IANAL, but you'd have a hard time convincing the judge that your ad campaign is justified and the customer has to be bound by your "different" TOS.
They rely on it not being important enough for you to take to court. I was with an ISP here in Australia that increased the price for plans $3/month accross the board. They were still the cheapest ISP available to many people, so they could have just said they can't fullfill their contracts and released everyone, most people would still have stayed, but instead they conned people that they were still bound by the contract. It would have been easy enough to leave, but you'd be paying more anyway. All contracts were 24months or less, for $72 who can be bothered with a lawsuit which is only likely to get you onto a higher priced plan on another ISP.
given the choice between closed source drivers and none at all (a choice any Linux user makes when using 3D graphics acceleration)
I'm using Radeon 9000 with open drivers. It does everything I need. I'm not a gamer, but supertux runs at about 80 FPS which seems plenty for my needs. All video plays fine. glxgears runs at about 1400 FPS, but I don't use glxgears for anything:)
I know it's not the latest and greatest , but the r300 driver apparently has "works well, no lockups" support for Radeon 9600 and radeon X800. Sure, there are many cards and late model cards not supported, but that doesn't amount to closed source drivers or none for all linux users with 3D graphics acceleration.
I freely admit to having no polls or studies to present, but I do not believe a reliable measure can be made of this sort of thing because of its very nature.
Am I to take it you're a man of faith?
Hebrews 11:1...faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Just joking! Still, it's a stretch to say that because you meet a lot of liberals that the "moral majority" is either a minority or nonexistant.
Hmmm, very interesting numbers, so religion is very important for 55%, but only 28% go to church each week.
That makes at least 27% of all Americans hypocrites or liars. Interesting indeed....
The reply is something to the effect of "Nobody else knows how to use YOUR computer, do you want nobody to use even the computer that is supposed to be for the whole family?"
Of course, if you are regularly reinstalling windows, they obviously don't know how to use that either, so what's the problem? I don't recommend actually saying this to you wife, I don't want to be responsible for any unintended consequences:)
If you are the house admin, do a dual boot install without asking, using the windows boot manager. Don't get them to use it, but copy bookmarks, IM accounts etc to the linux side as much as practicable. Set it up as much as possible so that you can say "click that icon to do that, etc, etc". Then when time comes to reinstall, be too busy, and tell them to boot linux for anything urgent. When they can't do something, reply "Yes, I'll get windows up {in an hour/tomorrow}". This way, they will not be intimidated by it (after all, they're getting windows back soon) and using it is a convenience, not a chore (that is, more convenient than having nothing working)
This is absolute proof that the minority voice controls the world.
All this article does is beg us to continue living in fear of some invisible and nonexistent moral majority.
The "moral majority" religious in USA are neither a minority nor nonexistant. The question "How important would you say religion is in your own life: very important, fairly important, or not very important?" got 55% very important, 29% fairly important.
Re:"Support" model seems to be a misnomer
on
Red Hat Sales Surge
·
· Score: 1
RedHat hasn't been overly noisy, but some acts they've done clearly demonstrate they aren't keen on the existence of CentOS, but accept they can't do anything about it.
If Redhat wanted to make rebuilds harder, they'd release source tarballs instead of source rpms. That would still be 100% GPL compliant. What they're not keen on is trademark dilution, as another poster commented. I don't know that they could really do much more to make rebuilds easier.
Not according to Strong's concordance and Greek dictionary, common understanding, or normal reading of the passage: "Everyone serves the good wine first, and when the guests have drunk freely, then that which is worse. You have kept the good wine until now!" at a wedding? Grape juice rather than wine at a wedding would not be likely to draw praise. It is also the same greek word used in Ephesians 5:18 "Don't be drunken with wine..." so either Jesus made wine or Paul commands not to be drunk with grape juice.
No wonder Jesus spoke to such people, saying: "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. And he said to them, You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!
In Luke 7: 33,34 Jesus claimed to have come "eating and drinking" the corresponding accusation being that he was "gluttonous and a drunkard". I think it is not customary to accuse teetotalers of being drunkards.
So basically, Puritanism is still alive and well in the culture in the US. There are plenty of people with more moderate views, but there is a certain balance, and both have influence.
I heard one pastor say "Jesus turned water into wine, and evangelical christians have been trying to turn it back ever since."
