If this had happened on 10 September 2001, nobody on/. would even think about calling it "terrorism" in this discussion.
That pretty much says it all, just how much your average American's way of thinking has been manipulated by the Bush administration in the past few years.
What's "wrong" is that Microsoft can be the slowest of slow IT companies, years behind anyone else with any given technology, their implementations are always more buggy and crash-prone and insecure than anyone else's ANYTHING, and they still come out on top in that particular market because they get to abuse their monopoly position to foist inferior solutions on customers years behind the times.
Basically it's just painful to see a company so consistently crap in their technologies so consistently succeed from a business perspective. This is what is "wrong" with the situation, and why whatever Microsoft does appears to be "wrong". They don't deserve to keep "winning" even when they DO come out with something because their stuff sucks and is years behind the times.
You don't understand, anti-virus market is essentially "artificially created" due to Microsoft's crap OS design - the epidemics we have in the Windows world should never have existed, had Microsoft decided to implement proper security models and design that ALREADY EXISTED BEFORE DOS 1.
Anti-virus software is SYMPTOMATIC TREATMENT of an underlying broader problem.
Even though your perception of consciousness may seem verbal, that doesn't mean that there is anything like a verbal "signal" that could be extracted.
But my point is the brain does this all the time (i.e. convert some "verbal-seeming thoughts") to an EXACTLY CORRESPONDING, REAL verbal stream, even, if you like, as you think those very thoughts. That is 'simply' some neurological and mechanical piece of "machinery" that does that, and we do it all the time - clearly those "verbal-seeming thoughts" are not SO fuzzy as to be "un-verbalizable" - in fact, they're apparently already in a form that is so easy to convert to a real spoken verbal stream, that we do it all the time, in "real-time", with no perceptible latency. Those "verbal-seeming thoughts" are, to at least ONE system in the brain (speech-production), very accessible and decode-able. All we need do is duplicate the underlying functionality of that system. And instead of translating that info to real speech (in our brain's case by making the mouth/tongue/lung etc muscles move in a certain way), just translate that info into some other form of "speech-ready" output.
If it were as difficult and vague as fuzzy as you think it is, then our brains themselves would not be able to produce real spoken speech so easily.
We don't need to "read every neuron in the brain" to do it. If that were the case, then the speech-production system in our brain would ALSO be required to do so, and it seems highly improbable that it does so. In any case, it's all just machinery - so even if it is very complex, it's still duplicate-able by technology.
The "conscious" part of our brain appears to already work with a thought structure that is closely tied to verbal structures (this "verbal-seeming" is not just "seeming", it can only "seem" that way if it *is* that way - these thoughts are not only in my language, but are well-structured according to the very precise grammatical rules of my language! Of course there is no doubt some "layer" of processing beneath that, some or other more "raw" mode of intelligent neural processing, that we are not consciously aware of - but as far as telepathy goes, is that interesting anyway? I only want to know the "results", i.e. the 'verbal-seeming' stream, the bit where the girl walking past thinks "that guy is cute" or is thinking "i hate my life" or whatever.
Of course there are those thought processes that go on all the time that we are not even aware of ourselves (e.g. other programmers may recognize the scenario of answers to their programming problems just "popping into their head" at unexpected/strange times - this is an example of the brain working on a problem "in the background" without our conscious realisation of it happening. If we learn, technologically, how to 'interface' with and understand our brain's neurological processes, there is no reason why we can't be privy to all of it's various processes, even though it is extremely complex. Because even though it is extremely complex, there is already proof that it is technologically possible - that proof is us ourselves, and the fact that we can transfer the product of our intellectual puzzle-solving endeavours (math, physics, programming, whatever) to external form (written, spoken, typed etc) - the 'answers'/'products' of our thought processes do not remain trapped within us and unable to get out.
Difficult, yes, impossible, no. The fact that we don't know how doesn't mean it is impossible.
"knowing what you're thinking is likely impossible"
But you know exactly what I'm thinking right now, because I'm typing it out, word for word exactly as each word appears in my mind...
