But if you're a DVD exec, I want the buttons on my DVD player ('fast forward,' 'top menu') to work as they *should* without playing "Mother-may-I?" with the embedded OS. The menu should NEVER be restricted. That doesn't even make sense! What harm could my having instant access to your product's menu do to your bottom line?
Two ways.
#1: It enables bypassing the copyright/FBI warning. This was the reason the "no fast forward, no menu" toggle was put into the DVD spec. It was thought the constant reminder would help limit piracy, and thus preserve the legal sales market.
#2: It enables bypassing the commercials; if you aren't forced to watch the trailers and commercials, you might not be brainwashed into buying their other crap. This is the use that was realized shortly after deployment of the standard.
Both can impact their bottom line if you can avoid them. Of course, #2 is massively annoying (more people can stand the five second annoyance of the FBI warning than eight minutes of mandatory commercials), and thus causes people to go out and find ways to get around it, which leads directly to bypassing the point of #1... and the region coding to boot in the process of doing so.
In short, the marketing divisions of major entertainment companies are probably the inspiration for Douglas Adams characterizing that of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the Wall when the Revolution comes". Here's hoping....
Personally I think "Don't promote businesses which serve no purpose other than helping students cheat on their schoolwork" is entirely consistent with "Don't be evil."
It's a good decision for Google's own selfish reasons, too. They prefer to hire the creme de la creme, who rise to the very top by their own efforts and nature. Such essay writing and other cheating services only facilitate the rise of the scum.
The grid is expected to be able to self-regulate power surges and maintain supply under extreme conditions.
Given this is NYC, one of the two top targets for attack on the US, and given that I am Quite Mad, I wonder exactly what manner of "power surge" would get transmitted within the superconducting grid by the EMP of a terrorist (or not) nuke at (say) one of the distribution endpoints? And how much of the attached US power grid infrastructure would get taken out (temporarily and long term) because of the efficient propagation of the EMP via superconductor?
And does my surge protector's warranty cover this? =)
Actually, it's almost like they don't want us to watch it. Fine with me.
I agree. My "watching" list has been short for a while. I've got HBO (free with the rent at my apartment), and haven't watched a damn thing they've aired this year. SciFi has been my main staple, but (as always) they're struggling. Painkiller Jane seems to be failing the Sturgeon's Law threshold, and since SG1 and Atlantis have both been crap of late, they've also fallen by the wayside. The Dresden Files aren't bad, but the books are better, so I'm reading them (and buying them) instead. Heroes looks like its about to jump the shark, either with the season finale or with the first couple episodes afterward. This leaves my program list down to Battlestar Galactica, Mythbusters, and Good Eats; BSG isn't up again until later in the summer, and I don't catch the other two regularly.
That said, I have no doubts that said helicopter will also take out 802.11 signals because only a really dumb team would jam only mobile signals.
On the other hand, there's a lot of spectrum, and if you are planning an assassination, local rules about "assigned frequencies" and "allowable broadcast power" really aren't a concern for the bad guys. An pro-am radio transmitter, tone generator, and a high-powered parabolic antenna (an old satellite dish?) shouldn't add more than $5k (at worst) to the cost of the plot. Finding a location to transmit from shouldn't be too hard; bypassing a home's mains feed to get you 100A at 220V takes a qualified electrician to do without killing yourself, but that's not an excessively hard-to-get skill set. The transmitter won't last long when overpowered by that much, but it's doesn't need to. Voila, any transistor radio now can serve as the detonator (as may the filings in your teeth). To add insult to injury, use a cell phone to remotely activate the radio transmitter.
I suspect the point is not to make it impossible for the terrorists (it's not practical), but merely to make sure it isn't easy — the old "low hanging fruit" approach. The fanatic mindset isn't generally very good at creative thinking, so if the can defenders prevent old ideas from working, they force the fanatics to continue working from a weakness rather than their strengths.
Having taught programming a few times since, it all kind of weaves together: learning programming is more of a journey of aided discovery than memorizing route information.
"Rote", like spelling... unless you're taking your "journey" metaphor in an unexpected direction. =)
I think there is a contrast between that and most teaching.
This depends on the caliber of educators you have in charge of teaching. I'd characterize a large part of my elementary school math education as "a journey of aided discovery", especially the parts that got the class most interested in math. Ditto reading. Ditto at high school the better social studies stuff. (The European history teacher didn't do so well at it.)
