So what you're saying is that you no longer support Libertarians, because you feel that they don't understand the concept that someone's individual rights end where they begin infringing on other's individual rights?
I think you need to take another look at the political philosophies of Libertarians, if that's the case. For example, Libertarians believe that it's never morally correct to initiate force against someone in order to achieve a goal.
They don't, however, have an issue with responding to such force in your defense.
I think that point illustrates that they draw boundaries on where one's rights begin and end. (Libertarians obviously don't feel that your individual rights are unlimited, if they don't ever feel it's justifiable to initiate force to get something you want.)
I think where, perhaps, *you* are confused is about when and where Libertarians feel government should step in and punish someone for their actions. I haven't ever heard a person who claimed to be Libertarian claim that state government should stop prosecuting drunk drivers. What they *do* object to is the "guilty until proven innocent" tactics, such as sobriety checkpoints, that are often used to randomly discover offenders.
Nobody ever said police work was easy - but I still feel it needs to be done the right way; by directly investigating suspicious behavior and only making arrests with probable cause. It's taking the easy way out to perform random searches of individuals, hoping to discover an offense.
This bothers me, because while I can quite clearly see the problems - I also don't like begging govt. to step in once again, and strong-arm a company into giving up something that's rightfully theirs, just because it happens to be in the public interest.
Who paid for that "last mile" of wire and whose employees strung it? Who has been maintaining it ever since when it breaks? Yep - your local telco.
I think it's time we realize this: As soon as we were ready to concede that we didn't need the "Ma Bell" monopoly anymore, we also admitted that technology advanced enough to give us alternatives. Who says we need Bell's wire to provide us with high-speed Internet? Sure, DSL might be cool - but any company willing to invest the money could set up a wireless Internet service that was faster and more convenient. They sure did it for voice communications and were wildly successful, despite a huge initial investment building cell towers and infrastructure.
What I see is a lot of "little guys" whining because they'd like to make money using Bell's expensive cabling and equipment. Maybe they should face the facts, and realize it's just not a feasible business to be in unless you have more capital to invest?
Re:But 2-way broadband has never been cheap!
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Broadband Obstacles
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· Score: 2
The whole idea of giving you 2-way broadband inexpensively causes a major shift in the way bandwidth is priced and sold. They aren't in a position to even consider doing that yet!
The fact is, it still costs more to provide reliable high-speed Internet access than what the average person thinks it should cost. To offset this, they sell you a fast downlink but a slow uplink for a relatively low price (DSL, satellite, cable modem). Those that want to provide the content can be charged much more for a fast uplink, because they're (typically) trying to do it for either a business purpose. The bandwidth providers count on their costs being subsidized by those running the web sites and ftp servers, because right now - they're the only ones who *might* lay out the serious cash ($1000 a month for an Internet T1, let's say).
It seems to me like Clarion's "Auto PC" was almost the perfect device of this type. I guess the price was too high for people though, so it got discontinued.
It gave you a pretty normal car stereo/CD player with MP3 capabilities, built-in GPS, and anything else you wanted to develop for its Windows CE environment.
I see them on eBay all the time - and wish I thought to buy one before I blew $350 or so on my new double-DIN head unit for my car. Oh well....
Almost all of the complaints I've ever seen lodged against Smoothwall were either accusations of the author being rude, a jerk, etc. - or accusations of GPL violations.
I think it's pretty clear that they haven't openly violated GPL. (They had a previous version where some wording needed a couple small changes to fully comply with GPL, but those changes were made before the latest release.)
As for the author, so what? The guy invested a lot of his time to give you a product that you can use for free. *That* is the bottom line. Is there a requirement anyplace that says you have to regularly report to Richard Morrell or interact with him directly in any way while you use Smoothwall? Not that I know of!
I joined the Smoothwall mailing list for quite a while, and what I saw was a flood of beginner questions that could have been answered by the user reading the instructions (or by actually installing the product before asking if it did or didn't have certain features!). If I was the author, I'd get angry with these people after a while too.
