Why do trains in the wide open midwest not make sense?
Uh... population density?
This question might confuse you because some earlier posters were hyperbolic- once said that "midwest lines never made sense", which we know is untrue, because the intercoastal train was very important prior to 1900. But then the advent of private automobile ownership destroyed most of the need for passenger trains, except "subways" for urban commuters.
The car allowed people to spread out more evenly across the land. The non-farm population once clustered tightly around cities, which had a rail station at the center. But spreading houses made people live further and further from the tracks, until it often became shorter and faster to just drive straight from start to destination, rather than driving AWAY to get to the train first... well, this is hard to explain without a chalkboard. But it should be intuitive... try drawing your own pictures.
Another important factor in the train's decline is the rise of airlines. The thing about airlines is that the infrastructure cost scales differently. You just need one airport at each of N cities, and then enough planes to handle the passenger load. But to lay rails between all those points would cost an N*N factor; and unlike planes, rail lines can't be moved when a destination becomes more popular. (To avoid N*N numbers of rails you can use a hub system. But then the 200mph trains don't reach the destination any faster than an 80mph automobile)
The total lack of rail service in the US similar to Europe is a disgrace.
Look at a population density map (Earthlights is good enough), and compare Europe with the western half of the USA. See any differences?
And that map is ignoring political boundaries, which are actually an important part of traffic patterns. The main section of Europe is broken into 5 large regions separated by language. A passenger is enormously less likely to travel between regions than to stay in his native territory. So travel between points in France is fine, so it doesn't matter that its harder to ride all the way to Germany.
Note that there are sections of the "west" that are dense enough to possibly support rail- maybe there could be a high-speed line between the 3 large Texan cities, for example...
Quite right. You should get a break if you turn other people in.
Why? Should I get a break if I give the government $50,000? I could tell them to spend it on overtime for detectives, so it works out provide them additional information on criminals- the same thing they'd have gotten if I informed on someone directly.
In actuality, there have been some prisoners facing trial who hired private detectives to check up on suspected local criminals in the hopes of learning something that could buy a lighter sentence- even if they'd had no knowledge of other crimes prior to arrest!
That's not legal you know. Just because something is on public land, doesn't mean you can mess with it.
Help me out here... what's the US criminal code that makes "messing" illegal?
If I trespass into your house and mess with your stuff that's one thing- but if you leave it alone in the middle of a public forest for weeks at a time, you've lost the right to complain about what a stranger might do to it.
If the government can buy someone's testimony by giving them their freedom, why can't they buy it with money?
That's a good point- and in fact, if you read US law strictly, all forms of plea-bargaining are illegal. It constitutes felonious inducement to alter testimony. Which means "bribery", or "conspiracy to committ perjury". Just read this law, straight from the US Department of Justice (pdf):
Whoever... gives, offers, or promises anything of value to any person, for or because of the testimony under oath or affirmation given or to be given by such person as a witness upon a trial, hearing, or other proceeding, before any court...
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than two years, or both.
But it's just one of those laws that the USA is happy to go on blatantly ignoring for long periods (rather like church-state separation, or anti-discrimination in state marriages). And this law was only passed in the 1950s, while prosecutorial plea-bargaining has been going on since 1790 or before.
the example about the public park restrooms with the faucets hits the nail on the head.
No it doesn't. Vandalism of equipment in a public park is not an offense worthy of a suprise federal raid. If the sensors were actually like the faucet, then the penalty should be comprable.
If the Air Force wants to be able to arrest people who poke at their equipment, they should not leave said equipment on open, recreational land.
The "Government" is not a monolith. The CIA can't grab you for an INS or IRS violation, and the USAF can't come at you for screwing around on NPS land. (When I said "can't", I meant "shouldn't be able to, but anything goes post-PATRIOT")
while with OSS a lousy support from one company will give another company the chance to offer better support and get the first company's customers this way, therefore an OSS company has a strong incentive to provide good support.
This brings up one of the hard-to-avoid weaknesses of F/OSS software economy: if the bulk of a company's revenue comes from paid support, then they have no incentive to make the software easier to install. In fact, they can even be motivated to make it intentionally more difficult for the non-expert.
