I'm curious about how carefully the editors check the edits if they approve them in a few seconds. It wouldn't give time to look up external references to check newly added facts.
Or, how about public infrastructure that is publicly owned, there's a genius idea. No monopoly, all carriers can have access to it at standard rates. But then the next Liberal government would just sell it anyway...
I suppose when Labor was writing its election promises, that would have been seen as radical socialist thinking. Today, you'd just have to say "why not?", if the government can prop up the entire financial sector and promise billions on spending for other infrastructure, why not provide the full funding for this other natural monopoly?
You say eliminating the biggest provider will reduce competition? Eliminating a virtual monopoly is bad for competition? Wow.
I think it's a bit silly not even reviewing their proposal, but that's ridiculous.
Apparently it won't be possible to build this new network profitably unless it's given a government granted monopoly. So there is a high-stakes game being played to find out whether there will be a Telstra monopoly or a non-Telstra monopoly. Or alternatively the Labor government could back out of its election promise somehow.
It's like saying that criminal organisations exist to serve the people. I'm sure they do serve some of the people some of the time, but it's not their reason for existence.
I too would accept $400k to switch my computer to Windows. Even after using some of the money to buy another Linux machine, there would be a tidy profit.
To elaborate on this point - a few days ago, there was a story about AT&T introducing capped plans, with a $1 per gigabyte excess usage fee. Contrast that to Australia, where a 20GB plan is already considered "extremely generous" (actually, there are ads on TV here claiming that 1GB is generous, for ADSL2+ connections....), and excess usage is typically charged at a rate of anywhere between $0.15 per megabyte (yes, $150 per gigabye is the low end of excess usage fees) and 1c per kilobyte (not uncommon on wireless plans, and yes, that is $10,000 per gigabyte. And yes, there has been at least one lawsuit over it when someone's son left bittorrent running overnight).
Add this to the non-existant infrastructure, and you've got net access which sucks, with a future outlook of continuing to suck while typical internet usage requires increasingly more bandwidth. One of these days IPTV will really take off, and then the providers will have to explain why it is that watching TV for a few hours every night has cost $9000 in excess usage fees - oh, wait, no they won't, they'll blame the consumer.
Yeah, but how would building a new network change the data pricing issues? What makes you think data will be any cheaper on the new network, once all that money has been spent on cabling?
You should consider finding a new ISP. Some of them don't charge for excess usage, but instead slow down the connection for the rest of the billing period. You can also find excess bandwidth at $2.50 per gigabyte.
...Among Slashdot editors to post the greatest number of Australia-related stories or something? Is there any chance they'll tire of the game and begin posting stories from countries other than Australia? Or is this some freakish form of patriotism at work by Slashdot's Aussie editors? I ask because I am so over stories from-and-about that country. Especially when they're of such little relevance to anybody other than Australians. I could understand if it was a Great Nation(tm), but there are, what, 20 million people there? At most. Suburbs of Mexico City have more people in them than that.
There are a few, but they are well and truely out-numbered by US-centric stories, and probably also the UK-centrics.
Quite a lot of people in Australia can already get a working ADSL connnection. They aren't going to rush out to sign up to a new network if it will cost twice as much per month and not necessarily offer higher bandwidth. I've read that this is one of the obstacles to the "build an entire new network from scratch" approach.
Another idea of building lower-cost add-ons such as wireless where coverage isn't currently available was planned by the previous government administration, and cancelled by the current.
Why would they bother? They'd have to bend over backwards to implement something for just a couple of percent of internet users, who probably won't use it anyway simply because Microsoft wrote it.
This wouldn't require bending over backwards. For a company the size of Microsoft, the effort and cost would be trivial.
I'm sure that Microsoft kindly shared the specs for SilverLight 2.0 with Mono/Novell during the development so that the Mono project would not have to play catch-up once 2.0 came out. Right?
Specs? If they were serious about Linux support, they would have provided source code, paid somebody to port it, and had it ready for easy installation on the launch date. (I don't consider the possibility of them porting it themselves, I don't think they have the skills.)
I suspect their only real interest in Linux is in trying to keep it locked out from as much of the web as possible.
Really, what better way to make end users aware of the risks involved when they're using proprietary file formats?
Sue your own customers because they try to break the lock in? Great plan!
