Regarding indoor signal quality, I would like to point out though that except for signal boosters there are also external antennas that you can place out of your home, but in some countries you need a special permit from the government to do that (this also applies to WiFi antennas).
I have a landline ADSL with 1 ISP plus HSDPA cellular broadband with all (3) cellular ISPs that operate here. Cellular broadband is not supposed to replace landline broadband, it is simply for when you are out or whenever the landline isn't working. The latency of cellular access is too high compared to landline, the signal indoors is often poor (but you can use signal boosters), and many times even if one day you have signal after a few days you may find that the signal is gone because tower locations change often and not only that but the connection quality is also dependent on how many people connect near your tower. Not only that, but some cellular ISPs do not give you a real IP, or force you to use their proxy server (easily bypassed though) or even force you to use only their own software (also easily bypassed if you flash the firmware of your router or if you use a free OS such as Debian).
Thus the perfect solution is to have both. If you can't pay for both, then the answer depends on how many hours of the day you are out. If you stay indoors only when you sleep, then certainly cellular boradband is the answer. But if you do stay indoors more than 3-4 hours of your awake life, then you shouldn't easily cancel the landline.
any nation with a developed intelligence infrastructure (or not, as it was in the press)
Most intelligence information is open source - which means it's somewhere published in the open. The power of intelligence does not lie in knowing a secret, but in being able to quickly analyse, comprehend, and act on available information. Intelligence is mainly about information processing, not information gathering.
Instead of trying to evaluate free software developers, why not help them instead? We know who they are, their names and emails are just a click away from the About box of the software we use, and most of them are googleable. Some of them aren't so lucky in their life outside free software. Some would appreciate some donated webspace, computer hardware, or other support. I have started AlgoLibre.org as a first effort to remind people that some free software developers may need our assistance. If there is any service benefiting free software developers you would like to run, you can run it through AlgoLibre, which is strictly non-commercial as well. Or just drop in and share your interest in the project, perhaps subscribing to the Recent Changes RSS feed if you want to stay tuned. I actually first started the project when I had the idea to provide some kind of medical insurance to all free software developers, so that in case a developer gets ill we can contribute to their medical expenses, and it should run in a wiki-like distributed non-centralised fashion just like free software works, or like a philanthropic circle: developers would explain their need on the site and users would choose whether to contribute or not.
I am not sure a sane mind can love crashing a plane and dying. Only some insane islamofascist terrorists enjoy doing that. If a sane person wants to commit suicide for whatever reason, there are surely better and less messy solutions. If someone wants to get rid of their plane, they could give it to charity or sell it. If someone wants a thrill, they can try some extreme sports which are dangerous but not lethal. Crashing a plane can only be the result of psychopathy or technical or human error.
That was a man who probably died in an accident. Saying he died doing what he loved doesn't help.
In these elections you have had the opportunity to vote for at least two politicians in the two mainstream parties who aren't working for the devil, and yet most Americans ignored both. Had he had an opportunity to see the modern America, Washington (that's your nation's founder, folks) would cry, or perhaps he would think that the country he founded was taken over by the Soviets or something... Churchill, your WW2 ally, couldn't say it any clearer: in a democracy people get what they deserve. If you masturbate every day with celebrity gossip and soap operas, that's what you get. Real democracy can only be realised when citizens have brains. Get a brain now and make it think, or risk one day having internal passports and imitating all the other totalitarian innovations of your old enemies, the commies. You didn't wait for the Soviets to fall under their own stupidity only to copy them, did you?