Consider how hard it was to install a PCI sound card for Microsoft(tm) Windows(r) 10 years ago versus today....
So explain the bottled water market to me. The government provides drinkable water for free; yet somehow, companies manage to charge $5/litre for their own "superior" water. But you just proved that it's impossible to compete with free!
And what about the automobile market? Do people really spend 10 or even 50 thousand on a car, when they could just walk for free? I can't understand it!
because the inferior product is so inexpensive as to make it worth the hassle for many.
Conversely, the superior product is too expensive to be worth the cost for many. I just don't see the problem here...
If you're offering something "better", and nobody buys, then the free market has proved it wasn't "better" enough.
if you do work, you should be rewarded for it, and the reward should fit the work done.
I've been digging a perfectly conical hole in my backyard for 4 years- it's now 110 meters deep. This has been a HUGE amount of work- so make with the reward!
OSS is failing developers
No. OSS is demonstrating that developers are becoming less needed. Software is reaching the point where it's acceptable to continue using the old stuff with minor modifications. In the future there will be fewer programmers servicing a larger number of computers, in the same way that there are today fewer farmers feeding more people. Those programmers that do continue to work will be only the very best.
To suggest that today's developers stay away from OSS for their own job security is Ludditism... desparately holding back progress because the future will make you obselete.
But I have not seen any evidence that taking healthy, BMI 20-25 adults and encouraging them to exercise more results in decreased mortality.
He never said "decreased mortality"- just "more fit". Those phrases are not necessarily correlated. The common conception of a "fit" person is one who is fast, strong, and alert- but the effort get those traits can easily reduce your overall lifespan, especially with an "Atkins" all-meat diet. Whereas there is strong evidence (but not yet longitudinally tested) that calorie restriction will increase lifespan, although its practitioners quickly take on a superficially unfit appearance
(If you use the Darwinian definition of "fitness", then longevity isn't relevant once your grandchildren have reached reproductive age...)
Have any evidence to support that claim? Where was he in 1972?
It is quite odd. Most successful politicians possess much "charisma", the ablity to make friends and influence people. You tend to remember if you've met them. And most military personnel become very close to the men they serve with- because they'll soon be trusting those guys with their lives. Yet nobody who served with Bush then has come forward (even with a $7000+ reward offer). Where's his bunkmate, his controller, his OHO? Maybe the Guard is different from the real military*- maybe they don't encourage much camraderie...
In all probability, "AWOL" is too strong a term. "Dereliction of duty" may be closer to the true offense. The single most damaging piece of missing documentation is why Bush never reported for his required physical, taking him off of flight status. The most amusing possibility is he knew it would be his first physical since the Pentagon had instituted random drug screening- which dovetails neatly with Bush's inability to deny ever having used cocaine, and with his admitted substance abuse at the time. But there's also the fact that Bush was coming close to the number of flight-hours that would've made him eligible to fly in Vietnam. Could've been anything- even plain old laziness.
* I know, of course, that today especially the National Guard is completely a part of the "real military". And it was probably true in the 70s too.
"under fire he beaches his boat and charges an enemy RPG gunner with his pistol"
The alternative would've been to leave the guy alive and in cover, meaning that RPG would've been flying into their boat 60 seconds later. It only takes one grenade to kill everyone on a swift boat.
that he just had to tell the machine gunner or even grab the machine gun and shoot with his boat offshore and away from potential boarders..
Obviously, if it had been that easy, he would've done it (he was wearing an M-16, you know). But the enemy had already ducked behind cover, and the only way to kill him was to chase.
But hey, if you prefer a combat leader with more discretion than valor, this should make you feel better- listen to a Republican ex-crewman of Kerry accuse him of being too cautious in battle:
Mr Gardner also recalled an incident in 1968 in which he was slightly wounded, causing Sen Kerry to abort the boat's mission. "I said: 'Lt Kerry, I'm fine, nothing's wrong. I got a little flesh wound here.' But Kerry was already backing out of the canal, getting ready to run for it,"
Well it was stunts like that that got infantry officers shot in the back.
And I know for a fact that none of the guys leaving our installation (Fort Lewis / McChord AFB) leave without vests.