1) Most if not all patents on the list cannot be enforced (e.g. sudo, xml, smilies, content syndication, rss, jpeg, tabbed-browsing, etc, etc, etc.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "cannot be enforced." That the patent is sufficiently flawed that the courts will eventually find the patent should not have been issued due to obviousness and/or prior art? That there are no targets available for litigation over use of the patent-infringing software? That if they attempt to sue the available target(s), the consequences will be worse for Microsoft than not suing?
I can easily see obviousness and prior art taking out 200 of the 250 or so without much trouble, and perhaps another 25 after protracted court fights, but I don't think it will be all of them. Finding litigation targets is trivial under US law, since as others have noted infringement suits may be directed against users of the infringing technology as well as producers.
The potentially pyrrhic nature of this litigation is possible, but it may be more a case of MAD. Consider as an example USP # 7,213,202 (applied for in 1999, granted this month), which looks to patent style sheets (or something similar). Assuming it stands (since much of the prior art is Microsoft's), the option becomes simple: everyone without Microsoft licenses must stop using and supporting CSS. Safari gets a co-license deal after some litigation, Firefox and Opera get hosed. The problem is... IE sucks. And there are enough businesses out there concerned enough with security that they may collectively decide to let the standard die, rather than be trapped into IE. But this is bad for everyone: CSS is useful.
So, I ask again: what do you mean by "cannot be enforced"?
Apple has a cult. Linux has a cult. Microsoft is the equivalent of Catholocism.;)
No, it's far closer to Satanism. All other faiths know Microsoft exists, but they are loathed rather than revered. Microsoft's worshipers are few and despised, who seek to improve their worldly position by dark pacts with an unholy power.
Every guy who buys a land barge drives it around feeling like the Big Man About Town, but to everyone else on the street he's either invisible or just a dickhead who doesn't give a rat's ass about the environmental cost of what he's doing.
...and who can't drive.
Seriously. Almost all of the idiots I see who can't stay even vaguely in lane, signal turns, or stop at the stop lines on the road are driving SUVs, with the rare red penismobile sportscar thrown in every now and then. I swear, it's almost enough to make me start buying corn syrup in bulk for use as a covert fuel additive.
The difference is that even if there is no deity, the majority religions still provide useful and positive services to their members.
Like brainwashing them to believe that if they strap on a bomb and kill the infidel, they'll go straight to heaven where virgins await them?
It's more accurate to say that the religions provide useful and positive services to their societies. In the case of "strap on a bomb and kill the infidel", it encourages surplus male population to go out and annoy outsiders, rather than make trouble in the local community. As long as you have at least modest genetic diversity, this isn't a serious problem in a polygamous society. If you have 72 nubile young women, then it doesn't matter much to the size of the next generation whether you have 144 irritatable young men, or just one very tired and happy one: you still end up with the same number of babies.
It may help if you think of religions as a trait of societies similar to genetic traits in an organism. They arise due to mutations (genetic or conceptual), and are subject to evolutionary pressures. Those which are more of a benefit than harm to the society are more likely to thrive. It doesn't have to do a LOT of good, just more good than not having it.
Religion is useful for inculcating basic ethical habits into those too young, simple, and/or stupid to independently develop them. Smile; if you think religious rednecks like Pat Robertson are annoying now, just imagine what they'd be like without it. (Watching "The Hills Have Eyes" again might help.)
RIAA, MPAA, NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS, Lawyers, Rich Scientologist perverts, corrupt, sold out congressmen/senators, AT&T, Verizon and countless more. just reading slashdot is enough to chill one from head to toe.
On the bright side, the EFF and ACLU haven't given up yet. For that matter, the NRA is still pretty healthy if it gets that far.
Heck, lets just go back to the more traditional system of watery tarts distributing scimitars.
I'm sure that could end up with worse results than the present system... if only because I can't see how it could possibly get worse results than the present system, the declaration of which inevitably results in utter disaster.
No, wait... the good part about the present system is that President Bush can only hold on for at most a bit under two more years, whereas the watery tart gives a lifetime appointment — more like the Supreme Court.
