Take your pic on the data you'd like to take issue with: slagging sales, stock market indifference, consumer market share in any product that has any competition, consumer perception, forward looking sales projections, historical inability to ship, outrageous inability to make money on any product not supported by a monopoly position.
I agree with all of the above points, save two: lagging sales and stock market indifference. If you look at sales of personal computers, you'll see that Vista is taking hold despite all of the negative attention that it has attracted. Simply put, the mainstream media haven't covered the disadvantages of Vista to nearly the same extent as the tech press, with the result that consumers are largely uninformed. Those banner ads saying "Dell recommends Windows Vista" work, because consumers by and large don't realize that Microsoft is paying Dell to put up those ads, and that Dell sales representatives will more than happily recommend XP when asked personally.
As for stock price, Microsoft is doing rather well. They aren't flying at their record height of $50 a share, but the trend has been upward of late, with MSFThitting a 52 week high last month.
To be quite honest, that was one of the most poorly written rants I've seen in a while. What was that essay about, the imminent failure of Microsoft, the downfall of hippie culture, or the downfall of Marxism/Leninism? There's three different threads of thought in that article, and not enough has been done to draw them together or draw parallels between them.
Actually living in cities as opposed to way out in suburbia is becoming more popular again than it was in the 80s
As far as I can tell, that's due to two factors. First, you have young college grads who want to be part of the social scene provided by the cities. Second, you have retiring Baby Boomers, who can afford to move into a small condo as they don't have kids, and like the greater availability of services in the city. There's still no trend showing that families with children are moving back into the cities. Finally, GP has a point about city schools. In pretty much every metropolitan area in the US, you'll see that the suburban school districts score at least 10% higher on standardized tests than urban districts. For a family that wants their kids to have the best possible education, it'd be pretty foolish to give that up.
This isn't about that. Google already has a service that reports and detects sites that try to phish your personal information or try to install malware on your machine. No, this effort is to try to purge the Google index of sites that sell malware creation and deployment toolkits to black-hats. IMHO, the original poster is correct. This wouldn't make it much more difficult for script-kiddies and black-hats to get their hands on malware kits, while making it more difficult for white-hats to find information about these programs.
If you're going to allow the player to do that, though, then don't try to moralize anyway through their GamerTag labels. If you're going to have consequences from the action make them in-game consequences.
If the action taken in-game will have possible negative consequences outside the game, then why would you even allow the action? To use the example from the summary, you're allowed to kill the "Little Sisters" in Bioshock for a reason. If the game developer wants to make a moral point, I'd prefer that he or she used the in-game mechanic, rather than obscure mechanisms from outside the game. To go back to the example, if I'm not supposed to kill the "Little Sisters", then tell me that as part of the mission objectives, and/or force me to restart if do happen to kill one of them. Don't do this obscure we'll-allow-the-action-but-brand-you-in-real-life crap.
The entire point of all games (not just video games) is that they allow you to pretend to do things without the moral sanctions that normally apply. To pick an antiquated example, would you like being labeled "potential thief" if you happened to play on the robbers' side in a game of Cops and Robbers? To put it more succinctly: if there are consequences outside the game, then its not a game. Its reality.
The state of DRM would change, as there would be no more litigation funded by record companies (leaving the MPAA to twist in the wind without a partner in crime) and less funding toward P2P obfuscating and software rootkit technologies.
Not necessarily. The RIAA was litigating independently long before the MPAA joined it. Remember, the MPAA's original attitude towards downloading was that it was only an issue for the music industry, since movies were too large to download, given the asynchronous nature of most users' internet connections. Then Bittorrent came along, and forced the movie industry to rethink that basic assumption. Given that the MPAA is an industry organization of similar clout and power compared to the RIAA, it could potentially continue litigation long after the RIAA was knocked out.
I just don't see how major music companies are relevant today, when for a small investment, any music group can record their own music at CD quality or better, burn CDs for small production runs, farm out CD production to a mastering company if they hit it big, set up a website for e-commerce and publicity, etc etc.
