OK, that's a reasonable explanation for the deal - we could look at it as Google paying for the right to control enough market share today (between Google Video and YouTube) to set legal precedent for the period down the road when they actually start making money on video content. Then the differential value of the market share could definitely be worth in the billions to Google, not because they couldn't duke it out with YouTube and win over the next 2-3 years at a fraction of the cost, but because they want to be the 800 pound gorilla right now so they can put the squeeze on the content owners right away.
I hadn't thought about the legal leverage advantage of having that market share today vs. having it in 2 years, and I am now inclined to agree with you on that point.
One minor issue - I still stand by my comment that the technology for online video delivery is commoditized at this point. I see dozens of small startups doing the same video hosting stuff with zero differentiation and almost zero software development investment, so clearly that meets any reasonable criteria for commoditization.
"Fire" is just a word. It's not my fault people are so jumpy.
Wrong, and I kind of hope you were attempting irony. You know exactly what will happen when you shout 'fire' in a crowded theater. The only reason you would shout fire in a crowded theater is to achieve that effect. Not because your precious inner child is just yearning to share that thought with the world, and to prevent you from doing so is to squelch your freedom of speech.
No, you know goddamned well what you are doing, and it is clear that you are trying to create a stampede, a reaction motivated not by rational thought or argumentation, but by appealing to people's survival instinct to get them to run out of the theater.
Likewise with inciting a riot - just because there is an underlying issue, like bad race relations, jobs being lost and people attributing it to illegal immigrants, etc. does not absolve you of responsibility if you inflame an angry mob of laid off workers and get them to commit violence or burn down a factory with people still in it. No, you knew goddamned well what you were doing and the fact that you only dropped a spark on the dry kindling doesn't mean it was the kindling's fault rather than yours.
The court has decided these ones long ago, and you are wrong, and they are right. The imminent lawless action test of Brandenberg v. Ohio is a very reasonable one, and I've never heard any rational person argue that they think shouting fire in a crowded theater, one of the most extreme examples of speech with obvious, immediate, and unavoidable negative consequences for people's wellbeing, should be legal or morally permissible.
Just because something is made with the vocal chords doesn't make it "speech" in the protected-by-the-first-amendment sense. Speech is something intended to convey thoughts or ideas, not something intended to create an imminently harmful or dangerous situation by bypassing rational thought.
Not to say that Google are complete idiots, but we all knew this was coming.
Were I behind the reigns at Google, I would have required they at least ink a few big content licensing deals before closing the transaction. In fact, with a bunch of licensing deals in place, possibly even some exclusive ones, I could see justifying a high valuation.
Why pay the huge takeout premium they paid and then have to do all the hard work after the takeout? I meant, the technology is commoditized and trivial, and the userbase can't really be worth that much to a company as big as Google, especially when they already have Google Video and could easily outgrow YouTube by spending a tiny fraction of the takeout price on advertising and promotions.
Nonono, show us what these frameworks can *do* that is directly useful to a web user and state clearly *why* it depends on XHTML usage. Or else you have failed utterly to make your case.
A nice little example on a website of an actual, functional capability that is enabled directly by the usage of XHTML, please. Something visible and demonstrable, not a long description of some generic XML content management framework.
I understand that the fact that XHTML is XML-parser friendly means you can in theory use it with any application framework that uses XML input and transforms it, but we need something to show why this advantage is more than just theoretical for the vast majority of users.
Well said. FF 2.0 is much faster, and much less memory hogging than 1.5, and as a result much more joyous to use. I have observed none of the bugs mentioned above, and every extension I used was ready to roll within a day or two of the 2.0 final release.
The only downside I see that's legit and affects everyone is the downgrade on the theme. But this, luckily, is extremely easy to fix. I recommend proceeding immediately to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/7/ to get the Qute theme for FF 2.0. It will keep you from having to gouge your eyeballs out.
Though 2.0 doesn't have tons of stellar new features that weren't available before, in terms of heavy browsing use case stability and performance it's a huge leap forward.
Develop a few *actual* applications where the XML-compliance of XHTML is actually useful in an observable way, and everybody will start producing XHTML compliant code for new websites, lest they be left out from a new revolution on the web.
As long as the benefits are just hypothetical (with XHTML somebody could develop useful parsing applications based on commodity XML parsers), try actually developing some such apps that generate real, observable value today, and you'll start convincing people who don't care about standards for their own sake.
