Well that is just plain wrong. There are very definable damages associated with Open Source software and that is quite specifically any code that was latter attached to that used open source code in a final product is required to be made available, so the cost of the appended code are definitively lost to the open source project and in fact represent failure to make payment for use of the original base open source code.
It is all about the direct exchange of code, I am using your code on condition that I will give you my code that I have appended to your product, so an open exchange of labour. In open source code under GPL, the code is never ever given away, it is only made available for conditional use of the code, whilst the application of the code as a completed work is made freely available, the code itself is protected. So the code as an application is free to use but the code as it's source is protected.
Additionally those other people who also contributed to the acceptance of the code as a viable product must also be protected. That is those people who promoted, supported, distributed, documented, and enhanced (usability, artwork, etc.) the product, their efforts have definitive value and the work enhances the code by expending it's acceptance and increasing the ability of that coding project to further develop ie. gain additional qualitative coding input from a wider base, which benefits all those who make use of the code as a completed project as well as originating coders.
It is not about playability, as that is nothing more than what accessories are available ie. remote keyboard and mouse. What it is about is an alternate sales scheme for game consoles. Join an MMO, sign a long term contract, pay the subscription fee and get a free game console as part of the package.
This creates an opportunity to create a major MMO whilst also providing an opportunity for additional sales and licence revenues. The only question is whether it would work or not and how many failed rental contracts Sony might get stuck with in these turbulent economic times but, the rental model often works better when finances are tight.
Cloud computing OS, jumpin' jehosaphat, vapour ware becomes a reality, the mind boggles, a vapour OS, to run vapour ware applications all on vapour ware hardware;D.
The immoral police are already on location, they are the casino guards, making sure no matter what happens the casino always gets 'your' money. Whether on or off line, protecting the mug punters is their last worry, after all that is why they call them mug punters.
Online gambling is far to easy to rig and, those who by their very nature are involved will always fall to temptation, they after all profit by exploiting other peoples weaknesses, whilst corruptly ensuring the odds favour them.
It is only gambling when the punter and the casino share the same odds, the rest of the time as it is currently run, it is really is just legalised theft.
All your talking about is how it comes configured out of the box and how it is updated. As it is now, a lot of mid size ISPs already supply preconfigured net hardware and it would be a very small step for them to supply preconfigured server appliances which they could upgrade and manage on line.
The google image of cloud computing is really just crippled cloud computing, all hamstrung by pointing to one location, true cloud computing is truly distributed broadly across the whole internet and not locked to half a dozen locations. Service based ISP's provide the bridge between complex 'underlying' backend administration and simple user front end administration, which for even the simplest user could simply be handled remotely by their ISP.
It is really stupid to think that only the internet 'God' google and their acolytes the googlites can configure a appliance server and deliver it to the end user ready to go and safe to use ie. plug and play and even if the user is incapable of then they supply and install. Every computer manufacturer and every reasonable ISP can do it and make money selling it, not renting it (although that is an option and they avoid infrastructure hassles). Privacy is what the local suppliers will be able to sell, your own private server that you can access from anywhere, not some public billboard where perverse privacy invasive strangers pry into your daily digital habits and personal affairs and, try to jam an endless flood of psychologically targeted advertising into your private life, well, that's not really true, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but, only because you would no longer have a private digital life;).
Actually I am not willing to bet anything on cloud computing. It is a marketing illusion, consumer electronic device with foss software will rule the day in terms of applications. Why the hell would anybody bother with those privacy invasive add spweing services, when they can simply plug in and run the own easy to configure consumer grade appliance server, running their own mail, web, media and file servers.
It really seems like idiot corporations go blind with greed, the delusion of being able to rent peoples data back to them, it all just totally ignores the reality and how server services have become more accessible and cheaper every year and, will continue to do so. It really is nothing more than hype, today's low cost technology attempting to solve yesterdays high cost server problems and for some inane reason they belief those low cost solution are only available to corporations to be rented to consumers with unlimited profit margins and will not become directly available to consumers at very low prices.
The most pathetic thing about all this, is the total failure of the current US administration in every area it gets involved in. Take those world leader meetings between the hockey puck mom running mate and, those pathetic sock puppet governments.