Could be something we all already have some grasp of: language, of course. So if I think, "Hmm, I'd love a Coke right now", the 'brain signal decoder' would break that down into some logical structure/construction representing what I am thinking, e.g. "first-person-singular (Potential) (Verb: strongly-desires) (Object: Drink: Coke) (When: Right now)", this is then packed and sent over the transmission medium, unpacked and run through the English-encoding system (or whatever language I am), and converted to in-memory ASCII representation "I would love a Coke right now". From the ASCII it is trivial to convert to rasterised text (if for the eye), or use text-to-speech if for the ear. The only part we're not yet capable of doing, amongst all that, is the actual part where you send the final rasterised image (or generated sound wave) to the eye or ear respectively, and the first step where we 'read' and interpret the orginal brain signal.
But we know these things are possible, of course, because there is already machinery in our brain to do these things, for example I already have a "module" of sorts in my brain that can convert the thought "Hmm, I'd love a Coke right now" to either (typed) text or (spoken) speech. All we need to do is (a) duplicate the functionality of that machinery, and (b) interface it with existing "hardware" (human bodies) and with the network communications infrastructure.
After pondering how truly mind-numbingly amazing it is that a company with so much money, resources, programming talent, knowledge, and (they claim) the will, still have such a ridiculous insecure operating system. And I've slowly, eventually come to the conclusion that Microsoft do not want to make a secure desktop operating system. Their strategy is simple: allow the Internet to become one huge, sticky mess of popups, security problems, spammers, hackers, virii, bank account info theft, etc that the Internet eventually becomes almost intolerable for ordinary users to use (we're getting there). Then just when people can't stand it anymore, they will "come to everyone's rescue": they will make a big announcement that they intend to replace all the (horribly insecure) OLD (standard) Internet protocols (that are supposedly allowing spammers/hackers etc to flourish), with new, super-secure, super-proprietary Microsoft-specific standards! And just in time for Longhorn/DRM.....
It's the old scam of letting a tame lion loose in the town square, scaring the people, then becoming the town hero when you catch the lion.
And people will fall for it, hook, line and sinker. Just like people really believe today that Microsoft were the innovative company that first "made computers user-friendly", someday they will really believe that Microsoft were the innovative company that "made the Internet secure".
Think about it... even the fact that Microsoft have begun making all these noises about "trusted computing", and have even recently started making noises about "getting rid of the spam problem".
Why not view telepathy as a 'simple' communication problem rather? (1) Develop some machinery to read person A's thoughts (could be either passively, or directed by person A). (2) Convert the content to some standardized form and send via some already well-known communications mechanism (e.g. Bluetooth, 802.11, Cellphone network, Internet, whatever), (3) Develop some machinery to convert the signal into a form that person B's brain can "listen to" or "see" (I am assuming we'd have to use an existing sense, as I suspect our brains probably cannot create new senses "willy-nilly" from new weird types of input, i.e. that that 'machinery' for sight and sound are fairly specific and part of the 'hardware' design of the brain.). Thus, the signal could be reconverted to speech and played back into the ear (or straight onto the ear's nerves), in which case you'd 'hear the other person thinking' much like listening to a person talking on a telephone. Or, the signal could be converted to text and overlayed as part of a software HUD on your eye signal (in which case you could, for example, see someone else's thoughts scroll by at the bottom of your vision, a bit like the scrolling headlines on CNN).
With something like Bluetooth, a self-arranging 'network' could automatically connect all the nodes nearby one another --- as you walked in a mall, for example, you could have several streams of text running by, showing other people's thoughts, and at the same time have your own thoughts revealed to others. Something like the cellphone network could be linked in too, allowing you to have the equivalent of phone conversations, just via thought.
Of course all this is just enhanced communications, i.e. "cellphones on steroids". It is not the same as truly perceiving what someone else is perceiving, but then telepathy doesn't necessarily imply that - it just implies being able to "read someone else's thoughts". Which technology will probably be able to make possible. (If you think about what the 'human machinery' already does when we communicate verbally, one realises it's probably not that far-fetched, as our bodies & brains have already 'developed' most of the required 'technology' - the last little bit is not such a stretch, is it).
