Armstrong is perhaps the single most tested athlete on the planet,
This is impossible to prove. I believe it's used to bring a little more drama to the whole Lance Armstrong cult. (OLN, I'm looking at you) I'm not saying anything about Armstrong because I don't have enough facts. I never will have enough facts. I'm grateful for what he's done for the visibility of the sport.
The reasoning is fundamentally flawed. Again, I really don't care about the guy one way or the other. This is more of a heads-up on using weak logic to support beliefs.
One day he is clean. The next day he crashed, had a surge of adrenaline and made up tons of ground after the crash.
Because the human body just doesn't work like this. Stage racing cyclists have bad days. But they don't follow it with **crushing** the field the next day in the middle of an extremely long stage race. If he was that good, there would have been several days of crushing the field and a season full of crushing the field. (Merckx, Antequil)
Adrenaline doesn't last more than a minute or two. This is hours of breakout performance in a field *full* of riders at his skill level who could not simply ride away from the field in a stage with *massive* climbs. His performance was very consistent with the profile of a performance enhancing drug user. (PED's)
If it was the case that Landis was gifted with Merckx/Antequil like engine, he would have returned to crushing fields in American races. This didn't happen. Not even close. This is strong evidence he was using PED's.
Noone gets to appeal this decision in court. Yes, they do. It's called the CAS. Court Arbitration for Sport (or something like that)
several riders are kicked out of the race and stripped of any stage victories after failing a doping test. They do this differently now. They let the race finish, then kick them out of whatever results they had for the race. No one is paying attention after the last stage.
the winner failing a drug test smeared the reputation of the tour even further. Landis just got caught. Previous Tour winners have admitted to systematic performance enhancing drug (PED) use. (Riis) It's important to note, the tests are nowhere near perfect and are subject to a great deal of political interference. For example, how is it Marion Jones who started systematically using PED at 16 (16!) was never caught. I'd argue it was a combination of poor testing and USA Track and Field. At the top of any given sport, it's a very small community. In Jones' case you are telling me visits to BALCO resulting in fantastical improvements wasn't widely known?
Stage racers have bad days. It is unlikely that one bad day can be followed by a heroic, **crush** the field, ride the next day. PED's make it very likely.
The doping tests are a huge invasion of privacy, In exchange for getting paid to ride *very* nice bikes, you have to pee in a cup. I'd take that trade. It's not an invasion of privacy. The basic point is MANY athletes will cheat given the opportunity. And many cyclists were cheating a whole lot. They still do. So, the consequences are, every Pro Tour rider pees in a cup.
Now the question whether this treatment professional cyclists get is fair is another matter The back story here is EPO use in cycling was extreme. http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/02/cyclist-dies-in-sleep.html Cycling got what was coming to them. Given the Olympics are going on, one has to wonder what PED's the cross-country skiers/biathletes have. Same kind of performance demands as cycling. Hopefully, other sports like biathlon have done their walk of shame already.
Parent marries two flawed ideas that don't belong together and then somehow calls this a justification.
1. Local Government is somehow a spendthrift. This is a Sarah Palin explanation. The people with little comprehension of what their government does whip this explanation out to beat down their enemies. My civics class from grammar school taught me that local government provides public services and infrastructure. You know those awful spendthrifts just wasting our taxes on roads, and sewage systems... Let's do away with law enforcement. Courts too. People that use this kind of thinking have one goal, a return of the truck system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system
2. Parent makes the leap that a high-tax environment is somehow hostile to business. The goal of the comment is to make the Corporate Welfare State as big as possible. Shift the entire tax burden away from the corporation to the employee. (not the Owner of the business, the employee)
It is much more expensive, and almost impossible for Microsoft to leave. This is true with any giant-sized super-mega corp. facility. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying it happens nowhere near the level of fear the remark generates. The goal behind the fear mongering is to complete the Corporate Welfare State.
I can corroborate all of the claims made about Time Warner.
The universally horrible service of subscription television is why we don't buy any service. It's a nice chunk of change at the end of the year. The shows are out on DVD the next year anyway.