Columbia it's drug problems and it is all the surrounding countries fault not the fault of US administration who is in charge, Iraq and it's terrorists problems and it is the surrounding countries fault and not the fault US administration who is in charge, Georgia and it's premeditated murder of sanctioned peace keepers and it is the surrounding countries fault and not the fault of the current US administration who is in charge.
Those three set piece publicity stunts where a damning indictment of the current US administration's corruption and incompetence. The only world (what a joke) leaders willing to be so shamefully used in a third rate publicity stunt, an embarrassment to themselves and their countries and to the US government.
Venezuela's efforts in advancing their technological adoption and bridging the digital divide is commendable and could only be improved upon by working with their neighbouring countries to create local ODM facilities so rather than buying in the technology, as much as possible is manufactured locally this of course would partner well with their likely contributions to FOSS software that are bound to result from their adoption of it.
Do you know the really interesting thing about all this, it is far easier and simpler for bean counters to calculate the savings per customer by providing cheap crap service than it is for business professionals to prove the losses that will result by providing cheap crap service.
Only experienced knowledgeable business executives will recognise valuable insights from experienced staff, nepotistic idiots will of course grab the easy answers in vain attempts to prove their non-existant value, think grandkids, basically two generations of pretty but stupid;D.
The whole idea of a central control for global domain names is just plain stupid. All you do is set up a treaty, which governs a uniform method of mirroring domain names to IP addresses across international boundaries, not that it controls domain names, just to that it controls IP address usage. As for domain names each country sets up it's independent registrar and selectively mirrors or puts in own domain data base entries in ie. good example, for.gov addresses they always point locally and if you want the US from outside the US you use.gov.us rather than the bullshit world government insanity of the current US administration '.gov' pointing to the the US.
Of course the real beauty of this system, is you the individual user can decide which domain data name addressing database you wish to use (default ISp configurations would point to the local where the country is of sufficient technological competence to create a domain name address registrar) and governments around the world can generate lot's of additional income by re-auctioning of the core.com and.net all over again.
The catch with all of those hidden competition is it let's the creator of the competition, access ideas from tens of thousands of people and keep all the ones it likes and never mention them publicly except to exploit them and only make few ideas public which it will only reward with a percentage of the prize money on offer. All of this while generating millions of dollars worth of free advertising whilst trying to create a false impression of google goodness in the public's eye.
The worship of all things google is, well, just so over. The privacy invasive, censorship loving, mass marketing, spamword advertsing princesses are just yesterdays news, of course that is a way rich but the googlites just have to accept the fact, things have changed and their meme marketing success aren't working any more.
The competition might be fun in it was all done very publicly and openly with every idea submitted published on the web site and the review and grading of those ideas also done in a very public fashion or does google want to keep it's secrets while prying into everybody else's;).
The reality of speech recognition, is it requires training of the system to suit the speech patterns of each individual user over a broad range of pysiological states as well as training of the user to alter the speech to suit what the system is capable of interpreting. People have trouble understanding and interpreting each others responces, how ever when handled in a polite personable fashion clarification is easily sought and provided in order to prevent confusion.
Computers are not people and people do not react to them as such, so variable input with the same intent which produces variable unpredictable results by computers, really pisses people of, perhaps it is not fair that they react so badly to failed technology but it is a reality. Want less frustration, a healthier and happier work place, make visitors who are likely customers feel more valued, then hire fucking people to deal with people and leave computers to deal with data, otherwise all you create is a whole bunch of very angry dissatisfied people.
Cloud computing has much more to do with creating a technological interface where people can access all the data they need at any time and which people can communicate with each other at any time (note also define limits to that communication). Computer nerd introverts who have become sufficiently wealthy to develop a real disconnect from the majority of their customers, should really forget about trying to create supposedly profitable system that are intended to eliminate human interaction for a world of extroverts.
From a customer perspective, do you know one gauranteed totally accurate to tell how a company values you as a customer, they either have a specially hired skilled person interact with you, they farm out your interaction to the cheapest off shore site or at the very bottom you get the automated, we only want to pretend to want to communicate with you, system.
You have no idea how untrue that is. Have you ever worked on a factory production line, have you worked on a building site for a subcontrator, have you ever worked any where that you are in fact supervised for the entire eight hours shift plus overtime.
