Anybody with any sense is going to shy away from going up against MS in any significant sense. If you have a world beating idea in the OS arena, the best you can do as a new entrant is to be bought up by the beast from Redmond. Your chief developers? They can be identified by PIs and their salaries quadrupled by MS. Publicly traded? You can't fight 40B in a hostile takeover. Privately owned? Can you afford to go up against Microsoft legal if they simply steal your ideas?
Big war chests deter competitors, like large militaries deter invasion.
This is Microsoft's version of peace through strength. I don't believe that it's a strategy that is consistent with behaving within the anti-trust laws.
All communist countries lie about their accomplishments. They never accurately tote up the costs of their legitimate accomplishments and they make stuff up as a matter of policy. Those insufficiently creative about making up progress notes get shot (like the folks who did the Soviet census right after the great purges of the '30s).
We won't know the truth of Cuba until communism falls, just as we didn't know the truth about the Soviets until they fell.
Efficient countries create surplus capital (even Marx agreed) and in capitalist ones, they end up making more and more until all are satisfied. Communist ones are inefficient and try to satisfy everybody but year after year, they make less and less. This fact is what makes the leadership eventually flinch and change from communist to capitalist societies.
Reread the Magic Cauldron. The marketplace of ideas is an arena where distribution and duplication costs are minimal and you never run out of any commodity. An unequal distribution of capitalism and freedom = some countries they leave people alone, some countries they rob and kill them at govt. whim. The countries in the second category are poor and hungry.
Actually, you probably do, whether you know it or not. The tax law has grown so convoluted, even the IRS can't be counted on to know the right answer to a tax question and if you ask them, their answer will have you paying more to them than if you brought it before a judge (not counting court costs of course).
The idea that cellular phone networks are a free market is laughable. The barriers to entry are fierce and largely political. New entrants have high barriers of entry and this distorts and facilitates bad behavior. The cure is to lower the barrier to entry so that established carriers have to either cater to customer needs or they watch their market share erode to upstarts who do a better job of it.
Actually, what changes things in the US is to push the weaker of the two major parties into 3rd place. Most often, the race that decides that is the governor's race. A lot of patronage and a lot of structural power goes with being one of the top two. For instance, election petition numbers are usually way lower for the top two parties and you can bargain some of your patronage power for legislation either in the state or the federal legislature. After all, how many libertarians want to serve in the election commission make work system? But keeping the Republican or Democrat workers there under the Libertarian label comes at a price.
If enough states push the Democrat or Republican parties to third party status, you will see them change the rules to be fairer to third parties all on their own.
Triage would be the answer to linux newbie problems. Essentially the name of the game is to reduce the number of windows apps/licenses in use to below the number easily documented. You don't need to eliminate MS in 60 days, you just need to get them in compliance in 60 so that when MS comes in for their audit, the school board can play a little hard ball with the audit team like not allowing them in between 9-5 (driving up the cost of the audit) and otherwise giving them little cooperation secure in the knowledge that they've got licenses to spare.
This way MS pays for the audit, the school district gets a quick changeover in time to save their budgets from being decimated and the ones who can't adjust quickly to an alternative get the time they need to shift over to Linux or Mac OS X.
Silly fellow, a company making life less convenient and more expensive for consumers is called a market opportunity. That's how new entrants kill established players. Companys are born, mature, and eventually die. If they don't respond to customer demand, they tend to do so a lot faster.
The problem, at heart, is legislative. The solution is to craft legislation that is *not* industry specific but gets at the heart of the promotion of the arts and sciences. The consumer interest is that you can copy everything freely, the producer interest is that they get compensated for their intellectual work. The balance between those interests has always been copyright and patents in order to get the producers to produce and the consumers eventual free access to the older stuff and prevent producers from becoming one hit wonders and just camping on that intellectual property and living on it forever.
The balance is off, the producers have stopped anything from coming into the public domain for decades, and it's harming the promotion of the arts and sciences. Keep an eye out for the Eldred case where this is being ruled on, probably next year.
