A mail-in rebate is one manifestation of the concept of market segmentation. The basic idea is that you have a product that costs you $10 to manufacture and distribute and figuring in your fixed costs and such you break even at $12, so you can sell it at, say, $15 and be profitable. What irks you, however, is that you/know/ that there are people out there that would buy it at $25 because it's so useful. If you set the price at that level, however, you lose all those customers that wouldn't pay more than $15 (because they're poor or whatever). So what you do is set the price at $25 and include a $10 mail-in rebate. The rich people will buy it at $25 and probably ignore the rebate (money isn't that valuable to them) while the poor people will find it opportune to spend the time to mail in the rebate request, spend some time on the phone to nag about not having received the money etc.
It would have been more ideal to have two different formal markets, of course, one for poor people and one for rich people and then have different prices in those two markets. This is often not feasible in practice.
What world do you live in where plotting an assasination doesn't qualify a person as "crazy"? I would say that depends entirely on the assassination in question. To take the lazy (easy) example, in my opinion the only thing that was crazy about plotting the assassination on Hitler was that it took them so long to get around to it.
The Chinese aren't as in love with suicide as the Japaneses. That may be, but I seem to recall that's basically what happened with one of the lead paint(?) scandals a number of weeks back.
"You could think you are specifying a porous polypropylene material for the separator, but once the thing is packaged up you would have no way of knowing what you actually got. Even under the best of circumstances, you can get screwed by your own job shop. What if the workers took a short cut and substituted the original material with cardboard?"
Even better there's a link to that article in the writeup! Pretty handy. One would think it's really easy to figure out what you got: you sample one battery out of every thousand (or whatever), open it up and do a thorough inspection of its contents. If it's not up to snuff, you scrap the entire shipment and a factory owner in China commits suicide.
safety is never dropped to cut costs or size. a single lawsuit showing otherwise and the company is ruined. On the contrary, safety is routinely dropped to cut costs and size. If we didn't do this, then everything would be infinitely expensive and we wouldn't ever have gotten as far as to stone tools.
By using any GPL code in your project, you (the creator of the rest of the project) no longer have the freedom to decide what happens to the rest of the code. You, the copyright holder, always have complete freedom as to how to license and use the work to which you hold the copyright. You only run into problems if you intend to stand on the shoulders of giants while writing your own original code.
I'd count "free trade", "relatively unrestricted commerce", "hard work", "commercialization", "commodities", "unfettered access to raw materials", "universal education", "slaves", "an exploitable workforce", "agriculture" or even "really good taffy" amongst the possible "cornerstones" of "Western economies." But "receipts"? Really? I think that when you really get into it "accounting" is pretty prominent on the list and if we give the OP the benefit of the doubt, then "receipts" is probably close enough.
If someone steals something, and then puts it in their bag and walks out setting off the alarms, then if the store has no right to check the bag, then how would the store check if you did steal something? If your jurisdiction allows it, you make a citizen's arrest and pray to your favoured deity that he actually did steal something and that this is enough of a crime to justify such an arrest.
If not (as is the case here in Norway where the police pretty much has a complete monopoly on violence), you challenge him verbally and hope he'll come up to the office with you voluntarily - or else you'll just have to let him go. Then you call the police and some times they ignore you while other times they will run the full length of the legal system to convict someone for stealing a bar of chocoloate (which happened at least once, as I recall, as a matter or principle).
I was surprized at how little negative reaction my post generated. It suggests that in slashdot, at least, atheism is either common or strongly tolerated. Are you suggesting that the normal state of affairs would/should be for atheism not to be tolerated?
The Catholic Church was also, at one time, a "ruthless criminal organization." Or at least that's how I would describe an organization that used to torture and kill those who refused to join it. The inquisition would tend to go after those who pretended to have already joined but who were still following their old religions in practice. The incentives put in place for converting were not, I believe, directly connected with the inquisition (tax breaks and what have you) although the church may certainly have been lobbying for them.
Others were killed and tortured, not for not being christian or not wanting to become one, but for being it in the wrong manner. Obviously, being a misguided christian is a greater crime than being a jew or a muslim in somewhat the same way that being a tratitor is worse than being the enemy.
Of course, that still makes the historical Catholic church a very violent and ruthless organization after modern standards.
If the tale of Jonah isn't literally true, what else in the Bible isn't true? Perhaps someone could go through with a yellow highlighter and mark off those parts I should believe, and those parts I can dismiss as mythology. Given that the world's largest religion is based on it, I think knowing which bits are true would be rather important. The highlighter you are looking for is generally referred to as an education in theology. Depending on what interpretation you subscribe to, different parts of the book will be highlighted. If you go strictly by Aquinas, only a handful of basic tenets remain and the rest is open to questioning and is only really meant as a tool to instruct those less well educated (which would include the lower priesthood).
