"You can not have read much about trusted computing, and in particular trusted network connect. Without the proper TCPA signatures, Linux won't be able to fake being a Windows box."
There was a good article a while back by an IBMer responsible for the TCPA Linux patch. TNC, he said, is only useful for extremely homogenous enterprises and would be useless for anything like DRM or what you're describing.
TCPA is not intended to be secure against the owner: it is possible to coax the manufacturer key out of the TCPA chip fairly easily, meaning you have complete freedom to forge TNC for your box.
France is a sovereign nation. It is recognized as such by pretty much every other country in the world. The French Parliament can pass whatever laws it wants, and, unless they violate the French Constitution, they are the law of the land. End of story.
According to the EU's founding treaties, France is supposed to pass a law that implements the EU Copyright Directive because the EU Parliament has passed it, but the EU can't force France to do so. France will be in violation of the treaty if they don't implement the EU Copyright Directive. So what? That would neither be the first nor last time a sovereign nation breaks a treaty, and the EU will have to suck it up, expel France from its membership, or declare war on France. Somehow the first of those seems the most likely to me.
And by the way, there's no way to overrule this sovereign nation by taking the issue to an "EU Court", whatever it is you mean by that, because the EU Copyright Directive IS NOT LAW. It is a piece of paper telling the nations of the EU that they have to change THEIR laws, and that they're in violation of the EU treaties if they don't. If the movie industry whines to The European Court of Justice [http://curia.eu.int/en/instit/presentationfr/inde x_cje.htm%5D (as I'm guessing you mean by "EU Court"), all that will happen is that France will be assigned penalties, which it cannot be forced to pay, since it is a sovereign nation, and the only way the EU could force it to do so is to defeat it in war. Before you make about how France was overrun in World War II, remember that France now has nukes.
French law is French law, nobody can tell France what laws it can and cannot pass, and if you don't like this you don't have to live in France. Why don't you do 2 minutes of research next time before telling the world how ignorant you are of such a basic political concept as national sovereignty?
"What he pointed out in several articles was that by the early 1800's, when Darwin was sailing on the Bugle, it was already widely accepted that biological evolution was a historical fact, thoroughly documented in the fossil record. What was missing was a good explanation of this fact. People examining fossils could see the general outline of the evolutionary process; they just didn't understand how it worked."
They didn't "see" it. What they saw were a bunch of fossils that each looked slightly different, such that it appeared that those fossils represented a species changing over time. THIS IS STILL A THEORY! They are drawing _inferences_ from the fossils that they _observed_. One inference is that the similar but different fossils represent not completely separate types of animals, but rather the same animal changing over time. Another inference is that natural selection is the reason why it's changing. The fact is that similar looking fossils exist. The inference is that the fossils are related and that natural selection describes their relationship.
"I can only urge you to read a book like Inside Windows 95."
I've read that exact book. But it has been a while for me too:-)
"Windows 95 had 4 "essential" design requirements. It had to run DOS software (including drivers). It had to run Win16 software (including drivers). It had to run Win32 software (obviously) and it had to do for first two no slower than DOS and/or Windows 3.11 would on a 386 with 4M of RAM."
Windows 95 _did_ do virtualization for DOS apps. Windows 3.1 did too; that's why you could run more than one of them on those systems. It didn't work for all apps since DOS apps expected to be able to do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted with the hardware, and for the cases where it didn't Windows 95 simply shut down and loaded DOS to run the app. Nothing of Windows 95 was left in memory except a little hook to restart Windows when the app finished. It also had a separate shared address space for Win16 apps, which is the same way Windows NT and WINE deal with those apps.
"Firstly, I think you'll find the thunking only happened for Win16 apps (although it's been a very long time since I read Inside Windows 95, so I could be remembering wrong. Secondly, this 16/32 bit hybridiations was the sacrifice that had to be made for backwards compatibility. That's why anyone - particularly business customers - who *didn't* have any need for the additional legacy support Windows 9x offered, should have been running Windows NT. There was no reason whatsoever to run WIndows 95 if you didn't need it for DOS or Win16 support."
I'm fairly certain I remember reading in there that Windows 95 DID have part of its kernel implemented in 16-bit code, so while some Win16 calls mapped to Win32, other Win32 calls mapped to Win16. _That's_ where I'm saying MS was lazy. The Win16 programs had to be able to bring each other down; there was no way around it since they expected a shared address space. But there was no reason for Win32 programs to be calling into the quagmire through Win16Mutex(). They could have written the whole kernel as Win32 and provided the Win16 API as just thunks to 32-bit calls. That way Win32 programs would have no contact with Win16, and Win16 programs couldn't cause problems except among themselves.
"That's not strictly true. 95 could fall back to using DOS (ie: the BIOS) for hardware access in the absence of proper WIndows 95 drivers."
