Mod the parent up. SuSE actually attacked faster than Red Hat, so the grandparent poster was wrong. Following their reasoning for using Red Hat, perhaps now they should switch to SuSE, like me. (=
Neither are acceptable forms of speach anywhere on this planet.
Why hasn't this been modded funny? It can't be serious. It is certainly free speech to explain how to shake vending machines. Hell, there's books on how to make bombs, assassinate people, etc., all legal (for entertainment purposes only).
But if you RTFA, you'd see that this is a parallel to the Ford example. The automobile manufacturers were suing Ford's customers, not their own.
In fact, the RIAA is worse off. In the Ford case, the people being sued probably would never be customers of the automobile manufacturers because they weren't rich enough to afford their cars. In the RIAA case, the people they are suing are the same people who would be buying CDs if they didn't have the option to download, and in many cases people do both -- buy CDs and download music files. So they are certainly closer to their own customers than in the Ford example.
Think about the 2D surface of a sphere. Imagine if you existed as a 2D creature living on it. While we could imaging an "inside" and "outside" if we think of the sphere in 3D, there's no "inside" and "outside" if you think of the 2D surface, there's just the surface. And if you head in any direction, you end up where you started.
Similarly, think of us on the 3D surface of a 4D sphere. There is no outside or inside, just the surface. It's hard to imagine in 4D, I'm not sure anyone actually can, but the analogy seems sufficient to understand how it could work.
I agree and disagree. When buying a hard drive I want to know how many programs, mp3s, photos, etc. I can fit on it. The size of those items are given in base 2 by the OS, so I need to know the size of the hard drive in binary.
On the other hand, do all OSes (or file managers) report GB in binary? Are there any that use decimal? What if somebody wrote one using decimal? Shouldn't the hard drive be OS agnostic? In that case, decimal GB seems to be the proper format. After all, there are standards for the kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, and other prefixes.
I guess the true solution is to pick a standard and have everyone conform to it (OSes, drives, CDROMs, CDRs, program packages, etc.)
My vote is for decimal. The SI standards for prefixes is easy to follow, understand, and convert. Base 2 is required internally for computers operations and addressing, but I don't see any useful reason to report file sizes or capacity in base 2. Programmers might have some reason such as determining amounts of memory required for files, but whatever function calculates the file size for them can be written to report in in binary if they want.
My guess would be that it would send a single packet when the sender started typing to turn on the notification and there are three cases for turning the notification off:
The sender hits ENTER and sends the message.
The program checks periodically if the user is typing. If they keyboard has been in use over x seconds, it sends a new "on" packet. If not, it either does nothing or sends an "off" packet. (Shouldn't need the "off" packet because of the next one below.)
At the receiver end, if an "on" packet hasn't been received in y seconds (y>=x), it turns off the notice. This covers the case where the user paused for long enough, or they've been disconnected.
Maybe not, but I've been annoyed for years by the big spots they use for scene changes. About 10 seconds before a scene change there is always a huge dot in the upper right corner, then again about 1 second before the change. I never used to notice them until I read about them, now I see them all the time in the theatre and I hate it. Ignorance can be bliss, I guess.
P.S. Yes, I know I may have just ruined it for a bunch of you too, but why should I be the only one to suffer. (=
Personally, I beg to differ for several reasons. Salaries ideally should be based on:
demand for skill
available supply of skill
complexity of skill
competency at skill (performance)
quantity of skills subject to above conditions
As far as I know there is no significant shortage of teachers so there's no reason to raise salaries because of supply and demand. As far as complexity, teaching generally only requires certain certificates or minor degrees. Positions that require more advanced degrees do indeed pay more already. Competency is a person by person assessment, some are good and some are bad. As for quantity of applicable skills, some teachers do a lot of upgrading of their teaching skills and, as far as I know, do get paid more for it.
In short, the mechanisms seem to be in place to pay teachers properly. If teachers made a ton of money, everybody and their dog would get into teaching (since it doesn't require much in terms of specialized or advanced degrees). What you'd end up with is a ton of bad teachers in it for the money, and an oversupply of teachers which would drive their salaries down anyway.
In addition to this, I think the whole education system we have now is poorly designed. It is still essentially using the same model of a teacher teaching to a whole class during set periods. That model was based in times when the teacher had the only books available and taught from it. We're two generations past that now (printing press, computers). Some programs are making progress in personalized learning, but the primary model is still the same.