The WWW is supported by nerds who put content online for the sake of it (of course it has to be said that, although in the beginning WWW started as a medium for scientists it quickly degenerated into a mental chaos, and as a result true nerds rarely visited the WWW in the early days, as it was seen as a medium for newbies, but now WWW is so ubiquitous that this is mainly of historical interest). Most nerds would continue putting content online even if ads didn't exist. Putting ads on a site and the monetisation that follows is something which should be seen as a byproduct of good work put online. It shouldn't be seen as an end by itself. Authors who post online should aim at writing superior prose and disseminating useful information, because that's what generates real value (in my view there is only one legitimate form of value in the economy and this is not money, it is intelligence which gives rise to knowledge). Permanent success comes only after one is able to produce real value. How much value do you see in a commercial site which paginates its articles and puts a crappy load of ads in them? Now compare that "value" with an open-access academic journal. In the first case, the authors aim to maximise ad revenue, and as a result their articles are stupid because they simply do not spend any of their time in intelligently trying to write good articles (all their time is put into measuring ad performance and trying to decide which kinds of ads are better). In the second case, the authors aim at creating real value through their useful articles (these that discuss real new discoveries, not the ones written while repeating the "publish or perish" mantra). Even though they usually don't put ads on journals, they could do it if they wanted, and if the articles were written in a more accessible manner (not necessarily dumped down) and the ads were highly relevant to the audience, more revenue would be generated than what stupid online magazines manage to achieve. It also must be said that putting a load of ads on a stupid article makes the site to be seen as annoying, while putting a few ads on a useful intelligent article does not make the site look annoying because the extra value present in the article "pays off" for any annoyance caused by the ads (and if the ads are intelligently chosen to be relevant and are presented in the right manner without flashy colours etc then they tend to be seen as useful extensions of the article rather than as annoyances). My bet is that if all stupid popular layman sites one day disappeared from the Net, netizens would feel no loss, because there are many sites maintained by nerds that disseminate really useful information (often with no ads as well!).
He doesn't smell the space, he smells the molecules that escape from his equipment after being subjected to the low temperature of space and then back to higher temperature of ISS.
There's a reason there are standards: to ensure consumers can choose from a consistent set of purchasing options all adhering to some minimal functionality (the standard). Manufacturers who release products that imply adherence to some standard while in fact they fail to meet its requirements have no place in a healthy economy. If a company still wants to release such pseudo-products, they should label them clearly as not adhering to a standard with a big visible label on the front of the box.
Some people say immigration is bad because it takes jobs away from the the natives. Migration control programmes such as those discussed are very often fuelled by such fears.
In a healthy free market economy, jobs are held by those who can contribute more to the economy for the least cost. It has been my observation that some people, once achieving some comfortable and secure lifestyle, stop innovating and become lazy sluggards, who, even if they spend 8-10 or more hours "at work", they produce little or no real tangible economic value. PHBs are a good example: While the economic contribution of a good manager is to provide sound planning and organisational design, PHBs merely walk around the office carrying a cup of tea, literally doing nothing. In theory, their contribution could become visible someday in a department or company crisis when a decision would be crucial, but my experience tells me that most PHBs would be unable to respond to any crisis in any intelligent way, and most of them stay employed thanks to connections and nepotism. The end result for the economy is great waste, inefficiency, lack of skills, and the development of a passive approach to life which hinders entrepreneurship, initiative, and innovation.
In such an economy, where a great number of people have learnt to live their life without earning it with their ability, thanks to nepotism, status, various social structures, etc, the appearance of a few migrants can have positive effects from an economic point of view: Migrants come, some of them having useful skills, and they renovate the economy. When employers notice that the migrants have real skills and are willing to work for lower wages, they will eventually fire the lazy sluggards and force them to take a more active approach to life and learn new skills, ie to become again actively useful in the economy. In this way, migrants help counterbalance the tendency of many humans to stop innovating once they achieve some security.
Knowing this, a certain number of migrants is not only tolerable but in fact should be highly wanted and desirable, as they have a legitimate and useful economic role to play in our economies (to wake up our lazy fellows). And it is not only highly educated migrants that should be in demand: Migrants with low education should be welcome as well, as they often help to fill gaps in an economy whose members increasingly move towards the service sector and higher-paying jobs.