I'm sure that 'Thomas Reuters' will see their business go through the roof after this:)
What better way to make anybody, large organization or individual, aware of the risk of open source software development? Why allow resources to be used, perhaps when it's hard to even measure the financial return, when you are opening yourself up to the possibility of multi-million dollar lawsuits, with all of the wasted management time and legal costs that will be incurred even if you fight and win?
Just saying, I think the legal system as it relates to software is completely broken.
Probably because if an applicant is willing to disregard the laws in order to underage drink or perform other illegal activities and flaunt them on the internet then likely he or she have no qualms with breaking the college honor code.
When Admissions has at least an order of magnitude more applications than open slots, they can afford to be picky about those things.
Is underage drinking illegal in the USA? In the countries I'm familiar with, it's only illegal to sell alcohol to somebody who is underage.
But on the other hand, I've never studied or worked anywhere that would regard drinking (at whatever age) as a sign of bad character. On the contrary, it's almost a prerequisite, for the after school/work socialising.
Yes, I wish we lived in a world where all formats, protocols, and standards were Free, but they never will be so long as capitalism remains our official state religion. Meanwhile, we still want to watch our movies and play our music.
Ha, if you are talking about the USA, capitalism is yesterdays theory. Today, the government is nationalizing left, right and center.
I don't think this has much to do with capitalism. Under capitalism, you should be free to undercut a competitor, even offer a product for free if you can work out a business model for it.
Instead, we have a system of government-granted monopolies.
If a philosophical argument is saying something about the real world, then to be a good argument it seems to me it must be based on premises that we can observe are likely to be true in the real world.
i.e., it must be a scientific argument.
I'm sceptical that there is any good argument in favour of Creationism, and I don't see how adding "philosophical" can change that.
But, I may be wrong and I'd be interested in an example.
How can you make good philosophical arguments *for* Creationism if Creationism is not a scientific theory? It makes no sense to me. Can you give an example?
... I took blood test, and I was vindicated, as I was way below drunk driving limit. But guess what, some cock sucking newspaper printed MY name and PRINTED that I was arrested for "suspicion of Drunk Driving". What the fuck is that shit?
It sounds like an accurate reporting of a simple fact. It's when people google your name and draw false conclusions that an injustice may occur. I'm not sure what can be done about that.
I thought the USA was founded on immigration, you know
It was built by immigrants, but strictly speaking, it was founded on tax revolt. We didn't like sending payment to England just because you were trying to pay for the French and Indian war.
-jcr
I see, start a new government because you are tired of paying taxes to the old one. I'm sure that will turn out really well.
Generally when people talk about "free will" in this sort of sense they mean that if you must choose between A or B, before you make your choice there is some non-zero possibility that you could pick either A or B. If your choice is governed by the mechanisms of a deterministic universe, there is really no possibility that you could pick either one; your choice is predetermined, and an observer with enough information could calculate with certainty what your choice will be before you make it. If you want to say that being free is simply being unconstrained to do what you try to do, then a robot following a program is "free," so long as nothing interferes with it trying to do what it is programmed to do.
I think it starts getting confusing already when the term "free will" is used. This sort of implies that a human could somehow "make a decision" independently of the physical mechanism of their brain. This appears to be impossible.
If we do use the term "free will" to mean "indeterminate" then it seems reasonable to believe that a human, an insect, or a subatomic particle has free will.
Its never been fully explained why by the vendors selling the boxes, but its been speculated that they are subsidized by the proprietary software vendors.
Proprietary software vendors need to pay for each installation? This doesn't sound like much of a business model. Worse than Linux in fact.
Except, we're not talking about a national advertising campaign here. We're talking about a specific sale where the ZIP code is known.
Thing I don't understand in the US is why the prices on the shelf-tickets (or their electronic equivalents) aren't required to include all applicable taxes.
I can see why it would be difficult to include those on an advertising billboard, because as you rightly say, taxes change from city to city. However, the billing system or Point-of-Sale computer CAN calculate the price inclusive of local taxes. There is, therefore, no excuse for the shelf ticket or final offer price not to be shown inclusive of all relevant taxes and fees. It inspires consumer confidence, as a shopper can add up the contents of the basket in his head, and work out the total price he will pay, without having to uplift it to account for taxes.
You are saying that you can't even see the final price before accepting the final authorisation to bill your credit card/whatever? I wouldn't be happy with that.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious about how carefully the editors check the edits if they approve them in a few seconds. It wouldn't give time to look up external references to check newly added facts.