Again, a logical falsehood. If used as an insult, as in "You are a Nazi!", or the common "femi-Nazi", then yes, it is an appeal to emotion. But that doesn't mean all analogies using Nazis are automatically so. In this case there is a valid analogy at hand, the comparison is not being used in an emotional context.
In fact, for any argument involving claims of "I was just doing my job" (or following orders), the Nazis are the most famous and clear demonstration that such a claim is not a valid excuse, and therefore the Nazi analogy is probably the best one regardless of the emotional attachments.
There seems to be two extreme falsehoods when using Nazis, those who use it as an insult without demonstrating any equivalence for analogy, and those who assume that any comparison to Nazis is invalid on its face because it envokes emotions. Both are falsehoods. Legitimate analogies using Nazis do exist, including this one.
I've only read parts of the DMCA, so I'm not sure what all the requirements are, but I'm curious if the following scenario is possible.
Write some sort of copyrighted work on a computer. Since copying files on the computer is easy, use the following method as a copyright protection: make a hardcopy. That is, your copyright protection method is to print out a copy, and even put some copyright notice on the printed copy. Then, sue manufacturers of scanners because they create and distribute "tools" that can be used to circumvent your copyright protection method, i.e., they can make copies.
Sure, there's lots of problems with this lawsuit. There's lots of precendence in law on use of photocopiers and scanners, but I'd bet not under the DMCA. I'm not sure what the DMCA requires for "digital", but the argument here is that the work being copied is the digital file you originally wrote. The hard copy is just the "encrypted" version, and using a scanner allows someone to convert if from the encrypted version back into a non-encrypted digital version. I original thought of including photocopiers, but that would be just making copies of the encrypted files, not decrypting them, which as far as I know is ok.
True, hardcopying is not a very good copy protection scheme, but as far as I know the "quality" of the system is not considered. For example, a Microsoft case mentioned in the parent story includes "clickable end-user licenses", which only uses a few words as the "protection" method. Or the CD protection method that can be circumvented using a marker. At a minimum, hardcopies are more difficult to copy than digital files directly, so it does at least have some merit as a protection scheme.
In essense, I think many arguments used in existing DMCA cases could be used against scanners for the above scenario. And anybody could do this and sue the manufactures.
I'm not suggesting this is a good thing, but perhaps it is a useful method for protesting the DMCA by making it very public and getting the big manufacturers working to help get it changed ASAP.
Actually, NASA is full of some very smart people who could easily do this job. While it's true that the manned spaceflight program went from zero to the moon in less than 10 years, it only happened because of the huge budget, and they didn't have to deal with splitting their budget between maintaining existing programs (Shuttle, ISS) and developing new ones at the same time.
Sure, there are problems with the way NASA is run, particularly managers who micro-manage. For example, I had to make a 15 minute presentation of an informal study to a group of engineers (information only, not used for any decisions), and it took thousands of dollars with 10 internal reviews over 4 months with up to 5 internal managers -- not to review the information (after the first review), but to make sure the fonts were ok, the plots were well aligned and zoomed they way they wanted them, etc.
But really, the problem is money. Their budget may seem huge, but in comparison to the 60s it is a small fraction and they've got to split it many more ways now. In fact, it's a tiny blip compared to the U.S. defense budget. The new launch vehicles could probably be built in a couple of years if they diverted on the order of 1% of the defense budget for that purpose.
You have fallen into the same logical falsehood as so many people do. An analogy is an argumentative tool to draw parallels for one specific aspect, not a complete comparison at all levels. The analogy was that "I was just doing my job" is not an excuse for doing something bad. That the level of "badness" is different is irrelevant to the argument. The analogy is valid for the purpose it was used.
You seem to have missed the fact that different people have different tastes. I happen to love the taste of (some) beer. But I can't stand the taste of coffee, and don't like most wines.
The difference is that I recognize my tastes don't apply to everyone, and I certainly don't try to interpret common usage of things dislike in terms of my own tastes, like you did when you said "I suspect that people are rallying their approval of the effects of the alcohol rather than the beer itself." Did it occur to you that other people might just like the taste of beer, even though you don't.
All you coffee drinkers are alike, you generalize about everything. (=
This cannot be a free speech issue. The phones and phone lines are privately owned. You own the phones, the phone company owns the lines.