BIOS!=DOS. Any operating system must make calls to BIOS sometimes, and disk access can be done (slowly) using it. Linux will use BIOS for hardware access if it has to. After a little research (very little - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95), you appear to be right in that Windows 95 could still run DOS drivers, though. I didn't know this, but it doesn't change my mind. If I'm understanding this correctly, all Windows 95 did then was offer a way to run another operating system's (DOS's) drivers. That doesn't make it based on DOS any more than ndiswrapper makes Linux based on Windows.
"This was due to backwards compatibility requirements, not laziness."
No. It was a lazy way to do backwards compatibility:)
OS/2 and Windows NT can also run Win16 programs, but they do it right by using virtual environments. Microsoft could have reimplemented all the code it took from Windows 3.1 in 32-bit mode and run Windows 3.1 programs by mapping the 16-bit calls to their 32-bit counterparts. This would have made it so that Win16 programs could only bring down other Win16 programs rather than the whole system, and 32-bit programs couldn't bring down anyone but themselves. This is, incidentally, what Windows XP still does.
Instead, MS decided to reuse Windows 3.1 code. Thus, a large number of the 32-bit calls in Windows 95 (including most of USER32.DLL) were simply thunks to Win16. This meant that any unstable program, 16-bit or 32-bit, could potentially bring down the system, since a hung program might tie up the single Win16Mutex(), causing any program that makes Win16 calls or Win32 calls that thunk to Win16 to hang as well.
"Do you even understand what you're talking about ? Look, i was not saying that windows 95 was better than Linux at the time, 95 is the worst OS that as ever existed. At that time linux was head and shoulders above it, simply because it was a Unix derivative. Windows wasn't ever a real OS, it was a GUI on top on DOS, which was also years behind Linux in term of Oses technology."
You may not know what you're talking about either. Windows 95 was NOT a GUI on top of DOS; DOS served the same function for Windows as it does for Linux with [loadlin.exe]. Windows has been mostly independent of DOS since Windows 3.0, just using it for a few system calls. The entire 9x line didn't use DOS for anything other than a boot loader. 9x still sucked, but that was from a combination of sloppy programming and the fact that they were lazy and reused a whole bunch of 16-bit code through thunking. This had to be managed with Win16Mutex(), and when a program crashed during a 16-bit call the entire system would slowly lock up: other programs would make calls that had to be handled with 16-bit code, and these would stall since the mutex was waiting on the crashed program to return.
> 20/20's John Stossel discovered that privatized water and electricity is safer, cheaper and more abundant.
What do you mean by "privatized"? The providers weren't regulated at all? I didn't say the government had to _provide_ water and electricity - it probably would be best if they didn't - I said they had to _regulate_ it. I'm pretty sure all drinking water in the U.S. is regulated by the FDA or EPA anyway, so there can be no such thing as "privatized" water. Furthermore, what do you mean by "more abundant"? That makes no sense unless you don't have running water or you're suffering brownouts all the time. And I'll agree that California set the price too low for a while:)
> If MS sold strictly direct-to-consumers, I'd be concerned.
Why? Retailers are in a different market. If one company were selling bananas it wouldn't matter if we could buy the bananas from Walmart, Kroger, or Tom Thumb.
> They don't. 12,000 retail companies are not forced to sell Windows/Office. They're asked to by their customers.
This is irrelevant. Microsoft is a big monopoly, and a lot of retailers sell their products to a lot of people who want to buy them. So?
Monopolies are inefficient partially because they charge too much for their products. $450 or however much it costs for Office is a lot more than it costs to copy the disk. Same with $200 for Windows. If people who would be willing to pay for the cost of making the physical CD do not have the products because they aren't willing to pay what Microsoft charges, there is inefficiency in the market.
If you're trollling: Nice one, you got me to respond.
If you're not: RTFA
The link is not to a temper tantrum from a "techie"; it's to a blog, which links to a well-reasoned argument from an ITD lawyer who lays out both why Quinn was within his discretion as head of the ITD and why centralizing all IT decsionmaking in Massachusetts is a bad idea.
Quinn is NOT making a huge change for all citizens: the citizens can use MS Word if they want to, submit Word documents to the Commonwealth if they want to, and receive Word documents from the Commonwealth if they request that format. All this says is that when the Commonwealth goes to archive these documents, it will archive them in ODF 1.0 or in PDF 1.5.
You do not understand basic economics. A monopoly can certainly occur without force due to, for example, economies of scale.
A good example of a natural monopoly is the market for electricity and water. A monopoly can most efficiently deliver these services, so a free market will result in a monopoly. No government involvement is needed for the monopoly to occur.
Government regulation _is_ needed, however, if electricity and water to be priced at economically efficient levels. A private monopoly will price electricity and water at the profit-maximizing level, which because of monopoly power is higher than the price should be from a social standpoint.
Okay, sorry I took you as a troll, and namecalling was uncalled for. I was in a bad mood at the time. No wonder I have bad karma:)
I still disagree with you. Common carrier as such wasn't what I meant to say, though. You're right in that they probably couldn't be considered a common carrier.