There are, of course, some dangers from the influx of huge numbers of migrants. One danger is sociological and has its basis in animal behaviour: You can see that, for example, ants are aggressive towards ants from different colonies. Similarly, humans in general do have some passive aggressiveness hidden somewhere in their mind towards persons from different nations. There is, of course, some biological basis for this, as it helps teams of humans (tribes) secure resources and maintain family lineages. But in the modern era, with our developed economies and globalised communications, we need not worry so much about these concerns that belong to the prehistory eras. What we should do is to take care to not allow this passive subconscious aggressiveness become an activated state of mind and infect the conscious mind. This can happen to most people, without them realising it, when great numbers of migrants come into a country and interact with the locals. Seeing one migrant does not raise xenophobic tendencies, but suddenly seeing a thousand migrants out of your door may cause your subconscious tribal feelings to be activated and projected to the consciousness in a variety of ways (xenophobia, racism, economic protectionism, security paranoia, etc). When this happens to the majority of a native population, the results can be disastrous. We have seen it in history and such mistakes should not be repeated by civilised people.
So, how can we ensure that immigration results in positive economic contributions without triggering sociological problems?
closed-source is unethical
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
If you own a computer and you load closed-source proprietary software on it you essentially declare your computer to be the property of the closed-source software makers. By loading their unethical produce on your machine you agree to execute the instructions that their software contains, whatever they do, and since it is closed-source you are not allowed to know what you are executing.
Closed-source software defies the natural law of property: You pay for giving up the control of your machine to a shadowy software maker. Closed-source software is an evil communist, totalitarian, and terrorist concept and ought to be eradicated just as the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were eradicated by their own inefficiency and stupidity. Just like citizens were considered to be the property of the state in communist and fascist countries, closed-source software houses consider your machine to be their property. It is a form of technological slavery, where your machines are owned and controlled by closed-source companies whose produce cannot be checked for accuracy, validity, and reliability. A closed-source vendor asks you to pay for executing instructions you are not aware of. They don't trust you to show you their code, why should you trust them to execute it on your machine? Buying and using closed-source software, in this sense, is not very different than collaborating with the Nazis (of course *in practice* sometimes people *have* to do it for various reasons, such as when a superior requires you to use some specific piece of software, but speaking *philosophically* the act still carries an unethical imbalance).
The only democratic alternative, which is in accordance with the natural laws of the free market and free enterprise, is free software. With free software you maintain control and true ownership of your whole machine, since you can read and understand what instructions you are executing on it. No more uncertainties regarding code reliability (of course *practically* you don't read the whole code, but speaking *theoretically* you can do so if you are willing). Free software is truly *yours*.
The natural concept of property is that you should be able to extract unlimited pleasure (happiness) from what you own without any third party interfering with your use of your property (except in certain cases where your pleasure damages someone's property, for example you cannot pollute your backyard's air because the pollution will spread to the property of your neighbours, therefore environmental pollution is also against the natural law of private property). Of course it has to be said that private property is not philosophically incompatible with sharing, and both can coexist naturally and harmoniously, especially for certain kinds of products such as software where sharing them does not limit your ability to extract pleasure from their use (you still own a piece of software you wrote even if you make copies and share them with everyone else on the planet, as every person owns their own copy and they are capable to extract unlimited happiness from it).
The same arguments are true for DRM as well: If you load DRMed songs to your music gadget, you effectivelly relinquish your property to those who control the DRM schema. You cannot extract unlimited pleasure from DRMed songs, and as a result the songs are not truly your property. But if they aren't your property, it would be an oxymoron to have to pay for them (you essentially pay for the "right" to give up the control of your gadgets to a third party). The only ethical solution would be to use DRM-free music.
Many people point out that while the idea of using only free software sounds good, it creates many practical difficulties. In some cases, this is true, as although you can live only with free software, there are important pieces of hardware whose manufacturer has not opened their documentation to the free software community and various social and economic requirements to stay compatible with users of proprietary software. It s
Track them down and send them a bill. They will notice pretty quickly and change their ways. If you can't find them declare all HTML/XHTML standards obsolete and release a new hypertext standard with obligatory built-in identification and automatic billing facilities.