As someone who became a Mario fan at 26 (blessed Virtual Console), let me be the first to say amen. I seriously doubt that you are the first to say amen.
Wait, we get to choose which laws we obey now? Of course you do. It's called free will. Now, your choice does not come with a complimentary "get out of jail free" card so choose wisely.
the Constitutionally defined rights of the copyright holder They are not Constitutionally defined - they are Constitutionally/allowed/, because if the Constitution did not explicitly allow them they would by default be outlawed by the ninth amendment.
As for "not considering BSDed software free software", you can convert BSD license to copyleft by slapping an extra restriction on it, which you are allowed to do, and as long as the end user is using the BSD licensed version, they have the freedom to do this if they want to. This presumably makes BSD preferrable to, e.g., closed source since BSD code can at least be salvaged. It does not necessarily make it preferrable to GPL, however.
Mine is to create a richer world, overall - one where people have more freedom, in all its variations. That really is begging the question though (hah!) - the debate is not whether or not we want freedom, the debate is over what that freedom is or should be and how such a goal may best be reached.
One of the important freedoms here is the ability to allocate risk, something that can require the ability to create restraints. To understand this properly requires that you are somewhat schooled in understanding economics, including why we want to pay off risk. That we may want something, or that something may be useful or opportune is insufficient grounds upon which to declare it an important freedom. Why is this freedom so important that it should be fundamental to our efforts?
For me, an optimal license would often be one that allowed public access after a reasonably short period - somewhere in the range of 3-5 years - and allowed the creation of derivates that was kept proprietary for that period. Personally, I'd be quite happy if copyright was abolished altogether. Interestingly, perhaps, the end result would be much closer to a BSD situation than a GPL situation.
I'll note that RMS and most of the rest of the community agree with me in considering BSD free software; the copylefter that disregard this seems to be a student invention, with PVV in the forefront. The crux of the matter isn't that BSD software isn't free - it clearly is. The primary problems stems from its ability to become non-free. This can be argued make BSD less "free" than GPL since its freedom is so fleeting.
As far as I can tell, you are arguing that the user should not have the freedom to get the change at a discounted cost (because the developer expects further work) by trading his freedom to have another developer do the work? It is well established practice in modern democratic thinking that it is necessary to some extent to take away people's freedom to give up their own freedoms (inalienable rights being the most extreme example but my nation's copyright law also has elements of this in it). That the ability to give up the right to the sources for software that you pay for should be seen as some sort of "freedom" worthy of preservation seems strange to me. At best, it can be seen as a necessary evil in some circumstances but it seems counter productive to go to any length to preserve such a practice.
Apart from that, developers are the ones that create changes. Without developers, the difference between the GPL and the BSD license is moot. The question, to my mind, is primarily one of what creates the most free software? This comes down to ideology though. BSD only creates free software if you consider BSD software to be "free". If you do not (perhaps because freedom for the user is what matters to you, not freedom for the developer) then clearly, BSD does not create free software at all, it just creates software.
The primary way that the GPL creates more software is by making the contributing developers feel "safe from exploitation" and "fighting against the machine" and "using the license that makes more free software", which in my are irrational, to a degree fueled by rms' excellent propaganda. The two first reasons appear to be very bad ones. If developers want to feel safe from exploitation, they should develop closed source with full copyright protection, or never reveal their software at all. The very nature of information is such that once you release it, you have no real way to prevent it being used to produce nukes, or plan the next holocaust, or whatever. Fighting against the machine is fun, I am sure, but it seems to me that such a desire should be fulfilled by the/type/ of software you write rather than the license you release it under. As for free software, see the above paragraph.
it is usually a case of a BSD developer saying "I want freedom for the people that use the software I write. I don't want to restrict what they can do with it, including making their own software from it and doing whatever they want with that. Ah, but at this point they have stopped being users and have become developers. That's why I'm saying that BSD gives freedom to developers rather than to users. With BSD, I as a user can have someone else tweak a piece of software I am using to fit me better but then risk them holding back their source code, effectively locking me in to them for any future tweaks I would also like. With GPL, the people I have tweak the software need to give me the resulting code and so the next time I need something done to it I have a free choice about who to approach. This because GPL takes freedom away from developers and gives it to users.
The user who is also a developer is such a marginal portion of the user base that he doesn't get any special consideration. He has the freedom of a user when he is a user and the restrictions of a developer when he is a developer.