They _still_ wouldn't be liable, though, because the Wikipedia Foundation isn't the organization making the libellous claim. Some user or IP editor is. Wikipedia is publishing what they wrote, but they have in their legal disclaimer page and in the page history basically that "Wikipedia Foundation didn't write this. Whoever made the edit wrote this. We're just relaying what they wrote."
It's basically like if some woman falsely claims President Bush raped her and the New York Times reported, "WOMAN CLAIMS PRESIDENT BUSH RAPED HER". Jane is doing this maliciously. She knows she wasn't raped; she just hates Bush. Would Bush have a case against Jane if he could prove he didn't rape her and she knew he hadn't raped her when she made the claim? Hell yes. Would he have a case against the New York Times? Hell no.
Same with Wikipedia. The Foundation isn't liable because they're not making the claim; they're reporting that an editor is, and they'll even tell you which editor. If you want to sue the editor for libel, go ahead. Wikipedia even gave Seigenthaler the IP of the editor, and if he wanted to sue he could file a Doe lawsuit and subpoena the ISP. He couldn't sue Wikipedia; Wikipedia was just relating to the public what the IP editor said. They're not claiming the IP editor is right.
You said elsewhere you live on a 3-acre plot of land. Are you a farmer? If so, you should know that the federal government STILL subsidizes farming, so despite your hatred of taxes you are personally benefitting from them at the expense of the rest of society.
"Give to Ceasar what is Ceasar's, and give to God what is God's.
Everything is God's."
Ummm, then why did Jesus SPECIFICALLY SAY that the coin belonged to Caesar and to give it to him.
By the way, if you don't pay taxes and you make more than the poverty cutoff, you are committing tax fraud and thus are still a criminal, despite your claim elsewhere to the contrary.
"No, because once the pasture is overgrazed it dies off and the ecology of the area changes, thus ending it's usability for anyone."
Ending its usability for everyone? Well, I'm sure the millions of people living there right now would disagree. It might not be as good farmland as it used to be, but it's still livable (and still farmable through irrigation, actually).
My point was that spillover costs, of which the tragedy of the commons is an instance, doesn't eliminate the entire benefit of something. The tragedy of the commons is a problem, and wireless networks may in the future suffer from it, but we will still be in a better world than if 802.11{A,B,G} devices were never sold. The solution isn't to hold back the technology or ban its sale. The solution _might_ be to tax it or force operators to purchase licenses from the FCC, but I think the overhead from those options is too high to justify it. The actors in the scenario of a wireless tragedy must perforce be geographically close to each other, so Coase's Theorem is likely to apply, and users of the spectrum may be able to solve the problem on their own.
Re:Let me know when it stops sucking
on
GCC 4.1 Released
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· Score: 0, Redundant
The best version of gcc for C++ was 2.95.3, and it _still_ makes me slightly mad every time I try to compile one of my old programs with GCC 3 and it spits out errors regarding my programs having a "void main()" instead of an "int main()". No good reason whatsoever for them to break compatibility with that nonsense.
Others have described this as "The Tragedy of the Commons." [econlib.org] Have a stretch of pasture where anyone can graze their cattle for free, and it'll soon be overgrazed. Have a stretch of the spectrum that anyone can freely use, and it'll become overused, so much so that no one gets any benefit.
Not true - everyone will still get some benefit. The total benefit will just be less than what it could have been if fewer people used it.
"The Intelligent Designer knew Adam would need a mate but Adam did not. If you ever have kids you'll realize that they have to learn some things on their own but you can be there to help them along the way."
An omnicient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent creator wouldn't have to use this tactic, unfortunately necessary for lesser beings like humans.
"There's nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist and believing in ID."
Depending on what you mean by "wrong", I would dispute that. Sure, it's not morally objectionable to hold these delusional and absurd beliefs, but it does indicate a complete rejection of rational thought and, imho, a desire to willfully close one's eyes to enlightenment. I find this to be a wrongheaded attitude, and it saddens me that there are so many people who would turn their back on learning so that they can retain the false comfort of delusion.
According to Google [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=South+Ko rea+unemployment&btnG=Search%5D, unemployment in South Korea is 3.6% right now. That's pretty low; it wouldn't be sound for them to embark on an expansionary fiscal policy. Moreover, even if they did, they should spend money only on the most useful public goods and shouldn't direct economic resources toward building a Linux distribution unless there truly wasn't one that met their needs. Building a local Linux distribution "to create jobs" is nothing more than protectionism, pure and simple, and would hurt their economy in both the long and short runs.
No, none at all. A company's responsibility is to its investors, not its employees, so of course the stock market wouldn't reward a company spending too much on employee amenities. Remember that companies compete for employees, and employees will refuse to work in a dismal work environment without being compensated with higher wages, so companies will provide the economically efficient amount of workplace amenities. And no, companies that don't grow aren't "ripped apart", whatever that means; they simply start paying dividends. Only if they are unable to make a sufficient profit that their stockholders believe the company is the best holder of their assets do companies cease doing business.
"Firefox would have to block plugins like that as well!"