All places where middle management spend their whole day squeezing every bit of labour of the workers they can. Not to belabour the point, but the strangest thing of all is the more you get paid the less you work and the less you are supervised but work on minimum wage, the very worst pay, and you are supervised constantly and you will get fired for slacking off.
You also get absolutely no internet access, no email, personal phone calls are restricted and even toilet breaks are monitored. People who get it easy should always think of those that get it much worse, not that you should join the as slave labour for minimum wage but, you should always consider ways that their work conditions should be improved (man those people really are underpaid for their miserable work conditions).
When it comes to professionals of course I forecast that the biggest time waster in the future will be UMPC's and unmonitored cellular internet access.
As EA does not clearly indicate the limitations they enforce on resale on the cover, they should be subject to a class action law suit and pay the penalty.
The only thing Comcast are trying to do with that policy is implement a masquerade behind which they can throttle a range of customers who refuse to pay extra for premium services. Network analysis which find the most intensive data traffic users (likely already has) and they will specifically be targeted, pay extra or have all your traffic shut down to a trickle every fifteen minutes for what, 2 minutes to start with and, then they will continually up that until, the customer leaves or pays the premium bandwidth fee, pays extra for the actual bandwidth, that Comcast B$ marketing claims to be selling.
They are going to use that age old pathetic and immature excuse, don't blame us for the time outs, the computer did it. It is all just one B$ marketing campaign after another, all so they can claim to sell something they have no intention of providing all buried behind a maze of contract conditions, limitations, and lobbyists working to protect their ability to basically lie in their marketing.
I think you mean, what would happen if you approached psychiatrists to find patients who are most likely to commit crimes of all kinds, lets say sociopaths and, got them.......... oh wait, they are genetically capable of creating completely false emotional responses, damn, whoops;D.
No, you are as wrong as you can be. They are a technology company not a software company. Just like every other emerging industry, it changes over time and companies within an evolving industry must change and adapt or die out. M$ is a corporation and is only as effective as it's executive team, the current team is just a abject failure at making the transition to a web based and services company, mostly as a result of their total failure to change their attitudes towards the customers.
Their pay for the privilege beta testing, believe the marketing instead of the warranty, it is always their fault, customers. While this amazingly enough did work for software companies for a while, the clear transition is to open source software (back to where it originally started) and, it most certainly and has failed when it comes to the supply of web based and services company. Computer hardware has also changed, it is now fully a consumer electronic product rather than specialist hardware.
So the hard brutal reality is M$ needs to separate into two distinct companies, a web based and services, company with management who is capable of generating a positive income and growth and which leaves the proprietary software part which basically milks as profit as it can out of existing product range without throwing away additional investment in it and, good example is XP and vista, how much better financially and image wise would M$ had been if they had dumped ballmer prior to his being able to produce vista ie. if M$ had simply stuck with Bill's XP.
As for hardware, what if M$ had the least bit of business acumen, rather than just B$ marketing skills (which inevitably fails) and monopoly exploitation (which history has proven over and over and over again, inevitably fails) and, bought Sony to get into the games console marketing, rather than keep losing money on their own games console.
In this case however the stock buyback is simply a means by which M$ can raise it's stock price in light of the failure of the latest version's of it's operating system and office suit and well as the continued failure of it's game console to generate returns to cover it's losses and as for server market share, that's simply a marketing lie hidden behind servers shipped with a operating system, versus the reality the most servers are not shipped with an operating system and of course let's not forget the continued dismal failure of MSN and live search and of course the edsel of music players 'ZUNE'.
Basically the stock buy back is simply because tmanagement lack the skill or imagination to effectively invest for the future so that they can diversify out of the OS and Office suite which is continually coming under greater threat. It is all a rather simply way for ballmer to point to himself and say that he improved M$ share price as he desperately tries to hang on for the next '10 YEARS' good luck M$. So I would not call making sound well thought out investments into MSN to be R&D, more just the logical change of direction for M$, a change they have touted for years, in fact more than a decade, but due to incompetence they have failed and, were desperate enough to try and buy themselves out of their failure.
The biggest problem with this, is between 78% and 80% of people told to act suspiciously can fool the system into believing they are intending to commit crime, logically those same people should be able to act in the opposite fashion to fool the system into believing they are not, I mean really, what are they thinking the logic of their analysis represents.
