I don't have any idea what the politics behind all this is, nor do I have enough interest to look it up, but it seems to me that if a company pays $1B for code, then it forks left and right and they're left with nothing but yet another version, that's not going to exactly be a good advertisement for investing in open source. While this outcome is much better than a closed source application being killed off, it still would have been much better if differences could have been worked out and Sun had something for their money.
It makes me slightly concerned for the longevity of the open source software business model. In 2004, a fair number of companies felt that open source would be not only socially beneficial but also profitable, and investment in open source rose. More recently, many of the companies that seemed the keenest to move in that direction -- Novell, Sun, MySQL, etc -- have been stumbling badly. Red Hat seems to be left as the sole successful high profile champion of an open source business model. If the result is the business types concluding that open source generally does not allow a viable business model and it is therefore not worth investing in open source development, that could be quite bad news. (Like it or lump it, a lot of open source development is paid for by those business types.)
The Theory of Evolution makes predictions about the kinds of fossils that should be found, and guess what, we keep finding them. It has been tested and proven itself quite well.
Technically, those are quasi-experiments (approximately, relying on the experiments already done by nature rather than setting up your own experiment) and they are rightly seen as of somewhat lesser value than controlled experiments -- the reason being that there's a strong temptation to be so selective about what data gets considered that you'll never allow a negative result. Say you were a mad scientist who believed dogs evolved from elephants. So you predict there'll be an almost-dog-almost-elephant fossil out there. You haven't found it? "Well, there's a lot of places to look," you say as you toss the 999,999th almost-dog-almost-wolf fossil away because it doesn't match what you're looking for so you didn't consider it in the study.
Makes the "one of the most popular science fiction shows in recent history" from the summary questionable. IIRC, Doctor Who, Survivors, Primeval, and even Torchwood trounced that figure by a good margin in the UK. Perhaps one of the most popular US shows, but it seems US audiences just aren't that into science fiction.
We get that. It's just backwards to complain about how people take the time to celebrate the achievements of free software developers.
You're missing the point -- they're doing the right thing. Because clearly, the appropriate way to celebrate the past achievements of free software is with a ridiculous angry row about some minor piece of pedantry. "It's GNU/Linux, bozo!", "Free software isn't the same as open source, dumbass!", "KDE sux and Gnome roolz, lameface!"
In fact, I'm hard pressed to come up with any field where hiring companies provide significant training and career development. At best, you get reimbursed for tuition (for MBAs, etc), or are required to take extra corporate training for things universities either don't teach or can't (trade secrets). But nothing along the lines of hiring novices and training them to be experts.
Hospitals take on junior doctors fresh out of university. They are not fully qualified until approximately age 35 in most countries. They do not, however, spend the 12 years from graduation to full qualification unpaid. Strategy consulting companies hire graduates from almost any discipline. The first thing they do is train them for three months, then place them in junior roles on the consultancy projects in a managed career progression. The civil service takes on people who have taken an entry test. They are placed in a managed career process, which on the "fast track" deliberately involves shorter than usual assignments to particular departments in order to build up the experience for senior roles. All of this is paid. Yes, most fields hire relative novices and train them to be experts through managed career progressions. They do not expect an ever-increasing process of unpaid work experience.
Again, the same argument could be made for any other field. Do you think a fresh civil engineering grad is ready actually to design that new highway tunnel? Or that fresh junior doctor to do that heart surgery? But in other fields, the hiring companies take it upon themselves to provide that training and career development. It is only computing where we would think to say "bugger off and work for free on some open source project, then come back in a few years time" and consider it a sane economic response (while simultaneously bemoaning the lack of qualified talent). Note - the response this thread is replying to was not 'well, he'll probably need a Masters or PhD for that particular area', it was 'go do some open source kernel hacking'.
I assumed that if he really wanted to work on compilers or kernels, then it must be a personal interest. If he would view working on open-source compilers/kernels as an unpaid chore for "the man", then it's probably a good thing that he didn't get a job working on such software in the first place.
I assumed that if he really wanted to work [in healthcare / as a teacher / as a lawyer / in finance / as a plumber / any other job in the world ], then it must be a personal interest. If he would view working [ for no pay ] as an unpaid chore for "the man", then it's probably a good thing that he didn't get a job working [ in his chosen field ] in the first place.
