Have you used a windows machine recently? There is no ftp client, except for, you've guessed it: Internet Explorer. So MS removes IE, puts in an ftp client so people can download their choice of browser, people who make FTP clients get uppity about being forced out of business.
What if someone wants to start selling UMS drivers? Shoiuld MS be forced to unbundle those too?
I see, and when IE is taken out of the windows install and the new user is provided with discs containing Opera, Firefox, Chrome and IE, which will they choose to install? The ones who don't care (i.e. the ones who are scared of the computer and just want to get back to myspace) will pick the one carrying the same logo as was on the splash screen when they started the computer.
I have an ideology too, and mine is that I want my computer to do as much out of the box as possible, with the minimum of fuss. If the operating system manufacturer has included extra apps to do things that I want to do, great. If those apps are surpassed enough by something third party that it's worth the minimal effort taken to switch, I'll switch, I suspect that most people who are willing to use 3rd party apps feel the same - 3rd party apps which suck don't have the right to try and poach users from the OS manufacturer's apps by stopping users having that default and hoping to bamboozle them into installing the suckier 3rd party app. If your app is good people will use it anyway.
And now for the car analogy: Imagine a world where electric windows aren't standard. Now, imagine that someone starts selling aftermarket electric windows. Now imagine that a car manufacturer, seeing the popularity of electric windows, starts to offer electric windows as standard equipment (and modifies its manufacturing process such that they can't really build cars without electric windows). The manufacturer's electric windows can still be replaced with new ones; if the aftermarket window people can offer a sufficient improvement to be worth getting it done they'll still do business, if they can't; they won't. Now, why should the situation be different if only one company makes cars? So their size and ability to provide electric windows for 'free' makes it difficult to compete? Sucks to be you - make a better product or make a different add on in the full expectation that it'll become standard equipment in a few years, but don't bitch that you want the people who buy the cars to be forced to take the car home from the dealer and then either pay you to fit your electric windows, leaving their car out of action for a week, or return it to the dealer to fit electric windows for free, but still leaving them car-less for a week.
While I can see that developers need to eat, I can also see that the alternative is that everyone suffers for having useful features taken away from them. Or, like they did with Windows XP N, the only people who'll care enough to buy the crippled version are the people who would have cared enough to install alternate software whether the built-in was there or not.
Do we see KDE complaining that Explorer competes with KDE4 for windows? OpenOffice complaining that wordpad competes with them? Octave complaining that for simple work calc competes with them? Zonealarm complaining that windows now includes a firewall? No. How much more of the ability of a fresh windows install to just let the user get on with what they want to be doing is going to be chipped away at because someone else wants an opening to peddle something to users to enable them to do what they could before?
Finally, I hear no-one screaming that linux should adhere to the same standards. Linux will not 'win' whilst it's seen as trying to create an unfair playing field with legal actions. If someone suggested that Firefox, Lynx, Konqueror and Nautilus were abolished from default installs so that other browsers could get a shot, it would be laughed off the mailing list. Someone sugesting that both browsers and all methods of getting browsers should go, forcing users to get them from a seperate disc would probably find themselves off the mailing list sharpish.
The computer is a wonderful tool because it can do so many things, trying to make it so that it won't do those things without first fiddling with it is a step backwards - especially as there are lots of other things that people may want to do which rely on internet explorer being t
It shows up on their credit report. Merchant banks do not like having to deal with chargebacks, and getting too many can get a merchant account closed.
well let's see if they're violating the GPL by, say, not offering the source code, sue them for every penny they've ever made (I suppose that's Sun will have to do that, or any other person who has contributed to OO.o) and start handing the money back out to people who stumped up.
Interestingly, as air forces switch to unmanned aircraft, and unmanned ships are invented (thanks, Israel), and shiny ground-control robots too, we're seeing an understandable drive towards changing the way that wars are fought to eliminate the risk to people all together, with the possible exception of attacking command and control centres behind the lines.
How long until the rules of war get changed so that you're not allowed to deliberately attack people, civilian or military?
