sort of. you can sell GPL software, technically, but it's not really a sustainable business: you're required to ship the source with it, and anyone you ship it to can resell it or give it away.
the Systems Engineering group in our R&D shop, which is all Mac, uses Word for their technical requirements. it's been the source of countless hours of frustration and problems. my own approach is to just give up on it: at various times, i've had over half the SE group ready to go back to troff (they were all old Bell Labs types), or possibly a TeX variant. in addition to behaving orders of magnitude more predictably, it's great for collaborative documents, since you can stick it under normal source control very easily. unfortunately, there was one member of the group who never knew either, and another who was in love with GUI editors, so i never quite pulled off the coup. even the group's director was on board for a while. i think if i had spent a weekend or two putting toghether some nice macro sets for them they'd have gone for it. oh, well; next time. in the end, we got by with lots of folk knowledge of the form "oh, don't do that!" and the good luck to be working on a project where we could logically decompose the requirements into several 75-200 page documents instead of one 400-600 one.
Does anyone still think that the appeals court was right in reversing Judge Jackson's decision?
to be clear, the appeals court upheld the lower court's findings; it overturned only the sentence, instructing the lower court to come up with another that more appropriately fit the crime. note that the appeals court agreed that microsoft was a monopoly and abused that monopoly position in violation of law and to the detriment of the public. had things continued on the course they were on, the lower court would likely have had to replace the sentence of breaking up microsoft with a less harsh one - perhaps opening up library source, or documenting hidden APIs, or similar. unfortunately for everyone except microsoft, in 2000 we had us an election and, thanks in at least a small part to Gates' financial support, in 2001 the DoJ was directed to make the case go away by the new administration.
you've missed the point. of course "truthyness" obfuscates the real meaning - that's the point. Colbert was being satirical, in many ways making fun of exactly what your complaining about with regard to words like downsizing.
and who, really, are you comparing "Americans" to? i've lived in London, and heard there probably the worst and strangest contortions of english ever. several Italian speakers i know say the same thing about most Italians - particularly those not from their region. ever asked a Guatemalan about the Spanish spoken in, say, Puerto Rico? Or a Mexican about that spoken in Guatemala, or a Spaniard about that spoken anywhere else? i think what you're noting is real, but has nothing to do with americans or geography. people, generally, simply aren't careful with formal language rules. sucks, but that's life.
and, for future reference, in proper english one only uses "it's" as a contraction; the possessive form is "its", similar to "his" or "hers".
true, provided you can get X connections out. that's frequently restricted on systems trying to be secure (both via firewalls and via turning off things like X connection forwarding in ssh). regardless, you're clearly right that it's possible, but my point was just that it's not unrealistic to believe that frequently people just have terminal emulators to work with.
i have no interest in gaming, but i'm intrigued by this card anyway. where did you find out about the chip? all i could find was generic statements like 400 Mhz, 32-bit. is there a real tech sheet somewhere i can look at?
1. Sure it does at first i thought this guy was saying code doesn't move around on its own, as seen in the Matrix, where it's all sliding and zooming. but, really, it sounds like he's simply saying things don't scroll down. now, coders aren't (generally) speed-readers, that's true. but having it scroll down the screen to read what's going on is a reasonable way to get through it.
2. Sure it does, or at least frequently can i know tons of coders who hate syntax highlighting, and technicolor shells are perhaps the most irritating user-level "innovation" of the GNU world. i mean, it's just text! this is about as sensible as bolding all your prepositions and putting all your pronouns in italics when writing english. also, keep in mind that in many (most?) of the hollywood scenes, folks are hacking remote systems; they've viewing code through a terminal emulator, not generally a fancy dev environment.
3. True, but not true enough i wish this was as ridiculous as the author makes it sound.
4. That's not code generally, the 3d representation isn't of code, but resources. for example, in the "I know this" scene, the girl wasn't doing anything with code, just trying to find an on switch.
5. Thank god this one's right.
6. Not all code is meant to be cracked don't assume that what you're seeing in films is always cracking. there's plenty of instances of kids just learning how to use an unfamiliar system. while 8 year olds are a bit outside my experience, i've seen young teenagers pick up new technical systems very quickly. this isn't about being a super-hacker, generally, just picking up new stuff.
7. Not all code is being cracked honestly, i'm not even sure what it means to crack code. one cracks systems. unless the code's been intentionally obfuscated, this just doesn't really apply - and i've never seen a movie go into enough detail to tell whether code's been obfuscated or not.
8. There's other ways to look unintelligible this is true and valid. if movie producers want to look totally unintelligable to normal people (even geeks!) and still not have to worry about what the code actually means, they should all just write in APL. looks like it's written by aliens, and even for good APL hacks, it's very nearly a write-only language anyway.
9. Cue religious war personally, i use an editor called acme. we're constantly fighting battles over why on earth coders would ever want to touch the mouse. i agree it's, overall, a significant time-saving device, and i think there's good evidence to back it up empirically, but that's highly contrary to people's own perception of what's going on. certainly most people i know who would describe themselves as "hackers" (rather than, say, "programmers" or "engineers") are very anti-mouse.