"Share the Net" is the first PC firewall/Inet sharing product I ever used. I have to give it a lot of credit for being there before almost all of the others. Back when it came out, it was worth the $70. I got several sales for its author because friends of mine were sharing their apartments/homes with roommates, and this product saved them from having to add extra phone lines so both them and their roommates could get online at the same time.
(Sure, sharing a 33.6K or 56K modem with 2 people sucked - but it was enough for IRC chat and checking email.)
In today's marketplace though, I think its age is showing. For starters, there's no reason to pay $70 for it, when better products are out there that are *free*! Second, SharetheNet hasn't been updated in quite a while, last I checked. It uses a pretty old Linux kernel version - and doesn't support a lot of features that have become standard in other firewall software products.
I hear you... I really do. But I still don't run any flavor of BSD myself. Right now, I find I'd rather have support for more devices, and learn to deal with some of the quirks in most Linux distros.
(Linux has always been very stable for me as a server. It runs into serious problems only when you start trying to make it into a desktop system and extensively use the X environment. In fact, X itself works just fine with a trimmed down window manager like fvwm. It's just not very "cool" or flashy, and not at all user-friendly when you need to add new items to menus.)
As a business user, I'd assume you're trying to use BSD (or Linux) in a server situation? If so, I'm not sure why you had so many issues with Linux. On the other hand, BSD installs all the basic stuff you need to run a very stable web, ftp, mail, news, etc. type of server - so I'm not faulting you at all for making that choice.
I'd say Real Networks is one of the minority of companies that gives a nod to Linux on a regular basis. They had a streaming server that ran under Linux, and their player works in Linux.
As someone else said, compare this to any of their competitors (MS and Apple) and see what kind of Linux support you get for their media formats.
But then you pointed out that among other things, you're another one of those Maxim readers.:)
Seriously though, I'm all for value-added services - but only when the value part is really valuable. I guess it depends largely on how valuable your TV watching is to you?
Myself, I find TV serves only as a temporary break in my schedule. Sometimes, I just want to be passively entertained for a little while, as I sit on my couch after work. Most often, I'd rather actively participate in something else (like maybe even Slashdot).
Even if TiVo does an outstanding job of locating TV content that's of interest to me - I'm not sure I care. I'd still prefer to actively seek out content that interests me using a resource like the web, as opposed to being spoon-fed the content on TV programs. TV caters to the lowest-common denominator most of the time.
(EG. Say I'm interested in cellphones, and want to buy a new one soon. My TiVo finds me several news stories on new cellphones, and a big program about the production of them. Fine, but it's still mostly marketing hype and watered-down facts that I have to now sit through 2+ hours of. In 10 minutes, I can go to the manufacturer web sites instead, and get complete technical specs on whatever new models they have out. Give me another hour, and I can read actual reviews from users of most of the choices to see which phones are best, and why.)
I think one of the primary reasons people use polls is as a "weapon of the underdog". If you're rooting for use of the most visable/highly-advertised and touted product, you have no need for a poll.
People like to arm themselves with statistics when they're trying to defend an alternate choice. Right now, Linux is one of those alternate choices.
Therefore, you can expect the Linux community to get vocal about going to site X or Y and casting a vote in favor of the OS. Microsoft, on the other hand, would really only do this to ensure that opposing views are silenced. They don't need a ZDNet poll to convince people to use.Net, or any of their other products.
If you've ever looked at "Software Audio Workshop" (commonly just known as SAW), that's what they do. You throw in multiple sound cards and/or MIDI interfaces, and it supports all of them. Of course, this gets fun juggling DMA and IRQ conflicts at some point - but you don't want to run this sort of app on a heavily loaded system anyway. You'd probably, in fact, design a seperate PC just to work with SAW.
I don't think this new Creative external sound card is a big deal at all. Oh, sure, it'll probably sell well. There are always those people convinced that their sound device picks up less interference noise/hum when it's outside a PC case.