[GPL developers] end up with "I would feel so bad if somebody else made something useful from my software and I didn't get money, so I'll make it impossible for them to make something useful and make money from it," I am sure you get this crowd also, but it seems to me they suffer from some fundamental misunderstandings about what GPL does to their code. Most importantly, there's nothing stopping anyone from profiting off of someone else's GPL software so if that's the goal then they're simply using the wrong license.
Except that's what the GPL tries to do. It's removing freedom. And that's what many of us BSDers are against. We want our software to keep freedom. Freedom isn't binary, nor can it easily be discussed without qualifiers. In this case, BSD is a case of the developer saying "I want freedom, I want it for myself, and who cares what everyone else does with it" whileas GPL is a case of the developer saying "I want freedom, I want it to rest with the end user of my software and never mind if that causes me some inconvenience in the process". They are different kinds of freedom, resting in different parts of the software ecosystem.
Great, so now I'm limited to the bands that tour and play venues I actually want to visit. Thanks, but I'll take a great $20 CD over a shitty $80 concert any day. There is something intriguingly masochistic about refusing to accept the $0 download and instead insisting on paying $20 for a CD. If your demographic is sufficiently large (and somehow I believe that it is) then - shock horror - the band will be able to make money from selling recordings of its performances and even from selling recordings of studio performances. Which would in fact be an improvement from the current situation since it would actually be the bands collecting that money rather than the middle men.
However in Iraq 2, America is definitely seen as the aggressor, even by friendly nations such as the UK (I mean the citizenry, not the govt.) and have created the problem for themselves. Here is something I'd be curious to know: In Norway, on Discovery Channel, when they refer to Iraq 2 in the various shows it is always (or at least most of the time, I haven't kept statistics) referred to as "the invasion of Iraq" (in English, so I expect the same commentator track is used throughout Europe). Is this different to how the same type of programming is presented on the US Discovery Channel counterpart?
What is your suggestion for promoting science Science is generally pursued either by public institutions (who generally get their funds from tuition, or else the government) and by profit-seeking inventors (who are probably better served pursuing patents, but who will be able to profit from their inventions anyway if they are useful ones).
and the useful arts? That is too big a field for one single answer to address.
How do we encourage authors, Authors will tend to write because they feel the urge to write. And if what they write is good enough that people start taking notice of them, they may even be able to earn money from it by - would you believe it - selling them books, selling them other merchandise, making public appearances and whatever else clever they can think of.
painters, You don't/seriously/ think that a full-size photocopy of the Mona Lisa is going to be as sought after as the original, do you? Art is all about originals for those who are into it and so this really is a total no-brainer.
musicians, etc Again, musicians will play music because they feel the urge to do so. And the decent ones will make money the same way they always have: live performances.
After all, who cares about the Constitutionally protected rights to control distribution? It's not Constitutionally protected - it's Constitutionally permitted to give exclusive distribution rights. That is, the writers of the Consitution apparantly concluded that copyright as they understood it would in itself be in violation of the 9th amendment. They therefore found it necessary to add a note effectively saying that notwithstanding the rest of the Constitution, Congress should still have the power to legislate copyright should they feel so inclined.
The Constitution does not, however, require that copyright must exist, it only says that it can even if its existence does violate people's basic rights (e.g. the 9th amendment again).
Or, in other words, for so long as copyright remains a necessary evil, we'll bow to the inevitable.
Michael Moore is a documentarian. He creates documentaries. His documentaries have a very strong left wing bias. The trick is in recognizing this factor, and judging his films accordingly. Moore strikes me first and foremost as a propagandist who uses the form of documentaries to deliver his propaganda. My impression from watching the Columbine movie was that while it was certainly entertaining in a ye olde stupid Americans kind of way (we Europeans often like to laugh at how silly we think Americans are/can be/might have been) it largely came across as on over-hyped under-critical opinion-fest with a bias so heavy it could probably stop a depleted uranium shell fired point blank.
I also don't much care for his over-provocative methods and the bit of underhanded privacy intrusion we see at the end of the movie (I think) was just plain old obnoxious. Perhaps there is some backstory to that particular incident that I'm just not familiar with, or perhaps the Jackass culture has extended further than I had thought over the pond, but from my my point of view it was so far across the line it alone put the entire movie in a suspicious light.
While I tend to agree with many of Moore's basic sentiments, I don't think he's doing his camp a lot of good with his works. Perhaps if he'd more clearly labeled it as satire or humour it would be a more credible weapon.
Fair Comment, But everyone understands the concept that Knives are sharp. It is a "feature" of being a knife.