Get the picture? People actually expect to earn a living doing their career and be paid for their hard work. The fact that they would like to choose a career based on personal interest does not mitigate this.
It's worse than that. Knife crime is down. The number of people injured by knives and other sharp instruments is down (although not by as much as was previously reported). Incidence of violent crime in general is down.
This hysteria and panic is caused by, well, nothing. Except the fact that for some unknown reason over the last 5 years the media has become much more likely to report each and every incident of violence with a knife that they get to hear about.
Sales is used as a very rough gauge of the average hours spent playing games across the teenage cohort, but the dodgy link is whether sales is related to time playing, rather than whether time playing violent games is related at all to behaviour. For instance, increased sales may be due to increased teenage employment (more jobs for teenagers, giving more money to spend) which tends to reduce time available actually to play the games, as well as reducing crime figures (unemployment -> crime rates is well documented).
But frankly any activity you spend significant amounts of time on is going to affect your mental processes and behaviour. The slashdot counter-claim that this is magically not true for video games is bunkum. House-buyers notice For Sale signs more readily even in the months after they have bought their house. Go-karters find it hard to avoid speeding on the way home from the track. You've probably seen people in video arcades, when they come off fight simulators, throwing air-punches on the way out. Frankly, those of us who want to pretend there's no link between how we spend our leisure time and the mental processes we learn are pretty much akin to the tobacco companies hanging on to the shred of "but I'm sure there's some way we can claim the link hasn't been completely proven". Better would be to at least have the guts to admit "yup, sure, the games are violent in a way that isn't completely healthy for me, but you know what: actually I enjoy a few unhealthy things now and then."
Don't get me wrong, British society has plenty of problems, not least with its government what with all of the CCTV
Actually the CCTV is fairly popular too, as it tends to reduce violence against the person (people are for instance quite glad of CCTV in train stations late at night and near bus ranks outside pubs) even though the vast majority of it is never watched. It's the traffic cameras that are unpopular, as that's where most people might actually want to break an enforceable law. And unlike some countries (Australia), in the UK the traffic cameras are all clearly visible, painted bright yellow, signed, advertised on the Web, and come up on your GPS to try to make dang sure you never get caught by one.
I don't know anything about Australian copyright law, but under US law you cannot copyright a fact. A train timetable would certainly qualify. This might be one area where we get things right.
In Australia (and I think elsewhere) there is such a thing as a "database right". A rough example would be the phone book. It is a collection of facts: people's names and their phone numbers. However, there is a significant investment in collecting these facts, and so the particular *set of facts* (ie, the database) has an associated database right. So, unless the authors of the app independently collected their own data on when trains pass particular stations (eg, by sitting in every station with a watch -- unlikely), they presumably were using RailCorps' "database" (timetable).
Sure, for certain niche markets, closed source can give a company a competitive advantage for a while... But if the market is "hot" enough, Open Source will eventually be there to eat its lunch. This has been happening over and over again for the past two decades. Were you asleep?
Ah, that lovely weasel-word: "eventually". OpenOffice.org still hasn't managed to eat Microsoft Office's lunch (and looks nowhere near getting a nibble at Excel) -- never mind, it's just not "eventually" yet. Firefox, celebrated champion of lunch eating, still lags at half or less of the market share compared to IE -- "don't complain, it's just not eventually yet." iTunes -- that's really popular, surely it's lunch should have been eaten now... "hold your horses, I said eventually" SAP? Salesforce.com? Google (indexing and search algorithms)? "You can't call me up on it because I said 'eventually'."
"Therefore, it is our right, nay, our duty to users everywhere to violate those bits of intellectual property at every possible opportunity until it becomes such a legal nightmare for these companies that they are forced to back down. Anything less would be uncivilized. I know this is no Rosa Parks moment, but it still very much necessary for the long-term viability of computing as we know it. Just say no to data format patents."
This is precisely the tactic I encourage everyone I know to use.
These people are no longer playing fair, WHY SHOULD WE?
In this day and age, corporations are, quite simply put, walking right over common sense. There is no more "customer service", but rather corporations simply see us all as resources to be mined.