<html><header><title>You Own an Integer</title>
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<h5> 44 67 DF 9B 0E C2 38 20 18 EE 1E 05 6F 49 CB 31</h5>
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Here is the ciphertext: 1302FFF479AC1849769A7B620A3BB81D6448FFC86FBB4B0059 AF5D564F058A1F6448FFC261B7184379803E6A1827EB5E2A02 FFEF61AD16
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1. I don't think lawyers are paid to manage the public relations of whatever company.
2. They should advise about the possible _legal_ consequences of their actions, which is something they love doing anyway, and I find no cause to believe they did otherwise.
IAmNotALawyer, but it seems the limitation of scope you propose would bring you into disagreement with the New York Bar Association; adding some emphasis:
A lawyer should exert best efforts to ensure that decisions of the client are made only after the client has been informed of relevant considerations. A lawyer ought to initiate this decision-making process if the client does not do so. Advice of a lawyer to the client need not be confined to purely legal considerations. A lawyer should advise the client of the possible effect of each legal alternative. A lawyer should bring to bear upon this decision-making process the fullness of his or her experience as well as the lawyer's objective viewpoint. In assisting the client to reach a proper decision, it is often desirable for a lawyer to point out those factors which may lead to a decision that is morally just as well as legally permissible. The lawyer may emphasize the possibility of harsh consequences that might result from assertion of legally permissible positions.
Or, in other words, if the lawyers didn't consider this possible unintended consequence, they were either stupid or grossly ignorant, perhaps even to the point of professional negligence. (I expect other state codes have similar provisions.)
I bet they knew fully the possible scenarios, and I bet they couldn't care less if some website made a fuss about it.
But if so, did they feel the same way about it spreading to two million or so web pages around the world? Hopefully for the sake of the poor lawyers involved you're right. If this possible reaction was anticipated, and if it end up affecting the legal merits as to whether the 09F9 key can be called a "trade secret" any longer (which now fails the laugh test), then the decision to take the chosen course of action should have been made by the client.
The hardships of past generations should not be used to justify hardships in this generation.
Feel free to tell her that. =)
Most of the rest of your comment is completely off-target. Her cooking is distinctly Italian, she regularly attends mass at a Italian-American Roman Catholic church, practices her Italian regularly with other Italian-American friends and with family still overseas... although she's recently had to cut back on her use of vulgar Italian now that my cousins are finally distracting her with grandchildren to dote on. Aside from the idiocies of Mussolini (which she will rant about whenever she feels provoked to, including when people discuss our current President), she's generally proud of her Italian and Italian-American heritage.
As for the "hardships" issue, I believe you imply a false dichotomy. Life is hard, no matter what; it's just a question of how the hardship should be distributed. Either immigrants (such as the estimated ten million or so Mexicans currently in the US, legally and not) must face the short-term hardship of learning the language, face the long-term hardship of being at a linguistic disadvantage, or get the 90%+ monolingual 300 million US citizens to become bilingual.
I don't think mandating English as the "official" language is a good idea, and efforts should be made to help with the transition. But I still think expecting that transition to be made involves the least overall and long-term "hardship". And I think my aunt understands this, understands how painful it is to learn Enlish (she was sixteen when she reached the US, with her entire English vocabulary consisting of "Hello"), but has no sympathy with anyone who thinks that just because it's hard, that that should stop them.
Seriously: why does the very same sentiment in the US produce such vitriol?
My only encounter with anything like "vitriol" on the subject has been from one of my Aunts, who immigrated to the US in 1950 or so as a teenager, and is generally quite liberal politically. Her position: "If I had to learn this ****ing language, then so do they!"
Despite the years, her Italian heritage often shines through.
It probably would have taken you less time to find this page than it did to write your post.
Being old fashioned, I checked that it's not a novel construction by looking at my 1973 dead-tree dictionary first; however, turning up this link to indicate the same thing shouldn't have taken much longer.
Incidentally: Dammit, America, stop cowering in fear!!!
Either way, that process can be time intensive as there are not a lot of people out there who have experience with the data models, the technology, and the business models.
Conjecture: the limited supply of such knowledge base experts today is a direct but unintentional result of the early 1990's The Hacker Crackdown.
No one will buy desktop PCs. in 2017 everything will be similar to what we call a laptop today.
