Well, it's not really begging the question, actually. Begging the question would be saying that the donation should go elsewhere because the donation should go elsewhere. I'm saying that the donation should go elsewhere for reasons x, y and z, and you're taking exception to those. Which is fine. But it's just you disagreeing with a premises of my argument (that there are better uses for the money). The logical form is valid and (importantly) non-trivial.
Probably the cost ought to be amortized between education and business/social development ministries.
We're surely in agreement here. The cost the Ministry of Education should pay toward the open source community should be proportional to the educational benefit gained - the "educational value" as you say. But I hold that this educational value is very, very low compared with other ways of spending the money, and for several reasons: the software already exists and would (does, even) without donation, and the donation wouldn't notable improve the software for education purposes.
By the same token, I hold that the value to New Zealand commerce, consumers and businesses is very large. So I'd certainly agree with lobbying, say, the Ministry of Commerce, Consumer Affairs and Business Development to get behind open source development.
Here's a hint as to why this won't happen: it's not the Minister of Education's job to spend my (yep, I'm a kiwi) tax money on helping "the product or the community". But do you know what is his job? To ensure that children in my country get the best education they can. And that means that when he has the choice of donating money to a software development group or spending it on one of the underfunded schools throughout the country, he must spend it on the kids.
You hear the "somebody, think of the children" argument a lot these days. But this is one case where it applies well. It is Maharey's job to think of the children. And they are best served by using the money elsewhere.
ac.nz is used for tertiary education. New Zealand schools use school.nz. And almost all high schools use PCs, with perhaps a handful of macs in a dusty corner, so this only really affects primary and intermediate schools.
It's unclear how much money they save. The total licensing deals the government has made with Microsoft are speculated to be worth about NZ$100 million (US$72m) over the next ten years. But the Maharey, the Minister of Education, said the dispute was regarding NZ$2.7m worth of Microsoft Office licenses that would not (otherwise) be used (because the macs in question aren't currently using Office) but which Microsoft insisted the Ministry pay for.
So, we know they're saving more than $2.7m and less than $100m, but we're not told exactly how much.
By the way, macs aren't extensively used outside of primary (roughly, elementary schools) and intermediate (school years 7-8) in New Zealand. Every high school I can think of (many) have one or two macs at most, and classes full of PCs. So, to my mind, Le Sueur is wrong, and NeoOffice _is_ the sort of software we can expect kids to use. It's unreasonable to claim five to twelve year olds have a need for (supposedly) superior, high-class spreadsheets, databases and business presentations.
I actually prefer the Bi-units now. 4,3GiB or 4,7GB is already a huge difference when talking about DVD capacity. [...] Only place where I still see a purpose for using binary units in computing is memory.
So, you prefer the Bi units, but you don't see that they have a use beyond memory? Isn't that a little contradictory?
The whole thing is being investigated by the Commerce Commission, so, this is hardly an unsolicited refund. It's more of a pre-emptive refund to defuse things, really; while it won't excuse them from the investigation, it does take away a lot of the investigation's momentum.
Personally, I prefer the music of Vincent Diamante - from 'Cloud', another project that has a feel of flow about it. You can grab the OST from the extra download page.
C++ is like a sharp scalpel. Yes you can hurt yourself if you're unskilled, inexperienced or sloppy.
Java and C# are like those scissors with rounded ends for kids. Totally inefficent but safe for beginners.
Your analogy is quite adept, because surgeons do, often, use scissors with rounded ends. Surgical scissors come in a number of varieties, including blunt/blunt (with both points blunted), sharp/blunt (that only expose a point when opened), and sharp/sharp. If you're going to be poking around inside someone, you don't want any sharp points beyond those that are strictly necessary, and that you're using to get the job done. How this applies analogously, to programming languages, is left as an exercise to the reader.
Hmm. Well, the GP is correct for low income households. Of course, you're also correct about high income households. So, while the GP was imprecise ("household tax rate"), I think that, given his clear mention of "the poor" what he means is correct. The figures I could find (for US Income Tax) look something like this:
1913 - 1% to 7%
WWI - ? to 77%
Post-WWI - ? to 25%
Pre-WWII - ? to 75%
WWII - ? to 91%
1964 - ? to 70%
1981 - 11% to 50%
1986 - 15% to 28%
1990s - 15% to 39.6%
2001 - 15% to 35%
A more comprehensive look at things would, of course, take into effect the breadth of the brackets as well. There's probably other factors as well (IANAE), such as the actual value of incomes.
Double happies were a form of firework. They were lit in the hand and then thrown a safe distance away, as opposed to sky rocket (American dialect: bottle rocket) or light and run fireworks. They had problems in that, if you held them a little too long, they'd go off in your hand. They packed quite a wallop too, and could do some serious damage. There were also problems with them being thrown at people/pets/property.
They were banned in New Zealand in the '90s. There's a sky rocket ban too, except for people with fireworks licenses (for public displays, generally). And, based on behaviour this year, a full private fireworks ban is being considered. Pretty funny: ban fireworks in celebration of the thwarting of the gunpowder plot.