I do generally try to stick to XHTML 1.0, since I care about standards and ease of parsing, but the majority of people don't, and they are the target audience the W3C needs to work on convincing.
You really ought to install Qute, a theme that was actually designed by somebody with an aesthetic sense. I'm actually using QuBranch right now, the unofficial Qute build for FF 2.0. I actually forgot how much better Qute was than that default theme in FF 1.5.
When I saw how awful the FF 2.0 default theme was (refresh? ugh!) I went out and found Qute again, and remembered what it was like to actually enjoy looking at my web browser again.
Shouldn't it be about both? If a page is going to be in harmonious balance with the elements and mankind, it ought to be both aesthetically pleasing and balanced to the human eye as well as exhibit favorable characteristics under scaling, different text needs for different usability audiences, etc.
My take - this is basically BS. I can couch good principles of web design in Hindu, Buddhist or any other sort of mysticism, but if I don't have the aesthetic sense and technical abilities to practice what I preach, then it's worthless.
Re:and the next new release will be called...
on
Ubuntu 6.10 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Umm... what's wrong with "I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS" or "I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu 6.10". They have version numbers so you can discuss this with your boss without having to use phrases like "Dapper Drake", "Edgy Eft" or "Feisty Fawn".
Eh? The old Slashdot rendering bug was fixed ages ago, certainly as of the initial 1.5 FF release if not a bit before that. And with the move to the CSS-based layout of Slashdot, that nasty old table rendering bug would no longer affect Slashdot anyway.
The default theme for FF 2.0 makes me want to scrape my eyes out. The default theme for 1.0/1.5 was bad, but it's gone from bad to actively offensive, in my opinion.
My eyes returned to happy land as soon as I got Qute for FF 2.0 installed.
They are health economists (well, one of them is, and the other is an economist). Health economists do these kind of large scale public health studies all the time. They are using statistics and economics to investigate issues of public health concern, not looking for medical explanations of causes.
If you look at the paper itself, the title may be provocative, but what they are actually doing is what health economists generally do in their research.
Also - the way they are doing their analysis seems (to me at least) to address the question of correlation vs. causation fairly well, because they are breaking down data county by county and region by region, looking at other intermediating variables and so on. See pages 37-39 where this is addressed fairly well.
You may take issue with their conclusions or their methodology, or the fact that they are examining a hypothesis that is not widely addressed in the medical community about a disease, but don't shit all over it just because they aren't doctors. Sometimes, from the micro perspective of a doctor, it may not be obvious what is causing a disease, whereas somebody trained in statistics who plays with some numbers from the NBER could find out something quite interesting.
I'm sure that someone at PEPCON probably thought it might be funny to start a fire, or didn't quite realise how rare/expensive it was or was from a racial minority or something.
Yeah, those damned racial minorities, always starting fires. ???
It was 8.5 million pounds of the stuff in 55 gallon drums. The fact that only 2 people died is fairly impressive, actually.
BTW, you can create explosions of equally impressive and deadly magnitude in grain silos. Should we ban the purchase of flour because you can make a bomb with it?
To be fair, social networking sites have fairly strong network externalities, which creates a barrier to entry if you have a big user base (i.e. MySpace). This means that the more users they have, the more utility they provide.
The problem is that the switching costs are so low I don't know how much it matters. All it takes is one leading group of folks to switch over together to a new social networking site and eventually others will follow. And - well, you don't even have to switch, you can just create a profile on the new site and wait to see if people show up eventually, like I did on Facebook.
YouTube on the other hand has de minimus network externalities, essentially zero switching costs (sending your friends viral video links hosted on some other domain doesn't change a damned thing), and no technological barriers to entry (anybody can host FLV/Flash video content, and encoding it just requires a bit of commodity hardware and some cheap software). Why anybody would buy such a site instead of just building is mysterious - the brand equity might be worth a few tens of millions of dollars, but Google could have spent 100 million to advertise and pimp an improved version of Google video and just slaughtered YouTube's market share.
The reason they didn't do this? When you can pay for acquisitions with funny money stock acquisitions, I think the stuff starts burning holes in people's pockets. The thing is I think Google is desparate to build some more meaningful barriers to entry themselves since their core search business is extremely vulnerable to competitive attack. I think they just want to buy places to stick lots of advertising dollars and they don't really care, a billion one way or the other.