The U.S. doesn't have jurisdiction over the entire world. European websites distributing Firefox can cheerfully ignore this ruling. This is bad, but not that bad. Plus, the ridiculousness of this will give our side more ammo in the anti-swpat war in Europe.
I haven't read the article, but I think the trial court fairly dramatically narrowed the enforceable claims in the patent.
This is bad for open source web browsers, but it won't kill them because open source code cannot be killed. If you don't believe this, look at DeCSS. The fact that you can look at it proves my point.
As far as the Mozilla Project goes, it might want to set up a foundation in Europe or another jurisdiction where software patents are illegal/unenforceable, transfer all U.S.-based Mozilla Foundation assets to the new foundation, and shut down the U.S. foundation before it gets sued. Mozilla Foundation probably has a fair amount of $$$ and may be seen as a target. Mind you, the Gecko engine wouldn't die if the Mozilla Foundation was sued and went bankrupt, but it wouldn't help either.
As far as the KHTML engine goes, there's not much of a problem: 1. Apple is a big corporation and can handle Eolas as well as Microsoft. 2. The KDE Project's assets are stewarded by KDE e.V., which is not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. so there is no problem.
"Any attempt to imagine what a selfish person desires, by anyone, will necessarily evoke their own desires. When you ask yourself 'what does a selfish person desire' or any question at all, where does the answer come from? Unless you believe that some external force provides these answers, the only possible origin is your own consciousness. The answer supplied by your own consciousness to the question 'that does a selfish person desire' can be nothing but what you desire and not someone else."
Consciousness (I'll assume we both know what it means) is the source of the answers to those questions. However, the answers don't necessarily come from one's own desires; the answer can be gleaned from observing how other people, who are selfish, behave, or even by imagining how a hypothetical Iago woud act. I let you define selfishness, but now you have to stick with the definition you chose. If you defined selfish as "originating from the self", I would agree with you that all desires are selfish, but you would be meaning something different. You are trying to use both definitions at once and are thus committing a logical fallacy.
"Instead of 'it rests' let's go with 'it's comprised of.' Again, poor choice of words, but if you were interested in understanding my arguments as much as attempting to defeat them, this would be obvious."
I am interested in understanding your arguments. I think I see what you mean, but believe you are getting there by changing definitions midstream, which you can't do. Yes, every desire comes from the self, but every desire isn't necessarily aimed at furthering the self. Do you see what I'm saying?
"Yes, the dictionary definition is exactly what I said, only leaving room for another reality wherein it is possible not to be selfish. I write with the knowledge that everyone is selfish. This doesn't automatically make my argument circular, it only makes me consistent. If I attempted to write from any other point of view than my own, I would be demonstrating that very 'startling disconnect from reality' I abhor, and would be implicitly maintaining a contradiction."
It is possible to consciously force oneself to temporarily disregard an assumption/bias. This isn't maintaining a contradiction; believing two contradictory things is indeed bad. However, it is disregarding something you know to be true in order to prove it true independent of taking it as an axiom. A lot of my argument has been trying to prove to you that there is an inconsistency in believing that everyone is selfish and simultaneously believing that private charity exists and that neither I nor most other people would act in a purely selfish manner.
"The context of this discussion is the concepts of selfishness and altruism. That you mention reflexes, which have nothing to do with how we make choices, suggests that you make no distinction between not only impulsive whim and conscious choice, but between your conscious mind and the nerve-endings in your knee caps."
Well, that was a little shallow I'll admit. I was trying to show that everything doesn't take place in the consciousness, but we haven't even defined consciousness. Is someone who is sleepwalking conscious? Let's just drop this point; don't quote the dictionary on consciousness since it will simply use equally vague words to define it.
"When you divorce an argument of its context by considering each clause in a vacuum (answering one cohesive thought in several quotes, replacing semi-colons with periods, etc), you lose its meaning, and additionally, confess that certain levels of abstract thought are inaccessible to you. Try answering each paragraph."
I don't respond to pure nonsense. If I have still not responded to part of your actual argument, please tell me and I will do so now. I assure you that abstract thought is not beyond my capacity. You, however, since you so much abhor a "startling disconnect from reality", admit that you cannot disregard your own assumptions long enough to prove them to yourself or anyone else. The inability to prove anything you feel strongly about is a sign of extremely shallow thinking.
By the way, this discussion will no doubt be archived soon, so perhaps we should consider this in our journals.
Such as what? Rules of a game aren't copyrightable. See [http://www.ipr-helpdesk.org/guias/imprimible/cuer po.jsp?guia=guia1&len=en&tipo=html%5D. They created their own code, designed their own art (heck, the tilesets aren't even that similar), and wrote their own documentation and strategy guides. All the games share are similar rules. If that's not what you meant by "intrinsic elements", please be more specific.
Slashdot Mirror
> I wonder if Lynx runs under XP?
Yes: [http://www.fredlwm.hpg.ig.com.br/cygwin/lynx/%5D
With a packet driver it'll even run under DOS.
"You can not have read much about trusted computing, and in particular trusted network connect. Without the proper TCPA signatures, Linux won't be able to fake being a Windows box."