So fire at seagulls, use infrared, see which points in the sky produce more infrared and less visible light. In any case, you get your 100 attack UAVs and you put them together with 100 AA UAVs. That's financially equivalent to 2 F-22s, each F-22 can shoot down 2 UAVs at medium range and 6 at short range with missiles. That's a total of 16. To do any more to fend off the attackers they're going to have to get in close and open up with guns, at which point they'll have a swarm of about 90 AA UAVs to worry about.
The only reason that we haven't seen this already is that the only people with the capability to build practical UAVs are the also the only people with F-22s.
More importantly. What about the fact that this isn't even a grey area? Statutes of this nature have been repeatedly thrown out by the courts. Over and over again. I'm sure someone will oblige and cire the cases...
Ok, I may have exaggerated when I said perfectly viable. But I find it hard to believe that Northern Rock, RBS, Woolworths, Whittard, Adams, Wedgwood, MFI, etc. would all have ended up in the situations that they now find themselves in and in such sudden and chaotic circumstances if their worsening situations hadn't been publicised by the media.
That one came up in the UK a few weeks ago. Here. I don't yet know the result, but those officers deserve sanctions themselves (Hugh Hegarty should smack the officer who tried to steal his camera with a private prosecution) rather than just trying to take moolah from the force. Oh, and perjury prosecutions all round - let's see whether the CPS decide to do it, of whether the Hegartys will have to do it themselves (the Police have tangled with the wrong people here anyway - the Hegarty brothers can afford to sue them back into the stone age)
They can indeed select who they wish to carry, and they selected these people by selling them a ticket. Seriously, why should you be allowed to renege on providing a service that you've already been paid for? And why should you be allowed to construct a T&C get-out clause that lets you if you can't by default?
Panicing because you're a paranoid nutter nosing in on other people's conversations is disorderly conduct. No system can possibly maintained that penalises people for how other people react to them.
Talking about using a bombe to crack encryption doesn't cause a panic, someone who heard half the conversation shouting "he's talking about bombs!!!!!11!!!11!" causes a panic.
No, 'keep out' is a statement, 'no entry if you're carrying a gun' is a conditional statement. The former simply requires the reader to know what 'keep out' means, the latter requires the reader to evaluate the conditional which is much more complicated. For instance, what counts as a gun? Does a TASER count? does anything which is legally defined as a firearm (which may include pepperspray and air rifles) count? Should you infact use the military definition and assume that you're ok so long as you aren't wheeling some artillery behind you?
Evaluating a conditional constructed by someone else is fraught with difficulty (and not just opportunities to be obtuse) if you have to always get the same result as they do.
He's not a member of the commonwealth, he doesn't get to call himself 'sir'. Well, I mean, he can call himself 'sir' if he likes, but he's no more entitled to do that than you or I would be. Like Screaming Lord Such; you can style your name however you like, but it won't stop people from thinking that you're mad if you try to use that to give yourself a title that you don't have.
Right, but it's not like HMQ actually compiles the new years honours list, it's compiled in Number 10 (i.e. by the officials of the head of government) anyway.
My thought exactly. My keyboard cost me £4, 3 1/2 years ago and has had very intensive usage ever since. It's shown no signs of breaking down or wearing out. It's a BenQ 6512-VA, incase anyone is interested.
Anyone who spends more than $10-15 on their desktop keyboard should be taken away to the looney bin sharpish.
The head of government doesn't have to be elected by any constituency - members of the cabinet need only be members of one of the houses. By tradition (for about the last 150 years) the Prime Minister has been a member of the Commons, (Wellington was Prime Minister whilst being a member of the Lords), the real requirement for a functioning government is that the Prime Minister have the support of a majority in the commons, who would have to have been elected by a majority of the constituencies.
It's not a very good system, but it's not the dictatorship you make it out to be. The real weakness is the party-whip system which allows legislation without actual majority support to be forced through anyway.
Except that the lawsuits are launched by the individual labels anyway - the RIAA itself doesn't actually sue anyone, it's just there to take the bad PR while the labels keep screwing people.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you used a windows machine recently? There is no ftp client, except for, you've guessed it: Internet Explorer.
So MS removes IE, puts in an ftp client so people can download their choice of browser, people who make FTP clients get uppity about being forced out of business.
What if someone wants to start selling UMS drivers? Shoiuld MS be forced to unbundle those too?
It is when the law requires favouritism.
