Don't worry about it. I added a patch long ago to randomize gender information. Been there since KDE 2.0.1. It isn't cryptography secure random, but I don't think that matters because gender is not used in the seed.
Well, when/if your Unix machine is down and you can't remember how to partition the new drive anymore you take what you can get, even if it means using Windows.
Don't land in Texas. Find an island in the middle of the Ocean, and land on a runway that allows an orientation such that they don't cross land before they land. If it makes it great, we have a shuttle to use. If not, the pieces land in the ocean.
Fortunately Montana is trying (last I heard it passed the house, but was still working through the senate) to stop this, by making it illegal to place this information on their drivers licenses. Unfortunately Montana doesn't have the population to make everyone care when their people can't fly or take a train anywhere.
Re: squatting. I agree that you should squat on a domain (though you might sometimes need more than 30 days to use it, the courts shouldn't have too much difficulty seeing though this in those cases.
What about non-squatters who get a large offer. My company used example.com as one domain years ago, and gradually quit using it as that side of the business was dropped. We still own it for the few customers left. Recently some new company made a large offer for that domain, something we can't refuse. After all we aren't using it much, and we need the money. Are we in the rights to now ask everyone (some of which have been around for a while) who might be interested in our domain if they want to beat that offer?
This is a real situation. I generally like the idea of offering it to everyone, not just this new guy (who I don't know if I can trust). I like the idea of getting a profit from the sale, and the domain is worth more than $100/year to us, so it isn't worth giving up just because we don't use it much.
So what are the ethics of this situation? Should I be mad at the CEO for not refusing the offer outright? Should he have sold it without asking anyone else if they want to bid? (Giving up the domain is not an option, we don't use it much, but it is work more than the registration fees to keep it)
You need to read and thing about the fine print on those 0% offers before you make that claim. GM was offering a rebate on all those cars, but when you went for 0% financing GMAC took the rebate. If you do the calculations, you pay less for the car if you get a normal loan from a bank, and take the rebate and put it in a saving account for the life of the loan. (This might require a money market account, I'm not sure).
Or to put it in simple terms: GMAC was collecting all the interest on the loan up front, and charging high interest rates than their competition!
What millions starving here? The population of the US does not contain millions of starving. I'm sure there are some who refuse to get help. (and a few lazy who have used all the help they can get, and despite ability still don't get a job) However millions is beyond believeable. There are only 300 million people in the US. Even if we assume your millions is 2, that is 1 in 150 starving? My local city has a population of 2 million, so there should be 10,000 people starving - a number I do not see.
Now if you count people below the poverty line, yes there are a lot of them. I was well below the poverty line for a few years of my life though, so I know for a fact that you don't have to starve just because you are below the poverty line.
I worked with families who were not starving on the same income as me, despite making the choice to only have one income! The life was not easy, we didn't have any fancy toys. No Cable TV, (nobody had internet then, but now we would get it at the library) our cars just barely ran. We also didn't gamble every penny we earned, and rarely could afford a drink or a smoke. (those who did that)
I have no sympathy for someone who can work, but doesn't. (There are many disabled who cannot work, or can work but not a good job, I sympathize with them) I have no sympathy for those who starve because they gamble/drink their money away. As my barber says, "In the 30s there were many starving families, but the men in those families still had enough money for pinballs downtown. Their co-workers who didn't spend their money on pinballs were not starving, though times were just as hard for everyone". He is old enough to remember.
Because searvices are about things that people can't do for themselves, things they can do but it doesn't make economic sense, or things they don't want to do but can.
As people learn to do things for themselves the first part goes away, and that is a large part of services for computer companies. (Once people know how to make their VPN client work they won't be calling for help making it work) The second also will go down because once you know how to do something the time waiting for tech support to get back to you is more valuable than the time to do it yourself. That leaves the third.
If you have a steady supply of goods coming down the pipe, you can turn those goods into services because people won't know how to use them.