I just dislike anything USB, for starters. That port doesn't have lots of bandwidth, for one thing. Couple that with everything under the sun wanting to share your USB connection, and it spells major trouble for low-latency sound.
Also, why give a musician a relatively fragile laptop? IMO, a poor hack of a solution. The ideal answer is building a PC in a rack-mount case, and installing it in a rack along-side any effects processors or rack-mount synths/samplers they might own.
You can buy a MIDI "surface controller" to get pads, knobs, and sliders galore which can be defined so you can work anything you'd normally have to drag or click around on with a mouse. (Eliminating all need for a mouse is the most important step to getting a PC on stage as music equipment.)
Re: Solaris as just an experimental OS on x86
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No Solaris 9 for x86
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I absolutely agree with you. Not only are people just taking a peek at it, and then going back to another OS - but they're also giving up due to lack of hardware support.
The "out of box" experience with Solaris for x86 was pretty poor, IMHO. One of our former employees paid the $25 or whatever for a copy of Solaris for x86 when they had that promotional deal going - and we couldn't get it to support A) our Crystal sound chipset built onto our Dell motherboards, B) our nVidia graphics chipset, or C) our 56K internal modem cards. Of course, that wasn't even beginning to worry about such extras as USB support.
Oh, I'm sure some Solaris fan will come along and tell me "You just needed to download driver X and Y from web site Z!" -- but that's not the point.
I'd expect a commercial Unix to support basic devices like my video card right out of the box. I had much better hardware support in Linux, and I'm not paying anything for the rights to install it.
Wow, someone else out there does know what I'm talking about. Gotta love Slashdot... even the most obscure reference gets a reply!
But yeah, I think the guy I met was named Leo. I only talked with him one time, because he was an acquaintance of a good friend of mine who was going to Mizzou.
Anyway, I didn't hear a whole lot positive about ThoughtPort - but I did get to tour his "facility". As I recall, it was all set up in some sort of mobile home/trailer home type of thing. It may not have been 100% Be, but it was pretty darn close. I think he had some sort of web camera pointed at a fish tank in the place, and that may have been a Windows-based Intel box. I'm almost positive he had web, news, and email running on all Be Boxes though. I'd never seen so much Be stuff in one place before, or after that.
Hmm.... interesting. I hadn't read about that guy's situation before. Quite honestly though, my first impression was that he's being a little less than 100% honest about his original intentions to register the domain name of his first site. (The one for Willow Springs Mall or whatever it was...) I mean, do you really believe someone would be so happy about a new shopping mall being built near them that they ran out and registered not one, but two names related to the new mall's name so they could build a fan site for it?
That's probably what initially angered the judge... likely saw this guy as trying to cash in on the domain name "gold rush".
Still, I see no excuse for what happened to him after that.
I don't know if anyone else touched on this already or not - but another issues here is what resources were used to spread the grievances.
If an employee sent out emails using the corporate email system, then those are company resources. It's no different than me printing out hundreds of flyers protesting something at the workplace on the company's copier, using the company's own paper supplies.
If I did such a thing, I think I'd have good reason to believe the company would take legal action against me. If nothing else, merely for misusing company property.
If this Intel guy only emailed people on their home Internet accounts, it might be a little different story.
Personally, I fail to see how "complete free-market capitalism" is such a radical idea, though.
I know most political Centrists like to draw lines spaced evenly between them for socialism vs. capitalism, but I'd beg to differ.
I can agree with Communism/Socialism being on the left-hand side of the equation, but the right-hand side would probably be anarchy, not capitalism. (After all, wouldn't you say that a state of anarchy is the ultimate in lack of govt. control of any kind, and every person acting completely on their own to achieve whatever goals he/she wishes?)
In any case, I don't think a perfect blend of socialism and capitalism is going to result in better employee loyalty. Perhaps it does work for neutral countries like Sweden and Finland, but that's primarily because they aren't among the top "global players" in industry. Sure, they have some big-name corporations (AKA. Nokia), but that's more an exception than a rule. While they're struggling for growth of the Lego toy company, other countries are cranking out automobiles and heavy industrial goods. It's sort of an apples vs. oranges debate.