Apparently excuses for legal pre-emptive arrests for unsavoury people is the new focus, much like the no fly lists. A list of politically undesirable people who will be arrested, searched, interrogated, transferred to a prison facility whilst their identities are confirmed (which I am sure will take no longer than 24 to 48 hours). All this will be done at a range of designated choke points, like train and subway stations and, maybe even toll booths.
Adjust your political alignment or you will find you, your family, your friends subject to random humiliations, violent arrests, searches including sexual groping and destruction of private property, of course your will be released and it will all be done with a masquerade of legality. I believe some journalists have already experienced exactly this type of pre-emptive arrest at the RNC convention, I don't believe they were particularly impressed with the concept.
Well I have to be honest with you, having any webmail service provider domain name instantly makes your company look amateurish from a prospective customer point of view, a real fly by night company. Don't be foolish register a domain name, a get your ISP to handle your email routing, most medium sized ISP's do it at very competitive rates and it is well worth the expenditure to create a more professional impression with potential customers.
A simpler method for email is to simply encrypt the message using the delivery address. Not that it really secures it but it does however force a action with criminal intent. For the message to be deciphered the recipient must fraudulently misrepresent themselves as the legitimate receiver of that message in order to read it and as a result can be subject to criminal prosecution ie. no more postcards and the feature can simply be built into all email readers.
As for required security, which is obvious in this case, there is no excuse for companies to compromises the privacy of their customers especially when it puts them a risk of being a victim of crime because they are to lazy and cheap to do it properly. They should of course define minimum standards for encryption as well as delivery and receipt of the required keys.
Yes, there is always the very subtle, I am doing it to you but in reality in M$ shops it is just bug ridden software doing it's own thing. Those cranky end user's, it freaks them out when they think you are crashing the box or losing their files or breaking their network connection, when it is all just unreliable software.
For protection I once printed the M$ EULA in large format and posted in on the wall next to my desk ie. don't blame me for that crappy software just read the warranty, things were more peaceful after that, of course also switching to a linux server likely had something to do with it as well;).
The fact the blue ray will largely be the same quality as dvd has a lot to do with the original storage format. For TV series SVHS video means, you can't get the data when it isn't there. So if they really want to sell the quality they are marketing, they have to use the original content as a digital framework and combine it high tech photo realistic animation to put the missing data back in, cost prohibitive as the sales will not justify it as people will be unwilling to replace existing DVD content already sold.
Not that high definition picture quality can be really pretty but, where is the scenery channel screen saver, the only content I would bother seeking out on high definition. Honestly failed plastic surgery, botox overdoses, unrealistic facial expressions and, overtly visible make up, are often just too painful watch on hi-definition (there is often another reason why blue ray is of no better quality than DVD, sometimes that quality is closer to SVHS than even DVD, gotta protect those egos).
Well techinically speaking, an arms race is a societal structure rather than a technological structure. So no arms race if the sociopaths in the military industrial complex are no longer there ie. even in the current technological age the arms race could be ended by eliminating those that profit by it, rather than allowing them to continue to generate profits by trying to eliminate the rest of us.
Just to be clear, by eliminate, I mean investigate, prosecute and imprison them for their inevitably criminal and corrupt practices.
The speech is absolutely not being made at the school, the school is seeking the speech. The same foolish notion could apply to a recording made in the previous century, being played at the school, quite definitively it is the person playing the recording today expressing themselves, not the person who recorded it a century ago.
As such the same should apply to a web site, it is the person seeking the web site, who loads in onto the schools computers and who displays it to others, they are the ones expressing themselves with in school grounds. So the principle choose to insult themself upon school grounds, the student did not choose where their creative works would be displayed, in computer jargon it is pull versus push.
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Well that is just plain wrong. There are very definable damages associated with Open Source software and that is quite specifically any code that was latter attached to that used open source code in a final product is required to be made available, so the cost of the appended code are definitively lost to the open source project and in fact represent failure to make payment for use of the original base open source code.
It is all about the direct exchange of code, I am using your code on condition that I will give you my code that I have appended to your product, so an open exchange of labour. In open source code under GPL, the code is never ever given away, it is only made available for conditional use of the code, whilst the application of the code as a completed work is made freely available, the code itself is protected. So the code as an application is free to use but the code as it's source is protected.