Dude, get a Nokia e7x series phone if you are cheap or the Communicator if you aren't.
Multitasking? Sure helps when I have an SSH client open and need to get something from a text file.
Global Copy and Paste? Pasting that public key from the text file into my ssh connection is sure a blessing.
Bottom line here is I think there are a very small number of us actually using a phone *something* like a desktop computer. I don't do it all the time, but it is an enormous value when the situation arises.
Your ignorance in this regard can be easily generalized to a much broader population of iPhone users.
I went from a really old Nokia Communicator to an e71 a while back.
Maps load quickly, the GPS lock is quick too. I move around the map with the keys with no drawing issues at all.
One of the issues I have with touchscreen phones is the lack of tactile buttons. I can use real buttons faster with less error.
I still don't understand the collective disregard for Nokia's products in the States. I doubly don't understand why Nokia passively markets their phones in the States.
It's good product and a more open platform. Nokia has been good about moving towards Free software too. That should be enough for the slashdot GPL hippies to get on board.
My project FileUniq is plain python, and executes a call to "md5" in order to get a hash.
MD5 is non-special (and deprecated anyway) no one at the BIS would give you a moment's difficulty. Worst case scenario, notify the BIS and they send you an official reply. I know this because I've worked with the BIS to export encryption technology. They were very easy to work with and tolerated my inexperience. Call them and explain your situation.
Sourceforge's language is a little daunting. A (new?) lawyer (justifying his job?) at sourceforge MegaCorp probably has quite a bit to do with the entire fiasco.
The number one reason why this is *very* much ado about nothing is that the projects the U.S. Government would have any interest in AT ALL are novel and strong encryption schemes. To satisfy both novel and strong conditions puts one into a *very* small and elite group.
Sure, there are many projects that implement standard/weak/known encryption. That's completely different than a project that implements legitimately novel AND strong to the point of piquing the interest of the BIS/spooks. I don't know for sure, but zrtp might be an example.
An American company can export SSL/TLS/PKI and similar, crypto products without ever drawing the interest of the BIS. I guess at some point in distant history, this was not the case. As someone that actually worked with the BIS on getting encryption export compliance it has been easy for a long time.
Your representation of the facts is suspect on a number of fronts.
The short form is that if they don't like how we use the kernel, we're unlikely to be accepted upstream. You casually forget to mention your introduction of a completely new lock method. This is a case of Google throwing code over the wall. That's not going to fly. When some suggestions are made regarding the method, they are ignored.
Then, there are proprietary dependencies that can't be released that breaks the build process. No effort is made on Google's part to make this play nice with a kernel build. More code throwing.
Then there are implications to other ARM builds that Google won't touch.
It's all still released as source code to the world Which creates problems for practically every ARM platform developer BUT Google.
Outside of the Google Reality Distortion Field, the code just doesn't work. At all.
Humans as a rule like their entertainment/political leaders to be familiar and similar. This desire is so powerful choices are typically made that harm the individual. For example, in order to share enjoying Californication, consumers pay Monopoly prices for subscription television then go out and pay Monopoly prices for the DVD. These same people vote for their representatives because they come to the conclusion 'I could have a beer with this guy as President.'
So, the answer to your question is, for most people, yes.
They are just using supply and demand to set the optimum price.
Demand/Supply equilibrium models don't work when you are attempting to describe a market at the author-level. This situation is a profit-seeking activity. In order to maximize profits, some demand goes unfilled or shifts to a similar author.
If the free market works, Which, it exhaustive historical observation repeatedly shows that the notion of competitive markets are temporary until some kind of Monopoly/Oligopoly/other mature market takes its place. Book Publishing (not the act of writing the book) is an Oligopoly.
prevailing prices Prices are simply the cost at which someone is willing to buy and the cost at which a publisher is willing to sell. No relation to anything else is ever necessary. Look at the pricing for DVD's. They cost less than $3 to make and deliver yet the average american consumer pays maybe 10+ times that for the latest and greatest?
reasonable profit A 'reasonable profit' is the one the seller thinks is reasonable. If I can sell a DVD for USD$1000 that cost me $5 to make, then $995 is a reasonable profit. The only thing I need is a willing buyer. No rational thinking required.