I think you'll always see a drop in employee loyalty when the number of companies to work for increases. Countries with more choices have to work harder to keep loyalty up, or alternately, choose not to worry about it - and go for more of a "revolving door" approach of "use 'em up and spit 'em out when they get unproductive".
Yeah, I'd be concerned about a situation like this, because not only might you come out a winner who lost money - but what kind of counter-suit can you put up against them?
Basically, you start out in a purely defensive posture. It's not like the trademark disputes that often go on between corporations, where they both have arguments for why the other guy stole some piece of their intellectual property.
I suppose you could claim the company was harassing you or something... but that's probably going to be a rather weak argument in court.
This goes back a ways, but I remember meeting one of the owners of a small ISP called "Thoughtport", that ran from Columbia, Missouri. He ran the whole ISP on BeBoxes. I think he may have been the only ISP in the U.S. to do such a thing.
I wonder what ever happened to all of his stuff?
I know the ISP went out of business years ago - but he had a nice collection of Be equipment there.
Umm, no... here in the U.S., police officers still take "requests" without any problems.
If you call, they'll show up.
Granted, our police officers are probably underpaid for the work they do - but I have no inclination to give any of them donations either.
I've already done so, indirectly, by paying for a couple of exhorbitantly expensive speeding tickets.
(In fact, I paid a lawyer to get them reduced to plain old parking tickets, but the "court costs" alone were close to $200 for each of them. Obviously, they're making plenty of money off of their traffic courts.)
That figures... The news media (TV in particular) is largely liberal, and believes in govt. as our protector.
They're quick to grasp onto any straw that aids their case, even if it's flawed logic.
The best thing you could do is write a letter to your local newspaper and bring up this point. Challenge your local TV station to back up their statement with fact!
Oh, so what you really mean is "I used to be opposed to censorship on principle, until something came along that really bothered me." ?
I have GTA3 at home, and both my wife and I play it quite a bit. Is it a violent game? Absolutely! Would I let pre-teen kids play it? No, probably not. Does this mean I support government trying to add more controls to our lives, to help ensure that my pre-teen kid doesn't get ahold of GTA3? No way!
Let's face the facts here: 1. Plenty of adults own game consoles, and a large number of them also own a violent game or two. 2. No matter what govt. restrictions you place on kids playing/buying games, the kids can still play these games in the privacy of homes of parents who own them.
It always boils down to the exact same thing. Government regulation is *no* substitute for parental guidance.
No, Universities have not "suddenly gotten greedy". The problem is, they've been too greedy for a long time - and the results are really starting to show!
I place most of the blame at the feet of the upper-level administrators of the colleges and Universities. My father is a PhD, teaching at a state-owned college, and the level of corruption is incredible. The dean and his appointees all give themselves large raises every year, while he announces to the faculty that once again, he won't be able to give out a raise due to budget constraints. He also, of course, feels his job requires the college to provide him with a car.
All of this starts a chain-reaction, where you get only bottom-of-the-barrel teachers willing to work there. These "teachers", in turn, pass students on through the system without ensuring that they've really learned the material. (For the small salaries they're paid, they don't want to put up with fights with students who scream and moan that it's "unfair I got an F in your class!")
These same deans and administrators are more concerned that their campus looks impressive and top-notch than whether or not their teachers are using the latest textbooks. They know that lucrative govt. grants aren't possible without dazzling the TV and print media. In fact, they typically spend so much time being a spokesperson for the college/University, they fail to notice what goes on "day to day" in the institution.
When they do win these grants, do they really help the students? Only partially. Again, grants are great profit-makers for the higher-ups. I've heard stories of schools that hire people full-time just to research and apply for as many grants as possible. Then, these people get a cut of the money off the top as a reward for each one they get.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is that you no longer support Libertarians, because you feel that they don't understand the concept that someone's individual rights end where they begin infringing on other's individual rights?