There was a good article a while back by an IBMer responsible for the TCPA Linux patch. TNC, he said, is only useful for extremely homogenous enterprises and would be useless for anything like DRM or what you're describing.
TCPA is not intended to be secure against the owner: it is possible to coax the manufacturer key out of the TCPA chip fairly easily, meaning you have complete freedom to forge TNC for your box.
France is a sovereign nation. It is recognized as such by pretty much every other country in the world. The French Parliament can pass whatever laws it wants, and, unless they violate the French Constitution, they are the law of the land. End of story.
e x_cje.htm%5D (as I'm guessing you mean by "EU Court"), all that will happen is that France will be assigned penalties, which it cannot be forced to pay, since it is a sovereign nation, and the only way the EU could force it to do so is to defeat it in war. Before you make about how France was overrun in World War II, remember that France now has nukes.
According to the EU's founding treaties, France is supposed to pass a law that implements the EU Copyright Directive because the EU Parliament has passed it, but the EU can't force France to do so. France will be in violation of the treaty if they don't implement the EU Copyright Directive. So what? That would neither be the first nor last time a sovereign nation breaks a treaty, and the EU will have to suck it up, expel France from its membership, or declare war on France. Somehow the first of those seems the most likely to me.
And by the way, there's no way to overrule this sovereign nation by taking the issue to an "EU Court", whatever it is you mean by that, because the EU Copyright Directive IS NOT LAW. It is a piece of paper telling the nations of the EU that they have to change THEIR laws, and that they're in violation of the EU treaties if they don't. If the movie industry whines to The European Court of Justice [http://curia.eu.int/en/instit/presentationfr/ind
French law is French law, nobody can tell France what laws it can and cannot pass, and if you don't like this you don't have to live in France. Why don't you do 2 minutes of research next time before telling the world how ignorant you are of such a basic political concept as national sovereignty?
"What he pointed out in several articles was that by the early 1800's, when Darwin was sailing on the Bugle, it was already widely accepted that biological evolution was a historical fact, thoroughly documented in the fossil record. What was missing was a good explanation of this fact. People examining fossils could see the general outline of the evolutionary process; they just didn't understand how it worked."
They didn't "see" it. What they saw were a bunch of fossils that each looked slightly different, such that it appeared that those fossils represented a species changing over time. THIS IS STILL A THEORY! They are drawing _inferences_ from the fossils that they _observed_. One inference is that the similar but different fossils represent not completely separate types of animals, but rather the same animal changing over time. Another inference is that natural selection is the reason why it's changing. The fact is that similar looking fossils exist. The inference is that the fossils are related and that natural selection describes their relationship.
"I can only urge you to read a book like Inside Windows 95."
:-)
q 0201.html%5D. OS/2 only required a 386 and 4 MB of RAM, yet it was able to run Win16 and DOS apps as well.
I've read that exact book. But it has been a while for me too
"Windows 95 had 4 "essential" design requirements. It had to run DOS software (including drivers). It had to run Win16 software (including drivers). It had to run Win32 software (obviously) and it had to do for first two no slower than DOS and/or Windows 3.11 would on a 386 with 4M of RAM."
Windows 95 _did_ do virtualization for DOS apps. Windows 3.1 did too; that's why you could run more than one of them on those systems. It didn't work for all apps since DOS apps expected to be able to do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted with the hardware, and for the cases where it didn't Windows 95 simply shut down and loaded DOS to run the app. Nothing of Windows 95 was left in memory except a little hook to restart Windows when the app finished. It also had a separate shared address space for Win16 apps, which is the same way Windows NT and WINE deal with those apps.
As far as performance requirements, look at this website: [http://www.mit.edu:8001/activities/os2/faq/os2fa
"Firstly, I think you'll find the thunking only happened for Win16 apps (although it's been a very long time since I read Inside Windows 95, so I could be remembering wrong. Secondly, this 16/32 bit hybridiations was the sacrifice that had to be made for backwards compatibility. That's why anyone - particularly business customers - who *didn't* have any need for the additional legacy support Windows 9x offered, should have been running Windows NT. There was no reason whatsoever to run WIndows 95 if you didn't need it for DOS or Win16 support."
I'm fairly certain I remember reading in there that Windows 95 DID have part of its kernel implemented in 16-bit code, so while some Win16 calls mapped to Win32, other Win32 calls mapped to Win16. _That's_ where I'm saying MS was lazy. The Win16 programs had to be able to bring each other down; there was no way around it since they expected a shared address space. But there was no reason for Win32 programs to be calling into the quagmire through Win16Mutex(). They could have written the whole kernel as Win32 and provided the Win16 API as just thunks to 32-bit calls. That way Win32 programs would have no contact with Win16, and Win16 programs couldn't cause problems except among themselves.
"That's not strictly true. 95 could fall back to using DOS (ie: the BIOS) for hardware access in the absence of proper WIndows 95 drivers."