I think this is an issue of terminology. I will always put my children first (well, I don't have any yet, but I plan to once I do). And I would expect nothing less of my wife (okay, this is all hypothetical, as I'm still single).
That doesn't mean you're supposed to not live your life or enjoy life in order to coddle your children excessively. Because all that coddling isn't putting your children first, it's screwing up their lives. Kids need to learn a certain degree of independence appropriate to their age, as you never know when you won't be there any more to take care of them.
I agree with the concept of showing them how to lead a good life by example, maintaining work-life balance, taking care of yourself physically and emotionally, being a good husband and father (or wife and mother), etc.
But in some absurd hypothetical "burning building" scenario, came down to my life or my kids' life, I'd expect my wife to save our kids. As humans, we're all mortal, and the only form of immortality we have is our children. They aren't us, certainly, but they carry our genes, the knowledge we share with them, and the values we impart to them, and they will hopefully have their own children someday to pass on the same to.
I'll be gone in 80 or 90 years one way or the other (barring medical technology that substantially extends the human lifespan).
A related digression - My mom became ill when I was 21 and passed away right after my 26th birthday (and I effectively had zero relationship with my father at the time, not having spoken with him in about 8 years). The sad thing is I know many people that age who would never be able to deal with the real world as an adult with a parent's illness and passing, getting them back and forth to the hospital, moving back home to take care of her, pay the bills, etc. It was extremely stressful, not to mention disruptive to my relationships and to my career. But my mother was an amazing woman and a great parent to me my whole life, how the hell could I do anything less for her than she would have done for me as a child? And luckily, she did a pretty good job at teaching me to be an independent person, or I probably wouldn't have held up through the whole ordeal.
I guess the point of all that was that someday you might be sick and alone, and you'll be damned glad if you were a good, loving parent to your children and they're there to help you out when you need them. Your husband or wife can run off to Timbuktu, but your children will always be your flesh and blood. But if you turn them into spoiled little monsters with no sense of familial responsibility, who's going to visit you in your old age or care for you in illness?
But crapping in your own locker isn't a demonstration that you've built a world-destroying crap bomb, because anybody can crap in a locker. It's not meaningful until you crap in somebody else's locker.
If, on the other hand, you build a nuclear blast-o-matic crap bomb and detonate it in your backyard as a way of intimidating your neighbors and threatening nations on the other side of the world that implicitly you might decide to supply their enemies with nuclear blast-o-matic crap bombs, then one might be justified punching that little fucker in the face before he gets any bad ideas.
You see how making a ridiculously inappropriate analogy led you to imply a stupid conclusion? Good.
Yeah, ummm, I think you might want to check on your numbers there again, bub. How many dead Muslims and how many dead Americans? That's what I thought. Now shut your fucking trap before you make an ass out of yourself again.
If you can please explain what exactly you think it means to "win" an insurgency in an occupied country, I'd be glad to hear it. Because you can't. It's impossible. The Nazis won a war against the French army in less than a week, but there was still an insurgency there throughout World War II. But do we say that the French "beat" the Germans in World War II? No.
The only way to win is not to fight. That's why we should get the fuck out of Iraq and support the Iraqis ability to protect and police their own country. If the Iranians invade, then we can send our army back in, otherwise the military shouldn't be there except to train and advise.
Because only geeks on Slashdot make jokes when bad things happen and people die? You must not get out much. I see jokes like this floating around Wall Street all the time. Nothing unique to Slashdot or techies or geekdom about it. People make light of grim news - it's a coping mechanism in a world that sometimes seems overloaded with grim news.
So lighten up and deal with it. Nobody except for you sits around and says "gee, I'm not going to take those Slashdotters seriously, they tell jokes about people who were murdered!".
Well, generally when somebody gets accused under an unjust law or accused of something many of us don't consider a crime, lots of folks will rally to the cause and suggest donating for their defense.
When somebody gets accused of something we can all agree is unequivocally bad, like murdering the mother of his children, my reaction is "let justice take its course." This seems fair to me, especially when we have no idea what the evidence is against him. Lots of people get accused of lots of crimes all the time and I don't generally donate money to their legal defense unless I think the law under which they are being prosecuted is terribly unjust.
