Voting based on a simple majority works perfectly with third parties in coalition with a larger party. If neither of the two big parties has a majority, the third party that can tip the balance becomes important.
You seem to be confused with our actual elections, which don't require a simple majority. When the outcome is based on a plurality, a strong third party does throw power to the big party with which its voters are most likely to disagree. We saw that in the 1992-2000 elections.
Unfortunately, third parties with no chance of actually winning the presidency continue to focus on the top of the ticket, which hurts a candidate with similar politics, instead of focusing on gaining seats in Congress where they could have an actual effect.
Of course, if they have no chance of winning a Congressional election, either, they risk just hurting the similar major party and helping the more dissimilar party win another seat in Congress.
The system doesn't minimize the power of third parties who actually get some power; it just makes it nearly impossible to do so in the first place, and punishes any who come close by helping a party that's likely to be hated by those sympathetic to the cause. Which is why Perot and Nader both lost a lot of support the second time they ran.
That's a horrible example. How would having an identical copy of a public park reduce the "value" of that park in any possible theory of value?
If Los Angeles built an exact replica of Central Park, would that someone reduce the utility of the first one for New Yorkers?
More to the point, is it "theft" if I show up to work today? After all, if I didn't show up, there's some non-zero chance I'd be fired, creating some tiny amount of marginal value to all of the unemployed people who are qualified to do my job.
Is it physically possible to take an action whatsoever that doesn't qualify as "theft" under your definition?
Umm, yes. But you're not free to distribute those copies as you see fit. Grandparent poster was advocating a limit to how long a company is allowed to sell music at a given price, after which it would be free, or cheaper. My point is that there arleady is such a limit, but it's a lot longer than the 6 or 7 years he's hoping for.
I don't see what "misconception" you're driving at, unless you're suggesting that after copyright runs out, the material doesn't pass into the public domain. Or maybe you didn't bother to read the comment you were replying to, even after quoting it.
Declaring them a monopoly would be like declaring all of the existing auto manufacturers with more than 1% of the market a collective monopoly, because obviously there's no competition.
The iPod most certainly doesn't play favorites. On shuffle mode, it will play every single song in your playlist exactly once (and tell you how many of the songs it's played so far) before starting over in another order.
I don't own an iPod shuffle, so I don't know if it does the same thing. I'd suspect it doesn't. Or Matthew Levy doesn't know what he's talking about, which is just as likely. Worshipping real geeks without being one yourself doesn't make you a good tech writer.
Also for those who don't know, he's doing something "no one else would do" in a very similar fashion to the way Craig Kilborne did it before he moved to a much crappier show on CBS.
First of all, the suggestion that Microsoft could subvert the GPL by selling 2 separate products, MS Linux (GPL) and a drivers package (proprietary) is kind of silly. Why wouldn't people just buy the driver package and use another distro with it? The code in the GPL'ed project that accessed the drivers would necessarily be open source as a part of that package, and could be taken by the other distros.
As for the whole idea of the article, one wonders how Mr. Dvorak would explain that Apple hasn't killed Microsoft yet. After all, damn near every peripheral works right out of the box on a Mac without getting into driver hell. Of course, being who he is, his repsonse would probably be "because Apple suxx0rs, D00D!!! My brother B1FF SEZ SO!1!"
To be fair, at least Disney (and Dreamworks, to a lesser extent, if they're offered the rights) have a real motive for not wanting to distribute Pixar's films for anything less than the huge portion of the profits they're getting now. Pixar's movies make Disney's look much worse in comparison.
Plus Pixar's refusal to make Toy Story 2 a crappy direct-to-video movie calls in to question Disney Animation's whole business plan of making one good movie a decade then turning it into a franchise of bad movies/TV shows. c.f. Lilo & Stitch on TV or Mulan II: The Electric Boogaloo.
It's hardly going to take bullying to get someone to distribute Pixar's films. Unless Cars is the biggest flop in the history of cinema, any studio would be foolish to not want to be associated with Pixar.
