfortunately, the simulation just shuts down. As the great Terry Pratchet said, if someone put a big red button in a cave with "End of the World Button -- DO NOT TOUCH" written on it, the paint wouldn't have time to dry...
No, because most of them share a religion that at best, tolerates[0], and at worst, actively encourages killing of infidels. Which actively preaches that the goal of the faith is GLOBAL TOTAL conversion. And large elements of which think that deliberately targeting innocent women and children is a Good Thing, rewarded by the deity in the afterlife with XXX virgins awarded to you.
And you (if you are a Christian) share a religion that has in the past promoted the killing of innocents because they are occupying an area of land that you hold sacred, even though they are allowing pilgrims to travel freely there (the Crusades), and promoted the torture of anyone who didn't show enough veneration to its priests (the Spanish Inquisition)
If you want something a bit more recent, how about the fundamentalist Christian lobby that wants to send schools back to the dark ages and teach Creationism instead of evolution? How about the Catholic church's refusal to accept contraception and abortion, which is a major contributing factor to the population problem in South America, as well as denying women the right to decide whether they want to have a child?
The point I'm trying to make is that every religion has had its bad moments. Just because a minority of its followers have an interpretation of a religion, it doesn't mean that all its followers can be tarred with the same brush.
Or not.
Many Indians, particularly those who have been well educated, speak and write better English than 'native' speakers (i.e. British and Americans) if you're talking about spelling and grammar. What Westerners often find it hard to understand is the accent.
If that's your problem, it's hardly exclusive to Indians; have you ever tried talking to someone from Glasgow?
Slashdot Mirror
That should be GBP 5000 (apparently /. doesn't recoginse the pound sign!)
Why should they have to go through these 'few simple steps' in the first place? Firstly, as several people have mentioned, your script doesn't often work as the telemarketers just hang up or simply ignore what you've said.
Secondly, you are taking up peoples private time to offer them something which they have almost certainly received in the past. You say you enter into the system the callee's response (e.g. not interested)...what exactly makes your bosses think that if someone is not interested in double glazing they will suddenly become interested in two weeks. In fact, what makes your bosses think that if they are interested they won't just go to a window shop or look on the net, rather than waiting for some nice company to ring them pre-emptively. Please understand I'm not taking this out on you personally...it's more the whole culture of telemarketing.
Living in the UK, we've had the Telephone Preference Service (equivalent of your NDNCR) for some time. Since I signed up for it about a year ago, I have had one telemarketing call (as opposed to about 2 a week beforehand). That particular person hung up pretty quickly when I threatened to sue him for 5000!
IANAL, but this is my understanding of the situation:
Technically, what you have bought is the CDs (or floppys or whatever) and possibly the manuals that come along with them. You can do whatever you want with these things, as long as it doesn't violate any laws. However, in order to use the product, you have to make a copy of at least part of it on your computer. This is governed by copyright law. Your purchase of the media doesn't grant you the right to make copies, your agreement to the licence does.
Of course, this is not what most people would think of when purchasing and installing software, but it could give a legal basis to the software companies (assuming of course that the end-user had a reasonable opportunity to read the licence before agreeing to it). In fact, the GPL relies on a similar mechanism.
Unfortunately there's nothing to stop the executives from immediately forming another company with the same staff, products, and business practices.
But...but...they can be debarred from ever running a company again. Haven't you seen the new Only Fools and Horses episode?
...far more than current methods of virus transmission. What happens if a bug slips through testing which, say, messes with the TCP/IP stack? Then you have practically every home computer in the world unable to access the Net to get the fix. Or even worse, it could just muck up some kernel function, then the computer would be completely unusable. It will happen sooner or later.
Another thing: IANANG (network guru) but what would be the effect on, international Internet links if, say, every single computer in Europe tries to fetch a 20 MB file at the same time? At least the way things are now the load is distributed!
In the beginning there was the Word. And the Word was a near pointer...and God said Let there be Light! And a light was instantiated...
Who volunteers to write the book of SCO? *ducks*
A reasonable advocate would be working on a method to right now to find coders who have NEVER seen either the SCO code, the licensed IBM code or the stolen Linux code and begin a process of writing true black-box replacements.
Leaving aside the rest of your post, which I'm sure somebody will pick up on, the problem is this suggestion is that no-one knows what those sections of code are! At least, no-one who hasn't signed the NDA which (IIRC) no-one has seen either.
No. Home users only upgrade when they buy a new pc. Most of my non-geeky friends run Windows 95.
Perhaps, but they will eventually upgrade to newer versions of Windows, if only so that they can still keep playing the newest games. Perhaps not in the next few years, but eventually Microsoft will get that revenue (so long as they don't install pirate versions!)
There's a crucial difference between music piracy and software piracy. Don't forget, for the vast majority of home computer users (the majority do not read Slashdot) Windows is the only option. Furthermore, sooner or later they will upgrade, if only to be able to run other software.
In other words, Microsoft gets no free publicity out of piracy, because it has pretty much saturated the market and very few people are now switching from other OSen to Microsoft, certainly not in the home user sector where the majority of piracy takes place
On the other hand, in the music industry there is a great deal more choice. People don't buy music out of necessity or because there is no other choice, but because they like it. In this situation there is a real benefit to giving away the product free. See the Baen Free Library for a more detailed rationale.
the extinction of AOLers.
Downside? What downside?
...in the first film, the Oracle tell Neo that he isn't the one - Neo just doesn't tell anyone else this. I'm not exactly sure how Neo's powers would be explained, but I have a feeling the "melding" with Smith may very well be to blame.