The way that the major music labels are still relevant is that the vast majority of people still follow the labels' orders^W recommendations on what to listen to. Just look at the Top 40 or Top 100 lists, and try to count the number of independent/non-RIAA signed artists. The labels' complaint is that, instead of buying CDs, people are downloading the albums for free.
Frankly, for all the talk about the Internet creating a new generation of independent music, I have trouble seeing how it could work, given that the RIAA's member companies have made people accustomed to following the label's lead in considering artists. Indeed, the labels' influence in choosing music has grown to the point where other influences, e.g. radio and word-of-mouth, have either been supplanted or co-opted by the labels. Given this situation, it is quite difficult for an up-and-coming band to get itself noticed without a contract with one of the large record companies.
Another problem occurs precisely because of the conditions you have described. Because it is so easy to start up a band and achieve widespread distribution, many more bands have started publishing. While this makes the music scene much richer than it would be otherwise, it does make it difficult for the listener to pick out what he or she would enjoy from the flow of new offerings.
I guess one solution to this can be seen in the web-radio/recommender systems (like Pandora, etc.). These basically automate the label's role, choosing songs or bands that a user would like based of songs that a user has already indicated they like. However, they have a problem with selecting new music for a user. For example, if you indicate that you like heavy metal, Pandora will continue selecting heavy metal. It can't make the jump and select songs from another genre that you might like based on your preferences within the heavy metal category.
The heat profile isn't affected terribly, as there aren't usually large heat sources in/around the bomb bay. However, the radar profile of the jet is affected to quite an extent. I suspect this is one of the reasons for this exercise - devise a system that will minimize the amount of time the jet spends with its bomb-bay doors open.
Not to be naive, but who is PATCO? Are you talking about the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the union that Reagan so famously broke?
Maybe we were launching bombs off pylons as supersonic speeds, but probably not bomb bays. As the article indicates, supersonic airstream around the plane would have blown the bomb back into the bomb bay, with obviously disastrous results. What this technology does is use small jets to locally slow down the airstream around the bomb bay so that the bomb can fall out of the bay without getting pushed back inside.
As another poster indicated, this technology would be useful for the F-22, which has to carry its weapons in internal bays to maintain its stealth and aerodynamic characteristics.
I'm quite confident that the government economists know what the break-even point is.
Even if any economists know what the break-even point is (studies are all over the map regarding that), they'd be quickly overridden by politicians seeking to pander to their favorite demographics. Just look at what happened during Reagan (i.e. "trickle-down" economics) or the current administration (tax cuts for corporations & rich people = more jobs).
can this negatively affect the mission/spacecraft itself?
Technically, the mission was to study the outer planets, so its already been accomplished. NASA keeps listening to Voyager even though its mission is technically complete because its one of a select few probes on course to exit the solar system. In other words, its mission right now is to go to the edge of the solar system and report back what it sees. In this sense, Voyager is close to accomplishing its (2nd) mission.
One of the core provisions of the GPL is that modifications to the code (if those modifications are distributed) must also be published under the GPL. Indeed, this is what distinguishes the GPL from more permissive open-source licenses, like the BSD license, which allows you to modify and re-release the code under a closed-source license.
I agree that words like theft are misused in the context of copyright violation. However, that has nothing to do with this case. The GPL is not a copyright, it is a distribution license. Asus must follow the rules of the license, or risk losing its right to distribute the code.
Indeed it does. Here in Minnesota, the public has abandoned its normally understanding view of taxes, and has voted in politicians that promise to cut taxes, even those tax cuts cause future harm (e.g. I35 bridge collapse). Fortunately, this is starting to change, as people are seeing that they are not benefiting over the long term from low tax rates, and that the costs, in terms of degrading infrastructure and decaying public services are outweighing the small benefit the average citizen gains from a low tax rate.
The original GPL code is still there, freely available from wherever the ASUS folks got it from.
No its not. According to the story, Asus modified the code before distributing it. Because they haven't published their modifications (in source code form), their distribution of the modifications (in binary form) violates the GPL.
And make it illegal for USA and others to sell their patented transgenic sterile seeds that happens to kill local species...
How can transgenic crops kill off the local species if they're sterile? Hint: pollen == plant gametes. Sterile == no gametes or ineffective gametes. How are sterile plants going to crossbreed with native species if they're incapable of breeding altogether?