10. But it should be i wish reality were more like the movies here.
yes, many. many don't, however, as the focus in the field is strongly on verbal communication; issues like punctuation and similar written language issues simply never come up. i don't have a breakdown between how many fall in each category.
not true, or at least not generally so. two things to consider. first, there are schools which specialize in just doing this type of language education. there is no requirement of "higher education" as we think of it. they're often called "finishing schools", and their job is just to help participants overcome the language barrier. they do this for participants from different backgrounds and headed towards different fields. it's therefore possible to find people with perfectly fine english without any particular advanced education to speak of. second, and much more important, the labor market in india is wildly different from anything we know of in the west. unemployment is in the double-digits, and most of the people who are employed (that is, >50%) are either under-employed or casual workers. the bulk of the labor force is engaged in "unorganized labor", which doesn't provide anything resembling health care or other benefits. in that sort of environment, it's much more difficult to predict where someone with a given background or education level will end up. call centers are still considered "good jobs", and competition to get those jobs is strong. it's a very different world.
If a company cares about customer service, they will hire (for their United States customers) support staff that can properly service someone who speaks the US variety of English.
this is true and vital, and plenty of companies have learned it, or are learning it now. but note that there's absolutely no reason why that person can't be Indian and in India. there are plenty of language schools in India that turn out people who're entirely fluent in english, including the american dialect. my experience working with engineers in India is that there's basically two ways companies can go about building a dev team in India. first, you can hire good engineers who cost aroudn 1/2 to 1/3 of what they'd cost in the US, and have at least roughly comparable skill levels. second, you can hire warm bodies who're engineers on paper, and you can get them for 1/5 to 1/10 of what similarly warm bodies would cost in the US. if whoever's in charge of hiring there understands that people are not fungible assets, you've got a good chance of getting a useful and productive team in India; if not, you're more or less screwed. my experience with customer support (other than as a customer) is more limited, but i have no reason to believe it's not the same there. i work with a guy who says things like "an indian could never understand me", where "understand" means "relate to". he gives examples of things like understanding baseball. wtf do i care if the customer support rep on the phone knows who won the Yankees game last night, regardless of where they are? there's legitimate points about language barrier and cultural differences impacting effective communication, and then there's flimsy rationalizations for stinking racism.
microsoft was deemed by the courts to have a virtual monopoly on desktop operating systems, a position which they used to force their direct customers (people like Dell and HP) to accept anti-competative licensing terms (like prohibiting those companies from shipping boxes with other OSs), bundling products in other fields to lock competitors there out (Office, IE, Media Player), and so on. the fact that there are other OSs available is irrelevant since they didn't represent a significant bulk of the desktop OS market (keep in mind that MS's market share was higher at the end of the '90s, when most of these anti-trust cases are referencing).
i understand the point he's trying to make, it's just that it's non-sensical. apple does not have a monopoly position in any market; it's therefore impossible for them to use it to affect others. they have market dominance in the digital audio player and online digital music sales markets, but no monopoly. if no monopoly, then no anti-trust and no problem. nothing Microsoft did to get in trouble with various courts is inherently illegal (well, not under this topic, anyway) - companies are, generally, free to bundle their products if they like, or offer whatever bizarre license terms they can think up. when a company attains a monopoly position, their activities are restricted to prevent them from leveraging that position to force people into doing what they want. your restating of the ancestor's point is a non-sensical comparison, explicitly because microsoft is (or at least was) a monopoly, as found by the courts, while apple is not. attempts to compare them need to first put them on the same footing, which depends on that misunderstanding of monopoly v. market dominance.
google's another popular one to get wrong here. google has market dominance in web search and advertising, but no monopoly anywhere. by the logic presented, it must be really awful that Ford won't support me putting a Ford engine in my Mini, or a VW engine in my Ford.
not exactly. Cingular (#1 in the US by user base since the merger w/ AT&T, when the pulled ahead of Verizon) is GSM; Verizon (#2 by user base, #1 by network footprint, trying to take back the #1 spot on user base) and Sprint (#3 by user base since the merger w/ Nextel (i think before as well, but not certain), not sure about network footprint) are CDMA operators (the old Nextel network is iDen, which is just plain different). T-Mobile (#4 by user base, and now by a significant margin, after the consolidation; they're not generally considered a Tier-1 operator any more in the US) is GSM. also, the use of SIM cards is not required for user choice, it just makes the mechanics easier. as you note, most US GSM operators lock their phones, and there's nothing to prevent CDMA operators from allowing arbitrary (compatible) phones onto their network (although you'd have to call them and give them the ID of the phone to get your number switched over). finally, CDMA phones can use SIM-like modules (UIQ, i think), but i'm not aware of any phone on the market in the US that uses them (it's a new thing in the CDMA world, and i've only ever seen two CDMA phones with it globally).
you fundamentally misunderstand "monopoly". don't feel bad, it's a common mistake (especially 'round these parts).
it's useless to say that apple has a monopoly on iTunes Music Store sales, the same way it's stupid to say that Ford has a monopoly on Taurus sales. Ford doesn't have a monopoly on cars, which is the industry in which they compete; similarly, apple doesn't have a monopoly on digital music sales, which is the field in which iTMS competes. true, Apple has market dominance in a way that Ford does not, but market dominance does not equal a monopoly, by a long shot.
apple has no ability to lock anyone into anything related to phones. for starters, they've already licensed the ability to play iTMS tracks on someone else's phone. and, of course, there's still the fact that iTMS does not represent any form of monopoly. there's nothing wrong with them offering Mac-only (or.Mac-only) features unless their abusing a monopoly position by doing so (or is Apple somehow "wrong" for not making Safari, iChat, GarageBand, or Spotlight available for Windows?). Given no monopoly, there can be no such abuse.
i'd agree that it's bad that it's illegal to try to work around the Fairplay DRM breakage, but that's entirely irrelevant to the rest of your post.
you're making a whole set of unfounded assumptions. i know several people who make well above the range you're talking about who think socialism or communism would work pretty darn well. i've not seen this concept of "class envy" show up as strongly as it is in this thread before now; it's kinda weird. feels like a diversionary tactic, to me.