Killing and torture is no longer the difference between Good American Free and Axis of Evil Free.
Is it the case that 'organ harvesting,' is the delineation between a good free and a bad free? I want to know where the line is for you. It's not a flamebait question.
but you are allowed to level your charges. Whether other people believe you is not the deal. Fair point. I hadn't thought of it that way. So, what's your reason for categorizing the examples as lunatic rambling? I'm serious here. Because I don't get it. Do you like your money taken from you by your government? You think some bad guys probably dying at the hand of your government is good? Despotic regimes do the same thing.
the real struggle for freedom Believe it or not, I'm sure we actually agree on lots of principals. I think we'd agree to disagree on how those principals are turned into action though.
What is 'real' and what is 'freedom?' A Republic that has clearly capitulated to banking and oligopolists is 'real' and 'free?' I'd like to know how you define this 'real freedom' versus your most despised 'non-free' place.
really being killed. Those deaths at Gitmo look like killing to me. What about all that killing in Iraq where the WMD's and Al Qaeda never were? CIA's secret prison facilities? Despotic regimes have secret prisons too. They torture and kill just like the Americans. How do you clearly distinguish between American secret prisons, torture, deaths and another with no moral ambiguity whatsoever? That's a serious question, not flamebait.
Microsoft will cooperate as long as they have a shot at public sector revenue. This is hardly unique to China. If the nation of Venezuela wanted Microsoft products, they'd take their money.
I think American crossed the line into full-scale hipocracy(sp!!) by calling China out on censorship. The Chinese are more overt, but the effects are the same.
How about the *massive* transfer of weath orchestrated by the Fed and Treasury? It's a 'bailout.' Maiden Lane 3 somehow generates profits in a way obvious to exactly no one. GM's debt holders got barely pennies on the dollar depending on their debt senority and yet AIG's counter parties got every single cent back. And the headline is "this is troubling" ?? http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jan2010/db2010018_994080.htm
Let's go back a few years to Sibel Edmonds story that *no* media would touch.
I missed the part where the American Republic was a bastion of Freedom.
1. This is the Legal world not a PHP/.net software contract. The social value of Lawyers is ranked far and above any software/net profession. Their costs have a greater probability of reflecting what's needed in dollar terms to maintain a specific American standard of living within the higher ranks of American society.
2. Look at it the way software projects doomed for failure in the average megacorp are costed-out. Take the lone developer or two's salary, divide it into the hours on the project, then add in every single conceivable cost including electricity for the entire facility, the CTO's salary, Project Manager's salary, Project Team, the cost of every computer that uses the software, the cost of every *user* that somehow benefits and you'll get to a project cost of $400,000 for a bash script. While it may sound funny, I've been there and seen that.
Not to hijack the thread too much, but the CEO's pet project can bleed costs all year and not come under any scrutiny whatsoever.
That's doubtful because my e71 has maps/gps. Do you have Windows and have you installed their middleware? From there, you should be able to get GPS maps installed.
Slashdot Mirror
Armstrong is perhaps the single most tested athlete on the planet,
This is impossible to prove. I believe it's used to bring a little more drama to the whole Lance Armstrong cult. (OLN, I'm looking at you) I'm not saying anything about Armstrong because I don't have enough facts. I never will have enough facts. I'm grateful for what he's done for the visibility of the sport.
The reasoning is fundamentally flawed. Again, I really don't care about the guy one way or the other. This is more of a heads-up on using weak logic to support beliefs.
One day he is clean. The next day he crashed, had a surge of adrenaline and made up tons of ground after the crash.