Are Customs being used just to get Americans accustomed to the idea that they have nothing private?
Schools exist for the same purpose, to make people behave in accordance with orders and consider surveillance a normal thing. One more reason to homeschool the kids. And then people wonder why the youth lacks skills... Of course they do since schools only teach obedience, rather than the sciences and the arts.
I definitely don't go across the boarder as often as I used to since that experience
A prime example of how security paranoia hurts the economy. The economy runs better when people move around and spend their money. If they are afraid to move freely because of overzealous agents, spending decreases and the economy halts.
A bag of mine was once routinely checked and the officer said there was a "suspicious object" in it and asked me to wait. He put his hand inside and pulled out a large cylindrical object which was full of tiny pointy nail-like objects. When he saw it in reality holding it in his own hands he paused for a full minute while looking at it with a facial expression which I will never forgot, then he put it back on and let me go saying absolutely nothing. The suspicious object was nothing more than a plastic box full of wooden toothpicks enclosed in paper!:)
On a similar occasion, another suspicious object in my bag turned out to be nothing more than a small pack of pistachio nuts.
Stupid annoyances like these and and the resulting loss of time is why I try to not subject myself to such pointless searches by traveling by train or ferry! On the plus side, most times my 3G laptop gets Internet signal on ground or sea, while on air all I have is a book!
If the media report some incidence(s) over and over for a few weeks, many people feel that "something is going on", but they don't think that such incidents could happen everyday and that for some reason the media pick up the stories selectively now. You cannot measure anything by how much media coverage it gets. All we hear from the media are stories about "another cable cut" but nobody tells us the average incidences of cuts in the last few years and their daily distribution within the year.
Present it as a business opportunity for them. Essentially you should try to sell the idea of open sourcing the code. Try to make it look like an advertisement for the company etc. If it doesn't work, just forget the whole affair.
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding indoor signal quality, I would like to point out though that except for signal boosters there are also external antennas that you can place out of your home, but in some countries you need a special permit from the government to do that (this also applies to WiFi antennas).
I have a landline ADSL with 1 ISP plus HSDPA cellular broadband with all (3) cellular ISPs that operate here. Cellular broadband is not supposed to replace landline broadband, it is simply for when you are out or whenever the landline isn't working. The latency of cellular access is too high compared to landline, the signal indoors is often poor (but you can use signal boosters), and many times even if one day you have signal after a few days you may find that the signal is gone because tower locations change often and not only that but the connection quality is also dependent on how many people connect near your tower. Not only that, but some cellular ISPs do not give you a real IP, or force you to use their proxy server (easily bypassed though) or even force you to use only their own software (also easily bypassed if you flash the firmware of your router or if you use a free OS such as Debian).
Thus the perfect solution is to have both. If you can't pay for both, then the answer depends on how many hours of the day you are out. If you stay indoors only when you sleep, then certainly cellular boradband is the answer. But if you do stay indoors more than 3-4 hours of your awake life, then you shouldn't easily cancel the landline.
The US shot down a thing they owned, and Russia and China make a fuss because they now can't steal military secrets from it.
Most intelligence information is open source - which means it's somewhere published in the open. The power of intelligence does not lie in knowing a secret, but in being able to quickly analyse, comprehend, and act on available information. Intelligence is mainly about information processing, not information gathering.
Instead of trying to evaluate free software developers, why not help them instead? We know who they are, their names and emails are just a click away from the About box of the software we use, and most of them are googleable. Some of them aren't so lucky in their life outside free software. Some would appreciate some donated webspace, computer hardware, or other support. I have started AlgoLibre.org as a first effort to remind people that some free software developers may need our assistance. If there is any service benefiting free software developers you would like to run, you can run it through AlgoLibre, which is strictly non-commercial as well. Or just drop in and share your interest in the project, perhaps subscribing to the Recent Changes RSS feed if you want to stay tuned. I actually first started the project when I had the idea to provide some kind of medical insurance to all free software developers, so that in case a developer gets ill we can contribute to their medical expenses, and it should run in a wiki-like distributed non-centralised fashion just like free software works, or like a philanthropic circle: developers would explain their need on the site and users would choose whether to contribute or not.