While I think you're right that (barring major societal shocks) laptops will be a massive majority, there will still be some reasons for a "desktop". Primarily, users who are elderly and disabled. My sister has secondary progressive MS; she uses a two-monitor setup (one for the desktop, one for Windows magnifier) to improve visibility. She's considering switching to a flat panel TV or to an overhead LCD projector after she the house purchase is finalized, but the two LCD screens gives more desktop pixel-acreage. Also, there's no way she could use a laptop keyboard or trackpad; she uses a BigKeys keyboard and Trackball Mouse for manual input when coding, but mostly relies DragonVoice for input in word processing and email.
Of course, "desktops" for most of these users may look more like a Mac Mini than a Lian Li Server Case. There will also be (as you note) the fringe crowd, running giant honking servers from paranoia or for amusement, fiddling with technology just to see what it can be made to do; but I bet this group will be smaller than those who use small desktops from need.
Others have noted two reasons your prediction about home servers is flawed: the wildly optimistic assumption you make that because reduced technical need for IP space restrictions implies ISPs' will be more tolerant in an IPv6 environment, and disaster preparedness advantages of such central services. I also suggest another reason: security.
NAT serves two functions: as an IP space multiplier, and as a firewall. Until servers for such functions become sufficiently hardened against attack and security compromise as to make such unheard of, or until firewall technology leaps far ahead of the system perversion experts with a simultaneous price drop and usability improvements to suit the home user, most people won't want all the gizmos on their home LAN to be exposing bare silicon to the internet.
(Your position also assumes everyone will want to get their own DNS name, but that at least might be plausible.)
Slashdot Mirror
But if you're a DVD exec, I want the buttons on my DVD player ('fast forward,' 'top menu') to work as they *should* without playing "Mother-may-I?" with the embedded OS. The menu should NEVER be restricted. That doesn't even make sense! What harm could my having instant access to your product's menu do to your bottom line?
Two ways.
#1: It enables bypassing the copyright/FBI warning. This was the reason the "no fast forward, no menu" toggle was put into the DVD spec. It was thought the constant reminder would help limit piracy, and thus preserve the legal sales market.
#2: It enables bypassing the commercials; if you aren't forced to watch the trailers and commercials, you might not be brainwashed into buying their other crap. This is the use that was realized shortly after deployment of the standard.
Both can impact their bottom line if you can avoid them. Of course, #2 is massively annoying (more people can stand the five second annoyance of the FBI warning than eight minutes of mandatory commercials), and thus causes people to go out and find ways to get around it, which leads directly to bypassing the point of #1... and the region coding to boot in the process of doing so.
In short, the marketing divisions of major entertainment companies are probably the inspiration for Douglas Adams characterizing that of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the Wall when the Revolution comes". Here's hoping....
So that's... about 330 MILLION IP addresses for the US DoD alone? And people bitch about MIT hoarding!
Perhaps, but when contemplating prying them loose the phrase "you and what army?" may need literal consideration.
Personally I think "Don't promote businesses which serve no purpose other than helping students cheat on their schoolwork" is entirely consistent with "Don't be evil."
It's a good decision for Google's own selfish reasons, too. They prefer to hire the creme de la creme, who rise to the very top by their own efforts and nature. Such essay writing and other cheating services only facilitate the rise of the scum.
(Hat tip to the late Edgar Bergen.)
The grid is expected to be able to self-regulate power surges and maintain supply under extreme conditions.
Given this is NYC, one of the two top targets for attack on the US, and given that I am Quite Mad, I wonder exactly what manner of "power surge" would get transmitted within the superconducting grid by the EMP of a terrorist (or not) nuke at (say) one of the distribution endpoints? And how much of the attached US power grid infrastructure would get taken out (temporarily and long term) because of the efficient propagation of the EMP via superconductor?
And does my surge protector's warranty cover this? =)
Actually, it's almost like they don't want us to watch it. Fine with me.
I agree. My "watching" list has been short for a while. I've got HBO (free with the rent at my apartment), and haven't watched a damn thing they've aired this year. SciFi has been my main staple, but (as always) they're struggling. Painkiller Jane seems to be failing the Sturgeon's Law threshold, and since SG1 and Atlantis have both been crap of late, they've also fallen by the wayside. The Dresden Files aren't bad, but the books are better, so I'm reading them (and buying them) instead. Heroes looks like its about to jump the shark, either with the season finale or with the first couple episodes afterward. This leaves my program list down to Battlestar Galactica, Mythbusters, and Good Eats; BSG isn't up again until later in the summer, and I don't catch the other two regularly.