And likewise with almost every piece of application software ever. What is the cost and amount of effort in upgrading Firefox? What is the cost and amount of effort in upgrading Windows (or a full Linux install, etc.)?
Application software lifecycle and OS lifecycle are held to different standards, and for good reason. Don't compare apples and oranges.
On the Windows build, the exact opposite seems to be true. The 2.0RC1 build seems to eat up far less RAM in intense browsing sessions than the 1.5.x series did. Much, much, less. Especially on very image intensive sites, that used to cause Firefox to gobble up memory until it usually died after a short period of time (uhhh, I won't explain what kind of "image intensive sites" I'm talking about here, you can figure it out I'm sure).:)
The reason for the price point of commercial open source software packages is basic microeconomics, and has nothing to do with the better/worse quality of the software.
The supported product has a close substitute, in the form of an absolutely free (and Free/Open Source) but unsupported product. So the lower end user base, on the bottom portion of the demand curve, will generally opt for the free alternative. Hobbyist developers and shops building internal-use applications only, for example, will use the GPL version of Qt. Many of these users might have been buyers at 500 dollars if there were no free alternative, but with an essentially identical free alternative, the support, on the margin, isn't worth 500 dollars to them.
Thus if you price at 500 dollars you get a smaller portion of the market. To make things worse, adverse selection effects are likely, just like with individual health care plans - the people who pay for the supported product are actually paying because they want to USE the support! With many or most commercial software products, people buy the product but only use the support very occasionally or never. As a result, the cost of support *per copy sold* is much lower and margins are generally going to be higher for the commercial (non-OSS) software company.
I think this is why Red Hat ultimately dropped their lower priced products - they realized they shouldn't be trying to compete with their free products, and that too many sales of their "Enterprise" products were getting cannibalized by lower end paid, supported products. Even though they lost a large number of paying customers in this move, the people who actually need support are much more price-inelastic and are willing to pay the higher price for Enterprise support if the only other option is no support.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, that's a reasonable explanation for the deal - we could look at it as Google paying for the right to control enough market share today (between Google Video and YouTube) to set legal precedent for the period down the road when they actually start making money on video content. Then the differential value of the market share could definitely be worth in the billions to Google, not because they couldn't duke it out with YouTube and win over the next 2-3 years at a fraction of the cost, but because they want to be the 800 pound gorilla right now so they can put the squeeze on the content owners right away.
I hadn't thought about the legal leverage advantage of having that market share today vs. having it in 2 years, and I am now inclined to agree with you on that point.
One minor issue - I still stand by my comment that the technology for online video delivery is commoditized at this point. I see dozens of small startups doing the same video hosting stuff with zero differentiation and almost zero software development investment, so clearly that meets any reasonable criteria for commoditization.
"Fire" is just a word. It's not my fault people are so jumpy.
Wrong, and I kind of hope you were attempting irony. You know exactly what will happen when you shout 'fire' in a crowded theater. The only reason you would shout fire in a crowded theater is to achieve that effect. Not because your precious inner child is just yearning to share that thought with the world, and to prevent you from doing so is to squelch your freedom of speech.
No, you know goddamned well what you are doing, and it is clear that you are trying to create a stampede, a reaction motivated not by rational thought or argumentation, but by appealing to people's survival instinct to get them to run out of the theater.
Likewise with inciting a riot - just because there is an underlying issue, like bad race relations, jobs being lost and people attributing it to illegal immigrants, etc. does not absolve you of responsibility if you inflame an angry mob of laid off workers and get them to commit violence or burn down a factory with people still in it. No, you knew goddamned well what you were doing and the fact that you only dropped a spark on the dry kindling doesn't mean it was the kindling's fault rather than yours.
The court has decided these ones long ago, and you are wrong, and they are right. The imminent lawless action test of Brandenberg v. Ohio is a very reasonable one, and I've never heard any rational person argue that they think shouting fire in a crowded theater, one of the most extreme examples of speech with obvious, immediate, and unavoidable negative consequences for people's wellbeing, should be legal or morally permissible.
Just because something is made with the vocal chords doesn't make it "speech" in the protected-by-the-first-amendment sense. Speech is something intended to convey thoughts or ideas, not something intended to create an imminently harmful or dangerous situation by bypassing rational thought.
Sorry, but Brandt is a fucking nutjob. Just look around on his sites. That is not a stable, coherent person.