Do they have just the vests? Or have they got chicken plates too? Because that's what the currently circulating "legend" relates a deficiency of. (Although really, the shortage of armored HMMVWs is more important)
Typically, a defense contractor (or at least Army contractor) doesn't build something and then sell it in the traditional sense of the word.
Typical how? I've worked software dev with the top 5 US defense contractors, and they normally work exactly like any other software contractor: the customer has unlimited rights to the product, and so does the developer. Note that this is typical contracting, not typical COTS.
Still not sure if this means it has been publicly distributed.
Doesn't matter if it's "publically" distributed or not. The word is "distribute", and the parent poster is wrong. The Army CANNOT pass out a GPL program to their soldiers without also giving them the source code and permission to mail it to friends and loved ones.
Saed al Saeff has been getting that wrong for a while, but I have first-hand knowledge from Pentagon PMs.
In any case, our technology hasn't been used against us in the heat of the moment
Uh, in the heat of the moment, the official battery hasn't died yet.
Short timeframe: Use the battery inside the NVG. Medium timeframe: Search for more special batteries on the same corpse or pallet the NVG came from. Long timeframe: Ask your insurgency-technician to take a break from cranking out IEDs to wire a voltage converter to the NVG.
can someone explain what transgamming is doing to wine and why they can't backport their changes to the main tree?
Transgaming could give changes back to wine, but they don't want to. They'd rather charge money for them.
Originally, the Wine project allowed people to modify and resell Wine without giving back the changed source code. But Transgaming built a business on doing that, and the Wine guys didn't feel like doing volunteer work for a corporation, so they changed Wine to a license that Transgaming can't use (without making their changes available for free).
So Transgaming's "WineX" is based on an older version of wine. It's a forked project.
Note that some of transgaming's "changes" may be other stuff, which they didn't write themselves, and thus wouldn't be allowed to give to Wine even if they did want.
There's still no standard way to set up an IP address for an interface on Linux.
Apparently I don't have enough Linux experience. What way is there other than "ifconfig"? pump?
Maybe you meant that the file under/etc which contains that address is non-standardized. That may be true, but a CLI operator can quickly search the scripts for whatever gets passed into ifconfig. This takes you down the road towards understanding actual computer-programming; which if you're in it for education, is a valuable goal too.
Furthermore, I don't think the ability to learn something is tied to the interface used to talk to that part of the system.
Have you ever seen someone try to drive with a manual transmission after only learning on standard*?
as long as they understand the oncepts they'll be able to easily figure out each tool.
Wrong. The CLI method is harder objectively. A person who knows CLI understands not only the networking concepts, but also the commandline parsing syntax required to activate them- not to mention understanding what a SIOCADDRT warning means.
If you train one guy with CLI and the other with GUI, and then have them switch, it's obvious that the CLI man will do better with the GUI than vice-versa.
Furthermore, the CLI skill is more useful overall- because more Linux systems have CLIs available than GUIs (especially in the wake of hardware or configuration failure)
* 92% of all new cars have automatic transmissions, making it (by definition) the standard.
Its still an EULA if the End User has to Agree to a License to do something like "Modify...the Program or its derivative works."
Still wrong! The key letter in eUla is U for User. To Use a GPLed program, you don't have to agree to ANYTHING. Microsoft claims that unless you agree to their eUla, you can't Use Excel at all.
The second-most important letter is E for End. "End" means you're the end of the line. The software stops here- you don't pass it along to anyone else. (You can't even resell it on ebay) But of course, the GPL gives you permission to be not just an End User, but an Intermediate Developer.
But, most people that I know that got them was to use them as 'work horses'. Not so much for off roading, but, for hauling the kids around all over...driving the 'group' around for lunches/parties/concerts...
That's not WORK. Those are jobs for minivans or station-wagons.
for hauling boats around, launching and retrieving them
How many SUV owners really have boats? And if you're serious about boating, then a pickup is better.
It was through their shortsightedness (at the time) and luck that gave the OS market to Gates.
Not only that. IBM was under federal monopoly investigation at the time. They contracted DOS to Microsoft because they didn't want to appear to be dominanting yet another market.
In a real way, the US anti-trust laws passed a monopoly from one company to another.