I think you need to take another look at the political philosophies of Libertarians, if that's the case. For example, Libertarians believe that it's never morally correct to initiate force against someone in order to achieve a goal.
They don't, however, have an issue with responding to such force in your defense.
I think that point illustrates that they draw boundaries on where one's rights begin and end. (Libertarians obviously don't feel that your individual rights are unlimited, if they don't ever feel it's justifiable to initiate force to get something you want.)
I think where, perhaps, *you* are confused is about when and where Libertarians feel government should step in and punish someone for their actions. I haven't ever heard a person who claimed to be Libertarian claim that state government should stop prosecuting drunk drivers. What they *do* object to is the "guilty until proven innocent" tactics, such as sobriety checkpoints, that are often used to randomly discover offenders.
Nobody ever said police work was easy - but I still feel it needs to be done the right way; by directly investigating suspicious behavior and only making arrests with probable cause. It's taking the easy way out to perform random searches of individuals, hoping to discover an offense.
This bothers me, because while I can quite clearly see the problems - I also don't like begging govt. to step in once again, and strong-arm a company into giving up something that's rightfully theirs, just because it happens to be in the public interest.
Who paid for that "last mile" of wire and whose employees strung it? Who has been maintaining it ever since when it breaks? Yep - your local telco.
I think it's time we realize this: As soon as we were ready to concede that we didn't need the "Ma Bell" monopoly anymore, we also admitted that technology advanced enough to give us alternatives. Who says we need Bell's wire to provide us with high-speed Internet? Sure, DSL might be cool - but any company willing to invest the money could set up a wireless Internet service that was faster and more convenient. They sure did it for voice communications and were wildly successful, despite a huge initial investment building cell towers and infrastructure.
What I see is a lot of "little guys" whining because they'd like to make money using Bell's expensive cabling and equipment. Maybe they should face the facts, and realize it's just not a feasible business to be in unless you have more capital to invest?
The whole idea of giving you 2-way broadband inexpensively causes a major shift in the way bandwidth is priced and sold. They aren't in a position to even consider doing that yet!
The fact is, it still costs more to provide reliable high-speed Internet access than what the average person thinks it should cost. To offset this, they sell you a fast downlink but a slow uplink for a relatively low price (DSL, satellite, cable modem). Those that want to provide the content can be charged much more for a fast uplink, because they're (typically) trying to do it for either a business purpose. The bandwidth providers count on their costs being subsidized by those running the web sites and ftp servers, because right now - they're the only ones who *might* lay out the serious cash ($1000 a month for an Internet T1, let's say).
It seems to me like Clarion's "Auto PC" was almost the perfect device of this type. I guess the price was too high for people though, so it got discontinued.
It gave you a pretty normal car stereo/CD player with MP3 capabilities, built-in GPS, and anything else you wanted to develop for its Windows CE environment.
I see them on eBay all the time - and wish I thought to buy one before I blew $350 or so on my new double-DIN head unit for my car. Oh well....
Have you ever had a truly good experience getting support on *any* IRC channel?
I can't begin to count all the rude and insulting people I've run into on plain old channels like #linux when I ask a question about something.
If I judged the quality of a product by that, I'd be 100% pro Microsoft by now!
Almost all of the complaints I've ever seen lodged against Smoothwall were either accusations of the author being rude, a jerk, etc. - or accusations of GPL violations.
I think it's pretty clear that they haven't openly violated GPL. (They had a previous version where some wording needed a couple small changes to fully comply with GPL, but those changes were made before the latest release.)
As for the author, so what? The guy invested a lot of his time to give you a product that you can use for free. *That* is the bottom line. Is there a requirement anyplace that says you have to regularly report to Richard Morrell or interact with him directly in any way while you use Smoothwall? Not that I know of!
I joined the Smoothwall mailing list for quite a while, and what I saw was a flood of beginner questions that could have been answered by the user reading the instructions (or by actually installing the product before asking if it did or didn't have certain features!). If I was the author, I'd get angry with these people after a while too.