Exactly. You bastards. I didn't even last 30 seconds.
I don't think Linux has flash support. More like flash has Linux support.
Or, how about public infrastructure that is publicly owned, there's a genius idea. No monopoly, all carriers can have access to it at standard rates. But then the next Liberal government would just sell it anyway...
I suppose when Labor was writing its election promises, that would have been seen as radical socialist thinking. Today, you'd just have to say "why not?", if the government can prop up the entire financial sector and promise billions on spending for other infrastructure, why not provide the full funding for this other natural monopoly?
You say eliminating the biggest provider will reduce competition? Eliminating a virtual monopoly is bad for competition? Wow.
I think it's a bit silly not even reviewing their proposal, but that's ridiculous.
Apparently it won't be possible to build this new network profitably unless it's given a government granted monopoly. So there is a high-stakes game being played to find out whether there will be a Telstra monopoly or a non-Telstra monopoly. Or alternatively the Labor government could back out of its election promise somehow.
Government exists to serve the people.
I don't think history supports that statement.
It's like saying that criminal organisations exist to serve the people. I'm sure they do serve some of the people some of the time, but it's not their reason for existence.
I too would accept $400k to switch my computer to Windows. Even after using some of the money to buy another Linux machine, there would be a tidy profit.
To elaborate on this point - a few days ago, there was a story about AT&T introducing capped plans, with a $1 per gigabyte excess usage fee. Contrast that to Australia, where a 20GB plan is already considered "extremely generous" (actually, there are ads on TV here claiming that 1GB is generous, for ADSL2+ connections....), and excess usage is typically charged at a rate of anywhere between $0.15 per megabyte (yes, $150 per gigabye is the low end of excess usage fees) and 1c per kilobyte (not uncommon on wireless plans, and yes, that is $10,000 per gigabyte. And yes, there has been at least one lawsuit over it when someone's son left bittorrent running overnight).
Add this to the non-existant infrastructure, and you've got net access which sucks, with a future outlook of continuing to suck while typical internet usage requires increasingly more bandwidth. One of these days IPTV will really take off, and then the providers will have to explain why it is that watching TV for a few hours every night has cost $9000 in excess usage fees - oh, wait, no they won't, they'll blame the consumer.
Yeah, but how would building a new network change the data pricing issues? What makes you think data will be any cheaper on the new network, once all that money has been spent on cabling?
You should consider finding a new ISP. Some of them don't charge for excess usage, but instead slow down the connection for the rest of the billing period. You can also find excess bandwidth at $2.50 per gigabyte.
- Gambling.
...Among Slashdot editors to post the greatest number of Australia-related stories or something? Is there any chance they'll tire of the game and begin posting stories from countries other than Australia? Or is this some freakish form of patriotism at work by Slashdot's Aussie editors? I ask because I am so over stories from-and-about that country. Especially when they're of such little relevance to anybody other than Australians. I could understand if it was a Great Nation(tm), but there are, what, 20 million people there? At most. Suburbs of Mexico City have more people in them than that.
There are a few, but they are well and truely out-numbered by US-centric stories, and probably also the UK-centrics.
Quite a lot of people in Australia can already get a working ADSL connnection. They aren't going to rush out to sign up to a new network if it will cost twice as much per month and not necessarily offer higher bandwidth. I've read that this is one of the obstacles to the "build an entire new network from scratch" approach.
Another idea of building lower-cost add-ons such as wireless where coverage isn't currently available was planned by the previous government administration, and cancelled by the current.
Why would they bother? They'd have to bend over backwards to implement something for just a couple of percent of internet users, who probably won't use it anyway simply because Microsoft wrote it.
This wouldn't require bending over backwards. For a company the size of Microsoft, the effort and cost would be trivial.
I'm sure that Microsoft kindly shared the specs for SilverLight 2.0 with Mono/Novell during the development so that the Mono project would not have to play catch-up once 2.0 came out. Right?
Specs? If they were serious about Linux support, they would have provided source code, paid somebody to port it, and had it ready for easy installation on the launch date. (I don't consider the possibility of them porting it themselves, I don't think they have the skills.)
I suspect their only real interest in Linux is in trying to keep it locked out from as much of the web as possible.
Really, what better way to make end users aware of the risks involved when they're using proprietary file formats?
Sue your own customers because they try to break the lock in? Great plan!