Look at how many commerical GPS units there are, and how many military ones.
That's quite true. I've seen $99 yellow Garmin devices that were used to call down JDAM strikes on Taleban targets. The US Army had this elaborate "21st Century Force Digitization" plan in the works, but they're pulling back from it because the men are creating better capability on their own from civilian COTS electronic gear.
Factoid 2: Today, all US warfighter pilots have GPS build into their avionics (and augmented by inertial navigation). But in the first Gulf War, many planes on bombing missions carried handheld GPS in the cockpit to find their targets.
Factoid 3: Remember the "Saving Private Lynch" made-for-TV rescue? Her unit was lost and overwhelmed because not one of them had even a civilian-level GPS handheld. I don't think the Army will make that mistake again.
Even in a war zone, most of the commercial GPSes in use are those ofUS soldiers.
That may be true today, but probably not in a few decades. We must assume that civilian GPS will become more and more common until all phones and 50% of wristwatches include it. Eventually, the OPFOR will have more civilian GPS recievers than they do troops. But at the same time, maybe someday the US Army will get its act together enough to give each soldier a military GPS unit. When that happens, they may once again feel safe about degrading the signal.
It all depends on your confidence in the Army's logistical ability to supply 100,000 units of a $300 machine. Sure, they haven't managed in the past 15 years, but there's always next time.
Since this is Slashdot, I'll try an analogy from the software industry.
Suppose Microsoft wanted to kill off other Operating Systems (which don't compete with them now, but might in the future). They could give away Windows(tm) for free or reduced cost for decades before running out of stored cash... and by that time, nobody else will have much idea how to write a kernel.
So, by playing "world's cop" and taking care of all "heavy military" threats facing Europe, the USA makes it profitable (in the short term) for the EU to reduce investment in the military. But then they won't have a good army later if the USA withdraws protection, or even turns against them.
That's a very subtle, indirect method of course. But if the USA's goal is to have the best military, they can achieve it by (1) investing in their own army and (2) protecting other wealthy nations for free, which discourages them from making the same investments even though they can afford it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do trains in the wide open midwest not make sense?
Uh... population density?
This question might confuse you because some earlier posters were hyperbolic- once said that "midwest lines never made sense", which we know is untrue, because the intercoastal train was very important prior to 1900. But then the advent of private automobile ownership destroyed most of the need for passenger trains, except "subways" for urban commuters.
The car allowed people to spread out more evenly across the land. The non-farm population once clustered tightly around cities, which had a rail station at the center. But spreading houses made people live further and further from the tracks, until it often became shorter and faster to just drive straight from start to destination, rather than driving AWAY to get to the train first... well, this is hard to explain without a chalkboard. But it should be intuitive... try drawing your own pictures.
Another important factor in the train's decline is the rise of airlines. The thing about airlines is that the infrastructure cost scales differently. You just need one airport at each of N cities, and then enough planes to handle the passenger load. But to lay rails between all those points would cost an N*N factor; and unlike planes, rail lines can't be moved when a destination becomes more popular. (To avoid N*N numbers of rails you can use a hub system. But then the 200mph trains don't reach the destination any faster than an 80mph automobile)
The total lack of rail service in the US similar to Europe is a disgrace.
Look at a population density map (Earthlights is good enough), and compare Europe with the western half of the USA. See any differences?
And that map is ignoring political boundaries, which are actually an important part of traffic patterns. The main section of Europe is broken into 5 large regions separated by language. A passenger is enormously less likely to travel between regions than to stay in his native territory. So travel between points in France is fine, so it doesn't matter that its harder to ride all the way to Germany.
Note that there are sections of the "west" that are dense enough to possibly support rail- maybe there could be a high-speed line between the 3 large Texan cities, for example...
Quite right. You should get a break if you turn other people in.
Why? Should I get a break if I give the government $50,000? I could tell them to spend it on overtime for detectives, so it works out provide them additional information on criminals- the same thing they'd have gotten if I informed on someone directly.
In actuality, there have been some prisoners facing trial who hired private detectives to check up on suspected local criminals in the hopes of learning something that could buy a lighter sentence- even if they'd had no knowledge of other crimes prior to arrest!