I cannot do open heart surgery on myself. However only the law and my own reluctance is preventing me from giving myself the vaccinations I should have. (Farmers often vaccinate their own livestock, and they don't get much training so I know it isn't inability preventing me) IBM isn't in any field where the law protects their ability to do services, and unlike medicine there are not major consequences to everyone is if I do my own services.
Just create a website that makes heavy use of CSS2.1. Test in Firefox and Konqueror, and then put a "best view with" banner on your page. That is what got Netscape all over.
P.S. I do not endorse this. I'm a big fan of simple web sites that any browser can view. Even Mosaic 1.1 if you can find it.
Most proprietary software is user tested? Some, but not most. I have never worked for a company that did any format useability tests, and I suspect that is the norm. In the real world we are lucky if we (the developers) are given time to pretend we are testers before shipping the product.
Open source developers do care. However we have to deal with the real world, and in the real world everyone uses Windows or the Mac, and everyone double clicks. Few use the right mouse button, and nobody even knows they can click the middle button (now wheel) - Many mice do not even have 3 buttons. This is a major problem because double click has horrid useability (sorry Apple, but it does). KDE and Gnome end up defaulting to a lower useability mode where double click exists just to be compatible with everything else, despite the useability issues. (Actually Microsoft has figured this out too, but it is too late for even them to switch users, so single click is a power user mode that few use)
Don't forget one important but often overlooked part of useability: power users. When you use a program every day it is worth trading time to learn a hard but fast interface over a more learnable interface. (best is to provide both interfaces though) How much time depends. The phone company used to spend days training operators on an interface that would save less than a second per call, but those operators dealt with so many calls that it was worth it. Open source tends to do better in this area because the programmers are the users and the boss isn't beating on their door about a required feature for the next version.
IPv6 is designed to solve this problem. I don't know how well it works, but if it works as well in practice as theory, you tell everyone on IPv4 that they need IPv6 to get good roaming. Maybe this would force Microsoft write a good IPv6 implementation for Windows. (yeah right)
I am not a lawyer, but clearly you need to consult one. Your "license" will not, and cannot hold up in court.
The phase: will enter the Public Domain on 1 January 2005. conflicts with everything else. When you place something into the public domain you cannot place other restricts on it like your 4 clauses.
Your first clause states: must include this copyright . This is not possible, because you have already stated it is public domain, and therefore it is not copyrighted!
A real lawyer can find other problems with this license.
Note that lawyers are not sure current copyright law even allows the possibility of placing something in the public domain. Everything is automatically copyright by you when you create it, and nothing in the law says you can give that up.
More than one project has gotten all the developers together and switched from a GPL license to a BSD license. It doesn't happen often, (And the attempt sometimes fails when someone disagrees with the change) but once in a while it happens. If developers cared about license issues this could not happen. In the real world programers like to program, not deal with legal stuff.
I've heard (but not encountered myself) that some projects just slap GPL on software because it is the only license they know about. When contacted these projects have instantly given permission to use a different license, and didn't understand why there was a question at all! (Obviously this can only apply to small one or two person projects)
My company loves BSD licensed software because it is such a pain to send the source to those few customers who request it.
As a developer I love the BSD license because I don't have to think twice about using it, I know I legally can. (Particularly if there is no advertising clause) Everytime I consider a GPL program that might be useful I have to figure out how to make sure it is not linked into my code. This is a pain, but I do it.
We do give our changes to BSD code back. Someday we will want to upgrade to a newer version of the program/library, and that will be much easier if we don't have to examine all our past bug fixes to see if they still need to apply, or if the community has found the bug separately and fixed it in a different way. (This is particularly hard if they find parts of the problem, some that we did not find, and we have some they did not find because now we need to fix the entire thing. So we send those patches back - it saves us effort and money in the long run.
Mind we are careful not to give our advantage away. However much as I want to write a kernel, we don't have any reason to develop our own kernel when *BSD fits our needs.