:)
BIOS!=DOS. Any operating system must make calls to BIOS sometimes, and disk access can be done (slowly) using it. Linux will use BIOS for hardware access if it has to. After a little research (very little - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95), you appear to be right in that Windows 95 could still run DOS drivers, though. I didn't know this, but it doesn't change my mind. If I'm understanding this correctly, all Windows 95 did then was offer a way to run another operating system's (DOS's) drivers. That doesn't make it based on DOS any more than ndiswrapper makes Linux based on Windows.
"This was due to backwards compatibility requirements, not laziness."
No. It was a lazy way to do backwards compatibility
OS/2 and Windows NT can also run Win16 programs, but they do it right by using virtual environments. Microsoft could have reimplemented all the code it took from Windows 3.1 in 32-bit mode and run Windows 3.1 programs by mapping the 16-bit calls to their 32-bit counterparts. This would have made it so that Win16 programs could only bring down other Win16 programs rather than the whole system, and 32-bit programs couldn't bring down anyone but themselves. This is, incidentally, what Windows XP still does.
Instead, MS decided to reuse Windows 3.1 code. Thus, a large number of the 32-bit calls in Windows 95 (including most of USER32.DLL) were simply thunks to Win16. This meant that any unstable program, 16-bit or 32-bit, could potentially bring down the system, since a hung program might tie up the single Win16Mutex(), causing any program that makes Win16 calls or Win32 calls that thunk to Win16 to hang as well.
"Do you even understand what you're talking about ? Look, i was not saying that windows 95 was better than Linux at the time, 95 is the worst OS that as ever existed. At that time linux was head and shoulders above it, simply because it was a Unix derivative. Windows wasn't ever a real OS, it was a GUI on top on DOS, which was also years behind Linux in term of Oses technology."
You may not know what you're talking about either. Windows 95 was NOT a GUI on top of DOS; DOS served the same function for Windows as it does for Linux with [loadlin.exe]. Windows has been mostly independent of DOS since Windows 3.0, just using it for a few system calls. The entire 9x line didn't use DOS for anything other than a boot loader. 9x still sucked, but that was from a combination of sloppy programming and the fact that they were lazy and reused a whole bunch of 16-bit code through thunking. This had to be managed with Win16Mutex(), and when a program crashed during a 16-bit call the entire system would slowly lock up: other programs would make calls that had to be handled with 16-bit code, and these would stall since the mutex was waiting on the crashed program to return.
> 20/20's John Stossel discovered that privatized water and electricity is safer, cheaper and more abundant.
:)
What do you mean by "privatized"? The providers weren't regulated at all? I didn't say the government had to _provide_ water and electricity - it probably would be best if they didn't - I said they had to _regulate_ it. I'm pretty sure all drinking water in the U.S. is regulated by the FDA or EPA anyway, so there can be no such thing as "privatized" water. Furthermore, what do you mean by "more abundant"? That makes no sense unless you don't have running water or you're suffering brownouts all the time. And I'll agree that California set the price too low for a while
> If MS sold strictly direct-to-consumers, I'd be concerned.
Why? Retailers are in a different market. If one company were selling bananas it wouldn't matter if we could buy the bananas from Walmart, Kroger, or Tom Thumb.
> They don't. 12,000 retail companies are not forced to sell Windows/Office. They're asked to by their customers.
This is irrelevant. Microsoft is a big monopoly, and a lot of retailers sell their products to a lot of people who want to buy them. So?
Monopolies are inefficient partially because they charge too much for their products. $450 or however much it costs for Office is a lot more than it costs to copy the disk. Same with $200 for Windows. If people who would be willing to pay for the cost of making the physical CD do not have the products because they aren't willing to pay what Microsoft charges, there is inefficiency in the market.
If you're trollling: Nice one, you got me to respond.
If you're not: RTFA
The link is not to a temper tantrum from a "techie"; it's to a blog, which links to a well-reasoned argument from an ITD lawyer who lays out both why Quinn was within his discretion as head of the ITD and why centralizing all IT decsionmaking in Massachusetts is a bad idea.
Quinn is NOT making a huge change for all citizens: the citizens can use MS Word if they want to, submit Word documents to the Commonwealth if they want to, and receive Word documents from the Commonwealth if they request that format. All this says is that when the Commonwealth goes to archive these documents, it will archive them in ODF 1.0 or in PDF 1.5.
You do not understand basic economics. A monopoly can certainly occur without force due to, for example, economies of scale.
A good example of a natural monopoly is the market for electricity and water. A monopoly can most efficiently deliver these services, so a free market will result in a monopoly. No government involvement is needed for the monopoly to occur.
Government regulation _is_ needed, however, if electricity and water to be priced at economically efficient levels. A private monopoly will price electricity and water at the profit-maximizing level, which because of monopoly power is higher than the price should be from a social standpoint.
Okay, sorry I took you as a troll, and namecalling was uncalled for. I was in a bad mood at the time. No wonder I have bad karma :)
I still disagree with you. Common carrier as such wasn't what I meant to say, though. You're right in that they probably couldn't be considered a common carrier.