I am not sure a sane mind can love crashing a plane and dying. Only some insane islamofascist terrorists enjoy doing that. If a sane person wants to commit suicide for whatever reason, there are surely better and less messy solutions. If someone wants to get rid of their plane, they could give it to charity or sell it. If someone wants a thrill, they can try some extreme sports which are dangerous but not lethal. Crashing a plane can only be the result of psychopathy or technical or human error.
That was a man who probably died in an accident. Saying he died doing what he loved doesn't help.
How about downloading debian.exe and getting rid of all of it?
Is this Slashdot?
In these elections you have had the opportunity to vote for at least two politicians in the two mainstream parties who aren't working for the devil, and yet most Americans ignored both. Had he had an opportunity to see the modern America, Washington (that's your nation's founder, folks) would cry, or perhaps he would think that the country he founded was taken over by the Soviets or something... Churchill, your WW2 ally, couldn't say it any clearer: in a democracy people get what they deserve. If you masturbate every day with celebrity gossip and soap operas, that's what you get. Real democracy can only be realised when citizens have brains. Get a brain now and make it think, or risk one day having internal passports and imitating all the other totalitarian innovations of your old enemies, the commies. You didn't wait for the Soviets to fall under their own stupidity only to copy them, did you?
Pirates weren't the only ones that spammed... governments spam us with numbers and sometimes they interfere with normal radio as well.
The WWW is supported by nerds who put content online for the sake of it (of course it has to be said that, although in the beginning WWW started as a medium for scientists it quickly degenerated into a mental chaos, and as a result true nerds rarely visited the WWW in the early days, as it was seen as a medium for newbies, but now WWW is so ubiquitous that this is mainly of historical interest). Most nerds would continue putting content online even if ads didn't exist. Putting ads on a site and the monetisation that follows is something which should be seen as a byproduct of good work put online. It shouldn't be seen as an end by itself. Authors who post online should aim at writing superior prose and disseminating useful information, because that's what generates real value (in my view there is only one legitimate form of value in the economy and this is not money, it is intelligence which gives rise to knowledge). Permanent success comes only after one is able to produce real value. How much value do you see in a commercial site which paginates its articles and puts a crappy load of ads in them? Now compare that "value" with an open-access academic journal. In the first case, the authors aim to maximise ad revenue, and as a result their articles are stupid because they simply do not spend any of their time in intelligently trying to write good articles (all their time is put into measuring ad performance and trying to decide which kinds of ads are better). In the second case, the authors aim at creating real value through their useful articles (these that discuss real new discoveries, not the ones written while repeating the "publish or perish" mantra). Even though they usually don't put ads on journals, they could do it if they wanted, and if the articles were written in a more accessible manner (not necessarily dumped down) and the ads were highly relevant to the audience, more revenue would be generated than what stupid online magazines manage to achieve. It also must be said that putting a load of ads on a stupid article makes the site to be seen as annoying, while putting a few ads on a useful intelligent article does not make the site look annoying because the extra value present in the article "pays off" for any annoyance caused by the ads (and if the ads are intelligently chosen to be relevant and are presented in the right manner without flashy colours etc then they tend to be seen as useful extensions of the article rather than as annoyances). My bet is that if all stupid popular layman sites one day disappeared from the Net, netizens would feel no loss, because there are many sites maintained by nerds that disseminate really useful information (often with no ads as well!).
I have tried both, and they do.
Since then is formal education correlated with intelligence?
He doesn't smell the space, he smells the molecules that escape from his equipment after being subjected to the low temperature of space and then back to higher temperature of ISS.