In the case of a true penny stock mass amounts of money do not need to be moved. 1000 shares trading in a day is an unheard of large number, and since we are talking less that $5/share, and often just a few pennies, the average person can manipulate prices! Of course you can't make enough from one manipulation to live, but if you do several at a time you can make money.
I agree the SEC should do more, but it isn't as easy as you would think to find these people.
When I first started using computers everyone used WordStar. In high school the school was proud of their lab filled with WordPerfect 5.1 (Which I think was just released) because "It is the same thing industry uses." In college Microsoft Word was already dominate. Then I got my first real job, and everything was done on FrameMaker.
If they will listen I just made a good point. Good luck getting them to listen though.
Can you send me a couple of those deal LCDs? Backlights can be found fairly cheap. Not worth it for a company to mess around fixing, but worth it to me, for my own use. (I will not eBay them after I fix them, though I might give a few as gifts to friends)
Well yes, but there is a big difference between things you look up in a book (the commands Oracle uses), and things you have to understand.
Once you know how databases work, you just need to know about TABLE_NAME, ALL_TABLES, and OWNER. If you don't understand databases, even knowing the above won't help you guess the right command. Even if you draw a mental blank and have to ask, do you understand what that command is doing, or is it just something you type out without understanding?
I prefer the generalist who can figure things out even if he is slower. The Oracle specialist is great in mission critical time counts situations, but he is useless for other tasks when Oracle is working fine. (Though I understand that Oracle is general complex enough that you need full time admins so I would have the specialists. Can they spend a free hour fixing MySql when your MySQL guy goes on vacation?
That is fine until you get the insight that two trains can use the same track at the same time so long as they are both going the same direction, and the back one doesn't overtake the front one. (The back one can even go faster than the front one so long as there is room) Things are now more complex, you need to slow down the back train if the front one can't leave the line on time because the next track is occupied and (insert many pages of things that can go wrong.
This is a real concern because it is expensive to build track. This is a subway, that means they have to dig in order to build more track. So the easist way to get more people though the system is put more trains on the track at any given time. There are still problems of getting more platforms in each station - if there are two trains in the station you somehow have to get over/under one to get to the next. They can deal with this, but it is a concern. (Even if they have to make a station larger, that is cheaper than building more lines and a larger station)
Mind this method of scaling won't get you very far because there are physical limits. However it is still useful if you can pull it off safely. That is a very complex task though.
In many cases it is not the penny stock company itself that is spamming, nor their backers. Instead it is some "broker" who is manipulating the stock for this own gain, often against the interests of the company or the officers.
Penny stocks are fairly easy to manipulate, and they can claim in court that they did their research and thought it would be good, pointing out they they did get all the reports they could get, often calling the management. (In some cases they will find a legitimate firm with a similar name so they can claim confusion) Then they tell the court they got lucky that some scammer decided to push the stock up just afterwords, and at the new price it was worth selling.
Note that in some cases penny stocks are for companies that have for all practical purposes stopped operating. The owner (often it was a small business trying to make money, but they ran out of money before producing anything promissing, and lost interest) just hasn't filed the paperwork to declare the company non-existant, so the stock still exists even though you cannot contact them.
Its not just that there is a problem identifying joe-jobs, it is that in most cases it is a joe-job, and the allibis are good. Still, the SEC does investigate these as best they can.
Before you return the drive ask them how they would like you to destroy the data. The might be entitled to their drive back, but they need to tell you what to do. If you are trustworthy they are likely to say something like "Send us the circuit board and destroy the rest". Normally they want proof that you are using the RMA to get a second free drive. Sometimes (rarely) they want the broken drive so engineering can figure out why it died, in which case they might have other instructions. You need to ask though.
Seriously though, the level of technology required to keep me alive in space isn't much less than anyone else in good health. In some ways I'm worse off because I have less shielding for radiation than a "normal" person, though I do better in the cold areas. (I'm not sure which is harder for technology to deal with)
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Don't worry about it. I added a patch long ago to randomize gender information. Been there since KDE 2.0.1. It isn't cryptography secure random, but I don't think that matters because gender is not used in the seed.