Additionally those other people who also contributed to the acceptance of the code as a viable product must also be protected. That is those people who promoted, supported, distributed, documented, and enhanced (usability, artwork, etc.) the product, their efforts have definitive value and the work enhances the code by expending it's acceptance and increasing the ability of that coding project to further develop ie. gain additional qualitative coding input from a wider base, which benefits all those who make use of the code as a completed project as well as originating coders.
It is not about playability, as that is nothing more than what accessories are available ie. remote keyboard and mouse. What it is about is an alternate sales scheme for game consoles. Join an MMO, sign a long term contract, pay the subscription fee and get a free game console as part of the package.
This creates an opportunity to create a major MMO whilst also providing an opportunity for additional sales and licence revenues. The only question is whether it would work or not and how many failed rental contracts Sony might get stuck with in these turbulent economic times but, the rental model often works better when finances are tight.
Cloud computing OS, jumpin' jehosaphat, vapour ware becomes a reality, the mind boggles, a vapour OS, to run vapour ware applications all on vapour ware hardware ;D.
The immoral police are already on location, they are the casino guards, making sure no matter what happens the casino always gets 'your' money. Whether on or off line, protecting the mug punters is their last worry, after all that is why they call them mug punters.
Online gambling is far to easy to rig and, those who by their very nature are involved will always fall to temptation, they after all profit by exploiting other peoples weaknesses, whilst corruptly ensuring the odds favour them.
It is only gambling when the punter and the casino share the same odds, the rest of the time as it is currently run, it is really is just legalised theft.
All your talking about is how it comes configured out of the box and how it is updated. As it is now, a lot of mid size ISPs already supply preconfigured net hardware and it would be a very small step for them to supply preconfigured server appliances which they could upgrade and manage on line.
The google image of cloud computing is really just crippled cloud computing, all hamstrung by pointing to one location, true cloud computing is truly distributed broadly across the whole internet and not locked to half a dozen locations. Service based ISP's provide the bridge between complex 'underlying' backend administration and simple user front end administration, which for even the simplest user could simply be handled remotely by their ISP.
It is really stupid to think that only the internet 'God' google and their acolytes the googlites can configure a appliance server and deliver it to the end user ready to go and safe to use ie. plug and play and even if the user is incapable of then they supply and install. Every computer manufacturer and every reasonable ISP can do it and make money selling it, not renting it (although that is an option and they avoid infrastructure hassles). Privacy is what the local suppliers will be able to sell, your own private server that you can access from anywhere, not some public billboard where perverse privacy invasive strangers pry into your daily digital habits and personal affairs and, try to jam an endless flood of psychologically targeted advertising into your private life, well, that's not really true, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but, only because you would no longer have a private digital life ;).
Actually I am not willing to bet anything on cloud computing. It is a marketing illusion, consumer electronic device with foss software will rule the day in terms of applications. Why the hell would anybody bother with those privacy invasive add spweing services, when they can simply plug in and run the own easy to configure consumer grade appliance server, running their own mail, web, media and file servers.
It really seems like idiot corporations go blind with greed, the delusion of being able to rent peoples data back to them, it all just totally ignores the reality and how server services have become more accessible and cheaper every year and, will continue to do so. It really is nothing more than hype, today's low cost technology attempting to solve yesterdays high cost server problems and for some inane reason they belief those low cost solution are only available to corporations to be rented to consumers with unlimited profit margins and will not become directly available to consumers at very low prices.
The most pathetic thing about all this, is the total failure of the current US administration in every area it gets involved in. Take those world leader meetings between the hockey puck mom running mate and, those pathetic sock puppet governments.
Columbia it's drug problems and it is all the surrounding countries fault not the fault of US administration who is in charge, Iraq and it's terrorists problems and it is the surrounding countries fault and not the fault US administration who is in charge, Georgia and it's premeditated murder of sanctioned peace keepers and it is the surrounding countries fault and not the fault of the current US administration who is in charge.
Those three set piece publicity stunts where a damning indictment of the current US administration's corruption and incompetence. The only world (what a joke) leaders willing to be so shamefully used in a third rate publicity stunt, an embarrassment to themselves and their countries and to the US government.