When these people no longer see reason, no longer work to provide a product without stifling the competition, then "Intellectual Disobedience" is the ONLY route left to address the situation.
If by "Intellectual Disobediance", you mean "allegedly violating their patent by distributing Linux access to FAT in major products", then your theory doesn't appear to work. Far from disrupting Microsoft, in the manner of civil disobedience, it just lets their lawyers think "woot, more revenue streams after we've won the first patent lawsuit!" If your complaint is that they see us as resources to be mined, then the solution is unlikely to be just to give them more resources to mine... you actually need to work out how to prevent the mining.
These people [people who don't want an internet connection on their gaming console] though are increasingly in the minority, and they are probably also in the minority that will be hardest hit by the economic slowdown - which is only going to hasten the inevitable.
Oh I quite disagree. Very few of the people I know who have XBoxes or Wiis have them connected to the internet. And it's not because they're poor, nor even because they don't *have* the internet (most of them are in fact techies). It's simply that the games console is something that sits next to the tv for casual single player games and the only time it is played "multiplayer"... is when they're playing Lego Star Wars with their children. Games-players have got older, and that means many of them have settled down, have families, and don't have time to waste hours playing online against "l33t" strangers. IIRC, only 1 of the 3 consoles comes with built-in WiFi, and it is the least popular. I can't see the 30-something dads I know being bothered to hook up a cord just to download a game they could pick up (on sale) in the supermarket next time they shop, let alone buying a WiFi add-on.
By my understanding (mostly from/. discussions but still), precedent is typical for common law as practised in the UK and its former colonies that inherited this systems, including the US.
In most systems, courts are only bound by precedents that were set in a higher court. Hence, in the UK, why the High Court and Law Lords decisions are so important - as these set precedent for all the courts beneath them, whereas a county court decision is less newsworthy. As another poster points out, this is also true in Sweden. So if this were to be a case for precedent-setting it wouldn't be all that important until some appeals have pushed it up to a higher level of the court system.
There are no audiobooks sold for Kindle. What gets sold are plain text books, and the device (not even the book!) is bundled with a text-to-speech reader. It's not the same as audiobooks. This is also in no way a violation of the authors' copyright, or anyone's else - they still get paid in full for the copy of their book. Copyright does not restrict the means of the end user to interpret the text - whether it is simply read, or TTS used to read it aloud, shouldn't be of any concern of the author.
No, this is greed, pure and simple. They could get away with charging extra for audiobooks, and they want to keep doing that; and now Amazon is pulling the rug from under that business model. So there's a lot of noise. But, gladly, Amazon and the customers have full right to just tell them to STFU, and that's what's most likely going to happen.
It depends. It may well be that a court would decide that Amazon is not just selling the book but also an on-demand public performance (the performer being Amazon with the text-to-speech software being a tool used in their performance). Generally, the law does not allow for inanimate objects to take actions -- instead they are tools used by human or corporate actors. So, oddly, it may well depend on the license agreement for the software. If the software is "licensed" to the user but still "owned" by Amazon, then you could argue it is Amazon who is performing the reading (via the tool), not the user. That might infringe a performance right. If the software is actually owned by the end-user, then it is easier to argue that the user is conducting their own private performance, which wouldn't infringe a right.
I am not a lawyer. Which is unfortunate, because otherwise I'd get paid handsomely for just this kind of silly logic chopping.
Correct. A monopoly position is not illegal. Using it to punish competitors or as a means of compliance is.
IIRC, in some countries regulators can take action to reduce monopolies even where they are not abused, if they believe increased competition would be in the interests of the consumer or the market. I could imagine Google being required to divest its mobile applications arm if they felt that dominance over both Web search and mobile applications was distorting the online advertising market.
Also, simply offering services at a loss can be seen by regulators and competition watchdogs as abusive market distortion -- for instance when The Times temporarily reduced its price to 25p, relying on its deep pockets, there was talk of this being potentially distorting as it may drive smaller papers out of business, reducing long term competition. So it's possible that any number of Google's loss-making activities could come under fire any time a regulator cares to look at them.
That being said, the article is rather short in one important area: a suggested mechanism for this sort of inheritance. Without that, it's bound to be mired in controversy for some time.