Well, when/if your Unix machine is down and you can't remember how to partition the new drive anymore you take what you can get, even if it means using Windows.
Don't land in Texas. Find an island in the middle of the Ocean, and land on a runway that allows an orientation such that they don't cross land before they land. If it makes it great, we have a shuttle to use. If not, the pieces land in the ocean.
Almost correct. As I recall a few of them had expired Ids. All entered the US legally. (some had over stayed, and some were on watch lists)
Fortunately Montana is trying (last I heard it passed the house, but was still working through the senate) to stop this, by making it illegal to place this information on their drivers licenses. Unfortunately Montana doesn't have the population to make everyone care when their people can't fly or take a train anywhere.
I wish my state would do this.
Re: squatting. I agree that you should squat on a domain (though you might sometimes need more than 30 days to use it, the courts shouldn't have too much difficulty seeing though this in those cases.
What about non-squatters who get a large offer. My company used example.com as one domain years ago, and gradually quit using it as that side of the business was dropped. We still own it for the few customers left. Recently some new company made a large offer for that domain, something we can't refuse. After all we aren't using it much, and we need the money. Are we in the rights to now ask everyone (some of which have been around for a while) who might be interested in our domain if they want to beat that offer?
This is a real situation. I generally like the idea of offering it to everyone, not just this new guy (who I don't know if I can trust). I like the idea of getting a profit from the sale, and the domain is worth more than $100/year to us, so it isn't worth giving up just because we don't use it much.
So what are the ethics of this situation? Should I be mad at the CEO for not refusing the offer outright? Should he have sold it without asking anyone else if they want to bid? (Giving up the domain is not an option, we don't use it much, but it is work more than the registration fees to keep it)
You need to read and thing about the fine print on those 0% offers before you make that claim. GM was offering a rebate on all those cars, but when you went for 0% financing GMAC took the rebate. If you do the calculations, you pay less for the car if you get a normal loan from a bank, and take the rebate and put it in a saving account for the life of the loan. (This might require a money market account, I'm not sure).
Or to put it in simple terms: GMAC was collecting all the interest on the loan up front, and charging high interest rates than their competition!
What millions starving here? The population of the US does not contain millions of starving. I'm sure there are some who refuse to get help. (and a few lazy who have used all the help they can get, and despite ability still don't get a job) However millions is beyond believeable. There are only 300 million people in the US. Even if we assume your millions is 2, that is 1 in 150 starving? My local city has a population of 2 million, so there should be 10,000 people starving - a number I do not see.
Now if you count people below the poverty line, yes there are a lot of them. I was well below the poverty line for a few years of my life though, so I know for a fact that you don't have to starve just because you are below the poverty line.
I worked with families who were not starving on the same income as me, despite making the choice to only have one income! The life was not easy, we didn't have any fancy toys. No Cable TV, (nobody had internet then, but now we would get it at the library) our cars just barely ran. We also didn't gamble every penny we earned, and rarely could afford a drink or a smoke. (those who did that)
I have no sympathy for someone who can work, but doesn't. (There are many disabled who cannot work, or can work but not a good job, I sympathize with them) I have no sympathy for those who starve because they gamble/drink their money away. As my barber says, "In the 30s there were many starving families, but the men in those families still had enough money for pinballs downtown. Their co-workers who didn't spend their money on pinballs were not starving, though times were just as hard for everyone". He is old enough to remember.
Because searvices are about things that people can't do for themselves, things they can do but it doesn't make economic sense, or things they don't want to do but can.
As people learn to do things for themselves the first part goes away, and that is a large part of services for computer companies. (Once people know how to make their VPN client work they won't be calling for help making it work) The second also will go down because once you know how to do something the time waiting for tech support to get back to you is more valuable than the time to do it yourself. That leaves the third.
If you have a steady supply of goods coming down the pipe, you can turn those goods into services because people won't know how to use them.