I see, and when IE is taken out of the windows install and the new user is provided with discs containing Opera, Firefox, Chrome and IE, which will they choose to install? The ones who don't care (i.e. the ones who are scared of the computer and just want to get back to myspace) will pick the one carrying the same logo as was on the splash screen when they started the computer.
I have an ideology too, and mine is that I want my computer to do as much out of the box as possible, with the minimum of fuss. If the operating system manufacturer has included extra apps to do things that I want to do, great. If those apps are surpassed enough by something third party that it's worth the minimal effort taken to switch, I'll switch,
I suspect that most people who are willing to use 3rd party apps feel the same - 3rd party apps which suck don't have the right to try and poach users from the OS manufacturer's apps by stopping users having that default and hoping to bamboozle them into installing the suckier 3rd party app. If your app is good people will use it anyway.
And now for the car analogy:
Imagine a world where electric windows aren't standard. Now, imagine that someone starts selling aftermarket electric windows. Now imagine that a car manufacturer, seeing the popularity of electric windows, starts to offer electric windows as standard equipment (and modifies its manufacturing process such that they can't really build cars without electric windows). The manufacturer's electric windows can still be replaced with new ones; if the aftermarket window people can offer a sufficient improvement to be worth getting it done they'll still do business, if they can't; they won't. Now, why should the situation be different if only one company makes cars?
So their size and ability to provide electric windows for 'free' makes it difficult to compete? Sucks to be you - make a better product or make a different add on in the full expectation that it'll become standard equipment in a few years, but don't bitch that you want the people who buy the cars to be forced to take the car home from the dealer and then either pay you to fit your electric windows, leaving their car out of action for a week, or return it to the dealer to fit electric windows for free, but still leaving them car-less for a week.
While I can see that developers need to eat, I can also see that the alternative is that everyone suffers for having useful features taken away from them. Or, like they did with Windows XP N, the only people who'll care enough to buy the crippled version are the people who would have cared enough to install alternate software whether the built-in was there or not.
Do we see KDE complaining that Explorer competes with KDE4 for windows? OpenOffice complaining that wordpad competes with them? Octave complaining that for simple work calc competes with them? Zonealarm complaining that windows now includes a firewall? No.
How much more of the ability of a fresh windows install to just let the user get on with what they want to be doing is going to be chipped away at because someone else wants an opening to peddle something to users to enable them to do what they could before?
Finally, I hear no-one screaming that linux should adhere to the same standards. Linux will not 'win' whilst it's seen as trying to create an unfair playing field with legal actions. If someone suggested that Firefox, Lynx, Konqueror and Nautilus were abolished from default installs so that other browsers could get a shot, it would be laughed off the mailing list. Someone sugesting that both browsers and all methods of getting browsers should go, forcing users to get them from a seperate disc would probably find themselves off the mailing list sharpish.
The computer is a wonderful tool because it can do so many things, trying to make it so that it won't do those things without first fiddling with it is a step backwards - especially as there are lots of other things that people may want to do which rely on internet explorer being t
It shows up on their credit report. Merchant banks do not like having to deal with chargebacks, and getting too many can get a merchant account closed.
"It's something I'm willing to put up with for free software, but it's an intolerable shortcoming for â100 software"
well let's see if they're violating the GPL by, say, not offering the source code, sue them for every penny they've ever made (I suppose that's Sun will have to do that, or any other person who has contributed to OO.o) and start handing the money back out to people who stumped up.
Interestingly, as air forces switch to unmanned aircraft, and unmanned ships are invented (thanks, Israel), and shiny ground-control robots too, we're seeing an understandable drive towards changing the way that wars are fought to eliminate the risk to people all together, with the possible exception of attacking command and control centres behind the lines.
How long until the rules of war get changed so that you're not allowed to deliberately attack people, civilian or military?
So fire at seagulls, use infrared, see which points in the sky produce more infrared and less visible light.
In any case, you get your 100 attack UAVs and you put them together with 100 AA UAVs.
That's financially equivalent to 2 F-22s, each F-22 can shoot down 2 UAVs at medium range and 6 at short range with missiles. That's a total of 16. To do any more to fend off the attackers they're going to have to get in close and open up with guns, at which point they'll have a swarm of about 90 AA UAVs to worry about.