To be fair, many of the right wing Christians will also be ready to haul you before a McCarthy hearing for not worshipping money and possessions, too. It's not just the flag.
And if you try to explain that Marxism is a lot closer to the philosophy Jesus taught than capitalism is, they'll probably crucify you.
Since BIND comes with OS X Client, anyone who's downloading and building it is a bit foolish. As for configuring it, it's not exactly rocket science. If you really need BIND you can take a half hour to learn how to configure it.
Is it at all possible that iDownload could use the DMCA to sue people who make software to remove their spyware?
No. There's no copyright issue whatsoever.
They might be able to argue that the spyware removal software is interfering with contracts between them and their users (as I believe some actually have tried to argue), but good luck convincing a court. At best, they could try to sue the people who installed their spyware, agreed to their ridiculous EULA, and then broke the EULA by removing it. I imagine the first person sued under those pretenses would just need to get a single Windows users on the jury, countersue for 1 billion dollars, and seize all of the spyware company's assets.
It's not happening now because it's a lot harder to turn the Mac into a zombie in the first place. You're hardly going to build an efficient collection of spamming zombies by putting malicious Java applications on random websites that no one's likely to visit. But once you do manage to get control of a machine, it's just as easy to do bad stuff with it if it's a Mac as it is with a Windows machine. You might not be able to do bad stuff to the machine to the same extent, but anything a user can do, a compromised Mac can do, too.
The Fair Use provisions of copyright law allow the recording of broadcasts for time-shifting purposes, and we're allowed to reproduce copyrighted works we're bought under the same provisions for personal use, provided there's no DRM being broken (which may be a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, even if the copying would be legal if the DRM wasn't present) to do so. Making copies of copyrighted materials that we otherwise have no right to, however, is still clearly illegal.
Objective C was invented long before NeXT existed. Hell, it was before the first Macintosh came out, when Steve Jobs would have thought you were crazy if you suggested someone could force him out of Apple so he'd found another computer company.
All of the user accounts on my OS X machines are allowed to send as much email as they want. The OS does nothing at all to prevent my account or any other user's account from sending billions of pieces of spam. My ISP would probably cut off my DSL before I managed to send that much, but my Mac's happy to send it all.
To be fair, it looks to me like the political system we're giving them is better than ours, because it doesn't feature 2 strong parties that just need a plurality to grab all the power. They can actually vote for someone who they agree with, instead of the lesser of 2 evils, and have a hope of a coalition government that might try to satisfy their interests.
Of course, the whole system is likely to collapse violently sooner or later, since they lack the social infrastructure for democracy. Until then it will be nice to have another example of how a democracy should work.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be confused with our actual elections, which don't require a simple majority. When the outcome is based on a plurality, a strong third party does throw power to the big party with which its voters are most likely to disagree. We saw that in the 1992-2000 elections.
Unfortunately, third parties with no chance of actually winning the presidency continue to focus on the top of the ticket, which hurts a candidate with similar politics, instead of focusing on gaining seats in Congress where they could have an actual effect.
Of course, if they have no chance of winning a Congressional election, either, they risk just hurting the similar major party and helping the more dissimilar party win another seat in Congress.
The system doesn't minimize the power of third parties who actually get some power; it just makes it nearly impossible to do so in the first place, and punishes any who come close by helping a party that's likely to be hated by those sympathetic to the cause. Which is why Perot and Nader both lost a lot of support the second time they ran.
If Los Angeles built an exact replica of Central Park, would that someone reduce the utility of the first one for New Yorkers?
More to the point, is it "theft" if I show up to work today? After all, if I didn't show up, there's some non-zero chance I'd be fired, creating some tiny amount of marginal value to all of the unemployed people who are qualified to do my job.
Is it physically possible to take an action whatsoever that doesn't qualify as "theft" under your definition?
I don't see what "misconception" you're driving at, unless you're suggesting that after copyright runs out, the material doesn't pass into the public domain. Or maybe you didn't bother to read the comment you were replying to, even after quoting it.