myself, i make significantly more than your cited range, and i think a good deal more socialist policy in the US would be very healthy for the country. so, to put it in your terms, yes, i suppose that means i want the government to take away some of my money to give to others. so? why is this such an odd concept? i enjoy significant benefits from it. the commonly cited examples are all true - i get more benefit from having good roads and interoperable telecommunications than someone who makes $5/hour - but that's not the half of it. despite the fact that i'm well past school age and don't have any kids, i'm in favor of heavy funding for public education. partially, that's because i just want to see other people do well, but partially it's because it's i recognize that it's good for all of society, including myself: a rising tide raises all ships. access to good free-or-trivially-cheap health care helps me, even if i never use it, because it helps the country run better. while i'd certainly like it if people would get behind universal health care for altruistic reasons, it's just as sound from an "enlightened self-interest" point of view.
communism, however, wouldn't work even in a "perfect society", unless by "perfect" you mean people don't have desires. everybody comes quickly to the point of communism being prone to leachers, neglecting human nature by removing motivation for good work, and so on. but it's much worse than that. humans will inherently have conflicting desires. two people will want some of my time, or the same plot of land. not "equivalent" assets, but the same exact things. capitalism - specifically, competition amongst both buyers and sellers of goods and services - provides a method for resolving these conflicts. imperfect, to be sure, but mostly functional. communism does not provide an equivalent method, so tends toward state control over more and more aspects of every day life. and, um, that's bad.
it's wrong to call socialism a "loose" form of communism, or communism-light. socialism preserves the competition that capitalism includes to resolve most resource constraint issues, while recognizing and dealing with the fact that some things are prone to market failures, in both senses of the term. whereas we can imagine a "pure capitalist" society or a "pure communist" society, it's difficult or impossible to pin down what a "pure socialist" society is, since it inherently includes grey-area decision making regarding what resources qualify for that sort of protection. the US has some socialist elements (see the FCC's control over radio frequency and our public education system, for example); europe has more (see protection of the labor market or access to health care), but it's all along a sliding scale.
are there problems and potential abuses with a socialist model? of course there are. i'm appalled at how much of my tax money goes to the military. or, more accurately, how much of it goes to the military's pointless foreign activities; it's as good as burning the money. the military could be just fine: what would blow the minds of most traditional conservatives in the US is that the military - the army especially, but really the whole thing - is the nation's largest socialist institution. they're just currently misguided. it's political suicide to advocate cutting the DoD's funding. so, okay: keep the funding the same, just move the money around. multiply DARPA funding; have the Army Corps of Engineers fix some of the nations infrastructure that's been horribly neglected by "the market", like our dike and levee system, or the power grids; continue the role of (geographic) wealth distribution they've had for most of t
your interpretation of "state" is interesting, and i can't definitively say it's wrong. however, based on the language used (the various states are frequently referred to as "the various states" explicitly, whereas "state" is frequently used for "nation" in english generally), i'm inclined to believe it refers to the defense of the State, singular. the states themselves were protected by the overall restrictions and limits placed on the federal government by the Constitution (the fact that we've subsequently redefined these limits is another mater entirely). i'm not aware of any case law (it'd have to be SCOTUS) on this topic, but i imagine some exist and would be fascinated to read it. regardless, it's a fair point: the historical context of revolution is important, and defense of liberty is a reasonable read on the motivation for enshrining the right to bear arms in the Constitution. were that the only historical information available for providing context, i'd readily concede the point. here, however, you either overplayed your hand or picked astoundingly bad examples:
Nobody was worried about the right to hunt...
interesting you should use that example. i'm not sure if you're aware of it or not, but the bit of English law which was the most direct predecessor to our Second Amendment was very much about the right to hunt. that wasn't its sole application, but it was the most common, and the one which persisted the longest (it's been in English courts in the past year).
or about the possibility of the Spanish suddenly invading New York.
well, maybe not the Spanish (although i bet it wasn't unthinkable), but the early Nation was far from secure. the British were a real threat, of course (see the War of 1812), violence between US and Native forces was frequent (making no assertions as to cause or justification), and the French weren't trusted.
you're correct that our revolutionary founding fathers were concerned about the possibility of the Federal government overstepping its bounds (and, regardless of whether they ended up liking it or not, i'm quite certain they'd all be initially shocked and aghast at the state of post-reconstruction America). but i'm not rewriting history here, i'm actively trying to point it out. they also documented their intentions in the constitution, remember; that's sort of the "defining work" for a good set of them. if you're interested in genuinely understanding history, rather than rewriting it or simply pretending it says what you want it to, the historical context of these laws is very important.
i think perhaps the fundamental problem here is that people like yourself confuse a moral imperative with the law; they're not the same thing. i absolutely agree with Jefferson's comments on the tree of Liberty and the blood of patriots and tyrants; and yes, he and others believed the people retained a moral right to forcibly overthrow an oppressive government. but that moral right is not the same as the law. the constitution makes no provisions for such a thing, nor does any other US law (with a very few, very narrow, set of exceptions). our founding fathers were traitors to the British Crown, no question about it. there's no reason that can't be true while also acknowledging that they were fulfilling a moral imperative to resist unjust rule and oppression.
we, as citizens and as free people, can discuss when our government has overstepped its bounds, and when we need to do something about it, and when that "something" involves force. we have a moral right to resist oppression. but the constitution does not address that right. the second amendment addresses defense.
people very much like Bush and Gingrich were in charge 200+ years ago; our founding fathers were jailed as terrorists (although they spelled it "traitors"). the idea of suppressing freedoms to maintain the illusion of security is nothing new; in fact, it might be the oldest idea in politics.