I think one of the potentially 'powerful' things about Mozilla is similar to what makes Linux powerful: it can be used by anyone who wants to embed a browser into any imaginable device (and customized any way they like), much like the Linux kernel is used to power all sorts of 'odd' things (such as the example someone mentioned here the other day of an 'electronic picture frame' product that Linus Torvalds bought, without realising until he got home that it ran Linux!).
But if your argument is that people in other countries should not attempt to capitalize on inventions in other countries, then surely the same should apply, that the US should not attempt to capitalize on inventions from outside the US? Send back all that fiber optic cable to Britain, then, and all those CDs back to Japan and Holland.
After a clean install of Win2K+SP3, first thing I did online was a Windows Update. I was infected by a variant of Blaster before the update completed.
Now I use NAT through a Linux box, which is already a lot safer. But what about all the "normal people" out there, the non-computer-experts who couldn't and shouldn't be bothered with having to know how to e.g. set up their own firewall? How can "normal users" even use Windows, it's almost impossible these days to not get a virus or worm of some sort unless you're a computer expert and willing to shell out extra $$ for firewalls or extra router/NAT systems etc.
Microsoft would hardly feel a fine of a few hundred million dollars - they have well over $40,000,000,000 in the bank, and are currently earning profits of approx. $600,000,000 every month. It would be less painful to them than a small speeding fine is to the man on the street; like some middle to upper class people regularly accept paying speeding fines just so they can speed, MS could just accept this as a minor cost of doing business.
So "only" a "small" community of millions of people all over the world understand this phrase. (Definitely it extends way beyond slashdot, is no doubt common in many other online communities (e.g. online gaming, blogs, irc etc, and there were many mainstream media articles about the phrase when it was first becoming popular).
In any case, it's use and understanding is still mostly restricted to this "relatively small" community of tens of millions of people. But virtually every "subculture" within broader culture has it's own domain-specific terminology, colloquialisms etc, similar to the dialectal variations we even have in e.g. all the different English-speaking communities all over the world (one might even view "Internet" sub-communities as just a generalization of the more obvious, concrete geographic sub-communities that usually give rise to dialectal variations). None of this makes these words/phrases any less "real", the negative "geekazoid" slant you put on it reveals only your own stupidity - your own bigotry towards this community, which sadly is self-referential, as here YOU are, posting on slashdot - not comfortable with your own "geekiness"? In any case, you will find many such words, if they are common enough, in modern dictionaries, and they will usually be marked if they are dialectal variations belonging to specific sub-communities (e.g. "British English", or sometimes even more specifically e.g. "Wales").
if SCO were to win, it would cost IBM some money and Linus some time.
One would really have to be a "cocksmoking teabagger" to believe that this would end up costing them personally in any way
Uh, where do you think IBM gets its money? From it's customers. The only ways for IBM to recover the lost income is (a) from it's customers (e.g. explicitly raise it's prices, or lower the service provided at a given price), and/or (b) lower the salaries of their employees (or at least, give them smaller raises in the next salary increase cycle). Most companies try to do a combination of all of the above in order to maintain the positive cash needed to keep alive. So in one way or another it is likely that ALL OF IBM'S CLIENTS will end paying, basically, "personally". IBM's corporate clients would, in turn, pass on their increased costs to (a) their customers, (b) their employees, etc.
IBM doesn't have a money tree where they just walk outside and pick off the money. To turn a profit, their income must exceed their expenses. A $5,000,000,000 expense must be compensated for somewhere along the lines in their income stream.
Can they realistically claim that they incurred five billion dollars damages here? That they may actually have lost $5,000,000,000 income because of these infringements?
Are they going to claim that every copy of Linux sold since, would have been a SCO sale instead, had this code not been used in Linux?