I cannot do open heart surgery on myself. However only the law and my own reluctance is preventing me from giving myself the vaccinations I should have. (Farmers often vaccinate their own livestock, and they don't get much training so I know it isn't inability preventing me) IBM isn't in any field where the law protects their ability to do services, and unlike medicine there are not major consequences to everyone is if I do my own services.
Just create a website that makes heavy use of CSS2.1. Test in Firefox and Konqueror, and then put a "best view with" banner on your page. That is what got Netscape all over.
P.S. I do not endorse this. I'm a big fan of simple web sites that any browser can view. Even Mosaic 1.1 if you can find it.
Most proprietary software is user tested? Some, but not most. I have never worked for a company that did any format useability tests, and I suspect that is the norm. In the real world we are lucky if we (the developers) are given time to pretend we are testers before shipping the product.
Open source developers do care. However we have to deal with the real world, and in the real world everyone uses Windows or the Mac, and everyone double clicks. Few use the right mouse button, and nobody even knows they can click the middle button (now wheel) - Many mice do not even have 3 buttons. This is a major problem because double click has horrid useability (sorry Apple, but it does). KDE and Gnome end up defaulting to a lower useability mode where double click exists just to be compatible with everything else, despite the useability issues. (Actually Microsoft has figured this out too, but it is too late for even them to switch users, so single click is a power user mode that few use)
Don't forget one important but often overlooked part of useability: power users. When you use a program every day it is worth trading time to learn a hard but fast interface over a more learnable interface. (best is to provide both interfaces though) How much time depends. The phone company used to spend days training operators on an interface that would save less than a second per call, but those operators dealt with so many calls that it was worth it. Open source tends to do better in this area because the programmers are the users and the boss isn't beating on their door about a required feature for the next version.
IPv6 is designed to solve this problem. I don't know how well it works, but if it works as well in practice as theory, you tell everyone on IPv4 that they need IPv6 to get good roaming. Maybe this would force Microsoft write a good IPv6 implementation for Windows. (yeah right)
I am not a lawyer, but clearly you need to consult one. Your "license" will not, and cannot hold up in court.
The phase: will enter the Public Domain on 1 January 2005. conflicts with everything else. When you place something into the public domain you cannot place other restricts on it like your 4 clauses.
Your first clause states: must include this copyright . This is not possible, because you have already stated it is public domain, and therefore it is not copyrighted!
A real lawyer can find other problems with this license.
Note that lawyers are not sure current copyright law even allows the possibility of placing something in the public domain. Everything is automatically copyright by you when you create it, and nothing in the law says you can give that up.
More than one project has gotten all the developers together and switched from a GPL license to a BSD license. It doesn't happen often, (And the attempt sometimes fails when someone disagrees with the change) but once in a while it happens. If developers cared about license issues this could not happen. In the real world programers like to program, not deal with legal stuff.
I've heard (but not encountered myself) that some projects just slap GPL on software because it is the only license they know about. When contacted these projects have instantly given permission to use a different license, and didn't understand why there was a question at all! (Obviously this can only apply to small one or two person projects)
My company loves BSD licensed software because it is such a pain to send the source to those few customers who request it.
As a developer I love the BSD license because I don't have to think twice about using it, I know I legally can. (Particularly if there is no advertising clause) Everytime I consider a GPL program that might be useful I have to figure out how to make sure it is not linked into my code. This is a pain, but I do it.
We do give our changes to BSD code back. Someday we will want to upgrade to a newer version of the program/library, and that will be much easier if we don't have to examine all our past bug fixes to see if they still need to apply, or if the community has found the bug separately and fixed it in a different way. (This is particularly hard if they find parts of the problem, some that we did not find, and we have some they did not find because now we need to fix the entire thing. So we send those patches back - it saves us effort and money in the long run.
Mind we are careful not to give our advantage away. However much as I want to write a kernel, we don't have any reason to develop our own kernel when *BSD fits our needs.