on the first amendment: the right to free speech is critical for the stability of our country exactly because it preserves the ability to replace our government - that is, the particular one in power at a given time, not the form - without the need for bloodshed. it is exactly to preserve the ability to reshape the government without force. indeed, aside from the religion section (which, depending on interpretation, may or may not be related), the rest of the first amendment fills the same purpose: a peaceful way to change the governemnt. i'm reminded of JFK's brilliant observation: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.". the founders were ensuring that we keep peaceful revolution possible.
on the second: the current bill of rights was formed by asking the various states signing the constitution for suggested amendments; the suggestions were then edited, consolidates (and some outright rejected), and set up for a vote. those that passed (10 of 12, if i remember right) became our bill of rights. it's interesting to note that, of the states that suggested a "right to bear arms" amendment, about a third included a clause to the effect of "standing armies being harmful to peace" or similar. now, those didn't become part of the law, but they're interesting context. certainly, they inform the meaning of the first half of the second amendment: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state...". the second amendment preserves the right to bear arms explicitly for the defense of the state - not for the overthrow of the government. forceful overthrow of the government is still treason.
sigh. that's really ironic. you want to send someone for jail for questioning free speech? you're clearly confused. free speech is exactly about allowing this idiot to question the fundamental principles of our government. you are aware, of course, that the constitution contains provisions for proposing and enacting amendments, and that we've had about two dozen, right? some of them changed mighty fundamental things. we don't send people to jail for advocating the impeachment of presidents, the direct election of senators, modifications to legislators salaries, welfare reform, revisions to patent and trademark law, or modifications to the first amendment. hell, we don't even throw people in jail for passing or enforcing laws which are subsequently found to be unconstitutional, in violation of our fundamental principles. you're presumably thinking of the crime of treason, which our constitution defines as "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.". mr. gingrich is being an idiot and an ass, but he is not engaging in treason. we've got better targets for that, if you're interested.
also, "que" is not a word (in english). you mean cue, a signal for action. the homonym is queue, a line/list of things waiting to be serviced.
i wish it were that simple. not that it'd be good, of course, but if it were that simple, it'd be easy to identify and discredit. no, the issue isn't christians v. muslims; it's us v. them. the enemy is no longer al queda; it's enemy combatants. and the folks in charge are going to define that any way the like. christian anti-war groups are no friends of these people. the quakers have been on the FBI's watch list, for crying out loud!
as i read the summary of this article, i opened my fortune cookie from lunch:
Fearless courage is the foundation of victory.
freedom is scary. freedom implies a lack of control, and most people, at least on some level, want things to be under control. when "bad stuff" happens, it's easy so grasp at the illusion of control to stave off the fear. in that sort of environment, freedom feels like lots of crap flying around; giving up the freedom feels like locking things down. but that's just the surest way to lose this battle. clinging to our freedoms - that which makes us americans (not to the exclusion of other countries, of course) - requires courage.
also, the first "lucky number" on that fortune cookie is 42, so it's got to be true.;-)
(eg: the party making the accusation should be the subject of the sentence)
two points here, one factual/logical, the other grammatical. first, IBM is the "actor" in the article; it's explicitly about IBM's issued response to a much earlier SCO allegation. the reworking you've suggested is appropriate for an article about that earlier SCO accusation. second, the abbreviation "eg" is used to introduce an example; you've instead given a rewording of your point, for which you probably really meant "ie". see here for further explanation.
while i disagreed with you generally, your argument was at least interestingly structured; more so than one would expect from/., at least. i was going to go through the debate process - particularly, the economics behind the jiffy lube example are interesting, and there's some assumptions you're making about who has a car and who derives the most value from regular long-distance transportation that you're not factoring in. but then you went and said this:
Show me one truely competitive market that is bad to the poor -- I haven't found any in all my history of debating this debate.
and your credibility went out the window. people have already done a decent job of providing examples (health care, education (the very issue at hand!), and, if you go back historically, things like police and fire brigades; pretty much any public service currently offered by most modern, developed governments, probably most significantly participation in a legal system), so i'm not going to bother with that. instead, i'm going to suggest you look at what that statement really says - about you. one or more of the following is true:
"all [your] history debating this debate" is very short - like, single-digit hours - and you've simply not come across any yet. in this case, being new to the debate, it's excusable that you haven't run into the astoundingly numerous counter-claims, but then you diminish your appeal as a debate partner, since it'd be more about educating you than a dialectic process.
you're ignoring historical examples, like private fire and police departments. ignoring history doesn't make it go away, and your refusal to learn from it speaks poorly of the likelihood you'll learn from debate generally. sure, using historical examples complicates things, as it introduces more variables, but deal with the complications, don't just pretend they don't exist.
you're lying/exagerating for effect. don't do that. the result is simply to weaken your position, as providing a single counter-example now undermines your entire argument, rather than being something you can deal with. even if you subsequently concede the individual point and can still support the rest of your argument, putting things in absolute terms like you have has the psychological, if not strictly logical, effect of "putting all your eggs in one basket", as it were: inviting people to dismiss your entire argument just by providing a single counter-example.
you're totally, or at least overwhelmingly, ignorant of economics. given the rest of your argument, this is overwhelmingly likely. again, not so much because of your position, but more because of how you state it. economics is complicated stuff, yet you simplify the jiffy lube example into just retail cost at the shop, giving no consideration to how value is derived? the fact that you can't (assuming it's a genuine inability, not a refusal) find any counter-examples on your own means you can't (again: or won't) understand the complexity. remember, raising counter-examples needn't undermine your position, they're an opportunity to strengthen it.
if it's a refusal, rather than an inability, you're probably making some claim about how there's never been a "real" free market, or some equally useless idealist argument. there's never been a "real" example of any economic system; all the world is compromise. dealing with the compromises to understand the effects of free market, government involvement, and so on becomes more complicated, but is certainly doable, and the most productive version of the exercise, given the world we live in.
more likely than (but not mutually exclusive with) any of the other options is that you've simply already decided the answer, and will stick by that decision regardless of any evidence presented. in that case, i suppose in a way i should thank you for identifying yourself so clearly. if, however, you actually want to debate people (regardless of whether this point happens to be true or not), you'd do well to not present yourself this way.