Of course one bus will generate more smog than one car, or even perhaps five or ten cars. But remember, for each bus carrying thirty to fifty people, that's at least 20 to 40 cars that aren't being used to fulfill those individuals' transport needs. A bus generates less pollution that 20 cars, and if there were no buses,
those people would need to use cars. So just looking at straight numbers (e.g. saying "the busses and trucks actually generate twice as much smog as the cars" is very misleading, it's as if there is an underlying implication that if you took away the buses the number of cars would remain the same. And yes, there are people who would deliberately 'twist' the facts to favour the notion of individuals driving cars rather than using public transport (e.g. here in South Africa we just culturally "like" driving our own cars, so every morning and evening there are traffic jams into and out of the cities, with hundreds of cars that have only one person in them.)
You are misunderstanding something crucial by applying an oversimplistic economic principle. It might be true, as you indicate, that simply increasing the amount of cash flowing in an economy does not contribute to inreased average wealth because it simply results in inflation. However, using just the average is misleading: increasing the overall flow of cash disproportionally in favor of the less wealthy elements of society results in a change in the relative wealth distribution in society. In other words, it might become slightly harder for the super-rich to buy yachts and private jets, and slightly easier for the average homeless person to buy a bottle of cheap whisky. And yes, possibly slightly easier for the average middle-class father to, say, buy a chess board for his daughter. The wealth distribution in US society is currently significantly skewed towards the extremely wealthy, who are overall probably less likely to attempt to print or use counterfeit money than the middle or lower classes, so by printing money freely, the middle and lower classes make themselves slightly richer relative to the extremely wealthy class by effectively lowering the value of the money in the rich guy's bank account. The rich guy's exact dollar value in the bank stays the same, but the value of those dollars becomes less, while the poor counterfeiter's dollar value in the bank goes up much higher than the average decrease of the dollar value.
Simple economics.
The very valid point that you also completely ignore, is that the overall effects of counterfeiting in a large economy such as the US may very well be completely negligible to the 'man on the street'. You have not even attempted to disprove that that might be the case; where are your facts to back that up? Skip the straw men bait-and-switch tactics, and argue your case.
Americans wouldn't believe me either when I claimed most of my spam is from the US, so I started keeping it around... some examples that sound US to me (and in any case are DEFINITELY not relevant to where I live):
"The ultimate digital cable filter
The filter will allow you to receive all the channels that you order with your remove control!payperviews, adult movies,sport events,special events! see now!"
"Internationally! We Can Send Your Ad Or Website out to MILLIONS Of Our OPT-IN List Of Clients. Contact Us at (904) 786-9905 and give us your contact information and best time to reach you."
"***Under Bill S.1618 TITLE III passed by the 105th U.S. Congress this letter Can Not be Considered Spam as long as we include the way to be removed."
"www.eliteconsultant.com
770-603-7026
Contact, Fredrick Burke
fredburke@eliteconsultant.com
Note: We at Elite Consultants respect your On-line Privacy. Under
Bills.1618,Title III passed by the 105th U.S. Congress this mail cannot be
considered spam as long as we include contact information and a remove"
US Stock market: "US Stock Market - Stock Profile of the Week"
US 'academic qualifications': "Academic Qualifications available from prestigious NONACCREDITTED universities. 203-286-2187 - USA"
"Google review": "C Y B E R D I F F E R E N C E C O R P.
PO Box 4152
Sedona, AZ 86340
TEL:1(305) 433-7426 - FAX: 1(928) 222-8473"
"December 2003: Manhattan Office, Retail and Industrial Space Update"
US 'fuel savers', US loans, US weight loss products/scams, US holidays, US hospital medical equipment (!), US health insurance providers, US credit blacklist clearing, US pyramid scams, US long distance phoning offers, US web hosting companies (e.g. "http://bananic-leaf.com/" spam), US mortgage financing, US life insurance policies... it just goes on. Everyone goes on about the Nigerians, but in terms of spamming and scamming, they have nothing on the Americans.
Interesting, I never realised that Google actually views this as abuse, that's good to know.
I've actually found it useful a number of times though that when a site didn't present me with the content that Google saw, I just viewed Google's cached copy.