However, I do want to comment on your use of the word "moderate" (presumably compared to "extreme" Puritanism) refering apparently to those whose christianity allows for drinking alcohol:
Jesus turned water into wine, the apostle Paul recommended to Timothy to drink wine for health reasons (I Timothy 5:23). So since I take this literally and conclude that to forbid wine is anti-christianity, aren't I being extreme, and teetotalers being moderate (allowing for new interpretations to affect doctrine). I'm certainly not trying to be moderate in my beliefs, I just find it impossible to reconcile Jesus miraculous production of wine with a prohibition on alcohol.
as to the asswipes who suggest they 'use google' think about that- how much luck do you expect they'll have hitting google for their entire cache.... (and google pays for bandwidth too)
As I understand the suggestion, it is that if regular users can find the content using google, so can the copyright owners. No robot required, just search in the normal way. If you can't find it like that, probably not many people can download it anyway.
A look at the most popular torrents or the number of files returned from search results in traditional P2P applications reveals that the bulk of material being traded is very recently released stuff.
I think this could well change if copyrights were 14-20 years as they were. I think many people, if faced with the choice of a downloading a movie from the 80's legally or downloading a recent movie illegally would choose the legal download. I know I would. Of course, many wouldn't care and would take the recent movie. Court action against infringers would also probably be seen as more reasonable.
As it is, I can rent old movies for $1 each for a week (if I get them on Tuesday), which is cheaper than my download costs for a movie anyway.
Copyrights and patents are there to protect the ownership of, and distribution/licensing rights to, original works created or invented by people.
bzzzt! wrong!
In the US, at least, copyrights and patents are there to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Protecting "ownership" of the works is a means to an end, not the purpose itself. The government is not permitted by the US constitution to use patents and copyrights to pursue any other goal.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing
for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right
to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Friends I have that don't use Linux can't seem to comprehend the idea of a free OS.
Just yesterday I had some success explaining this (regarding openoffice, not an OS, but no real difference) to some non-tech business associates:
They understand commodities, I explained that most software is a commodity with near zero distribution costs. I explained the role of vendor lock-in in increasing prices and eliminating competition. I told them that Sun sell hardware and produce software to add value to the hardware (close enough) and release it free to reduce Microsoft's vendor lock in and that this reduces Microsoft's influence on Sun's market and business.
Not a comprehensive explanation but it was enough for them to see a business reason for people to release free software and to not be looking for the catch.
Of course, what I never mention to them is that I'd love to read the bible more often, but it is just such poor writing that my brain won't tolerate it. It would be great if Neal Stephenson or Peter F. Hamilton or some equally great modern writer could rewrite the bible so it isn't so boring, tedious, cryptic, and, well, preachy.
Perhaps try reading proverbs. You can read a sentence or two at a time because it's largely written that way. If you want to be entertained by reading though, you might enjoy a novel more or some preaching CD's or videos of someone like Jesse Duplantis, who is very funny.
Wrong: any information provided by a scientist is thoroughly tested by other scientists in the same field to see if they get the same results.
Well, for example, though many would say that there is no significant dissent among the scientific community about if evolution occured, there have certainly been, and continue to be differing opinions on how evolution happened. How could this happen if all the information is so thoroughly tested. String theory anyone? Black holes? Dark matter? Now scientists themselves may understand the incompleteness etc of various theories, the masses do not.
Richard Dawkins seems to think that science has disproved god and wrote "The God Delusion", Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project wrote "The Language of God". Both books got great reviews from those who agreed with them, and poor reviews from those who disagreed. (I haven't read either book, but reviews about both). These are both pieces of opinion that have been put forward on the "scientific authority" of the author without peer review. It makes no difference which is correct (if either).
What was this quote related to? If I am understanding it properly...
You seem to have missed the significance of this: "We take the side of science... in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for the unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism."
A scientist claims the scientific community tolerates unsubstantiated just-so stories, and accepts this because of a prior (before evidence) commitment to materialism (a philosophy). Full quote from wikipedia has been edited out, and includes "Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." Objective? Certainly not. It's a philosophy taught on the authority of science. Taught at least sometimes by people who have a stronger committment to materialism than to the rigorous application of the scientific method. In effect, a religion.
Oh... you mean, it's only the god-given right of you creationists to present your "theory" as a fact?:-)
If science openly presents itself as a religion, it can do so also. Religions tend to claim revelation from a superior being as the source of knowledge. In reality, science often operates the same way, but the superior being is supposed to be the scientist instead of a god.