This is an unfortunate shortcoming of science at the moment. A tested result is rejected until there is a suggested mechanism; as soon as a mechanism is suggested, it is all too often treated as "true" even if the mechanism itself has never been experimentally tested at all but was just plucked out of the air. The one that instantly springs to mind is the 2005 result that being cold can after all make you susceptible to catching a cold. The paper is reasonable and itself admits that its "suggested mechanism" (that capillaries in the nose constrict, reducing access by the immune system) was not itself tested by the authors, but was just an idea they came up with when their actual experiment -- do people sitting around with their feet in bowls of icy water catch colds more often -- gave a positive result. Nonetheless, that mechanism very quickly started getting bandied around as if it were gospel.
Ok, a slightly less blinded-by-the-cynicism round-up.
Labour used to be dominated by the unions, but then realised this was making them almost unelectable as anybody who isn't in a union really doesn't like other people's unions very much. They've tried to become centrist.
Conservatives used to be very much for "small government", turning everything free market and cutting taxes as far as possible. They've been realising that times have changed since the 80s and a social conscience is generally seen as a good thing. So, both the main parties have been chasing "the middle ground", or at least marketing themselves that way.
The Liberal Democrats formed from an amalgam of a breakaway party from Labour (the SDP) and one of the old British political parties (the Liberals). They tend to have a socially progressive set of policies, often highlighting just one or two policies that sound populist or radical (eg, local income taxes) because they struggle to keep their profile up in the media.
Things are complicated further because while the Lib Dems have far too few seats ever to form a government, they have much more evenly spread support than the two main parties -- so northern seats are often Labour vs Lib Dem battles, while southern seats are often Conservative vs Lib Dem battles, making British politics a very odd fight: it's not a straight fight between Labour and Conservatives, but also a question of which of them can fight the Lib Dems at a local level more convincingly.
Also, although the Conservatives have a lead in the polls, the original headline is wrong to say that the Conservatives are "certainly going to be the next government", because of the way constituency borders are at the moment. The large lead in the vote could very easily turn into a small loss in numbers of seats, or a "hung parliament" (which in practice would probably mean a Labour minority government, as on economic issues the Lib Dems vote with Labour more often than with the Conservatives)
I think we need to be objective here.... We should collect statistics here and convince these Britons that OSS is still the best model around.
Because there's nothing more objective than deciding what conclusion you want to convince people of before collecting the statistics! (You don't happen to work for Gartner, do you?)
Some branches of the UK Government still do develop software and publish it with very permissive licenses. For example, JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) has sponsored a number of projects to produce open source software in higher education. And various other arms of the British Government always have spent huge amounts of money through private firms, often falling flat on their faces. Government projects failing isn't a new invention.
Basically the question is: what value does a browser add to your application? I can see two: it is already present (and so requires no download) and it contains a set of UI controls that you don't have to write. Both advantages are minimal.
I can add a few more:
Reduced workflow. A potential user / customer who discovers your service does not need to stop, download an application, find an admin who can give them permission to install it, etc, in order to become a customer. (Java / Flash don't necessarily solve this because of the next point.)
Minimal requirements. You know all your customers have a browser of some sort. Many of them may not have Java / Flash /.Net, or may have switched to a different browser for which they have not downloaded the relevant plugin.
Political safety. Few people moan that GMail is not open source. If it was a client application, rather than something server-side for which you don't even get the bytecode, there would be more political pressure to give the IP away.
Interaction with other sites, including search engines. Google's crawlers certainly cannot index the inside of my thick Java application. And even if it could, what URL could it give if my application sits on the desktop?
Evidence of user preference [for some sites/applications]. EBay bidding applications are ten a penny, but the vast majority of eBay customers still go through the website. So there are certainly occasions where users prefer the browser (though Word suggests there are other occasions where they don't).
And there are probably many more. For the most part, technologies aren't just chosen on whims but for business reasons (though 'it's what we have expertise in' can be a compelling reason)
Well, technically, the rule of thumb should be "understand first, act later" and in any event if you decide to act do it in a controlled environment first.