How's china? Ask the thousands of guys sentenced to death (well suppose that they can't speak anymore). So go on and ask the rural population or the dalai lama...
China is no more Communist than post-Soviet Russia, Saddam's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or any other brutal non-communist dictatorship. They stopped being communist when Deng Xiaoping came into power and proclaimed, "Black cat, white cat, who cares so long as it catches mice." You may as well ask the people that Saddam gassed, or Pinochet "disappeared".
That's the commonist way, so stop bullshitting people
That's the dictatorial way. All dictatorships jail and kill political enemies, no matter whether they are communist, capitalist, or fascist. Communism, specifically, is an economic system characterized by strong central planning and a nearly complete lack of private property. China (modern China, at any rate) is nothing like that. The government acknowledges private property, and encourages production by private industry, rather than government.
Then why does America still have such close ties to China?
The Chinese are no more communist (in the economic sense of the word) than we are. Arguably, the Chinese moved away from communism (when Deng Xiaoping proclaimed, "Black cat, white cat, who cares so long as it catches mice," in 1962). Not coincidentally, Deng's rise to power coincided with the warming of relations between China and the US, as seen by Nixon's visit.
We sent a man to the moon to demonstrate out superiority over the Soviets. However, that does not diminish the fact that our space program was conducted in far less secrecy than the Soviet space program. Thus, the current lack of fanfare around the Russian space program is due to the historic secrecy of the program, and not due to some kind of imagined modesty possessed by the Russian government.
Despite what we in the west think about the Russians, I strongly believe they will deliver on this given their track record.
I also know that when they finally deliver, the whole atmosphere will be met with very little fanfare unlike in the US.
That's because of a fundamental difference between Soviet/Russian space policy and American space policy. The Soviet space mission was always viewed as a military one, while the American space agency was a civilian organization. Therefore, there was always more fanfare around American launches, simply because NASA made itself more accessible to the public than the equivalent Soviet agency.
Now for those who might think this post is "flamebait", I'd like to remind them that the Soviet Union, much of which became today's Russia had and still has the biggest, heaviest and highest-capacity flying aircraft in service today. And this was put in service more than ten years ago...again, with little fanfare.
Again, you're comparing apples and oranges. The AN-225 was originally envisioned as a special carrier for the canceled Buran space shuttle. Only one was ever built, and even it was in storage until 2000, at which point it was retooled into a conventional transport. To compare a custom-built transport originally built for a single purpose to a multi-use mass-produced jetliner is unfair. You may as well compare Formula 1 cars to Toyota Camrys.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with all of the above points, save two: lagging sales and stock market indifference. If you look at sales of personal computers, you'll see that Vista is taking hold despite all of the negative attention that it has attracted. Simply put, the mainstream media haven't covered the disadvantages of Vista to nearly the same extent as the tech press, with the result that consumers are largely uninformed. Those banner ads saying "Dell recommends Windows Vista" work, because consumers by and large don't realize that Microsoft is paying Dell to put up those ads, and that Dell sales representatives will more than happily recommend XP when asked personally.
As for stock price, Microsoft is doing rather well. They aren't flying at their record height of $50 a share, but the trend has been upward of late, with MSFThitting a 52 week high last month.
To be quite honest, that was one of the most poorly written rants I've seen in a while. What was that essay about, the imminent failure of Microsoft, the downfall of hippie culture, or the downfall of Marxism/Leninism? There's three different threads of thought in that article, and not enough has been done to draw them together or draw parallels between them.
As far as I can tell, that's due to two factors. First, you have young college grads who want to be part of the social scene provided by the cities. Second, you have retiring Baby Boomers, who can afford to move into a small condo as they don't have kids, and like the greater availability of services in the city. There's still no trend showing that families with children are moving back into the cities. Finally, GP has a point about city schools. In pretty much every metropolitan area in the US, you'll see that the suburban school districts score at least 10% higher on standardized tests than urban districts. For a family that wants their kids to have the best possible education, it'd be pretty foolish to give that up.