There's a reason there are standards: to ensure consumers can choose from a consistent set of purchasing options all adhering to some minimal functionality (the standard). Manufacturers who release products that imply adherence to some standard while in fact they fail to meet its requirements have no place in a healthy economy. If a company still wants to release such pseudo-products, they should label them clearly as not adhering to a standard with a big visible label on the front of the box.
Some people say immigration is bad because it takes jobs away from the the natives. Migration control programmes such as those discussed are very often fuelled by such fears.
In a healthy free market economy, jobs are held by those who can contribute more to the economy for the least cost. It has been my observation that some people, once achieving some comfortable and secure lifestyle, stop innovating and become lazy sluggards, who, even if they spend 8-10 or more hours "at work", they produce little or no real tangible economic value. PHBs are a good example: While the economic contribution of a good manager is to provide sound planning and organisational design, PHBs merely walk around the office carrying a cup of tea, literally doing nothing. In theory, their contribution could become visible someday in a department or company crisis when a decision would be crucial, but my experience tells me that most PHBs would be unable to respond to any crisis in any intelligent way, and most of them stay employed thanks to connections and nepotism. The end result for the economy is great waste, inefficiency, lack of skills, and the development of a passive approach to life which hinders entrepreneurship, initiative, and innovation.
In such an economy, where a great number of people have learnt to live their life without earning it with their ability, thanks to nepotism, status, various social structures, etc, the appearance of a few migrants can have positive effects from an economic point of view: Migrants come, some of them having useful skills, and they renovate the economy. When employers notice that the migrants have real skills and are willing to work for lower wages, they will eventually fire the lazy sluggards and force them to take a more active approach to life and learn new skills, ie to become again actively useful in the economy. In this way, migrants help counterbalance the tendency of many humans to stop innovating once they achieve some security.
Knowing this, a certain number of migrants is not only tolerable but in fact should be highly wanted and desirable, as they have a legitimate and useful economic role to play in our economies (to wake up our lazy fellows). And it is not only highly educated migrants that should be in demand: Migrants with low education should be welcome as well, as they often help to fill gaps in an economy whose members increasingly move towards the service sector and higher-paying jobs.
There are, of course, some dangers from the influx of huge numbers of migrants. One danger is sociological and has its basis in animal behaviour: You can see that, for example, ants are aggressive towards ants from different colonies. Similarly, humans in general do have some passive aggressiveness hidden somewhere in their mind towards persons from different nations. There is, of course, some biological basis for this, as it helps teams of humans (tribes) secure resources and maintain family lineages. But in the modern era, with our developed economies and globalised communications, we need not worry so much about these concerns that belong to the prehistory eras. What we should do is to take care to not allow this passive subconscious aggressiveness become an activated state of mind and infect the conscious mind. This can happen to most people, without them realising it, when great numbers of migrants come into a country and interact with the locals. Seeing one migrant does not raise xenophobic tendencies, but suddenly seeing a thousand migrants out of your door may cause your subconscious tribal feelings to be activated and projected to the consciousness in a variety of ways (xenophobia, racism, economic protectionism, security paranoia, etc). When this happens to the majority of a native population, the results can be disastrous. We have seen it in history and such mistakes should not be repeated by civilised people.
So, how can we ensure that immigration results in positive economic contributions without triggering sociological problems?
If you own a computer and you load closed-source proprietary software on it you essentially declare your computer to be the property of the closed-source software makers. By loading their unethical produce on your machine you agree to execute the instructions that their software contains, whatever they do, and since it is closed-source you are not allowed to know what you are executing.
Closed-source software defies the natural law of property: You pay for giving up the control of your machine to a shadowy software maker. Closed-source software is an evil communist, totalitarian, and terrorist concept and ought to be eradicated just as the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were eradicated by their own inefficiency and stupidity. Just like citizens were considered to be the property of the state in communist and fascist countries, closed-source software houses consider your machine to be their property. It is a form of technological slavery, where your machines are owned and controlled by closed-source companies whose produce cannot be checked for accuracy, validity, and reliability. A closed-source vendor asks you to pay for executing instructions you are not aware of. They don't trust you to show you their code, why should you trust them to execute it on your machine? Buying and using closed-source software, in this sense, is not very different than collaborating with the Nazis (of course *in practice* sometimes people *have* to do it for various reasons, such as when a superior requires you to use some specific piece of software, but speaking *philosophically* the act still carries an unethical imbalance).