Venezuela's efforts in advancing their technological adoption and bridging the digital divide is commendable and could only be improved upon by working with their neighbouring countries to create local ODM facilities so rather than buying in the technology, as much as possible is manufactured locally this of course would partner well with their likely contributions to FOSS software that are bound to result from their adoption of it.
Do you know the really interesting thing about all this, it is far easier and simpler for bean counters to calculate the savings per customer by providing cheap crap service than it is for business professionals to prove the losses that will result by providing cheap crap service.
Only experienced knowledgeable business executives will recognise valuable insights from experienced staff, nepotistic idiots will of course grab the easy answers in vain attempts to prove their non-existant value, think grandkids, basically two generations of pretty but stupid ;D.
The whole idea of a central control for global domain names is just plain stupid. All you do is set up a treaty, which governs a uniform method of mirroring domain names to IP addresses across international boundaries, not that it controls domain names, just to that it controls IP address usage. As for domain names each country sets up it's independent registrar and selectively mirrors or puts in own domain data base entries in ie. good example, for .gov addresses they always point locally and if you want the US from outside the US you use .gov.us rather than the bullshit world government insanity of the current US administration '.gov' pointing to the the US.
Of course the real beauty of this system, is you the individual user can decide which domain data name addressing database you wish to use (default ISp configurations would point to the local where the country is of sufficient technological competence to create a domain name address registrar) and governments around the world can generate lot's of additional income by re-auctioning of the core .com and .net all over again.
The catch with all of those hidden competition is it let's the creator of the competition, access ideas from tens of thousands of people and keep all the ones it likes and never mention them publicly except to exploit them and only make few ideas public which it will only reward with a percentage of the prize money on offer. All of this while generating millions of dollars worth of free advertising whilst trying to create a false impression of google goodness in the public's eye.
The worship of all things google is, well, just so over. The privacy invasive, censorship loving, mass marketing, spamword advertsing princesses are just yesterdays news, of course that is a way rich but the googlites just have to accept the fact, things have changed and their meme marketing success aren't working any more.
The competition might be fun in it was all done very publicly and openly with every idea submitted published on the web site and the review and grading of those ideas also done in a very public fashion or does google want to keep it's secrets while prying into everybody else's ;).
The reality of speech recognition, is it requires training of the system to suit the speech patterns of each individual user over a broad range of pysiological states as well as training of the user to alter the speech to suit what the system is capable of interpreting. People have trouble understanding and interpreting each others responces, how ever when handled in a polite personable fashion clarification is easily sought and provided in order to prevent confusion.
Computers are not people and people do not react to them as such, so variable input with the same intent which produces variable unpredictable results by computers, really pisses people of, perhaps it is not fair that they react so badly to failed technology but it is a reality. Want less frustration, a healthier and happier work place, make visitors who are likely customers feel more valued, then hire fucking people to deal with people and leave computers to deal with data, otherwise all you create is a whole bunch of very angry dissatisfied people.
Cloud computing has much more to do with creating a technological interface where people can access all the data they need at any time and which people can communicate with each other at any time (note also define limits to that communication). Computer nerd introverts who have become sufficiently wealthy to develop a real disconnect from the majority of their customers, should really forget about trying to create supposedly profitable system that are intended to eliminate human interaction for a world of extroverts.
From a customer perspective, do you know one gauranteed totally accurate to tell how a company values you as a customer, they either have a specially hired skilled person interact with you, they farm out your interaction to the cheapest off shore site or at the very bottom you get the automated, we only want to pretend to want to communicate with you, system.
You have no idea how untrue that is. Have you ever worked on a factory production line, have you worked on a building site for a subcontrator, have you ever worked any where that you are in fact supervised for the entire eight hours shift plus overtime.
All places where middle management spend their whole day squeezing every bit of labour of the workers they can. Not to belabour the point, but the strangest thing of all is the more you get paid the less you work and the less you are supervised but work on minimum wage, the very worst pay, and you are supervised constantly and you will get fired for slacking off.
You also get absolutely no internet access, no email, personal phone calls are restricted and even toilet breaks are monitored. People who get it easy should always think of those that get it much worse, not that you should join the as slave labour for minimum wage but, you should always consider ways that their work conditions should be improved (man those people really are underpaid for their miserable work conditions).