That's not legal you know. Just because something is on public land, doesn't mean you can mess with it.
Help me out here... what's the US criminal code that makes "messing" illegal?
If I trespass into your house and mess with your stuff that's one thing- but if you leave it alone in the middle of a public forest for weeks at a time, you've lost the right to complain about what a stranger might do to it.
That's a good point- and in fact, if you read US law strictly, all forms of plea-bargaining are illegal. It constitutes felonious inducement to alter testimony. Which means "bribery", or "conspiracy to committ perjury". Just read this law, straight from the US Department of Justice (pdf):
But it's just one of those laws that the USA is happy to go on blatantly ignoring for long periods (rather like church-state separation, or anti-discrimination in state marriages). And this law was only passed in the 1950s, while prosecutorial plea-bargaining has been going on since 1790 or before.
the example about the public park restrooms with the faucets hits the nail on the head.
No it doesn't. Vandalism of equipment in a public park is not an offense worthy of a suprise federal raid. If the sensors were actually like the faucet, then the penalty should be comprable.
If the Air Force wants to be able to arrest people who poke at their equipment, they should not leave said equipment on open, recreational land.
The "Government" is not a monolith. The CIA can't grab you for an INS or IRS violation, and the USAF can't come at you for screwing around on NPS land. (When I said "can't", I meant "shouldn't be able to, but anything goes post-PATRIOT")
They had no right to disturb what was buried and didn't belong to them.
So you mean I can just go into a public park and use it as a big free storage area for my large equipment, and nobody else has a right to remove it?
(Hint: USAF != NPS)
while with OSS a lousy support from one company will give another company the chance to offer better support and get the first company's customers this way, therefore an OSS company has a strong incentive to provide good support.
This brings up one of the hard-to-avoid weaknesses of F/OSS software economy: if the bulk of a company's revenue comes from paid support, then they have no incentive to make the software easier to install. In fact, they can even be motivated to make it intentionally more difficult for the non-expert.
Consider how hard it was to install a PCI sound card for Microsoft(tm) Windows(r) 10 years ago versus today....
So explain the bottled water market to me. The government provides drinkable water for free; yet somehow, companies manage to charge $5/litre for their own "superior" water. But you just proved that it's impossible to compete with free!
And what about the automobile market? Do people really spend 10 or even 50 thousand on a car, when they could just walk for free? I can't understand it!
because the inferior product is so inexpensive as to make it worth the hassle for many.
Conversely, the superior product is too expensive to be worth the cost for many. I just don't see the problem here...
If you're offering something "better", and nobody buys, then the free market has proved it wasn't "better" enough.
if you do work, you should be rewarded for it, and the reward should fit the work done.
I've been digging a perfectly conical hole in my backyard for 4 years- it's now 110 meters deep. This has been a HUGE amount of work- so make with the reward!
OSS is failing developers
No. OSS is demonstrating that developers are becoming less needed. Software is reaching the point where it's acceptable to continue using the old stuff with minor modifications. In the future there will be fewer programmers servicing a larger number of computers, in the same way that there are today fewer farmers feeding more people. Those programmers that do continue to work will be only the very best.
To suggest that today's developers stay away from OSS for their own job security is Ludditism... desparately holding back progress because the future will make you obselete.
But I have not seen any evidence that taking healthy, BMI 20-25 adults and encouraging them to exercise more results in decreased mortality.
He never said "decreased mortality"- just "more fit". Those phrases are not necessarily correlated. The common conception of a "fit" person is one who is fast, strong, and alert- but the effort get those traits can easily reduce your overall lifespan, especially with an "Atkins" all-meat diet. Whereas there is strong evidence (but not yet longitudinally tested) that calorie restriction will increase lifespan, although its practitioners quickly take on a superficially unfit appearance
(If you use the Darwinian definition of "fitness", then longevity isn't relevant once your grandchildren have reached reproductive age...)
Have any evidence to support that claim? Where was he in 1972?