I'm sure that 'Thomas Reuters' will see their business go through the roof after this :)
What better way to make anybody, large organization or individual, aware of the risk of open source software development? Why allow resources to be used, perhaps when it's hard to even measure the financial return, when you are opening yourself up to the possibility of multi-million dollar lawsuits, with all of the wasted management time and legal costs that will be incurred even if you fight and win?
Just saying, I think the legal system as it relates to software is completely broken.
Probably because if an applicant is willing to disregard the laws in order to underage drink or perform other illegal activities and flaunt them on the internet then likely he or she have no qualms with breaking the college honor code.
When Admissions has at least an order of magnitude more applications than open slots, they can afford to be picky about those things.
Is underage drinking illegal in the USA? In the countries I'm familiar with, it's only illegal to sell alcohol to somebody who is underage.
But on the other hand, I've never studied or worked anywhere that would regard drinking (at whatever age) as a sign of bad character. On the contrary, it's almost a prerequisite, for the after school/work socialising.
"open but with royalty bearing patents" is a very common circumstance, really.
Yeah, but it's not normal for the license fees to be quite as high as this, for a single player license, surely?
Yes, I wish we lived in a world where all formats, protocols, and standards were Free, but they never will be so long as capitalism remains our official state religion. Meanwhile, we still want to watch our movies and play our music.
Ha, if you are talking about the USA, capitalism is yesterdays theory. Today, the government is nationalizing left, right and center.
I don't think this has much to do with capitalism. Under capitalism, you should be free to undercut a competitor, even offer a product for free if you can work out a business model for it.
Instead, we have a system of government-granted monopolies.
If a philosophical argument is saying something about the real world, then to be a good argument it seems to me it must be based on premises that we can observe are likely to be true in the real world.
i.e., it must be a scientific argument.
I'm sceptical that there is any good argument in favour of Creationism, and I don't see how adding "philosophical" can change that.
But, I may be wrong and I'd be interested in an example.
How can you make good philosophical arguments *for* Creationism if Creationism is not a scientific theory? It makes no sense to me. Can you give an example?
Personal Story:
It sounds like an accurate reporting of a simple fact. It's when people google your name and draw false conclusions that an injustice may occur. I'm not sure what can be done about that.
I thought the USA was founded on immigration, you know
It was built by immigrants, but strictly speaking, it was founded on tax revolt. We didn't like sending payment to England just because you were trying to pay for the French and Indian war.
-jcr
I see, start a new government because you are tired of paying taxes to the old one. I'm sure that will turn out really well.
Generally when people talk about "free will" in this sort of sense they mean that if you must choose between A or B, before you make your choice there is some non-zero possibility that you could pick either A or B. If your choice is governed by the mechanisms of a deterministic universe, there is really no possibility that you could pick either one; your choice is predetermined, and an observer with enough information could calculate with certainty what your choice will be before you make it. If you want to say that being free is simply being unconstrained to do what you try to do, then a robot following a program is "free," so long as nothing interferes with it trying to do what it is programmed to do.
I think it starts getting confusing already when the term "free will" is used. This sort of implies that a human could somehow "make a decision" independently of the physical mechanism of their brain. This appears to be impossible.
If we do use the term "free will" to mean "indeterminate" then it seems reasonable to believe that a human, an insect, or a subatomic particle has free will.
Postel's Law seems relevant here:
In this case, spell correctly if you know how, and ignore misspellings from others.
Its never been fully explained why by the vendors selling the boxes, but its been speculated that they are subsidized by the proprietary software vendors.
Proprietary software vendors need to pay for each installation? This doesn't sound like much of a business model. Worse than Linux in fact.
Except, we're not talking about a national advertising campaign here. We're talking about a specific sale where the ZIP code is known.
Thing I don't understand in the US is why the prices on the shelf-tickets (or their electronic equivalents) aren't required to include all applicable taxes. I can see why it would be difficult to include those on an advertising billboard, because as you rightly say, taxes change from city to city. However, the billing system or Point-of-Sale computer CAN calculate the price inclusive of local taxes. There is, therefore, no excuse for the shelf ticket or final offer price not to be shown inclusive of all relevant taxes and fees. It inspires consumer confidence, as a shopper can add up the contents of the basket in his head, and work out the total price he will pay, without having to uplift it to account for taxes.
You are saying that you can't even see the final price before accepting the final authorisation to bill your credit card/whatever? I wouldn't be happy with that.