List of transitional fossils
Intermediate forms
Also:
Talk Origins FAQ
and specifically:
Transitional vertebrates FAQ
More on intermediates
If you can explain what exactly is meant by "supports evolution", I'd gladly provide you with many more links. Or better yet, learn to use Google.
Read it and weep, creationist.
Couple of your links were broken:
List of transitional fossils
Intermediate forms
Not to say that Google are complete idiots, but we all knew this was coming.
Were I behind the reigns at Google, I would have required they at least ink a few big content licensing deals before closing the transaction. In fact, with a bunch of licensing deals in place, possibly even some exclusive ones, I could see justifying a high valuation.
Why pay the huge takeout premium they paid and then have to do all the hard work after the takeout? I meant, the technology is commoditized and trivial, and the userbase can't really be worth that much to a company as big as Google, especially when they already have Google Video and could easily outgrow YouTube by spending a tiny fraction of the takeout price on advertising and promotions.
The whole deal is just downright strange.
Nonono, show us what these frameworks can *do* that is directly useful to a web user and state clearly *why* it depends on XHTML usage. Or else you have failed utterly to make your case.
A nice little example on a website of an actual, functional capability that is enabled directly by the usage of XHTML, please. Something visible and demonstrable, not a long description of some generic XML content management framework.
I understand that the fact that XHTML is XML-parser friendly means you can in theory use it with any application framework that uses XML input and transforms it, but we need something to show why this advantage is more than just theoretical for the vast majority of users.
Well said. FF 2.0 is much faster, and much less memory hogging than 1.5, and as a result much more joyous to use. I have observed none of the bugs mentioned above, and every extension I used was ready to roll within a day or two of the 2.0 final release.
The only downside I see that's legit and affects everyone is the downgrade on the theme. But this, luckily, is extremely easy to fix. I recommend proceeding immediately to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/7/ to get the Qute theme for FF 2.0. It will keep you from having to gouge your eyeballs out.
Though 2.0 doesn't have tons of stellar new features that weren't available before, in terms of heavy browsing use case stability and performance it's a huge leap forward.
Develop a few *actual* applications where the XML-compliance of XHTML is actually useful in an observable way, and everybody will start producing XHTML compliant code for new websites, lest they be left out from a new revolution on the web.
As long as the benefits are just hypothetical (with XHTML somebody could develop useful parsing applications based on commodity XML parsers), try actually developing some such apps that generate real, observable value today, and you'll start convincing people who don't care about standards for their own sake.
I do generally try to stick to XHTML 1.0, since I care about standards and ease of parsing, but the majority of people don't, and they are the target audience the W3C needs to work on convincing.
You really ought to install Qute, a theme that was actually designed by somebody with an aesthetic sense. I'm actually using QuBranch right now, the unofficial Qute build for FF 2.0. I actually forgot how much better Qute was than that default theme in FF 1.5.
When I saw how awful the FF 2.0 default theme was (refresh? ugh!) I went out and found Qute again, and remembered what it was like to actually enjoy looking at my web browser again.
Shouldn't it be about both? If a page is going to be in harmonious balance with the elements and mankind, it ought to be both aesthetically pleasing and balanced to the human eye as well as exhibit favorable characteristics under scaling, different text needs for different usability audiences, etc.
My take - this is basically BS. I can couch good principles of web design in Hindu, Buddhist or any other sort of mysticism, but if I don't have the aesthetic sense and technical abilities to practice what I preach, then it's worthless.
Umm... what's wrong with "I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS" or "I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu 6.10". They have version numbers so you can discuss this with your boss without having to use phrases like "Dapper Drake", "Edgy Eft" or "Feisty Fawn".
Eh? The old Slashdot rendering bug was fixed ages ago, certainly as of the initial 1.5 FF release if not a bit before that. And with the move to the CSS-based layout of Slashdot, that nasty old table rendering bug would no longer affect Slashdot anyway.
Install this.
The default theme for FF 2.0 makes me want to scrape my eyes out. The default theme for 1.0/1.5 was bad, but it's gone from bad to actively offensive, in my opinion.
My eyes returned to happy land as soon as I got Qute for FF 2.0 installed.
They are health economists (well, one of them is, and the other is an economist). Health economists do these kind of large scale public health studies all the time. They are using statistics and economics to investigate issues of public health concern, not looking for medical explanations of causes.