(Small side-note: I'm NOT a fan of referer forging, one good reason being that spammers use it to 'advertise' sites via referer stats (and sometimes increase their page rankings this way too))
Slashdot Mirror
If this had happened on 10 September 2001, nobody on /. would even think about calling it "terrorism" in this discussion.
That pretty much says it all, just how much your average American's way of thinking has been manipulated by the Bush administration in the past few years.
Did he use force or violence? I don't think so.
What's "wrong" is that Microsoft can be the slowest of slow IT companies, years behind anyone else with any given technology, their implementations are always more buggy and crash-prone and insecure than anyone else's ANYTHING, and they still come out on top in that particular market because they get to abuse their monopoly position to foist inferior solutions on customers years behind the times.
Basically it's just painful to see a company so consistently crap in their technologies so consistently succeed from a business perspective. This is what is "wrong" with the situation, and why whatever Microsoft does appears to be "wrong". They don't deserve to keep "winning" even when they DO come out with something because their stuff sucks and is years behind the times.
You don't understand, anti-virus market is essentially "artificially created" due to Microsoft's crap OS design - the epidemics we have in the Windows world should never have existed, had Microsoft decided to implement proper security models and design that ALREADY EXISTED BEFORE DOS 1.
Anti-virus software is SYMPTOMATIC TREATMENT of an underlying broader problem.
Even though your perception of consciousness may seem verbal, that doesn't mean that there is anything like a verbal "signal" that could be extracted.
But my point is the brain does this all the time (i.e. convert some "verbal-seeming thoughts") to an EXACTLY CORRESPONDING, REAL verbal stream, even, if you like, as you think those very thoughts. That is 'simply' some neurological and mechanical piece of "machinery" that does that, and we do it all the time - clearly those "verbal-seeming thoughts" are not SO fuzzy as to be "un-verbalizable" - in fact, they're apparently already in a form that is so easy to convert to a real spoken verbal stream, that we do it all the time, in "real-time", with no perceptible latency. Those "verbal-seeming thoughts" are, to at least ONE system in the brain (speech-production), very accessible and decode-able. All we need do is duplicate the underlying functionality of that system. And instead of translating that info to real speech (in our brain's case by making the mouth/tongue/lung etc muscles move in a certain way), just translate that info into some other form of "speech-ready" output.
If it were as difficult and vague as fuzzy as you think it is, then our brains themselves would not be able to produce real spoken speech so easily.
We don't need to "read every neuron in the brain" to do it. If that were the case, then the speech-production system in our brain would ALSO be required to do so, and it seems highly improbable that it does so. In any case, it's all just machinery - so even if it is very complex, it's still duplicate-able by technology.
The "conscious" part of our brain appears to already work with a thought structure that is closely tied to verbal structures (this "verbal-seeming" is not just "seeming", it can only "seem" that way if it *is* that way - these thoughts are not only in my language, but are well-structured according to the very precise grammatical rules of my language! Of course there is no doubt some "layer" of processing beneath that, some or other more "raw" mode of intelligent neural processing, that we are not consciously aware of - but as far as telepathy goes, is that interesting anyway? I only want to know the "results", i.e. the 'verbal-seeming' stream, the bit where the girl walking past thinks "that guy is cute" or is thinking "i hate my life" or whatever.
Of course there are those thought processes that go on all the time that we are not even aware of ourselves (e.g. other programmers may recognize the scenario of answers to their programming problems just "popping into their head" at unexpected/strange times - this is an example of the brain working on a problem "in the background" without our conscious realisation of it happening. If we learn, technologically, how to 'interface' with and understand our brain's neurological processes, there is no reason why we can't be privy to all of it's various processes, even though it is extremely complex. Because even though it is extremely complex, there is already proof that it is technologically possible - that proof is us ourselves, and the fact that we can transfer the product of our intellectual puzzle-solving endeavours (math, physics, programming, whatever) to external form (written, spoken, typed etc) - the 'answers'/'products' of our thought processes do not remain trapped within us and unable to get out.
Difficult, yes, impossible, no. The fact that we don't know how doesn't mean it is impossible.