Often people seem to get this notion that free speech means you can say what you want, when you want, where you want, and how you want, none of which is true. It certainly doesn't apply to privately owned equipment and media. I don't even think a law is really even required for this. If phone companies put in their contracts that their phone lines could not be used for telemarketing (even non-profit or political), any telemarketer whose phones are hooked up with that company would be in violation and could be sued. Of course, the phone companies wouldn't really have anything to gain by doing so, and certainly wouldn't all get organized at their own cost. Hence the need for the law.
The plans were not lost, nor was the knowlege needed to build them lost.
I didn't mean to imply the plans were lost, I have not heard that urban legend. But I did understand that the manufacturing knowledge was lost, since it used old technology. Assuming you know better, I stand corrected.
I guess my point was that newer rockets would be better to start from than the Saturn V, which it appears you agree.
Small problem with the Saturn Vs. They don't know how to make them anymore. It'd take about as long to figure out how they were built in the first place as it would to design a new one from scratch.
But yes, having at least two types of vehicles would be ideal: one for heavy cargo lifting and the other for crew transportation. In fact, I think that was the original idea. The shuttle was a kludge by NASA to meet political/economic/technical constraints from the Nixon administration and the military. For more detail check out Chapter 1 of the CAIB report, or one of its references on the subject.
Why stop there? Can't every person who holds a copyright to some of the code sue SCO? How many different copyright holders are there in Linux? If SCO had 1000 lawsuits for copyright violation against it tomorrow, I wonder how much its stock would plummet.
Yes, good analogy and contrast. Venture capitalists are (supposed to be) good at recognizing potentially profitable businesses. Record labels are (supposed to be) good at recognizing potentially profitable musical talent.
(Some might say something about it being about the music and art, but we're talking about the business model which requires the ability to at least break even for the business to survive.)
But as you point out, venture capitalists work with a different business model -- they provide advice to help you make money and take a piece of your profit. The record labels force you to spend their money on their services and take their cut first. Perhaps the record labels could use venture capitalism as a business model that is more fair to the artists. It's a model that works (usually) without screwing people over like they do now.
Yes, but you'd think it wouldn't be too hard to find them. After all, they are selling something. They need to supply a way for customers to contact them to order their product or service.
True, a competitor may send spam out pretending to be that company (to get them in trouble), but then they also run the risk of providing more sales for their competitor. And can't a company do that with phones as well. (Yes, I suppose it's easier to demonstrate they didn't send it from phone records than email records, but that's only if it goes that far which would likely be rare.)
You misunderstand. I'm not saying that "taking tests and writing research papers" is the skill, it's the underlying knowledge and abilities associated with them.
You seem to be implying that doing only refers to physical actions. Being able to multiply large numbers in your head is certainly a skill. Being able to logically argue a point is a skill. Being able to design a control system for an elevator is a skill. These are all examples of things that come from education.
Sure, knowledge is not doing, but applying it is. And as the definition states, it is a learned power that makes it a skill. Being able to apply the knowledge makes it a skill, and that's what tests and thesis defenses and writing papers demonstrate.
Or should the costs simply be the amount that the record industry has lost through piracy due to the file sharing by that particular person
Whoa. I don't think they want to go there. Then the RIAA would have to first demonstrate that the record companies they represent are actually losing money becasue of file sharing, which opens the door to demonstrating that they may in fact be making more money from file sharing. I think they just want to keep the penalties punitive rather than compensatory, also a reason they'd want to settle out of court.
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Mod the parent up. SuSE actually attacked faster than Red Hat, so the grandparent poster was wrong. Following their reasoning for using Red Hat, perhaps now they should switch to SuSE, like me. (=
Why hasn't this been modded funny? It can't be serious. It is certainly free speech to explain how to shake vending machines. Hell, there's books on how to make bombs, assassinate people, etc., all legal (for entertainment purposes only).
In fact, the RIAA is worse off. In the Ford case, the people being sued probably would never be customers of the automobile manufacturers because they weren't rich enough to afford their cars. In the RIAA case, the people they are suing are the same people who would be buying CDs if they didn't have the option to download, and in many cases people do both -- buy CDs and download music files. So they are certainly closer to their own customers than in the Ford example.
Similarly, think of us on the 3D surface of a 4D sphere. There is no outside or inside, just the surface. It's hard to imagine in 4D, I'm not sure anyone actually can, but the analogy seems sufficient to understand how it could work.