If you look at the paper itself, the title may be provocative, but what they are actually doing is what health economists generally do in their research.
Also - the way they are doing their analysis seems (to me at least) to address the question of correlation vs. causation fairly well, because they are breaking down data county by county and region by region, looking at other intermediating variables and so on. See pages 37-39 where this is addressed fairly well.
You may take issue with their conclusions or their methodology, or the fact that they are examining a hypothesis that is not widely addressed in the medical community about a disease, but don't shit all over it just because they aren't doctors. Sometimes, from the micro perspective of a doctor, it may not be obvious what is causing a disease, whereas somebody trained in statistics who plays with some numbers from the NBER could find out something quite interesting.
I'm sure that someone at PEPCON probably thought it might be funny to start a fire, or didn't quite realise how rare/expensive it was or was from a racial minority or something.
Yeah, those damned racial minorities, always starting fires. ???
It was 8.5 million pounds of the stuff in 55 gallon drums. The fact that only 2 people died is fairly impressive, actually.
BTW, you can create explosions of equally impressive and deadly magnitude in grain silos. Should we ban the purchase of flour because you can make a bomb with it?
To be fair, social networking sites have fairly strong network externalities, which creates a barrier to entry if you have a big user base (i.e. MySpace). This means that the more users they have, the more utility they provide.
The problem is that the switching costs are so low I don't know how much it matters. All it takes is one leading group of folks to switch over together to a new social networking site and eventually others will follow. And - well, you don't even have to switch, you can just create a profile on the new site and wait to see if people show up eventually, like I did on Facebook.
YouTube on the other hand has de minimus network externalities, essentially zero switching costs (sending your friends viral video links hosted on some other domain doesn't change a damned thing), and no technological barriers to entry (anybody can host FLV/Flash video content, and encoding it just requires a bit of commodity hardware and some cheap software). Why anybody would buy such a site instead of just building is mysterious - the brand equity might be worth a few tens of millions of dollars, but Google could have spent 100 million to advertise and pimp an improved version of Google video and just slaughtered YouTube's market share.
The reason they didn't do this? When you can pay for acquisitions with funny money stock acquisitions, I think the stuff starts burning holes in people's pockets. The thing is I think Google is desparate to build some more meaningful barriers to entry themselves since their core search business is extremely vulnerable to competitive attack. I think they just want to buy places to stick lots of advertising dollars and they don't really care, a billion one way or the other.
I think this is an issue of terminology. I will always put my children first (well, I don't have any yet, but I plan to once I do). And I would expect nothing less of my wife (okay, this is all hypothetical, as I'm still single).
That doesn't mean you're supposed to not live your life or enjoy life in order to coddle your children excessively. Because all that coddling isn't putting your children first, it's screwing up their lives. Kids need to learn a certain degree of independence appropriate to their age, as you never know when you won't be there any more to take care of them.
I agree with the concept of showing them how to lead a good life by example, maintaining work-life balance, taking care of yourself physically and emotionally, being a good husband and father (or wife and mother), etc.
But in some absurd hypothetical "burning building" scenario, came down to my life or my kids' life, I'd expect my wife to save our kids. As humans, we're all mortal, and the only form of immortality we have is our children. They aren't us, certainly, but they carry our genes, the knowledge we share with them, and the values we impart to them, and they will hopefully have their own children someday to pass on the same to.
I'll be gone in 80 or 90 years one way or the other (barring medical technology that substantially extends the human lifespan).
A related digression -
My mom became ill when I was 21 and passed away right after my 26th birthday (and I effectively had zero relationship with my father at the time, not having spoken with him in about 8 years). The sad thing is I know many people that age who would never be able to deal with the real world as an adult with a parent's illness and passing, getting them back and forth to the hospital, moving back home to take care of her, pay the bills, etc. It was extremely stressful, not to mention disruptive to my relationships and to my career. But my mother was an amazing woman and a great parent to me my whole life, how the hell could I do anything less for her than she would have done for me as a child? And luckily, she did a pretty good job at teaching me to be an independent person, or I probably wouldn't have held up through the whole ordeal.