Actually, flying cars/personal seem about ready to roll (http://www.moller.com), we're just waiting on an air traffic control system that can handle them (expected rollout date 2015). I'd expect that we start seeing a corporate intercity taxi service about 2008.
There's a lot more than 2007 square miles of unoccupied desert in just the US alone. We could stick this in the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia and nobody would even notice other than the government accountants who would get money from other countries for something other than oil.
It's not only your bill that will go up, land prices go up (renewables are low-density power generators) and all other prices go up (electricity is a production cost for just about everything). The only thing that will go down is employment.
It's not strictly politics, it's more our tort system. Pretty much everybody in the 1st world has a loser pays rule. In most cases, filing a lawsuit is a significant risk because if you lose, you get to pay not only your lawyer but the other guy's lawyer.
Without a loser pays rule, it's cost effective to just sue and sue and sue as long as you have staff lawyers and low fixed costs. Nuclear plant protestors have almost no cost while utilities idling construction workers due to lawsuits have a very high fixed cost.
Pass a tort reform law with loser pays (Republicans are for, Democrats against) and watch nuclear power take off, the healthcare system get radically cheaper, and lots of other good effects.
It's a tough issue because the plaintiffs bar has a lot of rich lawyers funding the opposition.
So how much salt would you hav to dump off the east coast of Canada to restart the conveyer belt? I suspect that about 20 years into this supposed ~50 year process, we'd start mining salt like mad to make such a dump. In a decade, we might even manage it.
You should put a smiley, the humor isn't working well. There are McDonalds franchises who take credit cards and nationally, they're supporting speedpass (which bills to a credit card).
Sorry, you're the one that's parsing wrong. I've been warped by working in the past for lawyers. The LGPL/GPL are not IPR licenses under the 2nd half of the definition but they don't have to be, they are named specifically.
The really fun part is that, read carefully, it doesn't say that the GPL/LGPL is a "license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge."
In fact the GPL/LGPL are implied to be such licenses but MS is just going after them by name, not by characteristic. Create a license, called ALLGPL (Anti-Lawyering LGPL) that is cut and paste LGPL and it is not the LGPL, merely compatible with it. But MS then has the burden of proving that it is an IPR licenses which, of course, it is not.
Since copiers are merging into scanners, govt. restrictions on xerox technology are a likely secondary effect of this and copying an article in a library for research is eventually going to become an act that can be traced and initiate a prosecution.
I bet you never read your state code on militias. I've read a couple and they're all pretty much the same, they all define the militia as being the entire body of the people, the 'unorganized militia' and there's a second category of 'organized militia' that is National Guard, State Guard, etc. When you look at the way the laws are written, pretty much every adult male is in the militia whether they like it or not.
Now beyond that, there's plenty of evidence out there that the people who actually wrote the Constitution and passed it understood the 2nd amendment as covering individual firearm ownership. It's ignorance or willful blindness to maintain otherwise.
We are measuring global temperatures using two different systems, satellite and ground stations. They are giving divergent readings with the ground stations showing global warming and the satellite data showing no warming or even a slight cooling.
My point is that matters aren't cut and dried and that we should resolve the data discrepency before we condemn 10s of millions extra to poverty/death because we spent our resources on global warming amelioration instead of economic growth.
Not only that, but it the temperatures that are rising are at ground stations. The satellite temperature measurements diverge significantly and show no global warming. Considering urban sprawl, badly maintained sites, and a general bias for error to show up on the warming end are associated with the ground stations, not the satellite data, it's predictable that those with an agenda are sticking to the less accurate ground data to prove their fear mongering.
Apple's OS X compiler is GCC. They are giving back their code improvements so any GCC work that Red Hat provides will help GCC work better for both Linux and Darwin/OS X
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Anybody with any sense is going to shy away from going up against MS in any significant sense. If you have a world beating idea in the OS arena, the best you can do as a new entrant is to be bought up by the beast from Redmond. Your chief developers? They can be identified by PIs and their salaries quadrupled by MS. Publicly traded? You can't fight 40B in a hostile takeover. Privately owned? Can you afford to go up against Microsoft legal if they simply steal your ideas?