When it comes to professionals of course I forecast that the biggest time waster in the future will be UMPC's and unmonitored cellular internet access.
Well in this case it is EA who are stealing your copyright. Your right to sell the copyright licence you paid, bored with then game, EA are trying to steal your ability to sell it to someone else in the second hand market, exactly how disingenuous is this amazon web page http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B000FKBCX4/sr=/qid=/ref=olp_tab_used?ie=UTF8&coliid=&me=&qid=&sr=&seller=&colid=&condition=used.
As EA does not clearly indicate the limitations they enforce on resale on the cover, they should be subject to a class action law suit and pay the penalty.
The only thing Comcast are trying to do with that policy is implement a masquerade behind which they can throttle a range of customers who refuse to pay extra for premium services. Network analysis which find the most intensive data traffic users (likely already has) and they will specifically be targeted, pay extra or have all your traffic shut down to a trickle every fifteen minutes for what, 2 minutes to start with and, then they will continually up that until, the customer leaves or pays the premium bandwidth fee, pays extra for the actual bandwidth, that Comcast B$ marketing claims to be selling.
They are going to use that age old pathetic and immature excuse, don't blame us for the time outs, the computer did it. It is all just one B$ marketing campaign after another, all so they can claim to sell something they have no intention of providing all buried behind a maze of contract conditions, limitations, and lobbyists working to protect their ability to basically lie in their marketing.
I think you mean, what would happen if you approached psychiatrists to find patients who are most likely to commit crimes of all kinds, lets say sociopaths and, got them .......... oh wait, they are genetically capable of creating completely false emotional responses, damn, whoops ;D.
No, you are as wrong as you can be. They are a technology company not a software company. Just like every other emerging industry, it changes over time and companies within an evolving industry must change and adapt or die out. M$ is a corporation and is only as effective as it's executive team, the current team is just a abject failure at making the transition to a web based and services company, mostly as a result of their total failure to change their attitudes towards the customers.
Their pay for the privilege beta testing, believe the marketing instead of the warranty, it is always their fault, customers. While this amazingly enough did work for software companies for a while, the clear transition is to open source software (back to where it originally started) and, it most certainly and has failed when it comes to the supply of web based and services company. Computer hardware has also changed, it is now fully a consumer electronic product rather than specialist hardware.
So the hard brutal reality is M$ needs to separate into two distinct companies, a web based and services, company with management who is capable of generating a positive income and growth and which leaves the proprietary software part which basically milks as profit as it can out of existing product range without throwing away additional investment in it and, good example is XP and vista, how much better financially and image wise would M$ had been if they had dumped ballmer prior to his being able to produce vista ie. if M$ had simply stuck with Bill's XP.
As for hardware, what if M$ had the least bit of business acumen, rather than just B$ marketing skills (which inevitably fails) and monopoly exploitation (which history has proven over and over and over again, inevitably fails) and, bought Sony to get into the games console marketing, rather than keep losing money on their own games console.
In this case however the stock buyback is simply a means by which M$ can raise it's stock price in light of the failure of the latest version's of it's operating system and office suit and well as the continued failure of it's game console to generate returns to cover it's losses and as for server market share, that's simply a marketing lie hidden behind servers shipped with a operating system, versus the reality the most servers are not shipped with an operating system and of course let's not forget the continued dismal failure of MSN and live search and of course the edsel of music players 'ZUNE'.
Basically the stock buy back is simply because tmanagement lack the skill or imagination to effectively invest for the future so that they can diversify out of the OS and Office suite which is continually coming under greater threat. It is all a rather simply way for ballmer to point to himself and say that he improved M$ share price as he desperately tries to hang on for the next '10 YEARS' good luck M$. So I would not call making sound well thought out investments into MSN to be R&D, more just the logical change of direction for M$, a change they have touted for years, in fact more than a decade, but due to incompetence they have failed and, were desperate enough to try and buy themselves out of their failure.
The biggest problem with this, is between 78% and 80% of people told to act suspiciously can fool the system into believing they are intending to commit crime, logically those same people should be able to act in the opposite fashion to fool the system into believing they are not, I mean really, what are they thinking the logic of their analysis represents.