"Share the Net" is the first PC firewall/Inet sharing product I ever used. I have to give it a lot of credit for being there before almost all of the others. Back when it came out, it was worth the $70. I got several sales for its author because friends of mine were sharing their apartments/homes with roommates, and this product saved them from having to add extra phone lines so both them and their roommates could get online at the same time.
(Sure, sharing a 33.6K or 56K modem with 2 people sucked - but it was enough for IRC chat and checking email.)
In today's marketplace though, I think its age is showing. For starters, there's no reason to pay $70 for it, when better products are out there that are *free*! Second, SharetheNet hasn't been updated in quite a while, last I checked. It uses a pretty old Linux kernel version - and doesn't support a lot of features that have become standard in other firewall software products.
I hear you... I really do. But I still don't run any flavor of BSD myself. Right now, I find I'd rather have support for more devices, and learn to deal with some of the quirks in most Linux distros.
(Linux has always been very stable for me as a server. It runs into serious problems only when you start trying to make it into a desktop system and extensively use the X environment. In fact, X itself works just fine with a trimmed down window manager like fvwm. It's just not very "cool" or flashy, and not at all user-friendly when you need to add new items to menus.)
As a business user, I'd assume you're trying to use BSD (or Linux) in a server situation? If so, I'm not sure why you had so many issues with Linux. On the other hand, BSD installs all the basic stuff you need to run a very stable web, ftp, mail, news, etc. type of server - so I'm not faulting you at all for making that choice.
Au contraire!
I'd say Real Networks is one of the minority of companies that gives a nod to Linux on a regular basis. They had a streaming server that ran under Linux, and their player works in Linux.
As someone else said, compare this to any of their competitors (MS and Apple) and see what kind of Linux support you get for their media formats.
But then you pointed out that among other things, you're another one of those Maxim readers. :)
Seriously though, I'm all for value-added services - but only when the value part is really valuable. I guess it depends largely on how valuable your TV watching is to you?
Myself, I find TV serves only as a temporary break in my schedule. Sometimes, I just want to be passively entertained for a little while, as I sit on my couch after work. Most often, I'd rather actively participate in something else (like maybe even Slashdot).
Even if TiVo does an outstanding job of locating TV content that's of interest to me - I'm not sure I care. I'd still prefer to actively seek out content that interests me using a resource like the web, as opposed to being spoon-fed the content on TV programs. TV caters to the lowest-common denominator most of the time.
(EG. Say I'm interested in cellphones, and want to buy a new one soon. My TiVo finds me several news stories on new cellphones, and a big program about the production of them. Fine, but it's still mostly marketing hype and watered-down facts that I have to now sit through 2+ hours of. In 10 minutes, I can go to the manufacturer web sites instead, and get complete technical specs on whatever new models they have out. Give me another hour, and I can read actual reviews from users of most of the choices to see which phones are best, and why.)
I think one of the primary reasons people use polls is as a "weapon of the underdog". If you're rooting for use of the most visable/highly-advertised and touted product, you have no need for a poll.
.Net, or any of their other products.
People like to arm themselves with statistics when they're trying to defend an alternate choice. Right now, Linux is one of those alternate choices.
Therefore, you can expect the Linux community to get vocal about going to site X or Y and casting a vote in favor of the OS. Microsoft, on the other hand, would really only do this to ensure that opposing views are silenced. They don't need a ZDNet poll to convince people to use
If you've ever looked at "Software Audio Workshop" (commonly just known as SAW), that's what they do. You throw in multiple sound cards and/or MIDI interfaces, and it supports all of them. Of course, this gets fun juggling DMA and IRQ conflicts at some point - but you don't want to run this sort of app on a heavily loaded system anyway. You'd probably, in fact, design a seperate PC just to work with SAW.
I don't think this new Creative external sound card is a big deal at all. Oh, sure, it'll probably sell well. There are always those people convinced that their sound device picks up less interference noise/hum when it's outside a PC case.