Fsck 'em.
That said, I have no doubts that said helicopter will also take out 802.11 signals because only a really dumb team would jam only mobile signals.
On the other hand, there's a lot of spectrum, and if you are planning an assassination, local rules about "assigned frequencies" and "allowable broadcast power" really aren't a concern for the bad guys. An pro-am radio transmitter, tone generator, and a high-powered parabolic antenna (an old satellite dish?) shouldn't add more than $5k (at worst) to the cost of the plot. Finding a location to transmit from shouldn't be too hard; bypassing a home's mains feed to get you 100A at 220V takes a qualified electrician to do without killing yourself, but that's not an excessively hard-to-get skill set. The transmitter won't last long when overpowered by that much, but it's doesn't need to. Voila, any transistor radio now can serve as the detonator (as may the filings in your teeth). To add insult to injury, use a cell phone to remotely activate the radio transmitter.
I suspect the point is not to make it impossible for the terrorists (it's not practical), but merely to make sure it isn't easy — the old "low hanging fruit" approach. The fanatic mindset isn't generally very good at creative thinking, so if the can defenders prevent old ideas from working, they force the fanatics to continue working from a weakness rather than their strengths.
Having taught programming a few times since, it all kind of weaves together: learning programming is more of a journey of aided discovery than memorizing route information.
"Rote", like spelling... unless you're taking your "journey" metaphor in an unexpected direction. =)
I think there is a contrast between that and most teaching.
This depends on the caliber of educators you have in charge of teaching. I'd characterize a large part of my elementary school math education as "a journey of aided discovery", especially the parts that got the class most interested in math. Ditto reading. Ditto at high school the better social studies stuff. (The European history teacher didn't do so well at it.)
1) Most if not all patents on the list cannot be enforced (e.g. sudo, xml, smilies, content syndication, rss, jpeg, tabbed-browsing, etc, etc, etc.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "cannot be enforced." That the patent is sufficiently flawed that the courts will eventually find the patent should not have been issued due to obviousness and/or prior art? That there are no targets available for litigation over use of the patent-infringing software? That if they attempt to sue the available target(s), the consequences will be worse for Microsoft than not suing?
I can easily see obviousness and prior art taking out 200 of the 250 or so without much trouble, and perhaps another 25 after protracted court fights, but I don't think it will be all of them. Finding litigation targets is trivial under US law, since as others have noted infringement suits may be directed against users of the infringing technology as well as producers.
The potentially pyrrhic nature of this litigation is possible, but it may be more a case of MAD. Consider as an example USP # 7,213,202 (applied for in 1999, granted this month), which looks to patent style sheets (or something similar). Assuming it stands (since much of the prior art is Microsoft's), the option becomes simple: everyone without Microsoft licenses must stop using and supporting CSS. Safari gets a co-license deal after some litigation, Firefox and Opera get hosed. The problem is... IE sucks. And there are enough businesses out there concerned enough with security that they may collectively decide to let the standard die, rather than be trapped into IE. But this is bad for everyone: CSS is useful.
So, I ask again: what do you mean by "cannot be enforced"?
Microsoft hasn't even done 235 novel things in it's lifetime, let alone patentable.
It doesn't need to have done them; it just needs to have bought the rights from those who have.
Apple has a cult. Linux has a cult. Microsoft is the equivalent of Catholocism. ;)
No, it's far closer to Satanism. All other faiths know Microsoft exists, but they are loathed rather than revered. Microsoft's worshipers are few and despised, who seek to improve their worldly position by dark pacts with an unholy power.
Sign here in blood. In triplicate, if you please.
Then there are those of us that drive SUVs because our penis wont fit in a compact.
It's usually just the ego that doesn't fit for men. Women, on the other hand, sometimes have a valid (NSFW?) excuse.
Every guy who buys a land barge drives it around feeling like the Big Man About Town, but to everyone else on the street he's either invisible or just a dickhead who doesn't give a rat's ass about the environmental cost of what he's doing.