Big war chests deter competitors, like large militaries deter invasion.
This is Microsoft's version of peace through strength. I don't believe that it's a strategy that is consistent with behaving within the anti-trust laws.
All communist countries lie about their accomplishments. They never accurately tote up the costs of their legitimate accomplishments and they make stuff up as a matter of policy. Those insufficiently creative about making up progress notes get shot (like the folks who did the Soviet census right after the great purges of the '30s).
We won't know the truth of Cuba until communism falls, just as we didn't know the truth about the Soviets until they fell.
Efficient countries create surplus capital (even Marx agreed) and in capitalist ones, they end up making more and more until all are satisfied. Communist ones are inefficient and try to satisfy everybody but year after year, they make less and less. This fact is what makes the leadership eventually flinch and change from communist to capitalist societies.
Reread the Magic Cauldron. The marketplace of ideas is an arena where distribution and duplication costs are minimal and you never run out of any commodity. An unequal distribution of capitalism and freedom = some countries they leave people alone, some countries they rob and kill them at govt. whim. The countries in the second category are poor and hungry.
There's not a lot of communism in that idea.
DB
Actually, you probably do, whether you know it or not. The tax law has grown so convoluted, even the IRS can't be counted on to know the right answer to a tax question and if you ask them, their answer will have you paying more to them than if you brought it before a judge (not counting court costs of course).
DB
The idea that cellular phone networks are a free market is laughable. The barriers to entry are fierce and largely political. New entrants have high barriers of entry and this distorts and facilitates bad behavior. The cure is to lower the barrier to entry so that established carriers have to either cater to customer needs or they watch their market share erode to upstarts who do a better job of it.
Actually, what changes things in the US is to push the weaker of the two major parties into 3rd place. Most often, the race that decides that is the governor's race. A lot of patronage and a lot of structural power goes with being one of the top two. For instance, election petition numbers are usually way lower for the top two parties and you can bargain some of your patronage power for legislation either in the state or the federal legislature. After all, how many libertarians want to serve in the election commission make work system? But keeping the Republican or Democrat workers there under the Libertarian label comes at a price.
If enough states push the Democrat or Republican parties to third party status, you will see them change the rules to be fairer to third parties all on their own.
Triage would be the answer to linux newbie problems. Essentially the name of the game is to reduce the number of windows apps/licenses in use to below the number easily documented. You don't need to eliminate MS in 60 days, you just need to get them in compliance in 60 so that when MS comes in for their audit, the school board can play a little hard ball with the audit team like not allowing them in between 9-5 (driving up the cost of the audit) and otherwise giving them little cooperation secure in the knowledge that they've got licenses to spare.
This way MS pays for the audit, the school district gets a quick changeover in time to save their budgets from being decimated and the ones who can't adjust quickly to an alternative get the time they need to shift over to Linux or Mac OS X.
Silly fellow, a company making life less convenient and more expensive for consumers is called a market opportunity. That's how new entrants kill established players. Companys are born, mature, and eventually die. If they don't respond to customer demand, they tend to do so a lot faster.
The problem, at heart, is legislative. The solution is to craft legislation that is *not* industry specific but gets at the heart of the promotion of the arts and sciences. The consumer interest is that you can copy everything freely, the producer interest is that they get compensated for their intellectual work. The balance between those interests has always been copyright and patents in order to get the producers to produce and the consumers eventual free access to the older stuff and prevent producers from becoming one hit wonders and just camping on that intellectual property and living on it forever.
The balance is off, the producers have stopped anything from coming into the public domain for decades, and it's harming the promotion of the arts and sciences. Keep an eye out for the Eldred case where this is being ruled on, probably next year.
