Nah, they're not allowed to cheat. What they are allowed to do, however, is even more devious. For example, Frank Sinatra was big Vegas star, and famous for liking Baccarat. He was also on a casino's payroll. Whenever there was someone winning big on the Baccarat tables, they'd just call Frank, give him a stack of chips, and let the big roller hobnob with the star (all with free drinks). Problem solved.
My guess is that your MP3 player is showing up as a bog standard HDD unit, which is then treated as a fully identified device. The devices that need drivers are the ones that want to show up as something else that would require drivers to actually work properly (not just charge). I guess that's a reasonably smart behaviour that prevents some burnt devices. Your dumb LCD screen USB port probably couldn't care less about what's connected to it, so it gives juice to whatever asks for it.
If the school is entirely privately funded, this may be true. But if they receive even a little public funding for other things, the money they spent on research is money they would have spent on those other things.
What "money spent on research"? Like I said: if a company pays a university lab to research something, the company gets the research results, lab/university gets the cash, which in turn means that less tax money is needed to pay for the functioning of the university as a whole.
Huh? The reason the schools did the research is irrelevant. Did they receive public funding or not? Are you claiming that ALL research done by organizations that receive public funding goes into the public domain? That's just untrue.
I'm claiming that if a company is using research produced independently by a university, there are three possible ways that could happen: the research results were put in the public domain, the results were not put in the public domain and the company licensed them, or the company outright stole/appropriated the results. Since we're discussing immoral, not illegal, behaviour, I ignored the third possibility. The first implies that everybody is allowed to profit off the results, in one way or another. The second means that whatever the university thought was a fair price for the results was paid, and the company has no further debt to society for using the as they see fit. (If you think the debt wasn't fully repaid, I suggest you bring the complaint to whomever decided on the licensing scheme itself, not the licensees)
Since you seem to have a me-first attitude, I won't even try to pitch the idea of being, you know, a decent person. Instead, consider this: Pharmaceuticals are just as entitled to thinking of themselves first and foremost as you are.
Which brings us to economics 101: Assume that demand for medication is very elastic between the price points we're considering. By lowering the prices, (price * units sold) actually goes up, and they make more of a profit. (In developed countries, demand for medication tends to be very unelastic, but at the prices we're talking about, the high elasticity assumption is probably true for third-world countries.)
Of course, pharmaceuticals being allowed to think of themselves first and foremost, they're also allowed to leech every last cent off of you while being nice to some poor shmuck so they can sleep at night. Or perhaps there's people in there with some sense of social justice, who are trying to put some of that in practice.
Either the research done at the schools was funded by them, and they're "entitled" to it, or the research was done by the schools for some other reason, and they either licensed it (go argue with the licensor about the fees if they weren't enough) or the research was put in the public domain, which everybody is free to put to use as they see fit (but they still need the facilities to put the research into practice anyway, an investment that I hope you agree is fair they recoup). Whichever way you turn it, they're not stealing the sweat off your brow.
The whole point the OP was making is that such a plan is stupid. It puts the "omg carbon footprint" buzzword compliance first and foremost, and completely disregards a more holistic view of the problem. For example, dumping hydrochloric acid wastage in a river generates no carbon footprint whatsoever, so it can't possibly be nearly as bad as running your machines on electricity that comes from pollution-producing oil plants, right?
The gun analogy is pretty good. Gun possession is legal in the US, but people buy guns illegally as well. Torrents are legal, but people use them for illegal purposes too. You shouldn't go after everybody who sells guns because some people are trafficking them, and you shouldn't go after all torrents because some people are using them for illegal activities.
Now, here's the nasty part: as per most countries' legislations, the stuff you're getting from the pirate bay is probably illegal. You can't honestly claim the administrators of TPB are unaware of that behaviour, or that they're unable to stop it. The very description of the site implies that they 1) know about it, and 2) encourage it. Even if copyright infringement isn't a crime, it's still illegal, and they're still being a key part in the process. Under any sane legal system, that should be punishable
Arguably, it's good that they stand trial. We'll see how that goes. Either way, what they're doing already pretty much constitutes a form of nonviolent resistance.
Maybe they're disenfranchising their own voters. Maybe not.
The way I see it, this is how it works now: The citizens of a state elects its local government, then the states elect a federal government. While this is not technically true, in practice I doubt vote directions swing that much between state and federal elections, so you can pretty much assume it's all the same.