It is quite odd. Most successful politicians possess much "charisma", the ablity to make friends and influence people. You tend to remember if you've met them. And most military personnel become very close to the men they serve with- because they'll soon be trusting those guys with their lives. Yet nobody who served with Bush then has come forward (even with a $7000+ reward offer). Where's his bunkmate, his controller, his OHO? Maybe the Guard is different from the real military*- maybe they don't encourage much camraderie...
In all probability, "AWOL" is too strong a term. "Dereliction of duty" may be closer to the true offense. The single most damaging piece of missing documentation is why Bush never reported for his required physical, taking him off of flight status. The most amusing possibility is he knew it would be his first physical since the Pentagon had instituted random drug screening- which dovetails neatly with Bush's inability to deny ever having used cocaine, and with his admitted substance abuse at the time. But there's also the fact that Bush was coming close to the number of flight-hours that would've made him eligible to fly in Vietnam. Could've been anything- even plain old laziness.
* I know, of course, that today especially the National Guard is completely a part of the "real military". And it was probably true in the 70s too.
The alternative would've been to leave the guy alive and in cover, meaning that RPG would've been flying into their boat 60 seconds later. It only takes one grenade to kill everyone on a swift boat.
that he just had to tell the machine gunner or even grab the machine gun and shoot with his boat offshore and away from potential boarders..
Obviously, if it had been that easy, he would've done it (he was wearing an M-16, you know). But the enemy had already ducked behind cover, and the only way to kill him was to chase.
But hey, if you prefer a combat leader with more discretion than valor, this should make you feel better- listen to a Republican ex-crewman of Kerry accuse him of being too cautious in battle:
Well it was stunts like that that got infantry officers shot in the back.
What, you're quoting Al Franken now?
And I know for a fact that none of the guys leaving our installation (Fort Lewis / McChord AFB) leave without vests.
Do they have just the vests? Or have they got chicken plates too? Because that's what the currently circulating "legend" relates a deficiency of. (Although really, the shortage of armored HMMVWs is more important)
Typically, a defense contractor (or at least Army contractor) doesn't build something and then sell it in the traditional sense of the word.
Typical how? I've worked software dev with the top 5 US defense contractors, and they normally work exactly like any other software contractor: the customer has unlimited rights to the product, and so does the developer. Note that this is typical contracting, not typical COTS.
Still not sure if this means it has been publicly distributed.
Doesn't matter if it's "publically" distributed or not. The word is "distribute", and the parent poster is wrong. The Army CANNOT pass out a GPL program to their soldiers without also giving them the source code and permission to mail it to friends and loved ones.
Saed al Saeff has been getting that wrong for a while, but I have first-hand knowledge from Pentagon PMs.
In any case, our technology hasn't been used against us in the heat of the moment
Uh, in the heat of the moment, the official battery hasn't died yet.
Short timeframe: Use the battery inside the NVG.
Medium timeframe: Search for more special batteries on the same corpse or pallet the NVG came from.
Long timeframe: Ask your insurgency-technician to take a break from cranking out IEDs to wire a voltage converter to the NVG.
can someone explain what transgamming is doing to wine and why they can't backport their changes to the main tree?
Transgaming could give changes back to wine, but they don't want to. They'd rather charge money for them.
Originally, the Wine project allowed people to modify and resell Wine without giving back the changed source code. But Transgaming built a business on doing that, and the Wine guys didn't feel like doing volunteer work for a corporation, so they changed Wine to a license that Transgaming can't use (without making their changes available for free).
So Transgaming's "WineX" is based on an older version of wine. It's a forked project.
Note that some of transgaming's "changes" may be other stuff, which they didn't write themselves, and thus wouldn't be allowed to give to Wine even if they did want.
Pedantic: Crossover is not an application. It is a utility.
You use it to enhance the functionality of applications, but not as an end in itself.
There's still no standard way to set up an IP address for an interface on Linux.
/etc which contains that address is non-standardized. That may be true, but a CLI operator can quickly search the scripts for whatever gets passed into ifconfig. This takes you down the road towards understanding actual computer-programming; which if you're in it for education, is a valuable goal too.
Apparently I don't have enough Linux experience. What way is there other than "ifconfig"? pump?
Maybe you meant that the file under
Furthermore, I don't think the ability to learn something is tied to the interface used to talk to that part of the system.