Firstly, the Oracle never actually says that Neo isn't the One. From memory:
Oracle: But you already know what I'm going to tell you.
Neo: I'm not the One.
Oracle: Sorry, kid. You look like you're waiting for something. Your next life, maybe?
She never specifically says that he isn't the One. Most people interpret the 'next life' comment as referring to when he dies, then comes back to life again, and takes on the powers of the One.
And this leads on to my second point: the 'melding' with Smith doesn't happen until after Neo becomes the One.
But your point is still a good one. Perhaps some of Neo's powers got transferred to Smith when he 'destroyed' him in the first film?
I don't know how to start a new thread.
Just click the Reply button to the right of the dropdown boxes for changing display options -- between the article and the start of the comments.
Yes, but does Babelfish read Fremch?
Assuming they have somewhere else to go.
I think people will collectively draw a line in the sand when this kind of technology gets too overboard.
But what happens if it gets to the point where it is impossible to buy anything which isn't tagged. All it needs is for the major players in the market to come together to decide on this, and it becomes a de facto standard. Kind of like what Microsoft is/was trying to do with DRM. And if current trends continue, the government won't even try to stop them, they're more likely just to ask for a share of the pie (e.g. tracking data will be made available to law enforcement agencies).
The next stage is to integrate components of the Eienstein system to take into account the distortion of space between signal tranmittance and reception.
Actually, I seem to remember that the GPS system does make use of general relativity for precisely this reason, because the timing signal has to be so accurate. Presumably Galileo will have to do the same thing.
Seeing part of the picture is better than none of the picture.
How do we know that SCO hasn't grabbed the code they show us straight from the Linux kernel source tree, circa 1995?
The only way they can prove their case is to demonstrate that a source tree including the offending files compiles to a binary identical to one from a date before those features were added to Linux.
Of course, that doesn't even begin to address the fact that different programmers often solve the same issues in very similar ways...but then, we know they never had a case to begin with anyway.
Yes, but there's more. To prove that Linux stole code off them, you would have to have access to their whole source tree.
The only possible way to prove that IBM stole SCO's code is as follows:
- Produce source code which was allegedly in SCO before it was in Linux
- Prove the date it was added to Linux (this is easy, as source code from all the previous versions is archived)
- Prove the date it was in SCO
The only way to do the last one is to compile a whole version of SCO from, say, 1995, using the code they submit, and compare it against an actual binary from 1995. You can only do this if you have access to all the source code for that release -- so this NDA is even more worthless!Give it a few years and we'll have ActiveXML (TM).
If it was all a simulation, why would the people running the simulation care at all what people thought? That depends on the purpose of the simulation. If the idea is to keep as many humans alive as possible (e.g. for a power plant or processing farm) then you don't want a group of subversives causing disturbances, because that is likely to lead to people being killed. So you either control/kill the subversives to protect the majority, or you provide a 'buffer zone' as has been suggested so that you still get to use them as batteries or computers or whatever, but you have them isolated from the majority so they can't cause any problems.
Incorrect. All that needs to be simulated is what you actually perceive. In modern games, the engine calculates what can and can't be seen and doesn't draw the things that can't be seen. A simulation would use a much more sophisticated version of that algorithm. If you're looking through a microscope, microbes are individual simulated. If you aren't looking through the microscope, then they aren't simulated, or are simulated in the aggregate to calculate gross effects that might be perceivable (such as tainted meat causing food poisoning.)
This is the premise of Stephen Baxter's short story 'Phase Space'. It was some time since I read it, but the idea was that all humanity lives in a simulation which does exactly what you describe, and simulates only what we are looking at at the time. The 'hardware' behind the simulation gets more and more complicated over time to cope with our increased understanding of the universe.
Eventually, the simulated universe ends because some human suspects this and fires a laser beam at Alpha Centuri to prove it. He reasons that it would be impossible for the simulation to expand to fill such a large volume that quickly, and so the laser beam wouldn'd bounce back...unfortunately, the simulation just shuts down. As the great Terry Pratchet said, if someone put a big red button in a cave with "End of the World Button -- DO NOT TOUCH" written on it, the paint wouldn't have time to dry...
How the hell did this get modded interesting?
No, because most of them share a religion that at best, tolerates[0], and at worst, actively encourages killing of infidels. Which actively preaches that the goal of the faith is GLOBAL TOTAL conversion. And large elements of which think that deliberately targeting innocent women and children is a Good Thing, rewarded by the deity in the afterlife with XXX virgins awarded to you.
And you (if you are a Christian) share a religion that has in the past promoted the killing of innocents because they are occupying an area of land that you hold sacred, even though they are allowing pilgrims to travel freely there (the Crusades), and promoted the torture of anyone who didn't show enough veneration to its priests (the Spanish Inquisition)
If you want something a bit more recent, how about the fundamentalist Christian lobby that wants to send schools back to the dark ages and teach Creationism instead of evolution? How about the Catholic church's refusal to accept contraception and abortion, which is a major contributing factor to the population problem in South America, as well as denying women the right to decide whether they want to have a child?
The point I'm trying to make is that every religion has had its bad moments. Just because a minority of its followers have an interpretation of a religion, it doesn't mean that all its followers can be tarred with the same brush.
Or not. Many Indians, particularly those who have been well educated, speak and write better English than 'native' speakers (i.e. British and Americans) if you're talking about spelling and grammar. What Westerners often find it hard to understand is the accent.
If that's your problem, it's hardly exclusive to Indians; have you ever tried talking to someone from Glasgow?
Quidquid Latine dixit gravis videtur...