On the other hand, do all OSes (or file managers) report GB in binary? Are there any that use decimal? What if somebody wrote one using decimal? Shouldn't the hard drive be OS agnostic? In that case, decimal GB seems to be the proper format. After all, there are standards for the kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, and other prefixes.
I guess the true solution is to pick a standard and have everyone conform to it (OSes, drives, CDROMs, CDRs, program packages, etc.)
My vote is for decimal. The SI standards for prefixes is easy to follow, understand, and convert. Base 2 is required internally for computers operations and addressing, but I don't see any useful reason to report file sizes or capacity in base 2. Programmers might have some reason such as determining amounts of memory required for files, but whatever function calculates the file size for them can be written to report in in binary if they want.
The sender hits ENTER and sends the message.
The program checks periodically if the user is typing. If they keyboard has been in use over x seconds, it sends a new "on" packet. If not, it either does nothing or sends an "off" packet. (Shouldn't need the "off" packet because of the next one below.)
At the receiver end, if an "on" packet hasn't been received in y seconds (y>=x), it turns off the notice. This covers the case where the user paused for long enough, or they've been disconnected.
That's just a guess.
True, but then Linux is not even an operating system, it's the kernel. The entire operating system is really GNU/Linux (or maybe not). Clear as mud?
P.S. Yes, I know I may have just ruined it for a bunch of you too, but why should I be the only one to suffer. (=
demand for skill
available supply of skill
complexity of skill
competency at skill (performance)
quantity of skills subject to above conditions
As far as I know there is no significant shortage of teachers so there's no reason to raise salaries because of supply and demand. As far as complexity, teaching generally only requires certain certificates or minor degrees. Positions that require more advanced degrees do indeed pay more already. Competency is a person by person assessment, some are good and some are bad. As for quantity of applicable skills, some teachers do a lot of upgrading of their teaching skills and, as far as I know, do get paid more for it.
In short, the mechanisms seem to be in place to pay teachers properly. If teachers made a ton of money, everybody and their dog would get into teaching (since it doesn't require much in terms of specialized or advanced degrees). What you'd end up with is a ton of bad teachers in it for the money, and an oversupply of teachers which would drive their salaries down anyway.
In addition to this, I think the whole education system we have now is poorly designed. It is still essentially using the same model of a teacher teaching to a whole class during set periods. That model was based in times when the teacher had the only books available and taught from it. We're two generations past that now (printing press, computers). Some programs are making progress in personalized learning, but the primary model is still the same.
In fact, for any argument involving claims of "I was just doing my job" (or following orders), the Nazis are the most famous and clear demonstration that such a claim is not a valid excuse, and therefore the Nazi analogy is probably the best one regardless of the emotional attachments.
There seems to be two extreme falsehoods when using Nazis, those who use it as an insult without demonstrating any equivalence for analogy, and those who assume that any comparison to Nazis is invalid on its face because it envokes emotions. Both are falsehoods. Legitimate analogies using Nazis do exist, including this one.
Write some sort of copyrighted work on a computer. Since copying files on the computer is easy, use the following method as a copyright protection: make a hardcopy. That is, your copyright protection method is to print out a copy, and even put some copyright notice on the printed copy. Then, sue manufacturers of scanners because they create and distribute "tools" that can be used to circumvent your copyright protection method, i.e., they can make copies.
Sure, there's lots of problems with this lawsuit. There's lots of precendence in law on use of photocopiers and scanners, but I'd bet not under the DMCA. I'm not sure what the DMCA requires for "digital", but the argument here is that the work being copied is the digital file you originally wrote. The hard copy is just the "encrypted" version, and using a scanner allows someone to convert if from the encrypted version back into a non-encrypted digital version. I original thought of including photocopiers, but that would be just making copies of the encrypted files, not decrypting them, which as far as I know is ok.
True, hardcopying is not a very good copy protection scheme, but as far as I know the "quality" of the system is not considered. For example, a Microsoft case mentioned in the parent story includes "clickable end-user licenses", which only uses a few words as the "protection" method. Or the CD protection method that can be circumvented using a marker. At a minimum, hardcopies are more difficult to copy than digital files directly, so it does at least have some merit as a protection scheme.
In essense, I think many arguments used in existing DMCA cases could be used against scanners for the above scenario. And anybody could do this and sue the manufactures.