Instead, you'll have the overhead of: turning a profit, advertising, and appeasing parents. Remember, if you privatize the school system, it's no longer the children who are the customer, it's the parents. It's no longer about actually doing what's best for the child, it's about showing the parents you are doing what's best for the child, whether or not what's actually best for the child gets done.
i agree with pretty much everything you said, and the following point doesn't really undermine your argument, but: don't be fooled into believeing that public education doesn't include a positively stupid amount of convincing parents you're doing the right thing. parents groups exert a huge amount of control over education at the local level; more in smaller (by population) school districts. it's somewhat indirect, generally by way of the administration, but it's certainly there. not as much as in a private school system, but don't pretend (or don't be fooled into believing) it isn't there.
that being said, however: right on. god, wal-mart for education. great, now i'm going to have the shakes all day.
Slashdot Mirror
sort of. you can sell GPL software, technically, but it's not really a sustainable business: you're required to ship the source with it, and anyone you ship it to can resell it or give it away.
the Systems Engineering group in our R&D shop, which is all Mac, uses Word for their technical requirements. it's been the source of countless hours of frustration and problems.
my own approach is to just give up on it: at various times, i've had over half the SE group ready to go back to troff (they were all old Bell Labs types), or possibly a TeX variant. in addition to behaving orders of magnitude more predictably, it's great for collaborative documents, since you can stick it under normal source control very easily. unfortunately, there was one member of the group who never knew either, and another who was in love with GUI editors, so i never quite pulled off the coup. even the group's director was on board for a while. i think if i had spent a weekend or two putting toghether some nice macro sets for them they'd have gone for it. oh, well; next time.
in the end, we got by with lots of folk knowledge of the form "oh, don't do that!" and the good luck to be working on a project where we could logically decompose the requirements into several 75-200 page documents instead of one 400-600 one.
had things continued on the course they were on, the lower court would likely have had to replace the sentence of breaking up microsoft with a less harsh one - perhaps opening up library source, or documenting hidden APIs, or similar.
unfortunately for everyone except microsoft, in 2000 we had us an election and, thanks in at least a small part to Gates' financial support, in 2001 the DoJ was directed to make the case go away by the new administration.
you've missed the point. of course "truthyness" obfuscates the real meaning - that's the point. Colbert was being satirical, in many ways making fun of exactly what your complaining about with regard to words like downsizing.
and who, really, are you comparing "Americans" to? i've lived in London, and heard there probably the worst and strangest contortions of english ever. several Italian speakers i know say the same thing about most Italians - particularly those not from their region. ever asked a Guatemalan about the Spanish spoken in, say, Puerto Rico? Or a Mexican about that spoken in Guatemala, or a Spaniard about that spoken anywhere else? i think what you're noting is real, but has nothing to do with americans or geography. people, generally, simply aren't careful with formal language rules. sucks, but that's life.
and, for future reference, in proper english one only uses "it's" as a contraction; the possessive form is "its", similar to "his" or "hers".
true, provided you can get X connections out. that's frequently restricted on systems trying to be secure (both via firewalls and via turning off things like X connection forwarding in ssh). regardless, you're clearly right that it's possible, but my point was just that it's not unrealistic to believe that frequently people just have terminal emulators to work with.
i have no interest in gaming, but i'm intrigued by this card anyway. where did you find out about the chip? all i could find was generic statements like 400 Mhz, 32-bit. is there a real tech sheet somewhere i can look at?
1. Sure it does
at first i thought this guy was saying code doesn't move around on its own, as seen in the Matrix, where it's all sliding and zooming. but, really, it sounds like he's simply saying things don't scroll down. now, coders aren't (generally) speed-readers, that's true. but having it scroll down the screen to read what's going on is a reasonable way to get through it.
2. Sure it does, or at least frequently can
i know tons of coders who hate syntax highlighting, and technicolor shells are perhaps the most irritating user-level "innovation" of the GNU world. i mean, it's just text! this is about as sensible as bolding all your prepositions and putting all your pronouns in italics when writing english. also, keep in mind that in many (most?) of the hollywood scenes, folks are hacking remote systems; they've viewing code through a terminal emulator, not generally a fancy dev environment.
3. True, but not true enough
i wish this was as ridiculous as the author makes it sound.
4. That's not code
generally, the 3d representation isn't of code, but resources. for example, in the "I know this" scene, the girl wasn't doing anything with code, just trying to find an on switch.
5. Thank god this one's right.
6. Not all code is meant to be cracked
don't assume that what you're seeing in films is always cracking. there's plenty of instances of kids just learning how to use an unfamiliar system. while 8 year olds are a bit outside my experience, i've seen young teenagers pick up new technical systems very quickly. this isn't about being a super-hacker, generally, just picking up new stuff.
7. Not all code is being cracked
honestly, i'm not even sure what it means to crack code. one cracks systems. unless the code's been intentionally obfuscated, this just doesn't really apply - and i've never seen a movie go into enough detail to tell whether code's been obfuscated or not.