Unfortunately, this usually turns into a bland statement in a report such as "there is no scientific reason to believe this will cause harm to the environment", which is usually PR language for "well, we don't know it's going to go wrong, but there's always things we don't know" but is interpreted as "if you oppose this measure you are an unscientific bozo". And tiny, not-really-representative trials but "the best practical trials given cost and time constraints", are wished up into being treated as solid evidence of safety. After all, according to the lobbyists there was "no scientific reason to believe" that feeding heat-processed dead cows to cows was unsafe, until after the disaster the scientists involved in agriculture remembered about prions that could survive the processing and cause BSE / variant CJD.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have any idea what the politics behind all this is, nor do I have enough interest to look it up, but it seems to me that if a company pays $1B for code, then it forks left and right and they're left with nothing but yet another version, that's not going to exactly be a good advertisement for investing in open source. While this outcome is much better than a closed source application being killed off, it still would have been much better if differences could have been worked out and Sun had something for their money.
It makes me slightly concerned for the longevity of the open source software business model. In 2004, a fair number of companies felt that open source would be not only socially beneficial but also profitable, and investment in open source rose. More recently, many of the companies that seemed the keenest to move in that direction -- Novell, Sun, MySQL, etc -- have been stumbling badly. Red Hat seems to be left as the sole successful high profile champion of an open source business model. If the result is the business types concluding that open source generally does not allow a viable business model and it is therefore not worth investing in open source development, that could be quite bad news. (Like it or lump it, a lot of open source development is paid for by those business types.)
The Theory of Evolution makes predictions about the kinds of fossils that should be found, and guess what, we keep finding them. It has been tested and proven itself quite well.
Technically, those are quasi-experiments (approximately, relying on the experiments already done by nature rather than setting up your own experiment) and they are rightly seen as of somewhat lesser value than controlled experiments -- the reason being that there's a strong temptation to be so selective about what data gets considered that you'll never allow a negative result. Say you were a mad scientist who believed dogs evolved from elephants. So you predict there'll be an almost-dog-almost-elephant fossil out there. You haven't found it? "Well, there's a lot of places to look," you say as you toss the 999,999th almost-dog-almost-wolf fossil away because it doesn't match what you're looking for so you didn't consider it in the study.
2.4 million people tuned in for the finale.
Makes the "one of the most popular science fiction shows in recent history" from the summary questionable. IIRC, Doctor Who, Survivors, Primeval, and even Torchwood trounced that figure by a good margin in the UK. Perhaps one of the most popular US shows, but it seems US audiences just aren't that into science fiction.
You're missing the point -- they're doing the right thing. Because clearly, the appropriate way to celebrate the past achievements of free software is with a ridiculous angry row about some minor piece of pedantry. "It's GNU/Linux, bozo!", "Free software isn't the same as open source, dumbass!", "KDE sux and Gnome roolz, lameface!"
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.
This post modded informative because it appears everyone old enough to know the song has trouble remembering the lyrics....
In fact, I'm hard pressed to come up with any field where hiring companies provide significant training and career development. At best, you get reimbursed for tuition (for MBAs, etc), or are required to take extra corporate training for things universities either don't teach or can't (trade secrets). But nothing along the lines of hiring novices and training them to be experts.
Hospitals take on junior doctors fresh out of university. They are not fully qualified until approximately age 35 in most countries. They do not, however, spend the 12 years from graduation to full qualification unpaid. Strategy consulting companies hire graduates from almost any discipline. The first thing they do is train them for three months, then place them in junior roles on the consultancy projects in a managed career progression. The civil service takes on people who have taken an entry test. They are placed in a managed career process, which on the "fast track" deliberately involves shorter than usual assignments to particular departments in order to build up the experience for senior roles. All of this is paid. Yes, most fields hire relative novices and train them to be experts through managed career progressions. They do not expect an ever-increasing process of unpaid work experience.
Again, the same argument could be made for any other field. Do you think a fresh civil engineering grad is ready actually to design that new highway tunnel? Or that fresh junior doctor to do that heart surgery? But in other fields, the hiring companies take it upon themselves to provide that training and career development. It is only computing where we would think to say "bugger off and work for free on some open source project, then come back in a few years time" and consider it a sane economic response (while simultaneously bemoaning the lack of qualified talent). Note - the response this thread is replying to was not 'well, he'll probably need a Masters or PhD for that particular area', it was 'go do some open source kernel hacking'.