Have you ever seen someone try to drive with a manual transmission after only learning on standard*?
as long as they understand the oncepts they'll be able to easily figure out each tool.
Wrong. The CLI method is harder objectively. A person who knows CLI understands not only the networking concepts, but also the commandline parsing syntax required to activate them- not to mention understanding what a SIOCADDRT warning means.
If you train one guy with CLI and the other with GUI, and then have them switch, it's obvious that the CLI man will do better with the GUI than vice-versa.
Furthermore, the CLI skill is more useful overall- because more Linux systems have CLIs available than GUIs (especially in the wake of hardware or configuration failure)
* 92% of all new cars have automatic transmissions, making it (by definition) the standard.
Its still an EULA if the End User has to Agree to a License to do something like "Modify...the Program or its derivative works."
Still wrong! The key letter in eUla is U for User. To Use a GPLed program, you don't have to agree to ANYTHING. Microsoft claims that unless you agree to their eUla, you can't Use Excel at all.
The second-most important letter is E for End. "End" means you're the end of the line. The software stops here- you don't pass it along to anyone else. (You can't even resell it on ebay) But of course, the GPL gives you permission to be not just an End User, but an Intermediate Developer.
I called a taxi. 30 mins and $20 later, I was home, projectile vomiting kid in tow.
What kind of tip is required for that?
But, most people that I know that got them was to use them as 'work horses'. Not so much for off roading, but, for hauling the kids around all over...driving the 'group' around for lunches/parties/concerts...
That's not WORK. Those are jobs for minivans or station-wagons.
for hauling boats around, launching and retrieving them
How many SUV owners really have boats? And if you're serious about boating, then a pickup is better.
unless you think a 60mph (guessing) car chase has a positive outcome.
It worked for Orenthal Simpson... no wait, that was 16mph.
It was through their shortsightedness (at the time) and luck that gave the OS market to Gates.
Not only that. IBM was under federal monopoly investigation at the time. They contracted DOS to Microsoft because they didn't want to appear to be dominanting yet another market.
In a real way, the US anti-trust laws passed a monopoly from one company to another.
Look at how many commerical GPS units there are, and how many military ones.
That's quite true. I've seen $99 yellow Garmin devices that were used to call down JDAM strikes on Taleban targets. The US Army had this elaborate "21st Century Force Digitization" plan in the works, but they're pulling back from it because the men are creating better capability on their own from civilian COTS electronic gear.
Factoid 2: Today, all US warfighter pilots have GPS build into their avionics (and augmented by inertial navigation). But in the first Gulf War, many planes on bombing missions carried handheld GPS in the cockpit to find their targets.
Factoid 3: Remember the "Saving Private Lynch" made-for-TV rescue? Her unit was lost and overwhelmed because not one of them had even a civilian-level GPS handheld. I don't think the Army will make that mistake again.
Even in a war zone, most of the commercial GPSes in use are those ofUS soldiers.
That may be true today, but probably not in a few decades. We must assume that civilian GPS will become more and more common until all phones and 50% of wristwatches include it. Eventually, the OPFOR will have more civilian GPS recievers than they do troops. But at the same time, maybe someday the US Army will get its act together enough to give each soldier a military GPS unit. When that happens, they may once again feel safe about degrading the signal.
It all depends on your confidence in the Army's logistical ability to supply 100,000 units of a $300 machine. Sure, they haven't managed in the past 15 years, but there's always next time.
I'm curious. How is the USA doing this?
Since this is Slashdot, I'll try an analogy from the software industry.
Suppose Microsoft wanted to kill off other Operating Systems (which don't compete with them now, but might in the future). They could give away Windows(tm) for free or reduced cost for decades before running out of stored cash... and by that time, nobody else will have much idea how to write a kernel.
So, by playing "world's cop" and taking care of all "heavy military" threats facing Europe, the USA makes it profitable (in the short term) for the EU to reduce investment in the military. But then they won't have a good army later if the USA withdraws protection, or even turns against them.
That's a very subtle, indirect method of course. But if the USA's goal is to have the best military, they can achieve it by (1) investing in their own army and (2) protecting other wealthy nations for free, which discourages them from making the same investments even though they can afford it.