The GPL (any version) should NOT be used with voting machines. Instead, the software should be in the public domain. Unowned. Uncopyrighted. Unrestricted. Unencumbered.
And it had an even bigger corporation supporting it! At the time IBM was probably ten to twenty times the size of Microsoft. What doomed OS/2 was that IBM completely screwed its marketing.
Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years...
We had global warming 30 years ago? I thought we were all supposed to fear global cooling back then.
Seriously, if we had an event of this size a mere thirty years ago, it obviously isn't the one-of-a-kind end-of-the-world-in-twenty-years event the media is portraying it to be. What is the frequency of such events?
Why, was the grandparent poster's radio broadcast the subject of a congressional hearing?
This is such a fundamentally necessary right that it must be a central focus of ours to avoid things which endanger it.
Even to the point that history itself must be expunged lest someone learn you made a radio broadcast thirty years prior? This is beyond ludicrous!
It saddens me that the once intelligent left has descended so far into senility that it can't even grasp the simple concept that what one does in public is observable by the public.
The biggest error you made in your post was assuming a technocratic price theory. You seem to assume (given your moral harangue) that if only one could accurately discover Microsoft's costs and decide a fair profit, then a just price for Windows can be calculated. Maybe it's ten dollars a copy, or maybe only ten cents. But the assumption that there is a magical formula that one can plug numbers into is there.
While it certainly gets more complicated, in essence, price is determined only by two things: what the seller is willing to accept and the buyer willing to offer. Marginal utility and cost certainly do influence the buyer and seller, but the subjective valuation of the product trumps them both. Take the collective aggregate of buyers and sellers, and you end up with a price curve. This is something you can examine mathematically, but one must remember that it is a curve of convenience, because the actuality is that it is still a set of discrete economic transactions that the curve attempts to track.
Costs. There are costs related to the good, and also costs unrelated to the good. The seller certainly wants to recoup the latter costs by selling the goods, but they do not enter into his price calculations. And what of wages? Piece-wages are related to the cost of the good, but hourly wages and salaries are not. For a software company, such costs can be significant.
Profits. Gross profits or net? The only way your trite formula makes any sense is if you meant gross profits. But the only way your moral harangue has weight is if you meant net profits. You then say "profit only exists because of the existence of the proprietary 'locks'". Your definition of profit is very confused.
Now to your formula. What happens when Microsoft raises the price of Windows? Does its "profit" go up? According to your formula it must. But according to the price curve there is a point at which profits will fall as price increases. It's not the government that's keeping Microsoft from selling Windows at a minimum price of $1000 per copy. It's their selfish love of profits that keeps up from getting gouged! (Of course, some people will claim that they would be gouged even with a price of $10).
He wasn't "outed" as a communist, only as someone associated with a known communist organization. But regardless. This would be a matter of privacy if that association had been private, but it was not. He made it public by broadcasting his association with communists on public airwaves.
This should be an important lesson to all young people out there. What you do in your youthful stupidity will bite you in the butt when you are older. No matter how much you want it otherwise, you cannot erase the past.
You do indeed have the right to be left alone. But surveillance does not infringe upon that right until it invades your private domain. But the public square is not your domain. While you certainly can demand to be left alone in your own home, you cannot demand to be left alone when you are out in public.
The fact that a radio broadcast was made is public knowledge. You do not have a right to forbid the police from listening to your radio broadcasts. Whining about what you want does not change this one bit.
Your economic ignorance is shocking. Bookkeepers worldwide are fainting away from reading your post. Where did you learn your price theory, from the Reader's Digest condensed version of Das Kapital?
I hate to single you out, because I see similar ecnomic ignorance all the time. It's a subject that is not taught in school, but should be as required as math or history. Please, go get a basic freshman economics textbook. If that's too difficult, go get Landsburg's "The Armchair Economist", for some lighter educational fair.
The prior poster was making a valid analogy, but instead of responding with an appropriate argument in your favor, you resorted to cheap semantic games. The prior poster responded the statement, "If Microsoft wasn't so bent on keeping everything proprietary, there really would only be the cost of the media." Your response had NOTHING to do with this line of argument, and served only to derail it.
Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird?
WTF is wrong with a desktop solution? Our client systems are every bit as powerful as the servers, so why can't we use some of that power to provide a responsive and consistant user interface? Quad core laptops are coming, but to hear the way you guys speak, all the processing power should only be used for rendering crappy flash animations.
Don't replace the desktop with a browser. Replace it with a better desktop.
My job takes me to lots of software companies. One thing I have been seeing over the last year is huge upswing in the use of Macs in the corporate world.
Assuming a new OS will increase your productivity can be costly.