Random chance of exploding is not a necessary feature of being a computer, and if it is I certainly don't recall it being mentioned in the Ads. It might just be a question of time before it sinks in (unless, of course, we manage to drastically improve the technology).
How long until wilderness survival guides have chapters on "how to turn your laptop battery into a signal flare" and "starting a fire with your cell phone battery"? They would probably be quite useful chapters, even.
Of course, as others have touched upon, "how to blow up an aircraft with a beowulf cluster of Dells" would be sure to be a popular article in certain circles.
Really, is it that hard to carry an additional one pound and have a safer and probably better battery in a laptop? Has society gotten that wimpy? Intentionally carrying around a ticking time bomb and keeping it on your lap, all just to be fashionable, isn't exactly what I would call "wimpy" . . .
Slashdot Mirror
A mail-in rebate is one manifestation of the concept of market segmentation. The basic idea is that you have a product that costs you $10 to manufacture and distribute and figuring in your fixed costs and such you break even at $12, so you can sell it at, say, $15 and be profitable. What irks you, however, is that you /know/ that there are people out there that would buy it at $25 because it's so useful. If you set the price at that level, however, you lose all those customers that wouldn't pay more than $15 (because they're poor or whatever). So what you do is set the price at $25 and include a $10 mail-in rebate. The rich people will buy it at $25 and probably ignore the rebate (money isn't that valuable to them) while the poor people will find it opportune to spend the time to mail in the rebate request, spend some time on the phone to nag about not having received the money etc.
It would have been more ideal to have two different formal markets, of course, one for poor people and one for rich people and then have different prices in those two markets. This is often not feasible in practice.
If not (as is the case here in Norway where the police pretty much has a complete monopoly on violence), you challenge him verbally and hope he'll come up to the office with you voluntarily - or else you'll just have to let him go. Then you call the police and some times they ignore you while other times they will run the full length of the legal system to convict someone for stealing a bar of chocoloate (which happened at least once, as I recall, as a matter or principle).
Others were killed and tortured, not for not being christian or not wanting to become one, but for being it in the wrong manner. Obviously, being a misguided christian is a greater crime than being a jew or a muslim in somewhat the same way that being a tratitor is worse than being the enemy.
Of course, that still makes the historical Catholic church a very violent and ruthless organization after modern standards.
The user who is also a developer is such a marginal portion of the user base that he doesn't get any special consideration. He has the freedom of a user when he is a user and the restrictions of a developer when he is a developer. [GPL developers] end up with "I would feel so bad if somebody else made something useful from my software and I didn't get money, so I'll make it impossible for them to make something useful and make money from it," I am sure you get this crowd also, but it seems to me they suffer from some fundamental misunderstandings about what GPL does to their code. Most importantly, there's nothing stopping anyone from profiting off of someone else's GPL software so if that's the goal then they're simply using the wrong license.
And that's what many of us BSDers are against. We want our software to keep freedom. Freedom isn't binary, nor can it easily be discussed without qualifiers. In this case, BSD is a case of the developer saying "I want freedom, I want it for myself, and who cares what everyone else does with it" whileas GPL is a case of the developer saying "I want freedom, I want it to rest with the end user of my software and never mind if that causes me some inconvenience in the process". They are different kinds of freedom, resting in different parts of the software ecosystem.
The Constitution does not, however, require that copyright must exist, it only says that it can even if its existence does violate people's basic rights (e.g. the 9th amendment again).
Or, in other words, for so long as copyright remains a necessary evil, we'll bow to the inevitable.
I also don't much care for his over-provocative methods and the bit of underhanded privacy intrusion we see at the end of the movie (I think) was just plain old obnoxious. Perhaps there is some backstory to that particular incident that I'm just not familiar with, or perhaps the Jackass culture has extended further than I had thought over the pond, but from my my point of view it was so far across the line it alone put the entire movie in a suspicious light.
While I tend to agree with many of Moore's basic sentiments, I don't think he's doing his camp a lot of good with his works. Perhaps if he'd more clearly labeled it as satire or humour it would be a more credible weapon.
Random chance of exploding is not a necessary feature of being a computer, and if it is I certainly don't recall it being mentioned in the Ads. It might just be a question of time before it sinks in (unless, of course, we manage to drastically improve the technology).
How long until wilderness survival guides have chapters on "how to turn your laptop battery into a signal flare" and "starting a fire with your cell phone battery"? They would probably be quite useful chapters, even.
Of course, as others have touched upon, "how to blow up an aircraft with a beowulf cluster of Dells" would be sure to be a popular article in certain circles.