Apparently excuses for legal pre-emptive arrests for unsavoury people is the new focus, much like the no fly lists. A list of politically undesirable people who will be arrested, searched, interrogated, transferred to a prison facility whilst their identities are confirmed (which I am sure will take no longer than 24 to 48 hours). All this will be done at a range of designated choke points, like train and subway stations and, maybe even toll booths.
Adjust your political alignment or you will find you, your family, your friends subject to random humiliations, violent arrests, searches including sexual groping and destruction of private property, of course your will be released and it will all be done with a masquerade of legality. I believe some journalists have already experienced exactly this type of pre-emptive arrest at the RNC convention, I don't believe they were particularly impressed with the concept.
Well I have to be honest with you, having any webmail service provider domain name instantly makes your company look amateurish from a prospective customer point of view, a real fly by night company. Don't be foolish register a domain name, a get your ISP to handle your email routing, most medium sized ISP's do it at very competitive rates and it is well worth the expenditure to create a more professional impression with potential customers.
A simpler method for email is to simply encrypt the message using the delivery address. Not that it really secures it but it does however force a action with criminal intent. For the message to be deciphered the recipient must fraudulently misrepresent themselves as the legitimate receiver of that message in order to read it and as a result can be subject to criminal prosecution ie. no more postcards and the feature can simply be built into all email readers.
As for required security, which is obvious in this case, there is no excuse for companies to compromises the privacy of their customers especially when it puts them a risk of being a victim of crime because they are to lazy and cheap to do it properly. They should of course define minimum standards for encryption as well as delivery and receipt of the required keys.
There is always there is always the flip side course for 99.99% of other non-software businesses, which is far more justified as a MBA course.
All those objective that open source software fulfil and core subjects for the majority of businesses.
Open source software, managing software overheads more effectively, their profits are your costs.
Open source software, minimising retraining and re documentation, only implement worthwhile changes.
Open source software, avoiding supplier forced costly upgrades and managing them at your pace.
Open source software, using publicly audited software, hidden software faults cost you money.
Open source software, avoiding data lock in, don't be forced to pay for your own data over and over again.
Open source software, avoiding training costs, open source software for education, save on taxes whilst saving on overheads, double plus bonus.
Yes, there is always the very subtle, I am doing it to you but in reality in M$ shops it is just bug ridden software doing it's own thing. Those cranky end user's, it freaks them out when they think you are crashing the box or losing their files or breaking their network connection, when it is all just unreliable software.
For protection I once printed the M$ EULA in large format and posted in on the wall next to my desk ie. don't blame me for that crappy software just read the warranty, things were more peaceful after that, of course also switching to a linux server likely had something to do with it as well ;).
The fact the blue ray will largely be the same quality as dvd has a lot to do with the original storage format. For TV series SVHS video means, you can't get the data when it isn't there. So if they really want to sell the quality they are marketing, they have to use the original content as a digital framework and combine it high tech photo realistic animation to put the missing data back in, cost prohibitive as the sales will not justify it as people will be unwilling to replace existing DVD content already sold.
Not that high definition picture quality can be really pretty but, where is the scenery channel screen saver, the only content I would bother seeking out on high definition. Honestly failed plastic surgery, botox overdoses, unrealistic facial expressions and, overtly visible make up, are often just too painful watch on hi-definition (there is often another reason why blue ray is of no better quality than DVD, sometimes that quality is closer to SVHS than even DVD, gotta protect those egos).
Well techinically speaking, an arms race is a societal structure rather than a technological structure. So no arms race if the sociopaths in the military industrial complex are no longer there ie. even in the current technological age the arms race could be ended by eliminating those that profit by it, rather than allowing them to continue to generate profits by trying to eliminate the rest of us.
Just to be clear, by eliminate, I mean investigate, prosecute and imprison them for their inevitably criminal and corrupt practices.
The speech is absolutely not being made at the school, the school is seeking the speech. The same foolish notion could apply to a recording made in the previous century, being played at the school, quite definitively it is the person playing the recording today expressing themselves, not the person who recorded it a century ago.
As such the same should apply to a web site, it is the person seeking the web site, who loads in onto the schools computers and who displays it to others, they are the ones expressing themselves with in school grounds. So the principle choose to insult themself upon school grounds, the student did not choose where their creative works would be displayed, in computer jargon it is pull versus push.