I got my mom a new laptop for Christmas. Dual core centrino, 1Gig RAM, accelerated graphics, etc, etc. I was genuinely shocked that it's SLOWER than her old 266Mhz P1 Win98 machine. Actual program execution is of course faster, but bootup, shutdown, task switching, overall GUI responsiveness, etc., is visibly slower than the old system. I'm sure some of this sluggishness comes from the media center crap, but it's still a step backward.
The blogosphere is much better than that. There are good blogs and bad blogs and it's up to you to pick and choose the ones you want to pay attention to. You don't question the usefulness of the internet just because someone on a one-hit-per-day site uses the tag, so don't question the usefulness of blogs just because one of them is written by twit.
p.s. Figure out a way to filter this crap out, and Google will beat a path to your door.
It's not about privacy. It's about wants. The grandparent didn't "want" people knowing he did a radio show. Thus his righteous indignation that cops have the ability to discover that he did a radio show. It's a very shallow philosophy of rights, but it's par for the course these days. If you don't want something, scream bloody murder about your "rights", and you'll be modded up on Slashdot.
But there's only a couple of IT contractors who handle stuff like this.
People need to understand this. Government rules, regulations and procedures disqualify most possbible bids. Only those companies *specialized* in government contracts get these jobs. In addition, the margins on these jobs are so small, that larger companies have a huge advantage in the bidding process. Throw in several layers of lawyers and you end up with a system several realities removed from any semblance of a market.
What a low opinion the Japanese have for their elderly, to think that robot seals could be a substitute for genuine affection. If anyone sticks me in a room with crap like this, I'll CLUB them with the robot baby seal the next time they come and visit!
I'm not too surprised by this decision. The FSF has been arguing strenously for a couple decades that linking consitutes derivation. It's a different kind of linking, to be sure, but the analogy is very apt. In both cases there is no copying, modification or distribution of copyrighted material, only a reference to copyrighted materials. See http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366 for an expert's take on the issue.
I suspect that most people in Texas aren't the herd of clones you make them out to be. I also suspect that most people in Texas don't give a shit about your opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL (any version) should NOT be used with voting machines. Instead, the software should be in the public domain. Unowned. Uncopyrighted. Unrestricted. Unencumbered.
OS/2 had a big corporation opposing it
And it had an even bigger corporation supporting it! At the time IBM was probably ten to twenty times the size of Microsoft. What doomed OS/2 was that IBM completely screwed its marketing.
Fun with statistics:
365 days per year, 150 years of temperature records, and a wild-ass assumption that a 10 degree variation is "normal" for a given day of the year.
Given those numbers, how many record high temperatures would this predict for 2007?
Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years...
We had global warming 30 years ago? I thought we were all supposed to fear global cooling back then.
Seriously, if we had an event of this size a mere thirty years ago, it obviously isn't the one-of-a-kind end-of-the-world-in-twenty-years event the media is portraying it to be. What is the frequency of such events?
Did you miss the 50s? :)
Why, was the grandparent poster's radio broadcast the subject of a congressional hearing?
This is such a fundamentally necessary right that it must be a central focus of ours to avoid things which endanger it.
Even to the point that history itself must be expunged lest someone learn you made a radio broadcast thirty years prior? This is beyond ludicrous!
It saddens me that the once intelligent left has descended so far into senility that it can't even grasp the simple concept that what one does in public is observable by the public.
The biggest error you made in your post was assuming a technocratic price theory. You seem to assume (given your moral harangue) that if only one could accurately discover Microsoft's costs and decide a fair profit, then a just price for Windows can be calculated. Maybe it's ten dollars a copy, or maybe only ten cents. But the assumption that there is a magical formula that one can plug numbers into is there.
While it certainly gets more complicated, in essence, price is determined only by two things: what the seller is willing to accept and the buyer willing to offer. Marginal utility and cost certainly do influence the buyer and seller, but the subjective valuation of the product trumps them both. Take the collective aggregate of buyers and sellers, and you end up with a price curve. This is something you can examine mathematically, but one must remember that it is a curve of convenience, because the actuality is that it is still a set of discrete economic transactions that the curve attempts to track.
Costs. There are costs related to the good, and also costs unrelated to the good. The seller certainly wants to recoup the latter costs by selling the goods, but they do not enter into his price calculations. And what of wages? Piece-wages are related to the cost of the good, but hourly wages and salaries are not. For a software company, such costs can be significant.
Profits. Gross profits or net? The only way your trite formula makes any sense is if you meant gross profits. But the only way your moral harangue has weight is if you meant net profits. You then say "profit only exists because of the existence of the proprietary 'locks'". Your definition of profit is very confused.
Now to your formula. What happens when Microsoft raises the price of Windows? Does its "profit" go up? According to your formula it must. But according to the price curve there is a point at which profits will fall as price increases. It's not the government that's keeping Microsoft from selling Windows at a minimum price of $1000 per copy. It's their selfish love of profits that keeps up from getting gouged! (Of course, some people will claim that they would be gouged even with a price of $10).