Declaring them a monopoly would be like declaring all of the existing auto manufacturers with more than 1% of the market a collective monopoly, because obviously there's no competition.
Of course, you'll probably be long dead before the copyright on any high-quality digital recordings runs out, so it doesn't help you much.
I don't own an iPod shuffle, so I don't know if it does the same thing. I'd suspect it doesn't. Or Matthew Levy doesn't know what he's talking about, which is just as likely. Worshipping real geeks without being one yourself doesn't make you a good tech writer.
Or iPöd, as Swedish does use umlauts over 'o's. Of course, they have loan words from German that use ü, too.
Also for those who don't know, he's doing something "no one else would do" in a very similar fashion to the way Craig Kilborne did it before he moved to a much crappier show on CBS.
Uhh... yeah.
It's a good thing Swift and Voltaire were neither honest nor intelligent, then.
I thought the answer to his question was "Cowboy Neal".
As for the whole idea of the article, one wonders how Mr. Dvorak would explain that Apple hasn't killed Microsoft yet. After all, damn near every peripheral works right out of the box on a Mac without getting into driver hell. Of course, being who he is, his repsonse would probably be "because Apple suxx0rs, D00D!!! My brother B1FF SEZ SO!1!"
When did IKEA start selling consumer electronics?
How exactly do you propose the air compressor would be powered?
Plus Pixar's refusal to make Toy Story 2 a crappy direct-to-video movie calls in to question Disney Animation's whole business plan of making one good movie a decade then turning it into a franchise of bad movies/TV shows. c.f. Lilo & Stitch on TV or Mulan II: The Electric Boogaloo.
It's hardly going to take bullying to get someone to distribute Pixar's films. Unless Cars is the biggest flop in the history of cinema, any studio would be foolish to not want to be associated with Pixar.
And if you try to explain that Marxism is a lot closer to the philosophy Jesus taught than capitalism is, they'll probably crucify you.
Since BIND comes with OS X Client, anyone who's downloading and building it is a bit foolish. As for configuring it, it's not exactly rocket science. If you really need BIND you can take a half hour to learn how to configure it.
No. There's no copyright issue whatsoever.
They might be able to argue that the spyware removal software is interfering with contracts between them and their users (as I believe some actually have tried to argue), but good luck convincing a court. At best, they could try to sue the people who installed their spyware, agreed to their ridiculous EULA, and then broke the EULA by removing it. I imagine the first person sued under those pretenses would just need to get a single Windows users on the jury, countersue for 1 billion dollars, and seize all of the spyware company's assets.
My laser printer has had the same toner cartridge in it for about 8 years. It still prints just fine. Sounds like FUD to me.
It's not happening now because it's a lot harder to turn the Mac into a zombie in the first place. You're hardly going to build an efficient collection of spamming zombies by putting malicious Java applications on random websites that no one's likely to visit. But once you do manage to get control of a machine, it's just as easy to do bad stuff with it if it's a Mac as it is with a Windows machine. You might not be able to do bad stuff to the machine to the same extent, but anything a user can do, a compromised Mac can do, too.
Interesting. I imagine that if C++ had been the one with a $10,000 compiler, everyone today would be using Objective C.
The Fair Use provisions of copyright law allow the recording of broadcasts for time-shifting purposes, and we're allowed to reproduce copyrighted works we're bought under the same provisions for personal use, provided there's no DRM being broken (which may be a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, even if the copying would be legal if the DRM wasn't present) to do so. Making copies of copyrighted materials that we otherwise have no right to, however, is still clearly illegal.
Objective C was invented long before NeXT existed. Hell, it was before the first Macintosh came out, when Steve Jobs would have thought you were crazy if you suggested someone could force him out of Apple so he'd found another computer company.
How is this "informative"?
Of course, the whole system is likely to collapse violently sooner or later, since they lack the social infrastructure for democracy. Until then it will be nice to have another example of how a democracy should work.