...skill blending Confusian sensibilities with modern needs and tastes.
Oh, as a fellow sinophile, I completely agree. Compensated Feng Shui professionals obviously have honed confusian sensibilities. How else would they get anyone to believe their bullshit.
America is the only developed nation which is still robustly growing.
Right. Sure. Because Australia, with a growth rate just 0.01% per annum below that of America, is obviously not 'developed'. Hell, do they even have electricity? Oh, and don't even get me started on Canada!
This is all very true. Breaking of DRM can be, morally, quite agreeable. I just wanted to point out that, in the US at least, it's illegal regardless of whether you're going the whole hog in one bound (DeCSS, say), or performing a (in other circumstances) legal process that has the same outcome. The ends of the process, not the means, define what the process is.
My democratic representatives, thank goodness, have never considered legislation of this sort. So, in the meantime at least, I can circumvent away in order to support my free use.
There's an episode of the most excellent Trailer Park Boys in which Ricky, one of the protagonists, pulls a stunt that's analogous. He has someone take lawn furniture and the like from peoples yards and place it on the side of the footpath. Now, he muses, it's just garbage, and he can take it away. It's not (very) illegal to move the furniture around someone's yard, and it's not (very) illegal to take away garbage. So, he claims, he's not stealing.
The flaw in this scheme is similar to how the argument from the *IAA will go. Putting the decrypted file in memory (by playing it) certainly isn't circumventing DRM, reading from some area in memory and writing to the HD certainly isn't circumventing DRM. But that's not what's important: the overall outcome of the two processes put together is the circumvention of DRM, just as putting Ricky's processes together is, well, stealing lawn furniture.
Do I really have to? I always thought that an argument was to be accepted or rejected on the basis of its merits, regardless of who supports or gives the argument.
The quote you give mentions that some consider McCurry's arguments to be 'deceptive and manipulative' - that's a fine analysis. It's an example of evaluating the arguments themselves and deciding that they're a load of crap. So why, prithee, must we 'consider the source'?
This is where the NPOV weasels get to put the kabosh on ideas they don't like.
No, it's where non-factual POV is treated as such. Read the sentence you've quoted carefully: nobody gets to put the 'kabosh' on the objective factual information. All that policy states is that POV material should be dealt with in the same article as the NPOV material and marked as such (rather than hiding it away in a forked page).
Besides all that, the content forking policy isn't that relevent to your allegation that 'Wikipedia policy admits that [the truth] is whatever is "mainstream"' - it gives guidelines for how POV material is to be handled, not how NPOV is. So, bad luck, try again.
Even the Wikipedia NPOV policy admits that there is a point of view and it is whatever is "mainstream"
I'd love to see where the Wikipedia NPOV policy admits that. Really. Please direct us to the paragraph where Wikipedia policy states that the truth is democratic; because last time I checked WP policy reaffirmed that it is not.
I have to call bullshit on this one. If this is true, why is Nancy Cartwright still touring with the stage show 'My Life as a Ten Year-Old Boy' - the stage show was in New Zealand last month for the NZ International Comedy Festival. Hell, there were prime time TV ads for the show in which she does the voices (her getting pulled over by a traffic cop).
A few years ago these sprays and covers became popular in New Zealand. A consumer information magazine ran tests, with the help of the police who provided the cameras, to see how effective they were. The end result was that, once the cover or spray was applied, the license plates became less reflective than a plain plate.
New Zealand plates are mostly black on silvery white which I'd guess would be one of the most reflective plates in the first place and so the hardest to make more reflective - the effectiveness probably varies from country to country.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, not the Barbados ministry that I linked to, but perhaps the ministry I meant to link to.
We're surely in agreement here. The cost the Ministry of Education should pay toward the open source community should be proportional to the educational benefit gained - the "educational value" as you say. But I hold that this educational value is very, very low compared with other ways of spending the money, and for several reasons: the software already exists and would (does, even) without donation, and the donation wouldn't notable improve the software for education purposes.
By the same token, I hold that the value to New Zealand commerce, consumers and businesses is very large. So I'd certainly agree with lobbying, say, the Ministry of Commerce, Consumer Affairs and Business Development to get behind open source development.
Here's a hint as to why this won't happen: it's not the Minister of Education's job to spend my (yep, I'm a kiwi) tax money on helping "the product or the community". But do you know what is his job? To ensure that children in my country get the best education they can. And that means that when he has the choice of donating money to a software development group or spending it on one of the underfunded schools throughout the country, he must spend it on the kids.
You hear the "somebody, think of the children" argument a lot these days. But this is one case where it applies well. It is Maharey's job to think of the children. And they are best served by using the money elsewhere.
ac.nz is used for tertiary education. New Zealand schools use school.nz. And almost all high schools use PCs, with perhaps a handful of macs in a dusty corner, so this only really affects primary and intermediate schools.
It's unclear how much money they save. The total licensing deals the government has made with Microsoft are speculated to be worth about NZ$100 million (US$72m) over the next ten years. But the Maharey, the Minister of Education, said the dispute was regarding NZ$2.7m worth of Microsoft Office licenses that would not (otherwise) be used (because the macs in question aren't currently using Office) but which Microsoft insisted the Ministry pay for.