I just dislike anything USB, for starters. That port doesn't have lots of bandwidth, for one thing. Couple that with everything under the sun wanting to share your USB connection, and it spells major trouble for low-latency sound.
Also, why give a musician a relatively fragile laptop? IMO, a poor hack of a solution. The ideal answer is building a PC in a rack-mount case, and installing it in a rack along-side any effects processors or rack-mount synths/samplers they might own.
You can buy a MIDI "surface controller" to get pads, knobs, and sliders galore which can be defined so you can work anything you'd normally have to drag or click around on with a mouse. (Eliminating all need for a mouse is the most important step to getting a PC on stage as music equipment.)
I absolutely agree with you. Not only are people just taking a peek at it, and then going back to another OS - but they're also giving up due to lack of hardware support.
The "out of box" experience with Solaris for x86 was pretty poor, IMHO. One of our former employees paid the $25 or whatever for a copy of Solaris for x86 when they had that promotional deal going - and we couldn't get it to support A) our Crystal sound chipset built onto our Dell motherboards, B) our nVidia graphics chipset, or C) our 56K internal modem cards. Of course, that wasn't even beginning to worry about such extras as USB support.
Oh, I'm sure some Solaris fan will come along and tell me "You just needed to download driver X and Y from web site Z!" -- but that's not the point.
I'd expect a commercial Unix to support basic devices like my video card right out of the box. I had much better hardware support in Linux, and I'm not paying anything for the rights to install it.
Wow, someone else out there does know what I'm talking about. Gotta love Slashdot... even the most obscure reference gets a reply!
But yeah, I think the guy I met was named Leo. I only talked with him one time, because he was an acquaintance of a good friend of mine who was going to Mizzou.
Anyway, I didn't hear a whole lot positive about ThoughtPort - but I did get to tour his "facility". As I recall, it was all set up in some sort of mobile home/trailer home type of thing. It may not have been 100% Be, but it was pretty darn close. I think he had some sort of web camera pointed at a fish tank in the place, and that may have been a Windows-based Intel box. I'm almost positive he had web, news, and email running on all Be Boxes though. I'd never seen so much Be stuff in one place before, or after that.
Hmm.... interesting. I hadn't read about that guy's situation before. Quite honestly though, my first impression was that he's being a little less than 100% honest about his original intentions to register the domain name of his first site. (The one for Willow Springs Mall or whatever it was...) I mean, do you really believe someone would be so happy about a new shopping mall being built near them that they ran out and registered not one, but two names related to the new mall's name so they could build a fan site for it?
That's probably what initially angered the judge... likely saw this guy as trying to cash in on the domain name "gold rush".
Still, I see no excuse for what happened to him after that.
I don't know if anyone else touched on this already or not - but another issues here is what resources were used to spread the grievances.
If an employee sent out emails using the corporate email system, then those are company resources. It's no different than me printing out hundreds of flyers protesting something at the workplace on the company's copier, using the company's own paper supplies.
If I did such a thing, I think I'd have good reason to believe the company would take legal action against me. If nothing else, merely for misusing company property.
If this Intel guy only emailed people on their home Internet accounts, it might be a little different story.
That comment was spoken like a true "Centrist".
Personally, I fail to see how "complete free-market capitalism" is such a radical idea, though.
I know most political Centrists like to draw lines spaced evenly between them for socialism vs. capitalism, but I'd beg to differ.
I can agree with Communism/Socialism being on the left-hand side of the equation, but the right-hand side would probably be anarchy, not capitalism. (After all, wouldn't you say that a state of anarchy is the ultimate in lack of govt. control of any kind, and every person acting completely on their own to achieve whatever goals he/she wishes?)
In any case, I don't think a perfect blend of socialism and capitalism is going to result in better employee loyalty. Perhaps it does work for neutral countries like Sweden and Finland, but that's primarily because they aren't among the top "global players" in industry. Sure, they have some big-name corporations (AKA. Nokia), but that's more an exception than a rule. While they're struggling for growth of the Lego toy company, other countries are cranking out automobiles and heavy industrial goods. It's sort of an apples vs. oranges debate.