In the case of a true penny stock mass amounts of money do not need to be moved. 1000 shares trading in a day is an unheard of large number, and since we are talking less that $5/share, and often just a few pennies, the average person can manipulate prices! Of course you can't make enough from one manipulation to live, but if you do several at a time you can make money.
I agree the SEC should do more, but it isn't as easy as you would think to find these people.
When I first started using computers everyone used WordStar. In high school the school was proud of their lab filled with WordPerfect 5.1 (Which I think was just released) because "It is the same thing industry uses." In college Microsoft Word was already dominate. Then I got my first real job, and everything was done on FrameMaker.
If they will listen I just made a good point. Good luck getting them to listen though.
Can you send me a couple of those deal LCDs? Backlights can be found fairly cheap. Not worth it for a company to mess around fixing, but worth it to me, for my own use. (I will not eBay them after I fix them, though I might give a few as gifts to friends)
Well yes, but there is a big difference between things you look up in a book (the commands Oracle uses), and things you have to understand.
Once you know how databases work, you just need to know about TABLE_NAME, ALL_TABLES, and OWNER. If you don't understand databases, even knowing the above won't help you guess the right command. Even if you draw a mental blank and have to ask, do you understand what that command is doing, or is it just something you type out without understanding?
I prefer the generalist who can figure things out even if he is slower. The Oracle specialist is great in mission critical time counts situations, but he is useless for other tasks when Oracle is working fine. (Though I understand that Oracle is general complex enough that you need full time admins so I would have the specialists. Can they spend a free hour fixing MySql when your MySQL guy goes on vacation?
That is fine until you get the insight that two trains can use the same track at the same time so long as they are both going the same direction, and the back one doesn't overtake the front one. (The back one can even go faster than the front one so long as there is room) Things are now more complex, you need to slow down the back train if the front one can't leave the line on time because the next track is occupied and (insert many pages of things that can go wrong.
This is a real concern because it is expensive to build track. This is a subway, that means they have to dig in order to build more track. So the easist way to get more people though the system is put more trains on the track at any given time. There are still problems of getting more platforms in each station - if there are two trains in the station you somehow have to get over/under one to get to the next. They can deal with this, but it is a concern. (Even if they have to make a station larger, that is cheaper than building more lines and a larger station)
Mind this method of scaling won't get you very far because there are physical limits. However it is still useful if you can pull it off safely. That is a very complex task though.
In many cases it is not the penny stock company itself that is spamming, nor their backers. Instead it is some "broker" who is manipulating the stock for this own gain, often against the interests of the company or the officers.
Penny stocks are fairly easy to manipulate, and they can claim in court that they did their research and thought it would be good, pointing out they they did get all the reports they could get, often calling the management. (In some cases they will find a legitimate firm with a similar name so they can claim confusion) Then they tell the court they got lucky that some scammer decided to push the stock up just afterwords, and at the new price it was worth selling.
Note that in some cases penny stocks are for companies that have for all practical purposes stopped operating. The owner (often it was a small business trying to make money, but they ran out of money before producing anything promissing, and lost interest) just hasn't filed the paperwork to declare the company non-existant, so the stock still exists even though you cannot contact them.
Its not just that there is a problem identifying joe-jobs, it is that in most cases it is a joe-job, and the allibis are good. Still, the SEC does investigate these as best they can.
Before you return the drive ask them how they would like you to destroy the data. The might be entitled to their drive back, but they need to tell you what to do. If you are trustworthy they are likely to say something like "Send us the circuit board and destroy the rest". Normally they want proof that you are using the RMA to get a second free drive. Sometimes (rarely) they want the broken drive so engineering can figure out why it died, in which case they might have other instructions. You need to ask though.
Maybe Argentina has reformed. Their history is such that I wouldn't count on it though.
Right, he refused to be bound to any deal someone else made with the devil.
Cool! When do I get to go?
Seriously though, the level of technology required to keep me alive in space isn't much less than anyone else in good health. In some ways I'm worse off because I have less shielding for radiation than a "normal" person, though I do better in the cold areas. (I'm not sure which is harder for technology to deal with)