I guess the point of all that was that someday you might be sick and alone, and you'll be damned glad if you were a good, loving parent to your children and they're there to help you out when you need them. Your husband or wife can run off to Timbuktu, but your children will always be your flesh and blood. But if you turn them into spoiled little monsters with no sense of familial responsibility, who's going to visit you in your old age or care for you in illness?
But crapping in your own locker isn't a demonstration that you've built a world-destroying crap bomb, because anybody can crap in a locker. It's not meaningful until you crap in somebody else's locker.
If, on the other hand, you build a nuclear blast-o-matic crap bomb and detonate it in your backyard as a way of intimidating your neighbors and threatening nations on the other side of the world that implicitly you might decide to supply their enemies with nuclear blast-o-matic crap bombs, then one might be justified punching that little fucker in the face before he gets any bad ideas.
You see how making a ridiculously inappropriate analogy led you to imply a stupid conclusion? Good.
Yeah, ummm, I think you might want to check on your numbers there again, bub. How many dead Muslims and how many dead Americans? That's what I thought. Now shut your fucking trap before you make an ass out of yourself again.
If you can please explain what exactly you think it means to "win" an insurgency in an occupied country, I'd be glad to hear it. Because you can't. It's impossible. The Nazis won a war against the French army in less than a week, but there was still an insurgency there throughout World War II. But do we say that the French "beat" the Germans in World War II? No.
The only way to win is not to fight. That's why we should get the fuck out of Iraq and support the Iraqis ability to protect and police their own country. If the Iranians invade, then we can send our army back in, otherwise the military shouldn't be there except to train and advise.
Because only geeks on Slashdot make jokes when bad things happen and people die? You must not get out much. I see jokes like this floating around Wall Street all the time. Nothing unique to Slashdot or techies or geekdom about it. People make light of grim news - it's a coping mechanism in a world that sometimes seems overloaded with grim news.
So lighten up and deal with it. Nobody except for you sits around and says "gee, I'm not going to take those Slashdotters seriously, they tell jokes about people who were murdered!".
Well, generally when somebody gets accused under an unjust law or accused of something many of us don't consider a crime, lots of folks will rally to the cause and suggest donating for their defense.
When somebody gets accused of something we can all agree is unequivocally bad, like murdering the mother of his children, my reaction is "let justice take its course." This seems fair to me, especially when we have no idea what the evidence is against him. Lots of people get accused of lots of crimes all the time and I don't generally donate money to their legal defense unless I think the law under which they are being prosecuted is terribly unjust.
And likewise with almost every piece of application software ever. What is the cost and amount of effort in upgrading Firefox? What is the cost and amount of effort in upgrading Windows (or a full Linux install, etc.)?
Application software lifecycle and OS lifecycle are held to different standards, and for good reason. Don't compare apples and oranges.
On the Windows build, the exact opposite seems to be true. The 2.0RC1 build seems to eat up far less RAM in intense browsing sessions than the 1.5.x series did. Much, much, less. Especially on very image intensive sites, that used to cause Firefox to gobble up memory until it usually died after a short period of time (uhhh, I won't explain what kind of "image intensive sites" I'm talking about here, you can figure it out I'm sure). :)
The reason for the price point of commercial open source software packages is basic microeconomics, and has nothing to do with the better/worse quality of the software.
The supported product has a close substitute, in the form of an absolutely free (and Free/Open Source) but unsupported product. So the lower end user base, on the bottom portion of the demand curve, will generally opt for the free alternative. Hobbyist developers and shops building internal-use applications only, for example, will use the GPL version of Qt. Many of these users might have been buyers at 500 dollars if there were no free alternative, but with an essentially identical free alternative, the support, on the margin, isn't worth 500 dollars to them.
Thus if you price at 500 dollars you get a smaller portion of the market. To make things worse, adverse selection effects are likely, just like with individual health care plans - the people who pay for the supported product are actually paying because they want to USE the support! With many or most commercial software products, people buy the product but only use the support very occasionally or never. As a result, the cost of support *per copy sold* is much lower and margins are generally going to be higher for the commercial (non-OSS) software company.
I think this is why Red Hat ultimately dropped their lower priced products - they realized they shouldn't be trying to compete with their free products, and that too many sales of their "Enterprise" products were getting cannibalized by lower end paid, supported products. Even though they lost a large number of paying customers in this move, the people who actually need support are much more price-inelastic and are willing to pay the higher price for Enterprise support if the only other option is no support.