8. There's other ways to look unintelligible
this is true and valid. if movie producers want to look totally unintelligable to normal people (even geeks!) and still not have to worry about what the code actually means, they should all just write in APL. looks like it's written by aliens, and even for good APL hacks, it's very nearly a write-only language anyway.
9. Cue religious war
personally, i use an editor called acme. we're constantly fighting battles over why on earth coders would ever want to touch the mouse. i agree it's, overall, a significant time-saving device, and i think there's good evidence to back it up empirically, but that's highly contrary to people's own perception of what's going on. certainly most people i know who would describe themselves as "hackers" (rather than, say, "programmers" or "engineers") are very anti-mouse.
10. But it should be
i wish reality were more like the movies here.
yes, many. many don't, however, as the focus in the field is strongly on verbal communication; issues like punctuation and similar written language issues simply never come up. i don't have a breakdown between how many fall in each category.
why do you ask?
not true, or at least not generally so. two things to consider.
first, there are schools which specialize in just doing this type of language education. there is no requirement of "higher education" as we think of it. they're often called "finishing schools", and their job is just to help participants overcome the language barrier. they do this for participants from different backgrounds and headed towards different fields. it's therefore possible to find people with perfectly fine english without any particular advanced education to speak of.
second, and much more important, the labor market in india is wildly different from anything we know of in the west. unemployment is in the double-digits, and most of the people who are employed (that is, >50%) are either under-employed or casual workers. the bulk of the labor force is engaged in "unorganized labor", which doesn't provide anything resembling health care or other benefits. in that sort of environment, it's much more difficult to predict where someone with a given background or education level will end up. call centers are still considered "good jobs", and competition to get those jobs is strong. it's a very different world.
my experience working with engineers in India is that there's basically two ways companies can go about building a dev team in India. first, you can hire good engineers who cost aroudn 1/2 to 1/3 of what they'd cost in the US, and have at least roughly comparable skill levels. second, you can hire warm bodies who're engineers on paper, and you can get them for 1/5 to 1/10 of what similarly warm bodies would cost in the US. if whoever's in charge of hiring there understands that people are not fungible assets, you've got a good chance of getting a useful and productive team in India; if not, you're more or less screwed. my experience with customer support (other than as a customer) is more limited, but i have no reason to believe it's not the same there.
i work with a guy who says things like "an indian could never understand me", where "understand" means "relate to". he gives examples of things like understanding baseball. wtf do i care if the customer support rep on the phone knows who won the Yankees game last night, regardless of where they are? there's legitimate points about language barrier and cultural differences impacting effective communication, and then there's flimsy rationalizations for stinking racism.
microsoft was deemed by the courts to have a virtual monopoly on desktop operating systems, a position which they used to force their direct customers (people like Dell and HP) to accept anti-competative licensing terms (like prohibiting those companies from shipping boxes with other OSs), bundling products in other fields to lock competitors there out (Office, IE, Media Player), and so on. the fact that there are other OSs available is irrelevant since they didn't represent a significant bulk of the desktop OS market (keep in mind that MS's market share was higher at the end of the '90s, when most of these anti-trust cases are referencing).
i understand the point he's trying to make, it's just that it's non-sensical. apple does not have a monopoly position in any market; it's therefore impossible for them to use it to affect others. they have market dominance in the digital audio player and online digital music sales markets, but no monopoly. if no monopoly, then no anti-trust and no problem. nothing Microsoft did to get in trouble with various courts is inherently illegal (well, not under this topic, anyway) - companies are, generally, free to bundle their products if they like, or offer whatever bizarre license terms they can think up. when a company attains a monopoly position, their activities are restricted to prevent them from leveraging that position to force people into doing what they want. your restating of the ancestor's point is a non-sensical comparison, explicitly because microsoft is (or at least was) a monopoly, as found by the courts, while apple is not. attempts to compare them need to first put them on the same footing, which depends on that misunderstanding of monopoly v. market dominance.
google's another popular one to get wrong here. google has market dominance in web search and advertising, but no monopoly anywhere. by the logic presented, it must be really awful that Ford won't support me putting a Ford engine in my Mini, or a VW engine in my Ford.
not exactly. Cingular (#1 in the US by user base since the merger w/ AT&T, when the pulled ahead of Verizon) is GSM; Verizon (#2 by user base, #1 by network footprint, trying to take back the #1 spot on user base) and Sprint (#3 by user base since the merger w/ Nextel (i think before as well, but not certain), not sure about network footprint) are CDMA operators (the old Nextel network is iDen, which is just plain different). T-Mobile (#4 by user base, and now by a significant margin, after the consolidation; they're not generally considered a Tier-1 operator any more in the US) is GSM.
also, the use of SIM cards is not required for user choice, it just makes the mechanics easier. as you note, most US GSM operators lock their phones, and there's nothing to prevent CDMA operators from allowing arbitrary (compatible) phones onto their network (although you'd have to call them and give them the ID of the phone to get your number switched over).
finally, CDMA phones can use SIM-like modules (UIQ, i think), but i'm not aware of any phone on the market in the US that uses them (it's a new thing in the CDMA world, and i've only ever seen two CDMA phones with it globally).
you fundamentally misunderstand "monopoly". don't feel bad, it's a common mistake (especially 'round these parts).