"knowing what you're thinking is likely impossible"
But you know exactly what I'm thinking right now, because I'm typing it out, word for word exactly as each word appears in my mind ...
But we know these things are possible, of course, because there is already machinery in our brain to do these things, for example I already have a "module" of sorts in my brain that can convert the thought "Hmm, I'd love a Coke right now" to either (typed) text or (spoken) speech. All we need to do is (a) duplicate the functionality of that machinery, and (b) interface it with existing "hardware" (human bodies) and with the network communications infrastructure.
After pondering how truly mind-numbingly amazing it is that a company with so much money, resources, programming talent, knowledge, and (they claim) the will, still have such a ridiculous insecure operating system. And I've slowly, eventually come to the conclusion that Microsoft do not want to make a secure desktop operating system. Their strategy is simple: allow the Internet to become one huge, sticky mess of popups, security problems, spammers, hackers, virii, bank account info theft, etc that the Internet eventually becomes almost intolerable for ordinary users to use (we're getting there). Then just when people can't stand it anymore, they will "come to everyone's rescue": they will make a big announcement that they intend to replace all the (horribly insecure) OLD (standard) Internet protocols (that are supposedly allowing spammers/hackers etc to flourish), with new, super-secure, super-proprietary Microsoft-specific standards! And just in time for Longhorn/DRM .....
It's the old scam of letting a tame lion loose in the town square, scaring the people, then becoming the town hero when you catch the lion.
And people will fall for it, hook, line and sinker. Just like people really believe today that Microsoft were the innovative company that first "made computers user-friendly", someday they will really believe that Microsoft were the innovative company that "made the Internet secure".
Think about it ... even the fact that Microsoft have begun making all these noises about "trusted computing", and have even recently started making noises about "getting rid of the spam problem".
Why not view telepathy as a 'simple' communication problem rather? (1) Develop some machinery to read person A's thoughts (could be either passively, or directed by person A). (2) Convert the content to some standardized form and send via some already well-known communications mechanism (e.g. Bluetooth, 802.11, Cellphone network, Internet, whatever), (3) Develop some machinery to convert the signal into a form that person B's brain can "listen to" or "see" (I am assuming we'd have to use an existing sense, as I suspect our brains probably cannot create new senses "willy-nilly" from new weird types of input, i.e. that that 'machinery' for sight and sound are fairly specific and part of the 'hardware' design of the brain.). Thus, the signal could be reconverted to speech and played back into the ear (or straight onto the ear's nerves), in which case you'd 'hear the other person thinking' much like listening to a person talking on a telephone. Or, the signal could be converted to text and overlayed as part of a software HUD on your eye signal (in which case you could, for example, see someone else's thoughts scroll by at the bottom of your vision, a bit like the scrolling headlines on CNN).
With something like Bluetooth, a self-arranging 'network' could automatically connect all the nodes nearby one another --- as you walked in a mall, for example, you could have several streams of text running by, showing other people's thoughts, and at the same time have your own thoughts revealed to others. Something like the cellphone network could be linked in too, allowing you to have the equivalent of phone conversations, just via thought.
Of course all this is just enhanced communications, i.e. "cellphones on steroids". It is not the same as truly perceiving what someone else is perceiving, but then telepathy doesn't necessarily imply that - it just implies being able to "read someone else's thoughts". Which technology will probably be able to make possible. (If you think about what the 'human machinery' already does when we communicate verbally, one realises it's probably not that far-fetched, as our bodies & brains have already 'developed' most of the required 'technology' - the last little bit is not such a stretch, is it).
I think one of the potentially 'powerful' things about Mozilla is similar to what makes Linux powerful: it can be used by anyone who wants to embed a browser into any imaginable device (and customized any way they like), much like the Linux kernel is used to power all sorts of 'odd' things (such as the example someone mentioned here the other day of an 'electronic picture frame' product that Linus Torvalds bought, without realising until he got home that it ran Linux!).
For wxWindows users, there is also wxMozilla.