Seriously. Almost all of the idiots I see who can't stay even vaguely in lane, signal turns, or stop at the stop lines on the road are driving SUVs, with the rare red penismobile sportscar thrown in every now and then. I swear, it's almost enough to make me start buying corn syrup in bulk for use as a covert fuel additive.
Like brainwashing them to believe that if they strap on a bomb and kill the infidel, they'll go straight to heaven where virgins await them?
It's more accurate to say that the religions provide useful and positive services to their societies. In the case of "strap on a bomb and kill the infidel", it encourages surplus male population to go out and annoy outsiders, rather than make trouble in the local community. As long as you have at least modest genetic diversity, this isn't a serious problem in a polygamous society. If you have 72 nubile young women, then it doesn't matter much to the size of the next generation whether you have 144 irritatable young men, or just one very tired and happy one: you still end up with the same number of babies.
It may help if you think of religions as a trait of societies similar to genetic traits in an organism. They arise due to mutations (genetic or conceptual), and are subject to evolutionary pressures. Those which are more of a benefit than harm to the society are more likely to thrive. It doesn't have to do a LOT of good, just more good than not having it.
Religion is useful for inculcating basic ethical habits into those too young, simple, and/or stupid to independently develop them. Smile; if you think religious rednecks like Pat Robertson are annoying now, just imagine what they'd be like without it. (Watching "The Hills Have Eyes" again might help.)
RIAA, MPAA, NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS, Lawyers, Rich Scientologist perverts, corrupt, sold out congressmen/senators, AT&T, Verizon and countless more. just reading slashdot is enough to chill one from head to toe.
On the bright side, the EFF and ACLU haven't given up yet. For that matter, the NRA is still pretty healthy if it gets that far.
Heck, lets just go back to the more traditional system of watery tarts distributing scimitars.
I'm sure that could end up with worse results than the present system... if only because I can't see how it could possibly get worse results than the present system, the declaration of which inevitably results in utter disaster.
No, wait... the good part about the present system is that President Bush can only hold on for at most a bit under two more years, whereas the watery tart gives a lifetime appointment — more like the Supreme Court.
Your previous IT training helps you with the planning mindset needed, and the job will probably be lower stress.
1302FFF4 - 79AC1849 - 769A7B62 - 0A3BB81D - 6448FFC8 - 6FBB4B00 - 59AF5D56 - 4F058A1F - 6448FFC2 - 61B71843 - 79803E6A - 1827EB5E - 2A02FFEF - 61AD16 (ciphertext)
4467DF9B - 0EC23820 - 18EE1E05 - 6F49CB31 - 4467DF9B - 0EC23820 - 18EE1E05 - 6F49CB31 - 4467DF9B - 0EC23820 - 18EE1E05 - 6F49CB31 - 4467DF9B - 0EC238 (key)
5765204F - 776E2069 - 6E746567 - 6572732C - 202F2053 - 61797320 - 41414353 - 204C412E - 202F2059 - 6F752063 - 616E206F - 776E206F - 6E652074 - 6F6F2E (ascii hex)
We[SP]o - wn[SP]i - nteg - ers, - [SP]/[SP]S - ays[SP] - AACS - [SP]LA. - [SP]/[SP]Y - ou[SP]c - an[SP]o - wn[SP]o - ne[SP]t - oo.
Note that the line breaks of the poem (haiku copyright 2007 by Edward W. Felten) are encoded by a space-slash-space, rather than some manner of CR/LF combination.
I'm sorry, but I just don't agree:
1. I don't think lawyers are paid to manage the public relations of whatever company.
2. They should advise about the possible _legal_ consequences of their actions, which is something they love doing anyway, and I find no cause to believe they did otherwise.
IAmNotALawyer, but it seems the limitation of scope you propose would bring you into disagreement with the New York Bar Association; adding some emphasis:
Or, in other words, if the lawyers didn't consider this possible unintended consequence, they were either stupid or grossly ignorant, perhaps even to the point of professional negligence. (I expect other state codes have similar provisions.)
I bet they knew fully the possible scenarios, and I bet they couldn't care less if some website made a fuss about it.
But if so, did they feel the same way about it spreading to two million or so web pages around the world? Hopefully for the sake of the poor lawyers involved you're right. If this possible reaction was anticipated, and if it end up affecting the legal merits as to whether the 09F9 key can be called a "trade secret" any longer (which now fails the laugh test), then the decision to take the chosen course of action should have been made by the client.