I think religions tend to be dogmatic because people tend to be dogmatic. Science has not escaped this human tendency except in the case of observable repeatable phenomena, which tend to silence opposition without resorting to dogmatism. That's why you can have intelligent people, trained as scientists, come to the opposite conclusions on various matters, just as people follow different religions.
If we want science to avoid being labeled as religion, it needs to avoid the methods of religion. Comments like this, attributed to Richard Lewontin, don't help science to be percieved as objective:
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to understanding the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for the unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism."
So while science ought not to be a religion, to some, it obviously is. Such views should be diligently kept out of the classroom, particularly from being taught in government schools as fact.
That would be the case if RPM was the top one ahead in at least one of {popularity, quality}. This is not the case.
I think being used by Redhat and Suse would probably make it the top commercial package format. As long as you define commercial as sold and support services provided anyway.
I've used it with several rpm respositories, its not bad but several times I've had to hand resolve large messy conflicts, I've had to do that on debian true, but only when doing really messy mixtures of sid sarge and woody all on one box
You got that right for sure, choosing compatible repos is crucial.
being able to type rpm -i gcc-4.1.rpm and having it just work would be nice.... they will type apt-get install build-essentials or apt-get install gcc and it will "just work"
yum install gcc
yum localinstall package.rpm
I would love to have equivalent to apt-get build-dep etc though. I needed to switch from apt to yum when I got 64bit.
Now I've heard two main counter-arguments to that: first, that by contributing to the global pool of knowledge, the whole community is better off (so it's a moral obligation to contribute without asking for compensation).
To convince a profit minded boss, you have to demonstrate that open source reduces costs.
I'm a profit minded business owner. My country (Australia) has approx 20 million people. Lets say (without regard to how likely this is) that I could help get FOSS widely used. Maybe I'm paying someone to write a program, maybe I'm advocating, maybe I'm donating hardware loaded with FOSS to community organisations or schools. Not costing me more than a few thousand dollars, hypothetically, and I'm not doing it all, but making a contribution. Imagine it got to the point where 5 million people saved about $500 dollars by using FOSS, repeated every couple of years. That's effectively a quarter billion dollar injection to the economy my business operates in every couple of years.
Just from a business perspective, if you can increase the disposable income of the people in your target market by a few hundred dollars for next to nothing, it would be very short sighted to not do so. It's a good investment. Sure, it's not a guaranteed return, but neither is anything else.
For a good perspective on what I think FOSS means to capitalism, have a read of Paul Zane Pilzer's book "Unlimited Wealth". I've no idea what he thinks of FOSS himself, but if you read his six laws of economic alchemy, and compare proprietry software to FOSS, you'll see why some capitalists are really drawn to FOSS, even if they find it hard to understand and figure out what to do with it.
You actually believe that eyewitness testimony is reliable???
Having worked with people with mental disabilities, dementia patients, in sales/customer service and training roles, I'd say in many cases, no. And in my experience, so called normal people are often not much more rational than dementia patients, but they are irrational in more common (and therefore less noticable) ways. That's a good article you link to. The problem I see is that expert witnesses and scientists are really subject to the same weaknesses as everyone else, although hopefully offset by their training etc. So they have the advantage of being capable of being more objective (with doesn't guarantee they will actually be more objective in any given situation) but the disadvantage of looking at evidence after the fact and trying to reconstruct what happened.
Given the option of say finding fingerprints on a knife used in a murder, or three eyewitnesses of good reputation who say "Yes, that's him, I've known him for 20 years, I saw him stab the victim in broad daylight, not 10 meters from where I was standing" I would tend to give more weight to the eyewitness testimony. The less clear the circumstances, light, etc, the less weight I would put on the testimony.
Expert witnesses are people to, they are just people who didn't see what happened, so yes, I would give more weight to the witnesses who did see what happened than those who didn't. Severe penalties for lying would hopefully increase the quality of testimony.
Death penalty for a liar won't return the wrongly sentenced to life.
True, and I wasn't saying it to justify the death penalty. I would hope that it would make people much more diligent about speaking "the truth, and nothing but the truth" when giving evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Disk space is cheaper than my time. I just rip the VIDEO_TS and watch with a DVD player a few minutes later.
I just watch off the DVD immediately then rip and encode while I sleep. Best of both worlds.
IANAL, but you'd have a hard time convincing the judge that your ad campaign is justified and the customer has to be bound by your "different" TOS.