Under this proposed system, each state is responsible for the election of its own government, but the whole country elects the federal government, by weighing all individual votes the same at the national, rather than state, level.
Well, an init.d script is the farthest you can get from portable while still being a pure script. On the other hand, a script made of sh, sort, awk, sed, grep, and a few more similar tools will be quite portable. If you make sure you keep to the standard behaviour of all those tools (as opposed to using gawk-specific features, for example), it'll be even more portable. Etc etc. When you talk about writing shell scripts, you're usually not talking about pure sh, you're talking about glue code around the basic unix toolchain -- and that's typically the only limit to portability.
Damn, times will end at my place pretty soon then. Got two of each. And they're friendly! (Well, if you accept that the cat purposefully pawing at the dog when she's sleeping to piss her off still counts as friendly)
Also, other, bigger scale "experiments" over evolution have been made and passed: astronomers at the time rejected the idea of evolution because the earth couldn't possibly have been around for long enough to allow the process to take as long as suggested. Of course, that statement was based on the idea that the sun was a ball of fire (ie, combustion) and there wasn't enough fuel in there to make the fire burn that long. When the two scientific theories were put against each other, astronomy lost: they eventually figured out that stars work with nuclear processes and, therefore, last that much longer.
The Sherman Act is meant "to limit cartels and monopolies". Now, Apple sells PC-compatible computers, a position in which they do not hold a monopoly, and sell an operating system as a tie-in product. Unless you define the applicable market as Apple's own computers, there's no case whatsoever that they hold a monopoly in the operating system market either.
"So, I see you billed me here for 100 ad views, but I see here that some people outside the US may have been targeted. You know, we really don't sell in those markets, so I can't see why I should be paying for those views..." See where I'm headed?
I'll join in on the gang that recommends this one (I was skimming through the thread making sure it wasn't mentioned before I posted it myself).
The biggest selling point here is that the book provides a very gentle introduction to one of the most groundbreaking maths results ever (Gödel's incompleteness theorem), while giving you enough perspective that it doesn't make maths seem irrelevant (I mean, if it can't be complete, how useful can it possibly be, right? RIGHT?).
Also, it's an interesting philosophy book, in that it examines the nature of introspection, and the presentation is great, with "technical" bits interleaved with rather humorous texts that beautifully illustrate the mathematical concepts involved in plain english (as much as a dialogue with a crab cannon structure can possibly be "plain english", anyway)
It will also, for bonus points, work on your sense of mathematical aesthetics, and how it relates to artistic aesthetics (both in paining and music). Gaining a taste for what's mathematically beautiful is actually a very important hard skill for, for instance, programming jobs.
Actually, the "impact on the fisheries" point is one that interests me. Not so much the fisheries, but the general concept: If we start tapping into all sorts of "renewable energy", how much energy can we tap into before we shoot ourselves in our collective foot? When does solar start mucking with the earth's albedo, etc? At what point does wind and tide significantly dampen the natural phenomena they're based on?
(This isn't trolling, it's a genuine question, I haven't the faintest clue what the answer might be)
Techno -- in fact, electronica in general -- makes no attempt at pretending it's natural. It takes the "oh look, we can music with machines" idea, and runs with it into its own territory.
It's really easy to turn this into a "get off my lawn" thing, but it's not. There are tools, and there's no shame in using them. The problem is the number of people who use the tools to pretend they're better than they are at doing things without them.
On this subject, the major difference between Linux and Windows is that a sane account policy has been Linux standard practice for years now, rather than being the new thing. Application developers have gotten used to it and don't make (as many) mistakes where that is concerned.
There are two major differences here. First, apt and its shells are meant to do that. That's your expectation when you run it. In Microsoft's case, it's Windows Update you use, not a full-distro updater. Plus, historically, it hasn't really accumulated all that many updates for 3rd party software, so this really doesn't go with your reasonable expectations of what it does.
The second issue is transparency. You can read manifests and perform dry runs of apt installs to verify what it is you're installing. Windows update doesn't quite give you that possibility, afaik.
just because Javascript rightclick blockers are completely ineffectual doesn't detract from them being exactly the sort of thing the anti-circumvention clauses were written for. And no, a web page is no less copyrighted and no less worthy of copy-protection than any other media.
Of course all of this making perfect sense from inside the box doesn't make it look any less fucked up from outside.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, they're not allowed to cheat. What they are allowed to do, however, is even more devious. For example, Frank Sinatra was big Vegas star, and famous for liking Baccarat. He was also on a casino's payroll. Whenever there was someone winning big on the Baccarat tables, they'd just call Frank, give him a stack of chips, and let the big roller hobnob with the star (all with free drinks). Problem solved.