I assumed that if he really wanted to work on compilers or kernels, then it must be a personal interest. If he would view working on open-source compilers/kernels as an unpaid chore for "the man", then it's probably a good thing that he didn't get a job working on such software in the first place.
I assumed that if he really wanted to work [in healthcare / as a teacher / as a lawyer / in finance / as a plumber / any other job in the world ], then it must be a personal interest. If he would view working [ for no pay ] as an unpaid chore for "the man", then it's probably a good thing that he didn't get a job working [ in his chosen field ] in the first place.
Get the picture? People actually expect to earn a living doing their career and be paid for their hard work. The fact that they would like to choose a career based on personal interest does not mitigate this.
It's worse than that. Knife crime is down. The number of people injured by knives and other sharp instruments is down (although not by as much as was previously reported). Incidence of violent crime in general is down.
This hysteria and panic is caused by, well, nothing. Except the fact that for some unknown reason over the last 5 years the media has become much more likely to report each and every incident of violence with a knife that they get to hear about.
Sales is used as a very rough gauge of the average hours spent playing games across the teenage cohort, but the dodgy link is whether sales is related to time playing, rather than whether time playing violent games is related at all to behaviour. For instance, increased sales may be due to increased teenage employment (more jobs for teenagers, giving more money to spend) which tends to reduce time available actually to play the games, as well as reducing crime figures (unemployment -> crime rates is well documented).
But frankly any activity you spend significant amounts of time on is going to affect your mental processes and behaviour. The slashdot counter-claim that this is magically not true for video games is bunkum. House-buyers notice For Sale signs more readily even in the months after they have bought their house. Go-karters find it hard to avoid speeding on the way home from the track. You've probably seen people in video arcades, when they come off fight simulators, throwing air-punches on the way out. Frankly, those of us who want to pretend there's no link between how we spend our leisure time and the mental processes we learn are pretty much akin to the tobacco companies hanging on to the shred of "but I'm sure there's some way we can claim the link hasn't been completely proven". Better would be to at least have the guts to admit "yup, sure, the games are violent in a way that isn't completely healthy for me, but you know what: actually I enjoy a few unhealthy things now and then."
Don't get me wrong, British society has plenty of problems, not least with its government what with all of the CCTV
Actually the CCTV is fairly popular too, as it tends to reduce violence against the person (people are for instance quite glad of CCTV in train stations late at night and near bus ranks outside pubs) even though the vast majority of it is never watched. It's the traffic cameras that are unpopular, as that's where most people might actually want to break an enforceable law. And unlike some countries (Australia), in the UK the traffic cameras are all clearly visible, painted bright yellow, signed, advertised on the Web, and come up on your GPS to try to make dang sure you never get caught by one.
I don't know anything about Australian copyright law, but under US law you cannot copyright a fact. A train timetable would certainly qualify. This might be one area where we get things right.
In Australia (and I think elsewhere) there is such a thing as a "database right". A rough example would be the phone book. It is a collection of facts: people's names and their phone numbers. However, there is a significant investment in collecting these facts, and so the particular *set of facts* (ie, the database) has an associated database right. So, unless the authors of the app independently collected their own data on when trains pass particular stations (eg, by sitting in every station with a watch -- unlikely), they presumably were using RailCorps' "database" (timetable).
Sure, for certain niche markets, closed source can give a company a competitive advantage for a while... But if the market is "hot" enough, Open Source will eventually be there to eat its lunch. This has been happening over and over again for the past two decades. Were you asleep?
Ah, that lovely weasel-word: "eventually". OpenOffice.org still hasn't managed to eat Microsoft Office's lunch (and looks nowhere near getting a nibble at Excel) -- never mind, it's just not "eventually" yet. Firefox, celebrated champion of lunch eating, still lags at half or less of the market share compared to IE -- "don't complain, it's just not eventually yet." iTunes -- that's really popular, surely it's lunch should have been eaten now ... "hold your horses, I said eventually" SAP? Salesforce.com? Google (indexing and search algorithms)? "You can't call me up on it because I said 'eventually'."