They rely on it not being important enough for you to take to court. I was with an ISP here in Australia that increased the price for plans $3/month accross the board. They were still the cheapest ISP available to many people, so they could have just said they can't fullfill their contracts and released everyone, most people would still have stayed, but instead they conned people that they were still bound by the contract. It would have been easy enough to leave, but you'd be paying more anyway. All contracts were 24months or less, for $72 who can be bothered with a lawsuit which is only likely to get you onto a higher priced plan on another ISP.
given the choice between closed source drivers and none at all (a choice any Linux user makes when using 3D graphics acceleration)
:)
I'm using Radeon 9000 with open drivers. It does everything I need. I'm not a gamer, but supertux runs at about 80 FPS which seems plenty for my needs. All video plays fine. glxgears runs at about 1400 FPS, but I don't use glxgears for anything
I know it's not the latest and greatest , but the r300 driver apparently has "works well, no lockups" support for Radeon 9600 and radeon X800. Sure, there are many cards and late model cards not supported, but that doesn't amount to closed source drivers or none for all linux users with 3D graphics acceleration.
I freely admit to having no polls or studies to present, but I do not believe a reliable measure can be made of this sort of thing because of its very nature.
...faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Am I to take it you're a man of faith?
Hebrews 11:1
Just joking! Still, it's a stretch to say that because you meet a lot of liberals that the "moral majority" is either a minority or nonexistant.
Hmmm, very interesting numbers, so religion is very important for 55%, but only 28% go to church each week. That makes at least 27% of all Americans hypocrites or liars. Interesting indeed....
Perhaps you need to consider a bit further
At Least Once a Week - 28%
Almost Every Week - 14%
About Once a Month -14%
Total attending church once a month or more 56%
Or perhaps many people who regard monthly church attendance to be sufficient for their very important religion.
The reply is something to the effect of "Nobody else knows how to use YOUR computer, do you want nobody to use even the computer that is supposed to be for the whole family?"
:)
Of course, if you are regularly reinstalling windows, they obviously don't know how to use that either, so what's the problem? I don't recommend actually saying this to you wife, I don't want to be responsible for any unintended consequences
If you are the house admin, do a dual boot install without asking, using the windows boot manager. Don't get them to use it, but copy bookmarks, IM accounts etc to the linux side as much as practicable. Set it up as much as possible so that you can say "click that icon to do that, etc, etc". Then when time comes to reinstall, be too busy, and tell them to boot linux for anything urgent. When they can't do something, reply "Yes, I'll get windows up {in an hour/tomorrow}". This way, they will not be intimidated by it (after all, they're getting windows back soon) and using it is a convenience, not a chore (that is, more convenient than having nothing working)
This is absolute proof that the minority voice controls the world.
All this article does is beg us to continue living in fear of some invisible and nonexistent moral majority.
The "moral majority" religious in USA are neither a minority nor nonexistant. The question "How important would you say religion is in your own life: very important, fairly important, or not very important?" got 55% very important, 29% fairly important.
RedHat hasn't been overly noisy, but some acts they've done clearly demonstrate they aren't keen on the existence of CentOS, but accept they can't do anything about it.
If Redhat wanted to make rebuilds harder, they'd release source tarballs instead of source rpms. That would still be 100% GPL compliant. What they're not keen on is trademark dilution, as another poster commented. I don't know that they could really do much more to make rebuilds easier.
They say he turned it into grape juice, not wine.
Not according to Strong's concordance and Greek dictionary, common understanding, or normal reading of the passage: "Everyone serves the good wine first, and when the guests have drunk freely, then that which is worse. You have kept the good wine until now!" at a wedding? Grape juice rather than wine at a wedding would not be likely to draw praise. It is also the same greek word used in Ephesians 5:18 "Don't be drunken with wine..." so either Jesus made wine or Paul commands not to be drunk with grape juice.
No wonder Jesus spoke to such people, saying: "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. And he said to them, You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!
In Luke 7: 33,34 Jesus claimed to have come "eating and drinking" the corresponding accusation being that he was "gluttonous and a drunkard". I think it is not customary to accuse teetotalers of being drunkards.
Pygmies ARE short.
Pygmies are NOT short, they are regular. For a fuller understanding of this phenomenon, go to a McDonald's and order a small drink.
So basically, Puritanism is still alive and well in the culture in the US. There are plenty of people with more moderate views, but there is a certain balance, and both have influence.
I heard one pastor say "Jesus turned water into wine, and evangelical christians have been trying to turn it back ever since."