But if your argument is that people in other countries should not attempt to capitalize on inventions in other countries, then surely the same should apply, that the US should not attempt to capitalize on inventions from outside the US? Send back all that fiber optic cable to Britain, then, and all those CDs back to Japan and Holland.
You can't have it both ways.
????? ... I think you accidentally replied to the wrong post, there is no connection at all between what I said and your reply.
After a clean install of Win2K+SP3, first thing I did online was a Windows Update. I was infected by a variant of Blaster before the update completed.
Now I use NAT through a Linux box, which is already a lot safer. But what about all the "normal people" out there, the non-computer-experts who couldn't and shouldn't be bothered with having to know how to e.g. set up their own firewall? How can "normal users" even use Windows, it's almost impossible these days to not get a virus or worm of some sort unless you're a computer expert and willing to shell out extra $$ for firewalls or extra router/NAT systems etc.
Microsoft would hardly feel a fine of a few hundred million dollars - they have well over $40,000,000,000 in the bank, and are currently earning profits of approx. $600,000,000 every month. It would be less painful to them than a small speeding fine is to the man on the street; like some middle to upper class people regularly accept paying speeding fines just so they can speed, MS could just accept this as a minor cost of doing business.
So "only" a "small" community of millions of people all over the world understand this phrase. (Definitely it extends way beyond slashdot, is no doubt common in many other online communities (e.g. online gaming, blogs, irc etc, and there were many mainstream media articles about the phrase when it was first becoming popular).
In any case, it's use and understanding is still mostly restricted to this "relatively small" community of tens of millions of people. But virtually every "subculture" within broader culture has it's own domain-specific terminology, colloquialisms etc, similar to the dialectal variations we even have in e.g. all the different English-speaking communities all over the world (one might even view "Internet" sub-communities as just a generalization of the more obvious, concrete geographic sub-communities that usually give rise to dialectal variations). None of this makes these words/phrases any less "real", the negative "geekazoid" slant you put on it reveals only your own stupidity - your own bigotry towards this community, which sadly is self-referential, as here YOU are, posting on slashdot - not comfortable with your own "geekiness"? In any case, you will find many such words, if they are common enough, in modern dictionaries, and they will usually be marked if they are dialectal variations belonging to specific sub-communities (e.g. "British English", or sometimes even more specifically e.g. "Wales").
Well, in English at least, "Bridget" is still a female name ..
if SCO were to win, it would cost IBM some money and Linus some time.
One would really have to be a "cocksmoking teabagger" to believe that this would end up costing them personally in any way
Uh, where do you think IBM gets its money? From it's customers. The only ways for IBM to recover the lost income is (a) from it's customers (e.g. explicitly raise it's prices, or lower the service provided at a given price), and/or (b) lower the salaries of their employees (or at least, give them smaller raises in the next salary increase cycle). Most companies try to do a combination of all of the above in order to maintain the positive cash needed to keep alive. So in one way or another it is likely that ALL OF IBM'S CLIENTS will end paying, basically, "personally". IBM's corporate clients would, in turn, pass on their increased costs to (a) their customers, (b) their employees, etc.
IBM doesn't have a money tree where they just walk outside and pick off the money. To turn a profit, their income must exceed their expenses. A $5,000,000,000 expense must be compensated for somewhere along the lines in their income stream.
Can they realistically claim that they incurred five billion dollars damages here? That they may actually have lost $5,000,000,000 income because of these infringements?
Are they going to claim that every copy of Linux sold since, would have been a SCO sale instead, had this code not been used in Linux?
No, the WMDs do not count as lying. If you can't distinguish honest mistakes from actual lying
Can anyone really be this naive!?
No.
Of course one bus will generate more smog than one car, or even perhaps five or ten cars. But remember, for each bus carrying thirty to fifty people, that's at least 20 to 40 cars that aren't being used to fulfill those individuals' transport needs. A bus generates less pollution that 20 cars, and if there were no buses, those people would need to use cars. So just looking at straight numbers (e.g. saying "the busses and trucks actually generate twice as much smog as the cars" is very misleading, it's as if there is an underlying implication that if you took away the buses the number of cars would remain the same. And yes, there are people who would deliberately 'twist' the facts to favour the notion of individuals driving cars rather than using public transport (e.g. here in South Africa we just culturally "like" driving our own cars, so every morning and evening there are traffic jams into and out of the cities, with hundreds of cars that have only one person in them.)