They *have* dropped firewire support. Newer iPods can charge over firewire, but lack the controller to actually transfer data over it.
My guess is that your MP3 player is showing up as a bog standard HDD unit, which is then treated as a fully identified device. The devices that need drivers are the ones that want to show up as something else that would require drivers to actually work properly (not just charge). I guess that's a reasonably smart behaviour that prevents some burnt devices. Your dumb LCD screen USB port probably couldn't care less about what's connected to it, so it gives juice to whatever asks for it.
If the school is entirely privately funded, this may be true. But if they receive even a little public funding for other things, the money they spent on research is money they would have spent on those other things.
What "money spent on research"? Like I said: if a company pays a university lab to research something, the company gets the research results, lab/university gets the cash, which in turn means that less tax money is needed to pay for the functioning of the university as a whole.
Huh? The reason the schools did the research is irrelevant. Did they receive public funding or not? Are you claiming that ALL research done by organizations that receive public funding goes into the public domain? That's just untrue.
I'm claiming that if a company is using research produced independently by a university, there are three possible ways that could happen: the research results were put in the public domain, the results were not put in the public domain and the company licensed them, or the company outright stole/appropriated the results. Since we're discussing immoral, not illegal, behaviour, I ignored the third possibility. The first implies that everybody is allowed to profit off the results, in one way or another. The second means that whatever the university thought was a fair price for the results was paid, and the company has no further debt to society for using the as they see fit. (If you think the debt wasn't fully repaid, I suggest you bring the complaint to whomever decided on the licensing scheme itself, not the licensees)
Since you seem to have a me-first attitude, I won't even try to pitch the idea of being, you know, a decent person. Instead, consider this: Pharmaceuticals are just as entitled to thinking of themselves first and foremost as you are.
Which brings us to economics 101: Assume that demand for medication is very elastic between the price points we're considering. By lowering the prices, (price * units sold) actually goes up, and they make more of a profit. (In developed countries, demand for medication tends to be very unelastic, but at the prices we're talking about, the high elasticity assumption is probably true for third-world countries.)
Of course, pharmaceuticals being allowed to think of themselves first and foremost, they're also allowed to leech every last cent off of you while being nice to some poor shmuck so they can sleep at night. Or perhaps there's people in there with some sense of social justice, who are trying to put some of that in practice.
Either the research done at the schools was funded by them, and they're "entitled" to it, or the research was done by the schools for some other reason, and they either licensed it (go argue with the licensor about the fees if they weren't enough) or the research was put in the public domain, which everybody is free to put to use as they see fit (but they still need the facilities to put the research into practice anyway, an investment that I hope you agree is fair they recoup). Whichever way you turn it, they're not stealing the sweat off your brow.
The whole point the OP was making is that such a plan is stupid. It puts the "omg carbon footprint" buzzword compliance first and foremost, and completely disregards a more holistic view of the problem. For example, dumping hydrochloric acid wastage in a river generates no carbon footprint whatsoever, so it can't possibly be nearly as bad as running your machines on electricity that comes from pollution-producing oil plants, right?
The gun analogy is pretty good. Gun possession is legal in the US, but people buy guns illegally as well. Torrents are legal, but people use them for illegal purposes too. You shouldn't go after everybody who sells guns because some people are trafficking them, and you shouldn't go after all torrents because some people are using them for illegal activities.
Now, here's the nasty part: as per most countries' legislations, the stuff you're getting from the pirate bay is probably illegal. You can't honestly claim the administrators of TPB are unaware of that behaviour, or that they're unable to stop it. The very description of the site implies that they 1) know about it, and 2) encourage it. Even if copyright infringement isn't a crime, it's still illegal, and they're still being a key part in the process. Under any sane legal system, that should be punishable
Arguably, it's good that they stand trial. We'll see how that goes. Either way, what they're doing already pretty much constitutes a form of nonviolent resistance.
Maybe they're disenfranchising their own voters. Maybe not.
The way I see it, this is how it works now: The citizens of a state elects its local government, then the states elect a federal government. While this is not technically true, in practice I doubt vote directions swing that much between state and federal elections, so you can pretty much assume it's all the same.
Under this proposed system, each state is responsible for the election of its own government, but the whole country elects the federal government, by weighing all individual votes the same at the national, rather than state, level.