I think you'll always see a drop in employee loyalty when the number of companies to work for increases. Countries with more choices have to work harder to keep loyalty up, or alternately, choose not to worry about it - and go for more of a "revolving door" approach of "use 'em up and spit 'em out when they get unproductive".
Yeah, I'd be concerned about a situation like this, because not only might you come out a winner who lost money - but what kind of counter-suit can you put up against them?
Basically, you start out in a purely defensive posture. It's not like the trademark disputes that often go on between corporations, where they both have arguments for why the other guy stole some piece of their intellectual property.
I suppose you could claim the company was harassing you or something... but that's probably going to be a rather weak argument in court.
This goes back a ways, but I remember meeting one of the owners of a small ISP called "Thoughtport", that ran from Columbia, Missouri. He ran the whole ISP on BeBoxes. I think he may have been the only ISP in the U.S. to do such a thing.
I wonder what ever happened to all of his stuff?
I know the ISP went out of business years ago - but he had a nice collection of Be equipment there.
Umm, no ... here in the U.S., police officers still take "requests" without any problems.
If you call, they'll show up.
Granted, our police officers are probably underpaid for the work they do - but I have no inclination to give any of them donations either.
I've already done so, indirectly, by paying for a couple of exhorbitantly expensive speeding tickets.
(In fact, I paid a lawyer to get them reduced to plain old parking tickets, but the "court costs" alone were close to $200 for each of them. Obviously, they're making plenty of money off of their traffic courts.)
You said it better than I could!
Thank-you. Hopefully it will reach some of the folks who really need to hear it.
That figures... The news media (TV in particular) is largely liberal, and believes in govt. as our protector.
They're quick to grasp onto any straw that aids their case, even if it's flawed logic.
The best thing you could do is write a letter to your local newspaper and bring up this point. Challenge your local TV station to back up their statement with fact!
Oh, so what you really mean is "I used to be opposed to censorship on principle, until something came along that really bothered me." ?
I have GTA3 at home, and both my wife and I play it quite a bit. Is it a violent game? Absolutely! Would I let pre-teen kids play it? No, probably not. Does this mean I support government trying to add more controls to our lives, to help ensure that my pre-teen kid doesn't get ahold of GTA3? No way!
Let's face the facts here: 1. Plenty of adults own game consoles, and a large number of them also own a violent game or two. 2. No matter what govt. restrictions you place on kids playing/buying games, the kids can still play these games in the privacy of homes of parents who own them.
It always boils down to the exact same thing. Government regulation is *no* substitute for parental guidance.
No, Universities have not "suddenly gotten greedy". The problem is, they've been too greedy for a long time - and the results are really starting to show!
I place most of the blame at the feet of the upper-level administrators of the colleges and Universities. My father is a PhD, teaching at a state-owned college, and the level of corruption is incredible. The dean and his appointees all give themselves large raises every year, while he announces to the faculty that once again, he won't be able to give out a raise due to budget constraints. He also, of course, feels his job requires the college to provide him with a car.
All of this starts a chain-reaction, where you get only bottom-of-the-barrel teachers willing to work there. These "teachers", in turn, pass students on through the system without ensuring that they've really learned the material. (For the small salaries they're paid, they don't want to put up with fights with students who scream and moan that it's "unfair I got an F in your class!")
These same deans and administrators are more concerned that their campus looks impressive and top-notch than whether or not their teachers are using the latest textbooks. They know that lucrative govt. grants aren't possible without dazzling the TV and print media. In fact, they typically spend so much time being a spokesperson for the college/University, they fail to notice what goes on "day to day" in the institution.
When they do win these grants, do they really help the students? Only partially. Again, grants are great profit-makers for the higher-ups. I've heard stories of schools that hire people full-time just to research and apply for as many grants as possible. Then, these people get a cut of the money off the top as a reward for each one they get.