You are misunderstanding something crucial by applying an oversimplistic economic principle. It might be true, as you indicate, that simply increasing the amount of cash flowing in an economy does not contribute to inreased average wealth because it simply results in inflation. However, using just the average is misleading: increasing the overall flow of cash disproportionally in favor of the less wealthy elements of society results in a change in the relative wealth distribution in society. In other words, it might become slightly harder for the super-rich to buy yachts and private jets, and slightly easier for the average homeless person to buy a bottle of cheap whisky. And yes, possibly slightly easier for the average middle-class father to, say, buy a chess board for his daughter. The wealth distribution in US society is currently significantly skewed towards the extremely wealthy, who are overall probably less likely to attempt to print or use counterfeit money than the middle or lower classes, so by printing money freely, the middle and lower classes make themselves slightly richer relative to the extremely wealthy class by effectively lowering the value of the money in the rich guy's bank account. The rich guy's exact dollar value in the bank stays the same, but the value of those dollars becomes less, while the poor counterfeiter's dollar value in the bank goes up much higher than the average decrease of the dollar value.
Simple economics.
The very valid point that you also completely ignore, is that the overall effects of counterfeiting in a large economy such as the US may very well be completely negligible to the 'man on the street'. You have not even attempted to disprove that that might be the case; where are your facts to back that up? Skip the straw men bait-and-switch tactics, and argue your case.
Dammit .. the above is NOT what I intended to post. I made some edits after a preview, which somehow just vanished now.
Americans wouldn't believe me either when I claimed most of my spam is from the US, so I started keeping it around ... some examples that sound US to me (and in any case are DEFINITELY not relevant to where I live):
"The ultimate digital cable filter The filter will allow you to receive all the channels that you order with your remove control!payperviews, adult movies,sport events,special events! see now!"
"Internationally! We Can Send Your Ad Or Website out to MILLIONS Of Our OPT-IN List Of Clients. Contact Us at (904) 786-9905 and give us your contact information and best time to reach you."
"***Under Bill S.1618 TITLE III passed by the 105th U.S. Congress this letter Can Not be Considered Spam as long as we include the way to be removed."
"www.eliteconsultant.com 770-603-7026 Contact, Fredrick Burke fredburke@eliteconsultant.com Note: We at Elite Consultants respect your On-line Privacy. Under Bills.1618,Title III passed by the 105th U.S. Congress this mail cannot be considered spam as long as we include contact information and a remove"
US Stock market: "US Stock Market - Stock Profile of the Week"
US 'academic qualifications': "Academic Qualifications available from prestigious NONACCREDITTED universities. 203-286-2187 - USA"
"Google review": "C Y B E R D I F F E R E N C E C O R P. PO Box 4152 Sedona, AZ 86340 TEL:1(305) 433-7426 - FAX: 1(928) 222-8473"
"December 2003: Manhattan Office, Retail and Industrial Space Update"
US 'fuel savers', US loans, US weight loss products/scams, US holidays, US hospital medical equipment (!), US health insurance providers, US credit blacklist clearing, US pyramid scams, US long distance phoning offers, US web hosting companies (e.g. "http://bananic-leaf.com/" spam), US mortgage financing, US life insurance policies ... it just goes on. Everyone goes on about the Nigerians, but in terms of spamming and scamming, they have nothing on the Americans.
Interesting, I never realised that Google actually views this as abuse, that's good to know.
I've actually found it useful a number of times though that when a site didn't present me with the content that Google saw, I just viewed Google's cached copy.
(Small side-note: I'm NOT a fan of referer forging, one good reason being that spammers use it to 'advertise' sites via referer stats (and sometimes increase their page rankings this way too))
Have you actually used a Mac for any significant amount of time?