Because the human body just doesn't work like this. Stage racing cyclists have bad days. But they don't follow it with **crushing** the field the next day in the middle of an extremely long stage race. If he was that good, there would have been several days of crushing the field and a season full of crushing the field. (Merckx, Antequil)
Adrenaline doesn't last more than a minute or two. This is hours of breakout performance in a field *full* of riders at his skill level who could not simply ride away from the field in a stage with *massive* climbs. His performance was very consistent with the profile of a performance enhancing drug user. (PED's)
If it was the case that Landis was gifted with Merckx/Antequil like engine, he would have returned to crushing fields in American races. This didn't happen. Not even close. This is strong evidence he was using PED's.
Noone gets to appeal this decision in court.
Yes, they do. It's called the CAS. Court Arbitration for Sport (or something like that)
several riders are kicked out of the race and stripped of any stage victories after failing a doping test.
They do this differently now. They let the race finish, then kick them out of whatever results they had for the race. No one is paying attention after the last stage.
the winner failing a drug test smeared the reputation of the tour even further.
Landis just got caught. Previous Tour winners have admitted to systematic performance enhancing drug (PED) use. (Riis) It's important to note, the tests are nowhere near perfect and are subject to a great deal of political interference. For example, how is it Marion Jones who started systematically using PED at 16 (16!) was never caught. I'd argue it was a combination of poor testing and USA Track and Field. At the top of any given sport, it's a very small community. In Jones' case you are telling me visits to BALCO resulting in fantastical improvements wasn't widely known?
Stage racers have bad days. It is unlikely that one bad day can be followed by a heroic, **crush** the field, ride the next day. PED's make it very likely.
The doping tests are a huge invasion of privacy,
In exchange for getting paid to ride *very* nice bikes, you have to pee in a cup. I'd take that trade. It's not an invasion of privacy. The basic point is MANY athletes will cheat given the opportunity. And many cyclists were cheating a whole lot. They still do. So, the consequences are, every Pro Tour rider pees in a cup.
Now the question whether this treatment professional cyclists get is fair is another matter
The back story here is EPO use in cycling was extreme. http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/02/cyclist-dies-in-sleep.html Cycling got what was coming to them. Given the Olympics are going on, one has to wonder what PED's the cross-country skiers/biathletes have. Same kind of performance demands as cycling. Hopefully, other sports like biathlon have done their walk of shame already.
Parent marries two flawed ideas that don't belong together and then somehow calls this a justification.
1. Local Government is somehow a spendthrift. This is a Sarah Palin explanation. The people with little comprehension of what their government does whip this explanation out to beat down their enemies. My civics class from grammar school taught me that local government provides public services and infrastructure. You know those awful spendthrifts just wasting our taxes on roads, and sewage systems... Let's do away with law enforcement. Courts too. People that use this kind of thinking have one goal, a return of the truck system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system
2. Parent makes the leap that a high-tax environment is somehow hostile to business. The goal of the comment is to make the Corporate Welfare State as big as possible. Shift the entire tax burden away from the corporation to the employee. (not the Owner of the business, the employee)
It is much more expensive, and almost impossible for Microsoft to leave. This is true with any giant-sized super-mega corp. facility. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying it happens nowhere near the level of fear the remark generates. The goal behind the fear mongering is to complete the Corporate Welfare State.
I can corroborate all of the claims made about Time Warner.
The universally horrible service of subscription television is why we don't buy any service. It's a nice chunk of change at the end of the year. The shows are out on DVD the next year anyway.
Pfft.
Dude, get a Nokia e7x series phone if you are cheap or the Communicator if you aren't.
Multitasking? Sure helps when I have an SSH client open and need to get something from a text file.
Global Copy and Paste? Pasting that public key from the text file into my ssh connection is sure a blessing.
Bottom line here is I think there are a very small number of us actually using a phone *something* like a desktop computer. I don't do it all the time, but it is an enormous value when the situation arises.
Your ignorance in this regard can be easily generalized to a much broader population of iPhone users.
I went from a really old Nokia Communicator to an e71 a while back.
Maps load quickly, the GPS lock is quick too. I move around the map with the keys with no drawing issues at all.
One of the issues I have with touchscreen phones is the lack of tactile buttons. I can use real buttons faster with less error.