I'm not suggesting this is a good thing, but perhaps it is a useful method for protesting the DMCA by making it very public and getting the big manufacturers working to help get it changed ASAP.
Sure, there are problems with the way NASA is run, particularly managers who micro-manage. For example, I had to make a 15 minute presentation of an informal study to a group of engineers (information only, not used for any decisions), and it took thousands of dollars with 10 internal reviews over 4 months with up to 5 internal managers -- not to review the information (after the first review), but to make sure the fonts were ok, the plots were well aligned and zoomed they way they wanted them, etc.
But really, the problem is money. Their budget may seem huge, but in comparison to the 60s it is a small fraction and they've got to split it many more ways now. In fact, it's a tiny blip compared to the U.S. defense budget. The new launch vehicles could probably be built in a couple of years if they diverted on the order of 1% of the defense budget for that purpose.
You have fallen into the same logical falsehood as so many people do. An analogy is an argumentative tool to draw parallels for one specific aspect, not a complete comparison at all levels. The analogy was that "I was just doing my job" is not an excuse for doing something bad. That the level of "badness" is different is irrelevant to the argument. The analogy is valid for the purpose it was used.
The difference is that I recognize my tastes don't apply to everyone, and I certainly don't try to interpret common usage of things dislike in terms of my own tastes, like you did when you said "I suspect that people are rallying their approval of the effects of the alcohol rather than the beer itself." Did it occur to you that other people might just like the taste of beer, even though you don't.
All you coffee drinkers are alike, you generalize about everything. (=
Technically, it's a similie, not an analogy. (=
Often people seem to get this notion that free speech means you can say what you want, when you want, where you want, and how you want, none of which is true. It certainly doesn't apply to privately owned equipment and media. I don't even think a law is really even required for this. If phone companies put in their contracts that their phone lines could not be used for telemarketing (even non-profit or political), any telemarketer whose phones are hooked up with that company would be in violation and could be sued. Of course, the phone companies wouldn't really have anything to gain by doing so, and certainly wouldn't all get organized at their own cost. Hence the need for the law.
I didn't mean to imply the plans were lost, I have not heard that urban legend. But I did understand that the manufacturing knowledge was lost, since it used old technology. Assuming you know better, I stand corrected.
I guess my point was that newer rockets would be better to start from than the Saturn V, which it appears you agree.
But yes, having at least two types of vehicles would be ideal: one for heavy cargo lifting and the other for crew transportation. In fact, I think that was the original idea. The shuttle was a kludge by NASA to meet political/economic/technical constraints from the Nixon administration and the military. For more detail check out Chapter 1 of the CAIB report, or one of its references on the subject.
Why stop there? Can't every person who holds a copyright to some of the code sue SCO? How many different copyright holders are there in Linux? If SCO had 1000 lawsuits for copyright violation against it tomorrow, I wonder how much its stock would plummet.
Sorry, a correction to my first line. It should have read "...it's applying the underlying knowledge and abilities associated with them."
But as you point out, venture capitalists work with a different business model -- they provide advice to help you make money and take a piece of your profit. The record labels force you to spend their money on their services and take their cut first. Perhaps the record labels could use venture capitalism as a business model that is more fair to the artists. It's a model that works (usually) without screwing people over like they do now.
True, a competitor may send spam out pretending to be that company (to get them in trouble), but then they also run the risk of providing more sales for their competitor. And can't a company do that with phones as well. (Yes, I suppose it's easier to demonstrate they didn't send it from phone records than email records, but that's only if it goes that far which would likely be rare.)
You seem to be implying that doing only refers to physical actions. Being able to multiply large numbers in your head is certainly a skill. Being able to logically argue a point is a skill. Being able to design a control system for an elevator is a skill. These are all examples of things that come from education.
Sure, knowledge is not doing, but applying it is. And as the definition states, it is a learned power that makes it a skill. Being able to apply the knowledge makes it a skill, and that's what tests and thesis defenses and writing papers demonstrate.
Whoa. I don't think they want to go there. Then the RIAA would have to first demonstrate that the record companies they represent are actually losing money becasue of file sharing, which opens the door to demonstrating that they may in fact be making more money from file sharing. I think they just want to keep the penalties punitive rather than compensatory, also a reason they'd want to settle out of court.
Well, no. I'm not sure where you get the "bit" from. (=