.Mac-only) features unless their abusing a monopoly position by doing so (or is Apple somehow "wrong" for not making Safari, iChat, GarageBand, or Spotlight available for Windows?). Given no monopoly, there can be no such abuse.
it's useless to say that apple has a monopoly on iTunes Music Store sales, the same way it's stupid to say that Ford has a monopoly on Taurus sales. Ford doesn't have a monopoly on cars, which is the industry in which they compete; similarly, apple doesn't have a monopoly on digital music sales, which is the field in which iTMS competes. true, Apple has market dominance in a way that Ford does not, but market dominance does not equal a monopoly, by a long shot.
apple has no ability to lock anyone into anything related to phones. for starters, they've already licensed the ability to play iTMS tracks on someone else's phone. and, of course, there's still the fact that iTMS does not represent any form of monopoly. there's nothing wrong with them offering Mac-only (or
i'd agree that it's bad that it's illegal to try to work around the Fairplay DRM breakage, but that's entirely irrelevant to the rest of your post.
you're making a whole set of unfounded assumptions. i know several people who make well above the range you're talking about who think socialism or communism would work pretty darn well. i've not seen this concept of "class envy" show up as strongly as it is in this thread before now; it's kinda weird. feels like a diversionary tactic, to me.
myself, i make significantly more than your cited range, and i think a good deal more socialist policy in the US would be very healthy for the country. so, to put it in your terms, yes, i suppose that means i want the government to take away some of my money to give to others. so? why is this such an odd concept? i enjoy significant benefits from it. the commonly cited examples are all true - i get more benefit from having good roads and interoperable telecommunications than someone who makes $5/hour - but that's not the half of it. despite the fact that i'm well past school age and don't have any kids, i'm in favor of heavy funding for public education. partially, that's because i just want to see other people do well, but partially it's because it's i recognize that it's good for all of society, including myself: a rising tide raises all ships. access to good free-or-trivially-cheap health care helps me, even if i never use it, because it helps the country run better. while i'd certainly like it if people would get behind universal health care for altruistic reasons, it's just as sound from an "enlightened self-interest" point of view.
communism, however, wouldn't work even in a "perfect society", unless by "perfect" you mean people don't have desires. everybody comes quickly to the point of communism being prone to leachers, neglecting human nature by removing motivation for good work, and so on. but it's much worse than that. humans will inherently have conflicting desires. two people will want some of my time, or the same plot of land. not "equivalent" assets, but the same exact things. capitalism - specifically, competition amongst both buyers and sellers of goods and services - provides a method for resolving these conflicts. imperfect, to be sure, but mostly functional. communism does not provide an equivalent method, so tends toward state control over more and more aspects of every day life. and, um, that's bad.
it's wrong to call socialism a "loose" form of communism, or communism-light. socialism preserves the competition that capitalism includes to resolve most resource constraint issues, while recognizing and dealing with the fact that some things are prone to market failures, in both senses of the term. whereas we can imagine a "pure capitalist" society or a "pure communist" society, it's difficult or impossible to pin down what a "pure socialist" society is, since it inherently includes grey-area decision making regarding what resources qualify for that sort of protection. the US has some socialist elements (see the FCC's control over radio frequency and our public education system, for example); europe has more (see protection of the labor market or access to health care), but it's all along a sliding scale.
are there problems and potential abuses with a socialist model? of course there are. i'm appalled at how much of my tax money goes to the military. or, more accurately, how much of it goes to the military's pointless foreign activities; it's as good as burning the money. the military could be just fine: what would blow the minds of most traditional conservatives in the US is that the military - the army especially, but really the whole thing - is the nation's largest socialist institution. they're just currently misguided. it's political suicide to advocate cutting the DoD's funding. so, okay: keep the funding the same, just move the money around. multiply DARPA funding; have the Army Corps of Engineers fix some of the nations infrastructure that's been horribly neglected by "the market", like our dike and levee system, or the power grids; continue the role of (geographic) wealth distribution they've had for most of t
regardless, it's a fair point: the historical context of revolution is important, and defense of liberty is a reasonable read on the motivation for enshrining the right to bear arms in the Constitution. were that the only historical information available for providing context, i'd readily concede the point. here, however, you either overplayed your hand or picked astoundingly bad examples:interesting you should use that example. i'm not sure if you're aware of it or not, but the bit of English law which was the most direct predecessor to our Second Amendment was very much about the right to hunt. that wasn't its sole application, but it was the most common, and the one which persisted the longest (it's been in English courts in the past year).well, maybe not the Spanish (although i bet it wasn't unthinkable), but the early Nation was far from secure. the British were a real threat, of course (see the War of 1812), violence between US and Native forces was frequent (making no assertions as to cause or justification), and the French weren't trusted.
you're correct that our revolutionary founding fathers were concerned about the possibility of the Federal government overstepping its bounds (and, regardless of whether they ended up liking it or not, i'm quite certain they'd all be initially shocked and aghast at the state of post-reconstruction America). but i'm not rewriting history here, i'm actively trying to point it out. they also documented their intentions in the constitution, remember; that's sort of the "defining work" for a good set of them. if you're interested in genuinely understanding history, rather than rewriting it or simply pretending it says what you want it to, the historical context of these laws is very important.
i think perhaps the fundamental problem here is that people like yourself confuse a moral imperative with the law; they're not the same thing. i absolutely agree with Jefferson's comments on the tree of Liberty and the blood of patriots and tyrants; and yes, he and others believed the people retained a moral right to forcibly overthrow an oppressive government. but that moral right is not the same as the law. the constitution makes no provisions for such a thing, nor does any other US law (with a very few, very narrow, set of exceptions). our founding fathers were traitors to the British Crown, no question about it. there's no reason that can't be true while also acknowledging that they were fulfilling a moral imperative to resist unjust rule and oppression.