They _still_ wouldn't be liable, though, because the Wikipedia Foundation isn't the organization making the libellous claim. Some user or IP editor is. Wikipedia is publishing what they wrote, but they have in their legal disclaimer page and in the page history basically that "Wikipedia Foundation didn't write this. Whoever made the edit wrote this. We're just relaying what they wrote."
It's basically like if some woman falsely claims President Bush raped her and the New York Times reported, "WOMAN CLAIMS PRESIDENT BUSH RAPED HER". Jane is doing this maliciously. She knows she wasn't raped; she just hates Bush. Would Bush have a case against Jane if he could prove he didn't rape her and she knew he hadn't raped her when she made the claim? Hell yes. Would he have a case against the New York Times? Hell no.
Same with Wikipedia. The Foundation isn't liable because they're not making the claim; they're reporting that an editor is, and they'll even tell you which editor. If you want to sue the editor for libel, go ahead. Wikipedia even gave Seigenthaler the IP of the editor, and if he wanted to sue he could file a Doe lawsuit and subpoena the ISP. He couldn't sue Wikipedia; Wikipedia was just relating to the public what the IP editor said. They're not claiming the IP editor is right.
Read the common carrier regulations, anonymous dumbass.
You said elsewhere you live on a 3-acre plot of land. Are you a farmer? If so, you should know that the federal government STILL subsidizes farming, so despite your hatred of taxes you are personally benefitting from them at the expense of the rest of society.
"Give to Ceasar what is Ceasar's, and give to God what is God's.
Everything is God's."
Ummm, then why did Jesus SPECIFICALLY SAY that the coin belonged to Caesar and to give it to him.
By the way, if you don't pay taxes and you make more than the poverty cutoff, you are committing tax fraud and thus are still a criminal, despite your claim elsewhere to the contrary.
"No, because once the pasture is overgrazed it dies off and the ecology of the area changes, thus ending it's usability for anyone."
Ending its usability for everyone? Well, I'm sure the millions of people living there right now would disagree. It might not be as good farmland as it used to be, but it's still livable (and still farmable through irrigation, actually).
My point was that spillover costs, of which the tragedy of the commons is an instance, doesn't eliminate the entire benefit of something. The tragedy of the commons is a problem, and wireless networks may in the future suffer from it, but we will still be in a better world than if 802.11{A,B,G} devices were never sold. The solution isn't to hold back the technology or ban its sale. The solution _might_ be to tax it or force operators to purchase licenses from the FCC, but I think the overhead from those options is too high to justify it. The actors in the scenario of a wireless tragedy must perforce be geographically close to each other, so Coase's Theorem is likely to apply, and users of the spectrum may be able to solve the problem on their own.
The best version of gcc for C++ was 2.95.3, and it _still_ makes me slightly mad every time I try to compile one of my old programs with GCC 3 and it spits out errors regarding my programs having a "void main()" instead of an "int main()". No good reason whatsoever for them to break compatibility with that nonsense.
Others have described this as "The Tragedy of the Commons." [econlib.org] Have a stretch of pasture where anyone can graze their cattle for free, and it'll soon be overgrazed. Have a stretch of the spectrum that anyone can freely use, and it'll become overused, so much so that no one gets any benefit.
Not true - everyone will still get some benefit. The total benefit will just be less than what it could have been if fewer people used it.
"The Intelligent Designer knew Adam would need a mate but Adam did not. If you ever have kids you'll realize that they have to learn some things on their own but you can be there to help them along the way."
An omnicient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent creator wouldn't have to use this tactic, unfortunately necessary for lesser beings like humans.
"There's nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist and believing in ID."
Depending on what you mean by "wrong", I would dispute that. Sure, it's not morally objectionable to hold these delusional and absurd beliefs, but it does indicate a complete rejection of rational thought and, imho, a desire to willfully close one's eyes to enlightenment. I find this to be a wrongheaded attitude, and it saddens me that there are so many people who would turn their back on learning so that they can retain the false comfort of delusion.
"...that will create jobs..."
o rea+unemployment&btnG=Search%5D, unemployment in South Korea is 3.6% right now. That's pretty low; it wouldn't be sound for them to embark on an expansionary fiscal policy. Moreover, even if they did, they should spend money only on the most useful public goods and shouldn't direct economic resources toward building a Linux distribution unless there truly wasn't one that met their needs. Building a local Linux distribution "to create jobs" is nothing more than protectionism, pure and simple, and would hurt their economy in both the long and short runs.
According to Google [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=South+K
> Does that make sense?
No, none at all. A company's responsibility is to its investors, not its employees, so of course the stock market wouldn't reward a company spending too much on employee amenities. Remember that companies compete for employees, and employees will refuse to work in a dismal work environment without being compensated with higher wages, so companies will provide the economically efficient amount of workplace amenities. And no, companies that don't grow aren't "ripped apart", whatever that means; they simply start paying dividends. Only if they are unable to make a sufficient profit that their stockholders believe the company is the best holder of their assets do companies cease doing business.
"Firefox would have to block plugins like that as well!"