Precisely. Couldn't agree more. We don't need to fight these gruppets in the same way that we don't need to fight the creationists.
Is Slashdot running a competition for who can get a religious argument started in the least relevant topic? If so, I think we have a nominee!
"Therefore, it is our right, nay, our duty to users everywhere to violate those bits of intellectual property at every possible opportunity until it becomes such a legal nightmare for these companies that they are forced to back down. Anything less would be uncivilized. I know this is no Rosa Parks moment, but it still very much necessary for the long-term viability of computing as we know it. Just say no to data format patents."
This is precisely the tactic I encourage everyone I know to use.
These people are no longer playing fair, WHY SHOULD WE?
In this day and age, corporations are, quite simply put, walking right over common sense. There is no more "customer service", but rather corporations simply see us all as resources to be mined.
When these people no longer see reason, no longer work to provide a product without stifling the competition, then "Intellectual Disobedience" is the ONLY route left to address the situation.
If by "Intellectual Disobediance", you mean "allegedly violating their patent by distributing Linux access to FAT in major products", then your theory doesn't appear to work. Far from disrupting Microsoft, in the manner of civil disobedience, it just lets their lawyers think "woot, more revenue streams after we've won the first patent lawsuit!" If your complaint is that they see us as resources to be mined, then the solution is unlikely to be just to give them more resources to mine... you actually need to work out how to prevent the mining.
These people [people who don't want an internet connection on their gaming console] though are increasingly in the minority, and they are probably also in the minority that will be hardest hit by the economic slowdown - which is only going to hasten the inevitable.
Oh I quite disagree. Very few of the people I know who have XBoxes or Wiis have them connected to the internet. And it's not because they're poor, nor even because they don't *have* the internet (most of them are in fact techies). It's simply that the games console is something that sits next to the tv for casual single player games and the only time it is played "multiplayer" ... is when they're playing Lego Star Wars with their children. Games-players have got older, and that means many of them have settled down, have families, and don't have time to waste hours playing online against "l33t" strangers. IIRC, only 1 of the 3 consoles comes with built-in WiFi, and it is the least popular. I can't see the 30-something dads I know being bothered to hook up a cord just to download a game they could pick up (on sale) in the supermarket next time they shop, let alone buying a WiFi add-on.
By my understanding (mostly from /. discussions but still), precedent is typical for common law as practised in the UK and its former colonies that inherited this systems, including the US.
In most systems, courts are only bound by precedents that were set in a higher court. Hence, in the UK, why the High Court and Law Lords decisions are so important - as these set precedent for all the courts beneath them, whereas a county court decision is less newsworthy. As another poster points out, this is also true in Sweden. So if this were to be a case for precedent-setting it wouldn't be all that important until some appeals have pushed it up to a higher level of the court system.
There are no audiobooks sold for Kindle. What gets sold are plain text books, and the device (not even the book!) is bundled with a text-to-speech reader. It's not the same as audiobooks. This is also in no way a violation of the authors' copyright, or anyone's else - they still get paid in full for the copy of their book. Copyright does not restrict the means of the end user to interpret the text - whether it is simply read, or TTS used to read it aloud, shouldn't be of any concern of the author.
No, this is greed, pure and simple. They could get away with charging extra for audiobooks, and they want to keep doing that; and now Amazon is pulling the rug from under that business model. So there's a lot of noise. But, gladly, Amazon and the customers have full right to just tell them to STFU, and that's what's most likely going to happen.
It depends. It may well be that a court would decide that Amazon is not just selling the book but also an on-demand public performance (the performer being Amazon with the text-to-speech software being a tool used in their performance). Generally, the law does not allow for inanimate objects to take actions -- instead they are tools used by human or corporate actors. So, oddly, it may well depend on the license agreement for the software. If the software is "licensed" to the user but still "owned" by Amazon, then you could argue it is Amazon who is performing the reading (via the tool), not the user. That might infringe a performance right. If the software is actually owned by the end-user, then it is easier to argue that the user is conducting their own private performance, which wouldn't infringe a right.
I am not a lawyer. Which is unfortunate, because otherwise I'd get paid handsomely for just this kind of silly logic chopping.