The hardships of past generations should not be used to justify hardships in this generation.
Feel free to tell her that. =)
Most of the rest of your comment is completely off-target. Her cooking is distinctly Italian, she regularly attends mass at a Italian-American Roman Catholic church, practices her Italian regularly with other Italian-American friends and with family still overseas... although she's recently had to cut back on her use of vulgar Italian now that my cousins are finally distracting her with grandchildren to dote on. Aside from the idiocies of Mussolini (which she will rant about whenever she feels provoked to, including when people discuss our current President), she's generally proud of her Italian and Italian-American heritage.
As for the "hardships" issue, I believe you imply a false dichotomy. Life is hard, no matter what; it's just a question of how the hardship should be distributed. Either immigrants (such as the estimated ten million or so Mexicans currently in the US, legally and not) must face the short-term hardship of learning the language, face the long-term hardship of being at a linguistic disadvantage, or get the 90%+ monolingual 300 million US citizens to become bilingual.
I don't think mandating English as the "official" language is a good idea, and efforts should be made to help with the transition. But I still think expecting that transition to be made involves the least overall and long-term "hardship". And I think my aunt understands this, understands how painful it is to learn Enlish (she was sixteen when she reached the US, with her entire English vocabulary consisting of "Hello"), but has no sympathy with anyone who thinks that just because it's hard, that that should stop them.
Copyright is fine as long as it doesn't go to idiotic extremities such as DMCA
Agreed; the GPL would still work just dandy if you cut current copyright terms by a factor of ten.
Seriously: why does the very same sentiment in the US produce such vitriol?
My only encounter with anything like "vitriol" on the subject has been from one of my Aunts, who immigrated to the US in 1950 or so as a teenager, and is generally quite liberal politically. Her position: "If I had to learn this **** ing language, then so do they!"
Despite the years, her Italian heritage often shines through.
It probably would have taken you less time to find this page than it did to write your post.
Being old fashioned, I checked that it's not a novel construction by looking at my 1973 dead-tree dictionary first; however, turning up this link to indicate the same thing shouldn't have taken much longer.
Incidentally: Dammit, America, stop cowering in fear!!!Either way, that process can be time intensive as there are not a lot of people out there who have experience with the data models, the technology, and the business models.
Conjecture: the limited supply of such knowledge base experts today is a direct but unintentional result of the early 1990's The Hacker Crackdown.
It's a case of management incompetence.
Or a case of the law of unintended consequences?
No one will buy desktop PCs. in 2017 everything will be similar to what we call a laptop today.
While I think you're right that (barring major societal shocks) laptops will be a massive majority, there will still be some reasons for a "desktop". Primarily, users who are elderly and disabled. My sister has secondary progressive MS; she uses a two-monitor setup (one for the desktop, one for Windows magnifier) to improve visibility. She's considering switching to a flat panel TV or to an overhead LCD projector after she the house purchase is finalized, but the two LCD screens gives more desktop pixel-acreage. Also, there's no way she could use a laptop keyboard or trackpad; she uses a BigKeys keyboard and Trackball Mouse for manual input when coding, but mostly relies DragonVoice for input in word processing and email.
Of course, "desktops" for most of these users may look more like a Mac Mini than a Lian Li Server Case. There will also be (as you note) the fringe crowd, running giant honking servers from paranoia or for amusement, fiddling with technology just to see what it can be made to do; but I bet this group will be smaller than those who use small desktops from need.
Others have noted two reasons your prediction about home servers is flawed: the wildly optimistic assumption you make that because reduced technical need for IP space restrictions implies ISPs' will be more tolerant in an IPv6 environment, and disaster preparedness advantages of such central services. I also suggest another reason: security.
NAT serves two functions: as an IP space multiplier, and as a firewall. Until servers for such functions become sufficiently hardened against attack and security compromise as to make such unheard of, or until firewall technology leaps far ahead of the system perversion experts with a simultaneous price drop and usability improvements to suit the home user, most people won't want all the gizmos on their home LAN to be exposing bare silicon to the internet.
(Your position also assumes everyone will want to get their own DNS name, but that at least might be plausible.)