The U.S. doesn't have jurisdiction over the entire world. European websites distributing Firefox can cheerfully ignore this ruling. This is bad, but not that bad. Plus, the ridiculousness of this will give our side more ammo in the anti-swpat war in Europe.
I haven't read the article, but I think the trial court fairly dramatically narrowed the enforceable claims in the patent.
This is bad for open source web browsers, but it won't kill them because open source code cannot be killed. If you don't believe this, look at DeCSS. The fact that you can look at it proves my point.
As far as the Mozilla Project goes, it might want to set up a foundation in Europe or another jurisdiction where software patents are illegal/unenforceable, transfer all U.S.-based Mozilla Foundation assets to the new foundation, and shut down the U.S. foundation before it gets sued. Mozilla Foundation probably has a fair amount of $$$ and may be seen as a target. Mind you, the Gecko engine wouldn't die if the Mozilla Foundation was sued and went bankrupt, but it wouldn't help either.
As far as the KHTML engine goes, there's not much of a problem:
1. Apple is a big corporation and can handle Eolas as well as Microsoft.
2. The KDE Project's assets are stewarded by KDE e.V., which is not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. so there is no problem.
"Any attempt to imagine what a selfish person desires, by anyone, will necessarily evoke their own desires. When you ask yourself 'what does a selfish person desire' or any question at all, where does the answer come from? Unless you believe that some external force provides these answers, the only possible origin is your own consciousness. The answer supplied by your own consciousness to the question 'that does a selfish person desire' can be nothing but what you desire and not someone else."
Consciousness (I'll assume we both know what it means) is the source of the answers to those questions. However, the answers don't necessarily come from one's own desires; the answer can be gleaned from observing how other people, who are selfish, behave, or even by imagining how a hypothetical Iago woud act. I let you define selfishness, but now you have to stick with the definition you chose. If you defined selfish as "originating from the self", I would agree with you that all desires are selfish, but you would be meaning something different. You are trying to use both definitions at once and are thus committing a logical fallacy.
"Instead of 'it rests' let's go with 'it's comprised of.' Again, poor choice of words, but if you were interested in understanding my arguments as much as attempting to defeat them, this would be obvious."
I am interested in understanding your arguments. I think I see what you mean, but believe you are getting there by changing definitions midstream, which you can't do. Yes, every desire comes from the self, but every desire isn't necessarily aimed at furthering the self. Do you see what I'm saying?
"Yes, the dictionary definition is exactly what I said, only leaving room for another reality wherein it is possible not to be selfish. I write with the knowledge that everyone is selfish. This doesn't automatically make my argument circular, it only makes me consistent. If I attempted to write from any other point of view than my own, I would be demonstrating that very 'startling disconnect from reality' I abhor, and would be implicitly maintaining a contradiction."
It is possible to consciously force oneself to temporarily disregard an assumption/bias. This isn't maintaining a contradiction; believing two contradictory things is indeed bad. However, it is disregarding something you know to be true in order to prove it true independent of taking it as an axiom. A lot of my argument has been trying to prove to you that there is an inconsistency in believing that everyone is selfish and simultaneously believing that private charity exists and that neither I nor most other people would act in a purely selfish manner.
"The context of this discussion is the concepts of selfishness and altruism. That you mention reflexes, which have nothing to do with how we make choices, suggests that you make no distinction between not only impulsive whim and conscious choice, but between your conscious mind and the nerve-endings in your knee caps."
Well, that was a little shallow I'll admit. I was trying to show that everything doesn't take place in the consciousness, but we haven't even defined consciousness. Is someone who is sleepwalking conscious? Let's just drop this point; don't quote the dictionary on consciousness since it will simply use equally vague words to define it.
"When you divorce an argument of its context by considering each clause in a vacuum (answering one cohesive thought in several quotes, replacing semi-colons with periods, etc), you lose its meaning, and additionally, confess that certain levels of abstract thought are inaccessible to you. Try answering each paragraph."
I don't respond to pure nonsense. If I have still not responded to part of your actual argument, please tell me and I will do so now. I assure you that abstract thought is not beyond my capacity. You, however, since you so much abhor a "startling disconnect from reality", admit that you cannot disregard your own assumptions long enough to prove them to yourself or anyone else. The inability to prove anything you feel strongly about is a sign of extremely shallow thinking.
By the way, this discussion will no doubt be archived soon, so perhaps we should consider this in our journals.
Gaah ... the link has an extra space on the end of it. Go to http://www.ipr-helpdesk.org/guias/imprimible/cuerp o.jsp?guia=guia1&len=en&tipo=html
"They copy much of Civ's intrinsic elements."
r po.jsp?guia=guia1&len=en&tipo=html%5D. They created their own code, designed their own art (heck, the tilesets aren't even that similar), and wrote their own documentation and strategy guides. All the games share are similar rules. If that's not what you meant by "intrinsic elements", please be more specific.
Such as what? Rules of a game aren't copyrightable. See [http://www.ipr-helpdesk.org/guias/imprimible/cue