The only reason that we haven't seen this already is that the only people with the capability to build practical UAVs are the also the only people with F-22s.
More importantly. What about the fact that this isn't even a grey area? Statutes of this nature have been repeatedly thrown out by the courts. Over and over again. I'm sure someone will oblige and cire the cases...
Ok, I may have exaggerated when I said perfectly viable. But I find it hard to believe that Northern Rock, RBS, Woolworths, Whittard, Adams, Wedgwood, MFI, etc. would all have ended up in the situations that they now find themselves in and in such sudden and chaotic circumstances if their worsening situations hadn't been publicised by the media.
Absolutely - we should stop giving articles like this publicity. ~ This is what's been happening in the UK over the last few months:
STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT! you're killing perfectly viable companies!
I doubt a 200+ year-old piece of paper would make a very good weapon.
A 2x4 on the other hand...
That one came up in the UK a few weeks ago. Here. I don't yet know the result, but those officers deserve sanctions themselves (Hugh Hegarty should smack the officer who tried to steal his camera with a private prosecution) rather than just trying to take moolah from the force.
Oh, and perjury prosecutions all round - let's see whether the CPS decide to do it, of whether the Hegartys will have to do it themselves (the Police have tangled with the wrong people here anyway - the Hegarty brothers can afford to sue them back into the stone age)
They can indeed select who they wish to carry, and they selected these people by selling them a ticket.
Seriously, why should you be allowed to renege on providing a service that you've already been paid for? And why should you be allowed to construct a T&C get-out clause that lets you if you can't by default?
200 years ago, the USA's intervention in the middle east consisted of giving the Barbary pirates a damn good thrashing; which, frankly, they deserved.
Panicing because you're a paranoid nutter nosing in on other people's conversations is disorderly conduct. No system can possibly maintained that penalises people for how other people react to them.
Talking about using a bombe to crack encryption doesn't cause a panic, someone who heard half the conversation shouting "he's talking about bombs!!!!!11!!!11!" causes a panic.
No, 'keep out' is a statement, 'no entry if you're carrying a gun' is a conditional statement. The former simply requires the reader to know what 'keep out' means, the latter requires the reader to evaluate the conditional which is much more complicated.
For instance, what counts as a gun? Does a TASER count? does anything which is legally defined as a firearm (which may include pepperspray and air rifles) count? Should you infact use the military definition and assume that you're ok so long as you aren't wheeling some artillery behind you?
Evaluating a conditional constructed by someone else is fraught with difficulty (and not just opportunities to be obtuse) if you have to always get the same result as they do.
In answer to your question; no.
IANAL, etc.
Au contraire
Mr William Henry Gates III. KBE.
He's not a member of the commonwealth, he doesn't get to call himself 'sir'. Well, I mean, he can call himself 'sir' if he likes, but he's no more entitled to do that than you or I would be. Like Screaming Lord Such; you can style your name however you like, but it won't stop people from thinking that you're mad if you try to use that to give yourself a title that you don't have.
Shall I break out a new bag of troll feed?
Right, but it's not like HMQ actually compiles the new years honours list, it's compiled in Number 10 (i.e. by the officials of the head of government) anyway.
My thought exactly. My keyboard cost me £4, 3 1/2 years ago and has had very intensive usage ever since. It's shown no signs of breaking down or wearing out. It's a BenQ 6512-VA, incase anyone is interested.
Anyone who spends more than $10-15 on their desktop keyboard should be taken away to the looney bin sharpish.
The head of government doesn't have to be elected by any constituency - members of the cabinet need only be members of one of the houses. By tradition (for about the last 150 years) the Prime Minister has been a member of the Commons, (Wellington was Prime Minister whilst being a member of the Lords), the real requirement for a functioning government is that the Prime Minister have the support of a majority in the commons, who would have to have been elected by a majority of the constituencies.
It's not a very good system, but it's not the dictatorship you make it out to be. The real weakness is the party-whip system which allows legislation without actual majority support to be forced through anyway.
In theory; while Parliament can pass any law it likes, HMQ can tell them to go jump in a lake when they try to get royal assent
Except that the lawsuits are launched by the individual labels anyway - the RIAA itself doesn't actually sue anyone, it's just there to take the bad PR while the labels keep screwing people.
Weebl & Bob