I still don't understand the collective disregard for Nokia's products in the States. I doubly don't understand why Nokia passively markets their phones in the States.
It's good product and a more open platform. Nokia has been good about moving towards Free software too. That should be enough for the slashdot GPL hippies to get on board.
Clear, concise explanation of the problem. For all of the moral outrage posted, none of the comments have a clear understanding of the issue.
Pfft... I forgot to mention MD5 is a hashing algorithm, not really encryption per se...
My project FileUniq is plain python, and executes a call to "md5" in order to get a hash.
MD5 is non-special (and deprecated anyway) no one at the BIS would give you a moment's difficulty. Worst case scenario, notify the BIS and they send you an official reply. I know this because I've worked with the BIS to export encryption technology. They were very easy to work with and tolerated my inexperience. Call them and explain your situation.
Sourceforge's language is a little daunting. A (new?) lawyer (justifying his job?) at sourceforge MegaCorp probably has quite a bit to do with the entire fiasco.
OpenSSL and PKI-integrated projects all use standard crypto libraries that are based on standard crypto technology.
The BIS's interest lies in novel and strong encryption schemes. The difficulty of which is hard to describe.
The number one reason why this is *very* much ado about nothing is that the projects the U.S. Government would have any interest in AT ALL are novel and strong encryption schemes. To satisfy both novel and strong conditions puts one into a *very* small and elite group.
Sure, there are many projects that implement standard/weak/known encryption. That's completely different than a project that implements legitimately novel AND strong to the point of piquing the interest of the BIS/spooks. I don't know for sure, but zrtp might be an example.
An American company can export SSL/TLS/PKI and similar, crypto products without ever drawing the interest of the BIS. I guess at some point in distant history, this was not the case. As someone that actually worked with the BIS on getting encryption export compliance it has been easy for a long time.
Your representation of the facts is suspect on a number of fronts.
The short form is that if they don't like how we use the kernel, we're unlikely to be accepted upstream.
You casually forget to mention your introduction of a completely new lock method. This is a case of Google throwing code over the wall. That's not going to fly. When some suggestions are made regarding the method, they are ignored.
Then, there are proprietary dependencies that can't be released that breaks the build process. No effort is made on Google's part to make this play nice with a kernel build. More code throwing.
Then there are implications to other ARM builds that Google won't touch.
It's all still released as source code to the world
Which creates problems for practically every ARM platform developer BUT Google.
Outside of the Google Reality Distortion Field, the code just doesn't work. At all.
Humans as a rule like their entertainment/political leaders to be familiar and similar. This desire is so powerful choices are typically made that harm the individual. For example, in order to share enjoying Californication, consumers pay Monopoly prices for subscription television then go out and pay Monopoly prices for the DVD. These same people vote for their representatives because they come to the conclusion 'I could have a beer with this guy as President.'
So, the answer to your question is, for most people, yes.
They are just using supply and demand to set the optimum price.
Demand/Supply equilibrium models don't work when you are attempting to describe a market at the author-level. This situation is a profit-seeking activity. In order to maximize profits, some demand goes unfilled or shifts to a similar author.
If you watched Californication
When did Television start broadcasting historically accurate to the last detail stories?
It's probably time to turn off the TV for a good long while.
If the free market works,
Which, it exhaustive historical observation repeatedly shows that the notion of competitive markets are temporary until some kind of Monopoly/Oligopoly/other mature market takes its place. Book Publishing (not the act of writing the book) is an Oligopoly.
prevailing prices
Prices are simply the cost at which someone is willing to buy and the cost at which a publisher is willing to sell. No relation to anything else is ever necessary. Look at the pricing for DVD's. They cost less than $3 to make and deliver yet the average american consumer pays maybe 10+ times that for the latest and greatest?
reasonable profit
A 'reasonable profit' is the one the seller thinks is reasonable. If I can sell a DVD for USD$1000 that cost me $5 to make, then $995 is a reasonable profit. The only thing I need is a willing buyer. No rational thinking required.
This concludes the Economics lesson for today.