Actually, flying cars/personal seem about ready to roll (http://www.moller.com), we're just waiting on an air traffic control system that can handle them (expected rollout date 2015). I'd expect that we start seeing a corporate intercity taxi service about 2008.
There's a lot more than 2007 square miles of unoccupied desert in just the US alone. We could stick this in the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia and nobody would even notice other than the government accountants who would get money from other countries for something other than oil.
It's not only your bill that will go up, land prices go up (renewables are low-density power generators) and all other prices go up (electricity is a production cost for just about everything). The only thing that will go down is employment.
It's not strictly politics, it's more our tort system. Pretty much everybody in the 1st world has a loser pays rule. In most cases, filing a lawsuit is a significant risk because if you lose, you get to pay not only your lawyer but the other guy's lawyer.
Without a loser pays rule, it's cost effective to just sue and sue and sue as long as you have staff lawyers and low fixed costs. Nuclear plant protestors have almost no cost while utilities idling construction workers due to lawsuits have a very high fixed cost.
Pass a tort reform law with loser pays (Republicans are for, Democrats against) and watch nuclear power take off, the healthcare system get radically cheaper, and lots of other good effects.
It's a tough issue because the plaintiffs bar has a lot of rich lawyers funding the opposition.
So how much salt would you hav to dump off the east coast of Canada to restart the conveyer belt? I suspect that about 20 years into this supposed ~50 year process, we'd start mining salt like mad to make such a dump. In a decade, we might even manage it.
DB
You should put a smiley, the humor isn't working well. There are McDonalds franchises who take credit cards and nationally, they're supporting speedpass (which bills to a credit card).
Sorry, you're the one that's parsing wrong. I've been warped by working in the past for lawyers. The LGPL/GPL are not IPR licenses under the 2nd half of the definition but they don't have to be, they are named specifically.
The really fun part is that, read carefully, it doesn't say that the GPL/LGPL is a "license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge."
In fact the GPL/LGPL are implied to be such licenses but MS is just going after them by name, not by characteristic. Create a license, called ALLGPL (Anti-Lawyering LGPL) that is cut and paste LGPL and it is not the LGPL, merely compatible with it. But MS then has the burden of proving that it is an IPR licenses which, of course, it is not.
Since copiers are merging into scanners, govt. restrictions on xerox technology are a likely secondary effect of this and copying an article in a library for research is eventually going to become an act that can be traced and initiate a prosecution.
I bet you never read your state code on militias. I've read a couple and they're all pretty much the same, they all define the militia as being the entire body of the people, the 'unorganized militia' and there's a second category of 'organized militia' that is National Guard, State Guard, etc. When you look at the way the laws are written, pretty much every adult male is in the militia whether they like it or not.
Now beyond that, there's plenty of evidence out there that the people who actually wrote the Constitution and passed it understood the 2nd amendment as covering individual firearm ownership. It's ignorance or willful blindness to maintain otherwise.
The funny thing is that they are legally binding on contracts now, the political culture just hasn't caught up with the law.
DB
1st amendment rights, those are just for journalists, right? Well, now that McCain Feingold is passed...
We are measuring global temperatures using two different systems, satellite and ground stations. They are giving divergent readings with the ground stations showing global warming and the satellite data showing no warming or even a slight cooling.
My point is that matters aren't cut and dried and that we should resolve the data discrepency before we condemn 10s of millions extra to poverty/death because we spent our resources on global warming amelioration instead of economic growth.
DB
Not only that, but it the temperatures that are rising are at ground stations. The satellite temperature measurements diverge significantly and show no global warming. Considering urban sprawl, badly maintained sites, and a general bias for error to show up on the warming end are associated with the ground stations, not the satellite data, it's predictable that those with an agenda are sticking to the less accurate ground data to prove their fear mongering.
Better file system? I can't wait for the first 'drop table' outlook virus.
Apple's OS X compiler is GCC. They are giving back their code improvements so any GCC work that Red Hat provides will help GCC work better for both Linux and Darwin/OS X