However, I do want to comment on your use of the word "moderate" (presumably compared to "extreme" Puritanism) refering apparently to those whose christianity allows for drinking alcohol:
Jesus turned water into wine, the apostle Paul recommended to Timothy to drink wine for health reasons (I Timothy 5:23). So since I take this literally and conclude that to forbid wine is anti-christianity, aren't I being extreme, and teetotalers being moderate (allowing for new interpretations to affect doctrine). I'm certainly not trying to be moderate in my beliefs, I just find it impossible to reconcile Jesus miraculous production of wine with a prohibition on alcohol.
as to the asswipes who suggest they 'use google' think about that- how much luck do you expect they'll have hitting google for their entire cache.... (and google pays for bandwidth too)
As I understand the suggestion, it is that if regular users can find the content using google, so can the copyright owners. No robot required, just search in the normal way. If you can't find it like that, probably not many people can download it anyway.
A look at the most popular torrents or the number of files returned from search results in traditional P2P applications reveals that the bulk of material being traded is very recently released stuff.
I think this could well change if copyrights were 14-20 years as they were. I think many people, if faced with the choice of a downloading a movie from the 80's legally or downloading a recent movie illegally would choose the legal download. I know I would. Of course, many wouldn't care and would take the recent movie. Court action against infringers would also probably be seen as more reasonable.
As it is, I can rent old movies for $1 each for a week (if I get them on Tuesday), which is cheaper than my download costs for a movie anyway.
Copyrights and patents are there to protect the ownership of, and distribution/licensing rights to, original works created or invented by people.
bzzzt! wrong!
In the US, at least, copyrights and patents are there to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Protecting "ownership" of the works is a means to an end, not the purpose itself. The government is not permitted by the US constitution to use patents and copyrights to pursue any other goal.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Friends I have that don't use Linux can't seem to comprehend the idea of a free OS.
Just yesterday I had some success explaining this (regarding openoffice, not an OS, but no real difference) to some non-tech business associates:
They understand commodities, I explained that most software is a commodity with near zero distribution costs. I explained the role of vendor lock-in in increasing prices and eliminating competition. I told them that Sun sell hardware and produce software to add value to the hardware (close enough) and release it free to reduce Microsoft's vendor lock in and that this reduces Microsoft's influence on Sun's market and business.
Not a comprehensive explanation but it was enough for them to see a business reason for people to release free software and to not be looking for the catch.
Of course, what I never mention to them is that I'd love to read the bible more often, but it is just such poor writing that my brain won't tolerate it. It would be great if Neal Stephenson or Peter F. Hamilton or some equally great modern writer could rewrite the bible so it isn't so boring, tedious, cryptic, and, well, preachy.
Perhaps try reading proverbs. You can read a sentence or two at a time because it's largely written that way. If you want to be entertained by reading though, you might enjoy a novel more or some preaching CD's or videos of someone like Jesse Duplantis, who is very funny.
Wrong: any information provided by a scientist is thoroughly tested by other scientists in the same field to see if they get the same results.
... in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for the unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism."
Well, for example, though many would say that there is no significant dissent among the scientific community about if evolution occured, there have certainly been, and continue to be differing opinions on how evolution happened. How could this happen if all the information is so thoroughly tested. String theory anyone? Black holes? Dark matter? Now scientists themselves may understand the incompleteness etc of various theories, the masses do not.
Richard Dawkins seems to think that science has disproved god and wrote "The God Delusion", Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project wrote "The Language of God". Both books got great reviews from those who agreed with them, and poor reviews from those who disagreed. (I haven't read either book, but reviews about both). These are both pieces of opinion that have been put forward on the "scientific authority" of the author without peer review. It makes no difference which is correct (if either).
What was this quote related to? If I am understanding it properly...
You seem to have missed the significance of this: "We take the side of science
A scientist claims the scientific community tolerates unsubstantiated just-so stories, and accepts this because of a prior (before evidence) commitment to materialism (a philosophy). Full quote from wikipedia has been edited out, and includes "Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." Objective? Certainly not. It's a philosophy taught on the authority of science. Taught at least sometimes by people who have a stronger committment to materialism than to the rigorous application of the scientific method. In effect, a religion.
Oh... you mean, it's only the god-given right of you creationists to present your "theory" as a fact? :-)
If science openly presents itself as a religion, it can do so also. Religions tend to claim revelation from a superior being as the source of knowledge. In reality, science often operates the same way, but the superior being is supposed to be the scientist instead of a god.