For another thing, the writers of those articles aren't arrested
I really do mean to burst your world view bubble because reporters most certainly are jailed in the U.S.
http://www.judithmiller.com/537/reporter-jailed-after-refusing-to-name-source
Killing and torture is no longer the difference between Good American Free and Axis of Evil Free.
Is it the case that 'organ harvesting,' is the delineation between a good free and a bad free? I want to know where the line is for you. It's not a flamebait question.
The use of the word 'marginal' needs to be disambiguated too. It means 'not of central importance.'
but you are allowed to level your charges. Whether other people believe you is not the deal.
Fair point. I hadn't thought of it that way. So, what's your reason for categorizing the examples as lunatic rambling? I'm serious here. Because I don't get it. Do you like your money taken from you by your government? You think some bad guys probably dying at the hand of your government is good? Despotic regimes do the same thing.
the real struggle for freedom
Believe it or not, I'm sure we actually agree on lots of principals. I think we'd agree to disagree on how those principals are turned into action though.
What is 'real' and what is 'freedom?' A Republic that has clearly capitulated to banking and oligopolists is 'real' and 'free?' I'd like to know how you define this 'real freedom' versus your most despised 'non-free' place.
really being killed.
Those deaths at Gitmo look like killing to me. What about all that killing in Iraq where the WMD's and Al Qaeda never were? CIA's secret prison facilities? Despotic regimes have secret prisons too. They torture and kill just like the Americans. How do you clearly distinguish between American secret prisons, torture, deaths and another with no moral ambiguity whatsoever? That's a serious question, not flamebait.
Microsoft will cooperate as long as they have a shot at public sector revenue. This is hardly unique to China. If the nation of Venezuela wanted Microsoft products, they'd take their money.
I think American crossed the line into full-scale hipocracy(sp!!) by calling China out on censorship. The Chinese are more overt, but the effects are the same.
How about killing prisoners at Guantanamo? http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368 How was that story handled?? I'd argue that's a pretty serious situation and yet, somehow the mainstream media won't touch it. The title AP gave it was "Harper's questions three Guantanamo deaths." Somehow, prisoners under 24/7 observation are able to stuff rags down their throats AND THEN hang themselves? There's room for 'a question?' http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-01-18-guantanamo-deaths_N.htm?csp=34
How about the *massive* transfer of weath orchestrated by the Fed and Treasury? It's a 'bailout.' Maiden Lane 3 somehow generates profits in a way obvious to exactly no one. GM's debt holders got barely pennies on the dollar depending on their debt senority and yet AIG's counter parties got every single cent back. And the headline is "this is troubling" ?? http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jan2010/db2010018_994080.htm
Let's go back a few years to Sibel Edmonds story that *no* media would touch.
I missed the part where the American Republic was a bastion of Freedom.
Sounds to me like he'll axe the long-time Sun employees, instill an environment of fear-based fealty and then replace workers.
I also wonder if this wasn't part quid-pro-quo for getting the merger approved.
I see green shoots!
1. This is the Legal world not a PHP/.net software contract. The social value of Lawyers is ranked far and above any software/net profession. Their costs have a greater probability of reflecting what's needed in dollar terms to maintain a specific American standard of living within the higher ranks of American society.
2. Look at it the way software projects doomed for failure in the average megacorp are costed-out. Take the lone developer or two's salary, divide it into the hours on the project, then add in every single conceivable cost including electricity for the entire facility, the CTO's salary, Project Manager's salary, Project Team, the cost of every computer that uses the software, the cost of every *user* that somehow benefits and you'll get to a project cost of $400,000 for a bash script. While it may sound funny, I've been there and seen that.
Not to hijack the thread too much, but the CEO's pet project can bleed costs all year and not come under any scrutiny whatsoever.
Bottom line: $400,000 won't last long at the EFF.
I bought an unlocked e71 and use it on AT&T's network with no issues. GPS, maps and everything.
That's doubtful because my e71 has maps/gps. Do you have Windows and have you installed their middleware? From there, you should be able to get GPS maps installed.