Didn't Archimedes shout "Eureka!" and run naked in the streets when he discovered the principle of displacement?
This isn't about that. Google already has a service that reports and detects sites that try to phish your personal information or try to install malware on your machine. No, this effort is to try to purge the Google index of sites that sell malware creation and deployment toolkits to black-hats. IMHO, the original poster is correct. This wouldn't make it much more difficult for script-kiddies and black-hats to get their hands on malware kits, while making it more difficult for white-hats to find information about these programs.
If you're going to allow the player to do that, though, then don't try to moralize anyway through their GamerTag labels. If you're going to have consequences from the action make them in-game consequences.
It is indeed a run-on sentence, but its hardly the worst example of such.
If the action taken in-game will have possible negative consequences outside the game, then why would you even allow the action? To use the example from the summary, you're allowed to kill the "Little Sisters" in Bioshock for a reason. If the game developer wants to make a moral point, I'd prefer that he or she used the in-game mechanic, rather than obscure mechanisms from outside the game. To go back to the example, if I'm not supposed to kill the "Little Sisters", then tell me that as part of the mission objectives, and/or force me to restart if do happen to kill one of them. Don't do this obscure we'll-allow-the-action-but-brand-you-in-real-life crap.
The entire point of all games (not just video games) is that they allow you to pretend to do things without the moral sanctions that normally apply. To pick an antiquated example, would you like being labeled "potential thief" if you happened to play on the robbers' side in a game of Cops and Robbers? To put it more succinctly: if there are consequences outside the game, then its not a game. Its reality.
Not necessarily. The RIAA was litigating independently long before the MPAA joined it. Remember, the MPAA's original attitude towards downloading was that it was only an issue for the music industry, since movies were too large to download, given the asynchronous nature of most users' internet connections. Then Bittorrent came along, and forced the movie industry to rethink that basic assumption. Given that the MPAA is an industry organization of similar clout and power compared to the RIAA, it could potentially continue litigation long after the RIAA was knocked out.
The way that the major music labels are still relevant is that the vast majority of people still follow the labels' orders^W recommendations on what to listen to. Just look at the Top 40 or Top 100 lists, and try to count the number of independent/non-RIAA signed artists. The labels' complaint is that, instead of buying CDs, people are downloading the albums for free.
Frankly, for all the talk about the Internet creating a new generation of independent music, I have trouble seeing how it could work, given that the RIAA's member companies have made people accustomed to following the label's lead in considering artists. Indeed, the labels' influence in choosing music has grown to the point where other influences, e.g. radio and word-of-mouth, have either been supplanted or co-opted by the labels. Given this situation, it is quite difficult for an up-and-coming band to get itself noticed without a contract with one of the large record companies.
Another problem occurs precisely because of the conditions you have described. Because it is so easy to start up a band and achieve widespread distribution, many more bands have started publishing. While this makes the music scene much richer than it would be otherwise, it does make it difficult for the listener to pick out what he or she would enjoy from the flow of new offerings.
I guess one solution to this can be seen in the web-radio/recommender systems (like Pandora, etc.). These basically automate the label's role, choosing songs or bands that a user would like based of songs that a user has already indicated they like. However, they have a problem with selecting new music for a user. For example, if you indicate that you like heavy metal, Pandora will continue selecting heavy metal. It can't make the jump and select songs from another genre that you might like based on your preferences within the heavy metal category.
Could you please rewrite that with extrans mode? It looks like your examples got munched...
The heat profile isn't affected terribly, as there aren't usually large heat sources in/around the bomb bay. However, the radar profile of the jet is affected to quite an extent. I suspect this is one of the reasons for this exercise - devise a system that will minimize the amount of time the jet spends with its bomb-bay doors open.
Not to be naive, but who is PATCO? Are you talking about the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the union that Reagan so famously broke?
Maybe we were launching bombs off pylons as supersonic speeds, but probably not bomb bays. As the article indicates, supersonic airstream around the plane would have blown the bomb back into the bomb bay, with obviously disastrous results. What this technology does is use small jets to locally slow down the airstream around the bomb bay so that the bomb can fall out of the bay without getting pushed back inside.