IIRC, in some countries regulators can take action to reduce monopolies even where they are not abused, if they believe increased competition would be in the interests of the consumer or the market. I could imagine Google being required to divest its mobile applications arm if they felt that dominance over both Web search and mobile applications was distorting the online advertising market.
Also, simply offering services at a loss can be seen by regulators and competition watchdogs as abusive market distortion -- for instance when The Times temporarily reduced its price to 25p, relying on its deep pockets, there was talk of this being potentially distorting as it may drive smaller papers out of business, reducing long term competition. So it's possible that any number of Google's loss-making activities could come under fire any time a regulator cares to look at them.
This is an unfortunate shortcoming of science at the moment. A tested result is rejected until there is a suggested mechanism; as soon as a mechanism is suggested, it is all too often treated as "true" even if the mechanism itself has never been experimentally tested at all but was just plucked out of the air. The one that instantly springs to mind is the 2005 result that being cold can after all make you susceptible to catching a cold. The paper is reasonable and itself admits that its "suggested mechanism" (that capillaries in the nose constrict, reducing access by the immune system) was not itself tested by the authors, but was just an idea they came up with when their actual experiment -- do people sitting around with their feet in bowls of icy water catch colds more often -- gave a positive result. Nonetheless, that mechanism very quickly started getting bandied around as if it were gospel.
The British have a parliamentary system and your parties actually stand for something.
Oh my God, someone's removed this person's cynicism organ! Nurse, get him to the operating theatre immediately!
Ok, a slightly less blinded-by-the-cynicism round-up.
Labour used to be dominated by the unions, but then realised this was making them almost unelectable as anybody who isn't in a union really doesn't like other people's unions very much. They've tried to become centrist.
Conservatives used to be very much for "small government", turning everything free market and cutting taxes as far as possible. They've been realising that times have changed since the 80s and a social conscience is generally seen as a good thing. So, both the main parties have been chasing "the middle ground", or at least marketing themselves that way.
The Liberal Democrats formed from an amalgam of a breakaway party from Labour (the SDP) and one of the old British political parties (the Liberals). They tend to have a socially progressive set of policies, often highlighting just one or two policies that sound populist or radical (eg, local income taxes) because they struggle to keep their profile up in the media.
Things are complicated further because while the Lib Dems have far too few seats ever to form a government, they have much more evenly spread support than the two main parties -- so northern seats are often Labour vs Lib Dem battles, while southern seats are often Conservative vs Lib Dem battles, making British politics a very odd fight: it's not a straight fight between Labour and Conservatives, but also a question of which of them can fight the Lib Dems at a local level more convincingly.
Also, although the Conservatives have a lead in the polls, the original headline is wrong to say that the Conservatives are "certainly going to be the next government", because of the way constituency borders are at the moment. The large lead in the vote could very easily turn into a small loss in numbers of seats, or a "hung parliament" (which in practice would probably mean a Labour minority government, as on economic issues the Lib Dems vote with Labour more often than with the Conservatives)
Because there's nothing more objective than deciding what conclusion you want to convince people of before collecting the statistics! (You don't happen to work for Gartner, do you?)
Some branches of the UK Government still do develop software and publish it with very permissive licenses. For example, JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) has sponsored a number of projects to produce open source software in higher education. And various other arms of the British Government always have spent huge amounts of money through private firms, often falling flat on their faces. Government projects failing isn't a new invention.
I can add a few more:
And there are probably many more. For the most part, technologies aren't just chosen on whims but for business reasons (though 'it's what we have expertise in' can be a compelling reason)
Unfortunately, this usually turns into a bland statement in a report such as "there is no scientific reason to believe this will cause harm to the environment", which is usually PR language for "well, we don't know it's going to go wrong, but there's always things we don't know" but is interpreted as "if you oppose this measure you are an unscientific bozo". And tiny, not-really-representative trials but "the best practical trials given cost and time constraints", are wished up into being treated as solid evidence of safety. After all, according to the lobbyists there was "no scientific reason to believe" that feeding heat-processed dead cows to cows was unsafe, until after the disaster the scientists involved in agriculture remembered about prions that could survive the processing and cause BSE / variant CJD.