Well, an init.d script is the farthest you can get from portable while still being a pure script. On the other hand, a script made of sh, sort, awk, sed, grep, and a few more similar tools will be quite portable. If you make sure you keep to the standard behaviour of all those tools (as opposed to using gawk-specific features, for example), it'll be even more portable. Etc etc. When you talk about writing shell scripts, you're usually not talking about pure sh, you're talking about glue code around the basic unix toolchain -- and that's typically the only limit to portability.
Damn, times will end at my place pretty soon then. Got two of each. And they're friendly! (Well, if you accept that the cat purposefully pawing at the dog when she's sleeping to piss her off still counts as friendly)
Also, other, bigger scale "experiments" over evolution have been made and passed: astronomers at the time rejected the idea of evolution because the earth couldn't possibly have been around for long enough to allow the process to take as long as suggested. Of course, that statement was based on the idea that the sun was a ball of fire (ie, combustion) and there wasn't enough fuel in there to make the fire burn that long. When the two scientific theories were put against each other, astronomy lost: they eventually figured out that stars work with nuclear processes and, therefore, last that much longer.
You missed the part where he mentioned awareness of the alternative.
The Sherman Act is meant "to limit cartels and monopolies". Now, Apple sells PC-compatible computers, a position in which they do not hold a monopoly, and sell an operating system as a tie-in product. Unless you define the applicable market as Apple's own computers, there's no case whatsoever that they hold a monopoly in the operating system market either.
"So, I see you billed me here for 100 ad views, but I see here that some people outside the US may have been targeted. You know, we really don't sell in those markets, so I can't see why I should be paying for those views..." See where I'm headed?
I'll join in on the gang that recommends this one (I was skimming through the thread making sure it wasn't mentioned before I posted it myself).
The biggest selling point here is that the book provides a very gentle introduction to one of the most groundbreaking maths results ever (Gödel's incompleteness theorem), while giving you enough perspective that it doesn't make maths seem irrelevant (I mean, if it can't be complete, how useful can it possibly be, right? RIGHT?).
Also, it's an interesting philosophy book, in that it examines the nature of introspection, and the presentation is great, with "technical" bits interleaved with rather humorous texts that beautifully illustrate the mathematical concepts involved in plain english (as much as a dialogue with a crab cannon structure can possibly be "plain english", anyway)
It will also, for bonus points, work on your sense of mathematical aesthetics, and how it relates to artistic aesthetics (both in paining and music). Gaining a taste for what's mathematically beautiful is actually a very important hard skill for, for instance, programming jobs.
Actually, the "impact on the fisheries" point is one that interests me. Not so much the fisheries, but the general concept: If we start tapping into all sorts of "renewable energy", how much energy can we tap into before we shoot ourselves in our collective foot? When does solar start mucking with the earth's albedo, etc? At what point does wind and tide significantly dampen the natural phenomena they're based on?
(This isn't trolling, it's a genuine question, I haven't the faintest clue what the answer might be)
Techno -- in fact, electronica in general -- makes no attempt at pretending it's natural. It takes the "oh look, we can music with machines" idea, and runs with it into its own territory.
It's really easy to turn this into a "get off my lawn" thing, but it's not. There are tools, and there's no shame in using them. The problem is the number of people who use the tools to pretend they're better than they are at doing things without them.
On this subject, the major difference between Linux and Windows is that a sane account policy has been Linux standard practice for years now, rather than being the new thing. Application developers have gotten used to it and don't make (as many) mistakes where that is concerned.
Because Apple Computers has been encroaching on Apple Records territory for a while now?
Mine are named after famous computers. I have Hal, Hex, and Holly thus far.
There are two major differences here. First, apt and its shells are meant to do that. That's your expectation when you run it. In Microsoft's case, it's Windows Update you use, not a full-distro updater. Plus, historically, it hasn't really accumulated all that many updates for 3rd party software, so this really doesn't go with your reasonable expectations of what it does.
The second issue is transparency. You can read manifests and perform dry runs of apt installs to verify what it is you're installing. Windows update doesn't quite give you that possibility, afaik.
Ooops, good going with confusing electrons and protons...
Oh, neat. Which quark are you keeping then?
just because Javascript rightclick blockers are completely ineffectual doesn't detract from them being exactly the sort of thing the anti-circumvention clauses were written for. And no, a web page is no less copyrighted and no less worthy of copy-protection than any other media.
Of course all of this making perfect sense from inside the box doesn't make it look any less fucked up from outside.