As another poster indicated, this technology would be useful for the F-22, which has to carry its weapons in internal bays to maintain its stealth and aerodynamic characteristics.
Even if any economists know what the break-even point is (studies are all over the map regarding that), they'd be quickly overridden by politicians seeking to pander to their favorite demographics. Just look at what happened during Reagan (i.e. "trickle-down" economics) or the current administration (tax cuts for corporations & rich people = more jobs).
Technically, the mission was to study the outer planets, so its already been accomplished. NASA keeps listening to Voyager even though its mission is technically complete because its one of a select few probes on course to exit the solar system. In other words, its mission right now is to go to the edge of the solar system and report back what it sees. In this sense, Voyager is close to accomplishing its (2nd) mission.
One of the core provisions of the GPL is that modifications to the code (if those modifications are distributed) must also be published under the GPL. Indeed, this is what distinguishes the GPL from more permissive open-source licenses, like the BSD license, which allows you to modify and re-release the code under a closed-source license.
I agree that words like theft are misused in the context of copyright violation. However, that has nothing to do with this case. The GPL is not a copyright, it is a distribution license. Asus must follow the rules of the license, or risk losing its right to distribute the code.
Indeed it does. Here in Minnesota, the public has abandoned its normally understanding view of taxes, and has voted in politicians that promise to cut taxes, even those tax cuts cause future harm (e.g. I35 bridge collapse). Fortunately, this is starting to change, as people are seeing that they are not benefiting over the long term from low tax rates, and that the costs, in terms of degrading infrastructure and decaying public services are outweighing the small benefit the average citizen gains from a low tax rate.
No its not. According to the story, Asus modified the code before distributing it. Because they haven't published their modifications (in source code form), their distribution of the modifications (in binary form) violates the GPL.
How can transgenic crops kill off the local species if they're sterile? Hint: pollen == plant gametes. Sterile == no gametes or ineffective gametes. How are sterile plants going to crossbreed with native species if they're incapable of breeding altogether?
China is no more Communist than post-Soviet Russia, Saddam's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or any other brutal non-communist dictatorship. They stopped being communist when Deng Xiaoping came into power and proclaimed, "Black cat, white cat, who cares so long as it catches mice." You may as well ask the people that Saddam gassed, or Pinochet "disappeared".
That's the commonist way, so stop bullshitting peopleThat's the dictatorial way. All dictatorships jail and kill political enemies, no matter whether they are communist, capitalist, or fascist. Communism, specifically, is an economic system characterized by strong central planning and a nearly complete lack of private property. China (modern China, at any rate) is nothing like that. The government acknowledges private property, and encourages production by private industry, rather than government.
The Chinese are no more communist (in the economic sense of the word) than we are. Arguably, the Chinese moved away from communism (when Deng Xiaoping proclaimed, "Black cat, white cat, who cares so long as it catches mice," in 1962). Not coincidentally, Deng's rise to power coincided with the warming of relations between China and the US, as seen by Nixon's visit.
We sent a man to the moon to demonstrate out superiority over the Soviets. However, that does not diminish the fact that our space program was conducted in far less secrecy than the Soviet space program. Thus, the current lack of fanfare around the Russian space program is due to the historic secrecy of the program, and not due to some kind of imagined modesty possessed by the Russian government.
That's because of a fundamental difference between Soviet/Russian space policy and American space policy. The Soviet space mission was always viewed as a military one, while the American space agency was a civilian organization. Therefore, there was always more fanfare around American launches, simply because NASA made itself more accessible to the public than the equivalent Soviet agency.
Now for those who might think this post is "flamebait", I'd like to remind them that the Soviet Union, much of which became today's Russia had and still has the biggest, heaviest and highest-capacity flying aircraft in service today. And this was put in service more than ten years ago...again, with little fanfare.Again, you're comparing apples and oranges. The AN-225 was originally envisioned as a special carrier for the canceled Buran space shuttle. Only one was ever built, and even it was in storage until 2000, at which point it was retooled into a conventional transport. To compare a custom-built transport originally built for a single purpose to a multi-use mass-produced jetliner is unfair. You may as well compare Formula 1 cars to Toyota Camrys.