we, as citizens and as free people, can discuss when our government has overstepped its bounds, and when we need to do something about it, and when that "something" involves force. we have a moral right to resist oppression. but the constitution does not address that right. the second amendment addresses defense.
people very much like Bush and Gingrich were in charge 200+ years ago; our founding fathers were jailed as terrorists (although they spelled it "traitors"). the idea of suppressing freedoms to maintain the illusion of security is nothing new; in fact, it might be the oldest idea in politics.
bullshit. pure and utter bullshit.
on the first amendment:
the right to free speech is critical for the stability of our country exactly because it preserves the ability to replace our government - that is, the particular one in power at a given time, not the form - without the need for bloodshed. it is exactly to preserve the ability to reshape the government without force. indeed, aside from the religion section (which, depending on interpretation, may or may not be related), the rest of the first amendment fills the same purpose: a peaceful way to change the governemnt. i'm reminded of JFK's brilliant observation: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.". the founders were ensuring that we keep peaceful revolution possible.
on the second:
the current bill of rights was formed by asking the various states signing the constitution for suggested amendments; the suggestions were then edited, consolidates (and some outright rejected), and set up for a vote. those that passed (10 of 12, if i remember right) became our bill of rights. it's interesting to note that, of the states that suggested a "right to bear arms" amendment, about a third included a clause to the effect of "standing armies being harmful to peace" or similar. now, those didn't become part of the law, but they're interesting context. certainly, they inform the meaning of the first half of the second amendment: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state...". the second amendment preserves the right to bear arms explicitly for the defense of the state - not for the overthrow of the government. forceful overthrow of the government is still treason.
sigh. that's really ironic. you want to send someone for jail for questioning free speech? you're clearly confused. free speech is exactly about allowing this idiot to question the fundamental principles of our government. you are aware, of course, that the constitution contains provisions for proposing and enacting amendments, and that we've had about two dozen, right? some of them changed mighty fundamental things. we don't send people to jail for advocating the impeachment of presidents, the direct election of senators, modifications to legislators salaries, welfare reform, revisions to patent and trademark law, or modifications to the first amendment. hell, we don't even throw people in jail for passing or enforcing laws which are subsequently found to be unconstitutional, in violation of our fundamental principles. you're presumably thinking of the crime of treason, which our constitution defines as "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.". mr. gingrich is being an idiot and an ass, but he is not engaging in treason. we've got better targets for that, if you're interested.
also, "que" is not a word (in english). you mean cue, a signal for action. the homonym is queue, a line/list of things waiting to be serviced.
i wish it were that simple. not that it'd be good, of course, but if it were that simple, it'd be easy to identify and discredit. no, the issue isn't christians v. muslims; it's us v. them. the enemy is no longer al queda; it's enemy combatants. and the folks in charge are going to define that any way the like. christian anti-war groups are no friends of these people. the quakers have been on the FBI's watch list, for crying out loud!
but that's just the surest way to lose this battle. clinging to our freedoms - that which makes us americans (not to the exclusion of other countries, of course) - requires courage.
also, the first "lucky number" on that fortune cookie is 42, so it's got to be true.
first, IBM is the "actor" in the article; it's explicitly about IBM's issued response to a much earlier SCO allegation. the reworking you've suggested is appropriate for an article about that earlier SCO accusation.
second, the abbreviation "eg" is used to introduce an example; you've instead given a rewording of your point, for which you probably really meant "ie". see here for further explanation.
- "all [your] history debating this debate" is very short - like, single-digit hours - and you've simply not come across any yet. in this case, being new to the debate, it's excusable that you haven't run into the astoundingly numerous counter-claims, but then you diminish your appeal as a debate partner, since it'd be more about educating you than a dialectic process.
- you're ignoring historical examples, like private fire and police departments. ignoring history doesn't make it go away, and your refusal to learn from it speaks poorly of the likelihood you'll learn from debate generally. sure, using historical examples complicates things, as it introduces more variables, but deal with the complications, don't just pretend they don't exist.
- you're lying/exagerating for effect. don't do that. the result is simply to weaken your position, as providing a single counter-example now undermines your entire argument, rather than being something you can deal with. even if you subsequently concede the individual point and can still support the rest of your argument, putting things in absolute terms like you have has the psychological, if not strictly logical, effect of "putting all your eggs in one basket", as it were: inviting people to dismiss your entire argument just by providing a single counter-example.
- you're totally, or at least overwhelmingly, ignorant of economics. given the rest of your argument, this is overwhelmingly likely. again, not so much because of your position, but more because of how you state it. economics is complicated stuff, yet you simplify the jiffy lube example into just retail cost at the shop, giving no consideration to how value is derived? the fact that you can't (assuming it's a genuine inability, not a refusal) find any counter-examples on your own means you can't (again: or won't) understand the complexity. remember, raising counter-examples needn't undermine your position, they're an opportunity to strengthen it.
- if it's a refusal, rather than an inability, you're probably making some claim about how there's never been a "real" free market, or some equally useless idealist argument. there's never been a "real" example of any economic system; all the world is compromise. dealing with the compromises to understand the effects of free market, government involvement, and so on becomes more complicated, but is certainly doable, and the most productive version of the exercise, given the world we live in.
- more likely than (but not mutually exclusive with) any of the other options is that you've simply already decided the answer, and will stick by that decision regardless of any evidence presented. in that case, i suppose in a way i should thank you for identifying yourself so clearly. if, however, you actually want to debate people (regardless of whether this point happens to be true or not), you'd do well to not present yourself this way.
most likely, of course, is all of the above.that being said, however: right on. god, wal-mart for education. great, now i'm going to have the shakes all day.