I think religions tend to be dogmatic because people tend to be dogmatic. Science has not escaped this human tendency except in the case of observable repeatable phenomena, which tend to silence opposition without resorting to dogmatism. That's why you can have intelligent people, trained as scientists, come to the opposite conclusions on various matters, just as people follow different religions.
If we want science to avoid being labeled as religion, it needs to avoid the methods of religion. Comments like this, attributed to Richard Lewontin, don't help science to be percieved as objective:
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to understanding the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for the unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism."
So while science ought not to be a religion, to some, it obviously is. Such views should be diligently kept out of the classroom, particularly from being taught in government schools as fact.
That would be the case if RPM was the top one ahead in at least one of {popularity, quality}. This is not the case.
I think being used by Redhat and Suse would probably make it the top commercial package format. As long as you define commercial as sold and support services provided anyway.
I've used it with several rpm respositories, its not bad but several times I've had to hand resolve large messy conflicts, I've had to do that on debian true, but only when doing really messy mixtures of sid sarge and woody all on one box
... they will type apt-get install build-essentials or apt-get install gcc and it will "just work"
You got that right for sure, choosing compatible repos is crucial.
being able to type rpm -i gcc-4.1.rpm and having it just work would be nice.
yum install gcc
yum localinstall package.rpm
I would love to have equivalent to apt-get build-dep etc though. I needed to switch from apt to yum when I got 64bit.
http://ftp.linux.cz/pub/localization/OpenOffice.or g/2.1/OOo_2.1.0rc2_native_LinuxX86-64_langpacks_rp m/
Now I've heard two main counter-arguments to that: first, that by contributing to the global pool of knowledge, the whole community is better off (so it's a moral obligation to contribute without asking for compensation).
Try, the whole community is better off, so your target market has more disposable income. Thinking from FOSS in a business rather than FOSS as a business. My other post in this thread explains my view more fully
To convince a profit minded boss, you have to demonstrate that open source reduces costs.
I'm a profit minded business owner. My country (Australia) has approx 20 million people. Lets say (without regard to how likely this is) that I could help get FOSS widely used. Maybe I'm paying someone to write a program, maybe I'm advocating, maybe I'm donating hardware loaded with FOSS to community organisations or schools. Not costing me more than a few thousand dollars, hypothetically, and I'm not doing it all, but making a contribution. Imagine it got to the point where 5 million people saved about $500 dollars by using FOSS, repeated every couple of years. That's effectively a quarter billion dollar injection to the economy my business operates in every couple of years.
Just from a business perspective, if you can increase the disposable income of the people in your target market by a few hundred dollars for next to nothing, it would be very short sighted to not do so. It's a good investment. Sure, it's not a guaranteed return, but neither is anything else.
For a good perspective on what I think FOSS means to capitalism, have a read of Paul Zane Pilzer's book "Unlimited Wealth". I've no idea what he thinks of FOSS himself, but if you read his six laws of economic alchemy, and compare proprietry software to FOSS, you'll see why some capitalists are really drawn to FOSS, even if they find it hard to understand and figure out what to do with it.
You actually believe that eyewitness testimony is reliable???
Having worked with people with mental disabilities, dementia patients, in sales/customer service and training roles, I'd say in many cases, no. And in my experience, so called normal people are often not much more rational than dementia patients, but they are irrational in more common (and therefore less noticable) ways. That's a good article you link to. The problem I see is that expert witnesses and scientists are really subject to the same weaknesses as everyone else, although hopefully offset by their training etc. So they have the advantage of being capable of being more objective (with doesn't guarantee they will actually be more objective in any given situation) but the disadvantage of looking at evidence after the fact and trying to reconstruct what happened.
Given the option of say finding fingerprints on a knife used in a murder, or three eyewitnesses of good reputation who say "Yes, that's him, I've known him for 20 years, I saw him stab the victim in broad daylight, not 10 meters from where I was standing" I would tend to give more weight to the eyewitness testimony. The less clear the circumstances, light, etc, the less weight I would put on the testimony.
Expert witnesses are people to, they are just people who didn't see what happened, so yes, I would give more weight to the witnesses who did see what happened than those who didn't. Severe penalties for lying would hopefully increase the quality of testimony.
Death penalty for a liar won't return the wrongly sentenced to life.
True, and I wasn't saying it to justify the death penalty. I would hope that it would make people much more diligent about speaking "the truth, and nothing but the truth" when giving evidence.