The only democratic alternative, which is in accordance with the natural laws of the free market and free enterprise, is free software. With free software you maintain control and true ownership of your whole machine, since you can read and understand what instructions you are executing on it. No more uncertainties regarding code reliability (of course *practically* you don't read the whole code, but speaking *theoretically* you can do so if you are willing). Free software is truly *yours*.
The natural concept of property is that you should be able to extract unlimited pleasure (happiness) from what you own without any third party interfering with your use of your property (except in certain cases where your pleasure damages someone's property, for example you cannot pollute your backyard's air because the pollution will spread to the property of your neighbours, therefore environmental pollution is also against the natural law of private property). Of course it has to be said that private property is not philosophically incompatible with sharing, and both can coexist naturally and harmoniously, especially for certain kinds of products such as software where sharing them does not limit your ability to extract pleasure from their use (you still own a piece of software you wrote even if you make copies and share them with everyone else on the planet, as every person owns their own copy and they are capable to extract unlimited happiness from it).
The same arguments are true for DRM as well: If you load DRMed songs to your music gadget, you effectivelly relinquish your property to those who control the DRM schema. You cannot extract unlimited pleasure from DRMed songs, and as a result the songs are not truly your property. But if they aren't your property, it would be an oxymoron to have to pay for them (you essentially pay for the "right" to give up the control of your gadgets to a third party). The only ethical solution would be to use DRM-free music.
Many people point out that while the idea of using only free software sounds good, it creates many practical difficulties. In some cases, this is true, as although you can live only with free software, there are important pieces of hardware whose manufacturer has not opened their documentation to the free software community and various social and economic requirements to stay compatible with users of proprietary software. It s
now imagine a beowulf cluster of companion-swallowing cloud-burping stars!
Track them down and send them a bill. They will notice pretty quickly and change their ways. If you can't find them declare all HTML/XHTML standards obsolete and release a new hypertext standard with obligatory built-in identification and automatic billing facilities.
whether you like it or not
Schools exist for the same purpose, to make people behave in accordance with orders and consider surveillance a normal thing. One more reason to homeschool the kids. And then people wonder why the youth lacks skills... Of course they do since schools only teach obedience, rather than the sciences and the arts.
A prime example of how security paranoia hurts the economy. The economy runs better when people move around and spend their money. If they are afraid to move freely because of overzealous agents, spending decreases and the economy halts.
A bag of mine was once routinely checked and the officer said there was a "suspicious object" in it and asked me to wait. He put his hand inside and pulled out a large cylindrical object which was full of tiny pointy nail-like objects. When he saw it in reality holding it in his own hands he paused for a full minute while looking at it with a facial expression which I will never forgot, then he put it back on and let me go saying absolutely nothing. The suspicious object was nothing more than a plastic box full of wooden toothpicks enclosed in paper! :)
On a similar occasion, another suspicious object in my bag turned out to be nothing more than a small pack of pistachio nuts.
Stupid annoyances like these and and the resulting loss of time is why I try to not subject myself to such pointless searches by traveling by train or ferry! On the plus side, most times my 3G laptop gets Internet signal on ground or sea, while on air all I have is a book!
If the media report some incidence(s) over and over for a few weeks, many people feel that "something is going on", but they don't think that such incidents could happen everyday and that for some reason the media pick up the stories selectively now. You cannot measure anything by how much media coverage it gets. All we hear from the media are stories about "another cable cut" but nobody tells us the average incidences of cuts in the last few years and their daily distribution within the year.
Present it as a business opportunity for them. Essentially you should try to sell the idea of open sourcing the code. Try to make it look like an advertisement for the company etc. If it doesn't work, just forget the whole affair.