He wasn't "outed" as a communist, only as someone associated with a known communist organization. But regardless. This would be a matter of privacy if that association had been private, but it was not. He made it public by broadcasting his association with communists on public airwaves.
This should be an important lesson to all young people out there. What you do in your youthful stupidity will bite you in the butt when you are older. No matter how much you want it otherwise, you cannot erase the past.
You do indeed have the right to be left alone. But surveillance does not infringe upon that right until it invades your private domain. But the public square is not your domain. While you certainly can demand to be left alone in your own home, you cannot demand to be left alone when you are out in public.
The fact that a radio broadcast was made is public knowledge. You do not have a right to forbid the police from listening to your radio broadcasts. Whining about what you want does not change this one bit.
Your economic ignorance is shocking. Bookkeepers worldwide are fainting away from reading your post. Where did you learn your price theory, from the Reader's Digest condensed version of Das Kapital?
I hate to single you out, because I see similar ecnomic ignorance all the time. It's a subject that is not taught in school, but should be as required as math or history. Please, go get a basic freshman economics textbook. If that's too difficult, go get Landsburg's "The Armchair Economist", for some lighter educational fair.
The prior poster was making a valid analogy, but instead of responding with an appropriate argument in your favor, you resorted to cheap semantic games. The prior poster responded the statement, "If Microsoft wasn't so bent on keeping everything proprietary, there really would only be the cost of the media." Your response had NOTHING to do with this line of argument, and served only to derail it.
Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird?
WTF is wrong with a desktop solution? Our client systems are every bit as powerful as the servers, so why can't we use some of that power to provide a responsive and consistant user interface? Quad core laptops are coming, but to hear the way you guys speak, all the processing power should only be used for rendering crappy flash animations.
Don't replace the desktop with a browser. Replace it with a better desktop.
My job takes me to lots of software companies. One thing I have been seeing over the last year is huge upswing in the use of Macs in the corporate world.
Assuming a new OS will increase your productivity can be costly.
I got my mom a new laptop for Christmas. Dual core centrino, 1Gig RAM, accelerated graphics, etc, etc. I was genuinely shocked that it's SLOWER than her old 266Mhz P1 Win98 machine. Actual program execution is of course faster, but bootup, shutdown, task switching, overall GUI responsiveness, etc., is visibly slower than the old system. I'm sure some of this sluggishness comes from the media center crap, but it's still a step backward.
To some people, anything Microsoft does is wrong.
I'll tell you why businesses aren't upgrading: there's absolutely no need to.
You bring a tear to Richard Stallman's eyes.
When all else fails in an argument, resort to semantic word games.
Copyright infringement == copyright infringement
The blogosphere is much better than that. There are good blogs and bad blogs and it's up to you to pick and choose the ones you want to pay attention to. You don't question the usefulness of the internet just because someone on a one-hit-per-day site uses the tag, so don't question the usefulness of blogs just because one of them is written by twit.
p.s. Figure out a way to filter this crap out, and Google will beat a path to your door.
It's not about privacy. It's about wants. The grandparent didn't "want" people knowing he did a radio show. Thus his righteous indignation that cops have the ability to discover that he did a radio show. It's a very shallow philosophy of rights, but it's par for the course these days. If you don't want something, scream bloody murder about your "rights", and you'll be modded up on Slashdot.
Everything is moral, ethical and legal... until your company gets to a certain size. Then it becomes and evil monopoly.
But there's only a couple of IT contractors who handle stuff like this.
People need to understand this. Government rules, regulations and procedures disqualify most possbible bids. Only those companies *specialized* in government contracts get these jobs. In addition, the margins on these jobs are so small, that larger companies have a huge advantage in the bidding process. Throw in several layers of lawyers and you end up with a system several realities removed from any semblance of a market.
What a low opinion the Japanese have for their elderly, to think that robot seals could be a substitute for genuine affection. If anyone sticks me in a room with crap like this, I'll CLUB them with the robot baby seal the next time they come and visit!
I'm not too surprised by this decision. The FSF has been arguing strenously for a couple decades that linking consitutes derivation. It's a different kind of linking, to be sure, but the analogy is very apt. In both cases there is no copying, modification or distribution of copyrighted material, only a reference to copyrighted materials. See http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366 for an expert's take on the issue.
Perhaps the judge has read too much of Stallman?
If this is indeed illegal...
It is not illegal. It's only one judge's opinion. Expect this to be overturned in an apellate court.
I suspect that most people in Texas aren't the herd of clones you make them out to be. I also suspect that most people in Texas don't give a shit about your opinion.