So, we know they're saving more than $2.7m and less than $100m, but we're not told exactly how much.
By the way, macs aren't extensively used outside of primary (roughly, elementary schools) and intermediate (school years 7-8) in New Zealand. Every high school I can think of (many) have one or two macs at most, and classes full of PCs. So, to my mind, Le Sueur is wrong, and NeoOffice _is_ the sort of software we can expect kids to use. It's unreasonable to claim five to twelve year olds have a need for (supposedly) superior, high-class spreadsheets, databases and business presentations.
Well, that's what they were doing for the cameras on New Zealand television.
You know, it's a science piece, so we have to show them in lab coats, safety goggles on, with some unidentified coloured liquids.
The whole thing is being investigated by the Commerce Commission, so, this is hardly an unsolicited refund. It's more of a pre-emptive refund to defuse things, really; while it won't excuse them from the investigation, it does take away a lot of the investigation's momentum.
Personally, I prefer the music of Vincent Diamante - from 'Cloud', another project that has a feel of flow about it. You can grab the OST from the extra download page.
- 1913 - 1% to 7%
- WWI - ? to 77%
- Post-WWI - ? to 25%
- Pre-WWII - ? to 75%
- WWII - ? to 91%
- 1964 - ? to 70%
- 1981 - 11% to 50%
- 1986 - 15% to 28%
- 1990s - 15% to 39.6%
- 2001 - 15% to 35%
A more comprehensive look at things would, of course, take into effect the breadth of the brackets as well. There's probably other factors as well (IANAE), such as the actual value of incomes.Double happies were a form of firework. They were lit in the hand and then thrown a safe distance away, as opposed to sky rocket (American dialect: bottle rocket) or light and run fireworks. They had problems in that, if you held them a little too long, they'd go off in your hand. They packed quite a wallop too, and could do some serious damage. There were also problems with them being thrown at people/pets/property.
They were banned in New Zealand in the '90s. There's a sky rocket ban too, except for people with fireworks licenses (for public displays, generally). And, based on behaviour this year, a full private fireworks ban is being considered. Pretty funny: ban fireworks in celebration of the thwarting of the gunpowder plot.
Oh, as a fellow sinophile, I completely agree. Compensated Feng Shui professionals obviously have honed confusian sensibilities. How else would they get anyone to believe their bullshit.
This is all very true. Breaking of DRM can be, morally, quite agreeable. I just wanted to point out that, in the US at least, it's illegal regardless of whether you're going the whole hog in one bound (DeCSS, say), or performing a (in other circumstances) legal process that has the same outcome. The ends of the process, not the means, define what the process is.
My democratic representatives, thank goodness, have never considered legislation of this sort. So, in the meantime at least, I can circumvent away in order to support my free use.
Bad analogy time. Really bad analogy.
There's an episode of the most excellent Trailer Park Boys in which Ricky, one of the protagonists, pulls a stunt that's analogous. He has someone take lawn furniture and the like from peoples yards and place it on the side of the footpath. Now, he muses, it's just garbage, and he can take it away. It's not (very) illegal to move the furniture around someone's yard, and it's not (very) illegal to take away garbage. So, he claims, he's not stealing.
The flaw in this scheme is similar to how the argument from the *IAA will go. Putting the decrypted file in memory (by playing it) certainly isn't circumventing DRM, reading from some area in memory and writing to the HD certainly isn't circumventing DRM. But that's not what's important: the overall outcome of the two processes put together is the circumvention of DRM, just as putting Ricky's processes together is, well, stealing lawn furniture.
wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/WgaTray.exe
The quote you give mentions that some consider McCurry's arguments to be 'deceptive and manipulative' - that's a fine analysis. It's an example of evaluating the arguments themselves and deciding that they're a load of crap. So why, prithee, must we 'consider the source'?
Ah, but note the difference between a slashback and a backslash. The former is as you describe it. The latter is, well, this. Or this: \
Besides all that, the content forking policy isn't that relevent to your allegation that 'Wikipedia policy admits that [the truth] is whatever is "mainstream"' - it gives guidelines for how POV material is to be handled, not how NPOV is. So, bad luck, try again.
I have to call bullshit on this one. If this is true, why is Nancy Cartwright still touring with the stage show 'My Life as a Ten Year-Old Boy' - the stage show was in New Zealand last month for the NZ International Comedy Festival. Hell, there were prime time TV ads for the show in which she does the voices (her getting pulled over by a traffic cop).
((S)he do the police in different voices!)
A few years ago these sprays and covers became popular in New Zealand. A consumer information magazine ran tests, with the help of the police who provided the cameras, to see how effective they were. The end result was that, once the cover or spray was applied, the license plates became less reflective than a plain plate.
New Zealand plates are mostly black on silvery white which I'd guess would be one of the most reflective plates in the first place and so the hardest to make more reflective - the effectiveness probably varies from country to country.
Bloody preview button. Why must you mock me so? Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand.