You know why I would never try Safari for Windows? Because Apple had it checked by default in an iTunes update. I don't care how good it could be.
And openoffice was recently lumped in with a Java update, so I guess that software is now dead to you too? And don't hold your breath, but I suspect we'll see chrome lumped into an update for something shortly... google earth maybe?
I call bullshit. Let's say that the probability of a child surviving drops fourfold if the father does not remain in the relationship for a length for, say, beyond one year after birth.
"Silly, unfounded speculation." to use your words. We could just as easily speculate that the probability of the child surviving drops 100 fold or 1000 fold, if the 'family unit' is just mother + child. Depends entirely on the culture and environment.
Note that then the father simply needs to impregnate at least four women instead of sticking around with one long-term in order to make up, genetically, for his absence during child-rearing. For more attractive men (better genetically), or more powerful ones (in old times, also translating to better genetically), impregnating at least four women as opposed to just one is far from a tall order.
Only from the males perspective. The women, on the other side, would see a fourfold increase in the chances of their offspring not making it, and unlike the male, they have no way to balance it back out. So why would they choose to mate with the male who leaves them? Sure the FIRST one might fall for it... but the 2nd? 3rd? and 4th? Provided they know his strategy is to leave they will reject him and choose a mate that will help ensure the child survives.
And as for the whole 'stoning' thing... assuming that there is roughly a 50/50 male female distribution, then at least 3 males have been denied the chance to reproduce by the dominant males strategy. So they get together, and decide their best strategy at reproducing is eliminating the dominant male. With 3 on 1 the pretty-boy is dead.
Remember jealousy is a part of our genetics too, and easily interpreted as part of a procreation/survival mechanism.
100cm Wide? I know a third of Americans are Obese, but 100 cm is massive. I'm about average and only 45 cm wide.
Agreed. I wanted to keep it to round numbers. Where a reclined person at 50cm resolution would be 1 or at most 2 pixels wide. So 70cm or 100cm... really made no difference.
FWIW I was orginally going to convert to feet, and then decided to stay metric.
"50cm is like one and a half feet"... the average person is under 6.5 feet... 6.5/1.5 = 4.33... it just got needlessly messy to get to the same 8 pixels to work with.:)
But if you're limited to 50cm, that means that you're not going to be able to accurately identify a number of things. You'd be able to pick out a book on a table, but you'd not know what it was. You might be able to tell that that lady is sunbathing in the nude, but not actually see anything.
50cm is like half a meter. Most people are under 2 meters tall, and between 50cm and 100cm wide. So if you had a resolution of 50cm, you wouldn't see a 'lady sunbathing in the nude' you'd see 1x4 to 2x4 block of colored pixels. Try to draw a 'woman sunbathing in the nude' using 8 pixels. Now using 4-8 pixels draw each of 'borat wearing a g-string', a pig, a camel, a litter of cocker spaniels, a beige hammock, and a cardboard box and explain how to tell them apart.
For comparison the 'mario' in the original Nintendo "Super Mario Brothers" was around 400 pixels. And they had to dedicate the entire top 3rd to his head just so that he'd have a discernable eye, nose, and moustache.
We're not counting "serial monogamy" as a genuine form of monogamy here. After all, screwing your mistress tonight, your wife tomorrow, and your mistress again on Friday is just a very rapid form of serial monogamy...
No its not.
The two intimate relationships clearly overlap. "serial monogamy" is pretty much defined by the relationships not overlapping, not just the sex not overlapping.
Only a complete idiot would argue that having a wife and mistress on alternate evenings is 'serial monogamy' not 'polygamy'. Indeed by that logic the only way one could ever be polygamous would be if they had a threesome.
Its hard enough to switch people from IE to firefox. What makes Google think they can switch users to yet another web-platform?
Firefox doesn't really make the rest of the web run better. It does have some features that are compelling, and some people get it for the plug-ins, others get it to avoid issues with IE, still others get it for the ideology, or cross platform consistency, but there really aren't any websites that 'work significantly better with firefox'.
If google starts pushing new features into Chrome that integrate with their online properties, that will give Chrome definite advantages over other browsers when accessing these services, and make them a more compelling download.
You say its 'hard enough to get people to switch from IE to...Firefox' and that's true, but firefoxes biggest obstacle is visibility. How does joe average find firefox? And once he finds it, what does it promise that IE isn't giving him that he really cares about?
Meanwhile with Chrome we can anticipate google telling him to download it every time he searches, everytime he checks his mail? So visibility is covered. It will also tell him it will make all this better, sites he's already using will be 'better' and its free too? he'll jump all over that.
Next consider how many people install their damned toolbar? Clearly if google puts up a link and says 'hey install our crap, it will make your gmail / gdoc / gmap / glife better', people WILL do it. We've already got evidence of that.
And if Google does the carrot of dangling extra features for using THEIR browser, people just wont use them and migrate to other services.
That must be why Internet Explorer failed, when IE started dangling extra features... oh wait.
As long as search, gmail, etc, works in IE and firefox people aren't going to stop using the services. And yes they may well switch to Chrome for a feature carrot they can't get elsewhere. Or maybe users will just pressure MS and Mozilla to implement that feature so they can use it in IE or FF too... and google sits in the coveted position of being able to create defacto standards.
And if google can get a few other players like myspace and facebook to utilize whatever new features google stuffs into chrome that would just be gravy on top...
Let's say that we go 10,000 years back. Why would a man not screw around as much as possible?
Lots of reasons...
Inability to find good mates... Ideal mothers for your children would reject you knowing that you wouldn't provide for them?
Low chance of offspring surviving... mothers would be unable to care for your children, and unable to find mates willing help them?
Societal acceptance... e.g. The other men would stone him? Stone the women he cheated with? Stone his offspring?
Monogamy exists in nature. There are reasons for why it works where it exists.
And if love existed, who's to say that it lasted for long periods?
Indeed. Monogamy isn't necessarily 'till death to we part' in modern society at least it simply means not cheating on your partner. It is entirely possible to marry, raise a child, separate, marry someone else, and even raise another child, all within the confines of monogamy.
Hell when I was a teen, most of us were pretty monogamous; its not that we all married our first crush, but rather that our teen years were a succession of monogamous relationships of varying lengths, some quite brief, and punctuated with periods of being 'single'.
And yes some people who were supposedly 'in a relationship' cheated, and when caught it carried a stigma, one that I would say definitely impacted their dating prospects in the circles where it was known that they cheated (applied to both males and females).
Really, Firefox's competitor isn't Chrome, it's diluting standards based browser compatibility. If Google can come in and hammer out some market share and re-establish even further the importance for developers to stick to standards, it might be all that FF/Safari/Opera needs to really muscle over the 30-50% market share, and just enough credibility to keep Microsoft at bay.
Maybe. Or maybe its just going to be a vehicle to push their agenda. Want gmail to work its best? Use Chrome. Want extra features from Youtube? Want google docs to work better? Use chrome...
Sure its OSS and you can fork it, and integrate features into alternative browsers, but so what? As long as they are dictating what those features are and how they work, what do they care what browser you actually use? They are in the enviable and powerful position of defining standards. Whenever they want something, they make it a feature of gmail and their apps and implement it in Chrome, and then wait for the rest of the world to get in line...
I actually agree with the GP, languages are trivial, architecture is not.
The traditional response to that is: "Did you ever see architect try to build something?"
I'm not saying languages are as hard as architecture, but don't kid yourself, being a great software architect doesn't confer you mastery of any and all languages with trivial effort. You still need to clock in some serious time to master a language.
The US would be too afraid of terrorists attacking it to risk building it.
We used to be so worried about the Communists beating us. But now it's like we don't even care. Where's the fire?
Too busy watching American Idol while the economy tanks.;)
Seriously though, I think the biggest reason is that there isn't anyone to build it. Its too much money and too much risk of not being profitable enough or at all, and would require too much cooperation from the state and federal government (in terms of permits, granting rights of way to lay track etc) for private enterprise to attempt it.
Meanwhile the current political environment would make it impossible for the government to do a major project like this on its own. Critics on every side would dominate the debate shouting their political position that it should be privatized (republican), that its fiscally irresponsible, that the money should go towards schools, or health care (democrat) or that if the government has this kind of scratch lying around they should be reducing taxes (libertarian) instead of building world class projects like this.
After nearly 20 years of programming experience, I have come to the conclusion that programming languages are totally irrelevant when it comes to "being a master". The real art lies in being able to analyze the problem, and making abstractions to come up with an elegant solution. The rest is implementation, and wether you write it in C++, Java or bash, it all remains more or less the same.
Agreed. However, 'being a master' programmer and then picking up a new language is still going to leave you making noob mistakes with it. Additionally, some languages are enough of a paradigm shift (C++ to Lisp, for example) that the elegant abstractions you might make for C++ is like ramming a square peg into a round hole if you apply it to Lisp.
To put it another way, when you are a master with a hammer, every problem becomes one of how to bang a nail... if someone hands you a pair of pliers... you might find yourself using it expertly to hammer something.
You can know every little detail of C++ e.g., and still be a lousy programmer.
Agreed 100%. But not knowing the language you are using isn't a recipe for success either.;)
There is a phase in most programmers life (mine too) where they think "Cool, C++ has multiple inheritance, so I'm going to use that if I can". But after a while you'll learn to say "I'm going to use that if I really have to".
20 years experience you said. You should hit the point of saying, "I'm just not going to use multiple inheritance. Period." soon. I kid, I kid.
So, please, go ahead and learn new languages if you want, it won't do any harm, but you'll only advance as a programmer by constantly questioning your own designs and thinking about how they can be improved.
Exposing yourself to more languages is helpful for multiple reasons. It helps you learn to separate the programming problem from the language. Its much easier to think in abstract terms if you have multiple languages in your belt. And of course, having more tools in your belt means that when you approach a new problem you can reach for the best one.
The signature is not a security feature. Unless you want to train tens of millions of clerks in precision handwriting analysis techniques.
Think about it from the otehr side. Only a tiny fraction of them are ever challenged, and so they only need a few experts working for the CC company to look at them in the event of a disputed charge.
It's merely a token of accession to contract terms. Having people write, "yes" would be just as effective.
The signature -is- however legal evidence that you did accede to the contract terms. So if you dispute the charge, the first thing they do is review the evidence -- if you signed it, and the clerk actually remembers your face, game over. If you just signed it, and their handwriting experts testify that its your signature, game over.
If you genuinely didn't sign it, then your handwriting experts will testify that its not your signature, and you are in the clear.
Granted, you can abuse this by deliberately signing off handed and different than normal, and then disputing it, and you might get away a couple times, but they'll catch on and sooner or later they'll be able to produce a clerk who remembers you and surveillance tapes to back it up, and then your on the hook for a criminal fraud charge...
No, it is an attempt to prevent misleading marketing from unnecessarily driving up the price of meat. About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
Right. 50x the cost of testing. What is that exactly? If it currently works out to 0.1 cent per pound of beef, then the price of 100% tested beef is a whopping 5 cents more per pound.
There's a point beyond which testing leaves the realm of statistical cost-effectiveness.
Agreed. Isn't that something the free market should regulate. If people =want= it, and are willing to the pay the cost, even though it doesn't actually do anything, so what?
The only value of such testing is to trick a public which doesn't understand statistics into thinking they're getting some worthwhile value for the extra cost of that testing.
Perhaps.
But this is an economy where my shampoo is advertised to give me 50% more shine thanks to its unique formulation that infuses it with time released nutrients, and my gasoline should have 'techron' lest my engine become hopeless clogged, and cocoa-puff cereal is part of a well balanced breakfast -- why all the sudden now are they worried someone might say something misleading?
Just because Japan and Korea have decided to cave and let misguided public sentiment trump sound mathematical policy is no reason for the U.S. to follow suit.
Sorry. That ship sailed years ago.
If anything, I would rather we spend that extra money to teach people basic statistics as part of the required educational curriculum.
Its not -your- money. Its -their- money. The people who want to test all of it, and the people who want to buy tested meat. Granted if that somehow pressures all companies to do it, you'll end up paying for it... but hey, you spend more money on pointless packaging and advertising than the contents for half the foods you eat already... its the American way.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you in principle, but its absurd for them to draw a line in the sand on this OF ALL THINGS. There is SO much misinformation and FUD in marketing and advertising and it really should all be cleaned up. So it just comes off as asinine to finally draw a line in the sand and protect the american public from 'too much safety testing'.
as an early 80's baby, still just seems like magic to me.
You were born too late. The computers you could get from 80-85 machines were both instant on and silent. From the Apple's to the TRS-80s to the Commodore's.
Granted the disk drives / tape drives of the time were noisy clunkers, but still, those were external peripherals... the computer itself was silent.
Apple is only losing value, as the software it subsidizes to add value to its own hardware is being used by Pystar, without permission an in a way contrary to the license Apple is selling it under.
Then Apple has an easy out, they can charge OSX what its worth, and then they don't have to worry if someone buys it and uses it in a way they don't like.
Violating the GPL to use Linux to add value to your device would result in similar legal action from the FSF, as Linksys and Tivo discovered. Except that Pystar supporters in this thread didn't cry about that action because they have emotional attachments to the GPL they lack for Apple.
Using Linux to add value to a linksys isn't illegal. The violation was that they were distributing modified code without distributing the modified source according to the GPL that gave them permission to redistribute. By not following the GPL their right to re-distribute code was revoked, and by doing so they were violationg basic copyright law.
Apple is trying to TAKE AWAY a right to use that you have by default, that you are explicitly granted by copyright law. The GPL GRANTS YOU RIGHTS to redistribute that you don't otherwise have. This makes a huge difference.
We covered this already.
I'm only stating facts.
No. You are making them up.
As for your argument that copyright only applies to duplication: you're wrong. You can't remix and resell music you buy.
You can't remix and resell COPIES of music you buy. If you could somehow record your brother rapping on top an original led zepplin CD you bought, you could resell that.
More importantly: with software there is a SPECIFIC EXCLUSION IN COPYRIGHT THAT ALLOWS YOU TO INSTALL YOUR SOFTWARE. So that one copy, from the installation CD onto the PC is ALWAYS legal, doesn't require any special license, and yes, you are also allowed to "modify it" so that it works. Even the DMCA contains an exclusion that allows you to modify software so that it works.
Note that the same exclusions don't come with music. So music is a poor analogy.
Apple has no legal obligation to license its technology to competitors just because they want it.
Correct. However by selling copies of OSX at retail, where Psystar is buying them, they are providing them with all the licensing they really need.
Lets say you invented the DVD player. And then some other company approached you because they wanted to build a TV/DVD player combo device and wanted to license your technology, and you said no, you didn't want to license your technology to them. You could do that.
But if they decided to head over to walmart and buy your dvd players at retail, and then created a combo box with a slot to hold your dvd player, and then stuck your dvd player in it and then sold it as a package, there is NOTHING you can do about it. They aren't violating your IP. By purchasing a DVD player from you for each package they sell they have all the licensing they need to make and resell their packages. They are even allowed to 'mod' the dvd player to make it integrate more smoothly with their combo box.
If you buy a Potter book (and please don't just on my account), and then rewrite the ending to please a given audience, and then sell it as the work of the Potter author, you are not operating a book store, but rather violating copyright.
There are three separate questions there.
1) Am I tearing the pages off the original Potter book and then stapling my own ending on? Or am I selling copies of this book with my ending on it. There is a significant difference.
2) What constitutes 'modifiying'? Psystar advertises that their computers run an unmodified leopard kernel. It sounds as though they have redirected the updater to check with psystar before showing apple updates, to ensure compatibility. That's about as nefarious as installing a web proxy so that safari checks a 3rd party to make sure a page is 'safe' before loading the page... is this sort of software extension an 'illegal modification' or simply another software application.
People install software all the time that modifies the way their OS behaves, or adds support for hardware not supported by the os out of the box.
3) Selling a modified book as being the original work of someone else is almost definitely not a copyright violation. It might be a trademark issue, it might be a truth-in-advertising issue, but its NOT a copyright issue.
However, allowing Paystar to represent that it is selling a functional equivalent to an Apple Mac would be more than lost money for Apple,
Lost money based on what? People are paying for the Apple product they want. Are you saying they lost money because apple didn't get to sell them hardware too? So what? The customer chose Psystar because they wanted OSX and didn't WANT Apple hardware. If I buy your brand of pencil you don't get to dictate what brand of paper I purchase to write on it. Why should apple be allowed to tie these products together?
it would be a brand smear and potentially expose Apple to liability.
Again based on what?
but some small business or litigious retired couple that buys a Paystar PC being marketed as a cheap Mac will at some point demand that Apple solve their problems because they think they have a legal license.
1) We don't know that apple can actually invalidate the product simply because you chose not to use their hardware. Apple claims they can, but it has yet to be tested. So maybe they -do- have a legal license.
2) If its being marketed as a 'cheap mac' deceptively then it will be a trademark lawsuit brought against Psystar, not a copyright one.
3) When in the history of computing has using a product with unapproved hardware resulted in a liability for the vender? They have universally and invariably told cusotmers that their product is not, can not, and will not be supported on unsupported/unapproved hardware.
ie Apple may or may not have a legal right to dictate what hardware you use OSX with but they definitely have the right right to support OSX only on hardware they approve of.
4) Have you been to the website, do you see an apple logo? Do you see it being represented as a cheap Mac? It is clearly marketed as generic PC hardware capable of running Apple's OS X Leopard, that they will preinstall for you and include with your purchase.
The problem is that Paystar is modifying and reselling software it has neither a license nor any copyright to modify and resell. It also lacks any right to even to distribute Apple's software against the terms of its license.
You don't normally need one. If I buy a Harry Potter book, and then resell it, I don't need a license to do this.
If I buy a Harry Potter book, write my name on it, and then resell it (modified by me), I don't need a license to do that either.
It's no different than selling software that is licensed as NFR, or selling Windows OEM without hardware, or any number of other uncontested legal mechanisms.
NFR has been successfully challenged in court (not a supreme court precedent or anything, but still...)
Selling 'OEM without qualifying hardware' is another interesting case, because the legal conundrum falls not on the seller but on the buyer, because it states that the license isn't "valid" unless it was sold with qualifying hardware. Since the seller isn't bound by the license, if he acquires OEM software and resells it there is squat the vendor can do to him. (This has been tested by the courts as well.) Its the end user that has an 'invalid' license (assuming the terms even hold, as they themselves have never been tested.)
But there really isn't much point in going after them individually, now is there?
And Microsoft, for its part hasn't historically cared to go after the end user if they bought OEM windows without hardware. (They have from time to time cracked down on the reseller by taking away their 'preferred Microsoft partner status' or taking away a discount they receive on buying microsoft software... but really that's about all they can do. And as of late they have been very tolerant of OEM software sold bare.)
Apple's license also establishes the conditions under which they allow users to make copies of their software. Without a copyrights both Apple and Gnu's licenses would be toothless.
Except that you don't actually legally need a license to USE software that you PURCHASED.
And that's all fine and good, but if I buy a copy off the shelf, I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
Suppose you sell hammers, and then as a convenience to customers sell replacement / upgraded rubber grips for your hammers. What happens if someone comes along, sees those grips, and then decides they would work great on his hatchet, and so he buys a pile of your grips puts them on his hatchets and then re-sells them.
Do you, as grip manufacturer, get to squawk about how those grips are just for your hammer customers?
The fact that you made them, and sold them, shouldn't constrain what I do when I buy them, even if that isn't your intended purpose.
it also means the GLP can be dismissed by any corporation who doesn't want to follow it because they think they can make more profits ignoring it.
No that's not true.
If a company decides to ignore the GPL, their legal problems aren't really from violation of the license, but from violation of copyright.
Remember, by DEFAULT Tivo, Linksys, etc have no right to redistribute GPL code. The GPL is what grants them the right. So if they decide to redistribute without adhering to the GPL they are violating copyright.
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You know why I would never try Safari for Windows? Because Apple had it checked by default in an iTunes update. I don't care how good it could be.
And openoffice was recently lumped in with a Java update, so I guess that software is now dead to you too?
And don't hold your breath, but I suspect we'll see chrome lumped into an update for something shortly... google earth maybe?
It is not "like" half a meter, it is exactly half a meter.
Yours would be the 3rd reply that pointed that out.
The mario sprite is 16x13 pixels, or 208px. 46 of those are blank so you could say that he's only 162px.
Sorry, yes, its the 'super mario' sprite which is double height, 13x32 or 416, which I was referring to.
That's why you can fake attachment.
Yeah, because that works so well.
I call bullshit. Let's say that the probability of a child surviving drops fourfold if the father does not remain in the relationship for a length for, say, beyond one year after birth.
"Silly, unfounded speculation." to use your words. We could just as easily speculate that the probability of the child surviving drops 100 fold or 1000 fold, if the 'family unit' is just mother + child. Depends entirely on the culture and environment.
Note that then the father simply needs to impregnate at least four women instead of sticking around with one long-term in order to make up, genetically, for his absence during child-rearing. For more attractive men (better genetically), or more powerful ones (in old times, also translating to better genetically), impregnating at least four women as opposed to just one is far from a tall order.
Only from the males perspective. The women, on the other side, would see a fourfold increase in the chances of their offspring not making it, and unlike the male, they have no way to balance it back out. So why would they choose to mate with the male who leaves them? Sure the FIRST one might fall for it... but the 2nd? 3rd? and 4th? Provided they know his strategy is to leave they will reject him and choose a mate that will help ensure the child survives.
And as for the whole 'stoning' thing... assuming that there is roughly a 50/50 male female distribution, then at least 3 males have been denied the chance to reproduce by the dominant males strategy. So they get together, and decide their best strategy at reproducing is eliminating the dominant male. With 3 on 1 the pretty-boy is dead.
Remember jealousy is a part of our genetics too, and easily interpreted as part of a procreation/survival mechanism.
100cm Wide? I know a third of Americans are Obese, but 100 cm is massive. I'm about average and only 45 cm wide.
Agreed. I wanted to keep it to round numbers. Where a reclined person at 50cm resolution would be 1 or at most 2 pixels wide. So 70cm or 100cm ... really made no difference.
Looking it up after the fact...
http://www.morencyrest.com/sizing.htm
If this is to be trusted, it appears most people are 16-26 inches at the shoulder. (or 40-66cm)
It's precisely half a meter.
Touche.
FWIW I was orginally going to convert to feet, and then decided to stay metric.
"50cm is like one and a half feet"... the average person is under 6.5 feet... 6.5/1.5 = 4.33... it just got needlessly messy to get to the same 8 pixels to work with. :)
But if you're limited to 50cm, that means that you're not going to be able to accurately identify a number of things. You'd be able to pick out a book on a table, but you'd not know what it was. You might be able to tell that that lady is sunbathing in the nude, but not actually see anything.
50cm is like half a meter. Most people are under 2 meters tall, and between 50cm and 100cm wide. So if you had a resolution of 50cm, you wouldn't see a 'lady sunbathing in the nude' you'd see 1x4 to 2x4 block of colored pixels. Try to draw a 'woman sunbathing in the nude' using 8 pixels. Now using 4-8 pixels draw each of 'borat wearing a g-string', a pig, a camel, a litter of cocker spaniels, a beige hammock, and a cardboard box and explain how to tell them apart.
For comparison the 'mario' in the original Nintendo "Super Mario Brothers" was around 400 pixels. And they had to dedicate the entire top 3rd to his head just so that he'd have a discernable eye, nose, and moustache.
We're not counting "serial monogamy" as a genuine form of monogamy here. After all, screwing your mistress tonight, your wife tomorrow, and your mistress again on Friday is just a very rapid form of serial monogamy...
No its not.
The two intimate relationships clearly overlap. "serial monogamy" is pretty much defined by the relationships not overlapping, not just the sex not overlapping.
Only a complete idiot would argue that having a wife and mistress on alternate evenings is 'serial monogamy' not 'polygamy'. Indeed by that logic the only way one could ever be polygamous would be if they had a threesome.
Its hard enough to switch people from IE to firefox. What makes Google think they can switch users to yet another web-platform?
Firefox doesn't really make the rest of the web run better. It does have some features that are compelling, and some people get it for the plug-ins, others get it to avoid issues with IE, still others get it for the ideology, or cross platform consistency, but there really aren't any websites that 'work significantly better with firefox'.
If google starts pushing new features into Chrome that integrate with their online properties, that will give Chrome definite advantages over other browsers when accessing these services, and make them a more compelling download.
You say its 'hard enough to get people to switch from IE to...Firefox' and that's true, but firefoxes biggest obstacle is visibility. How does joe average find firefox? And once he finds it, what does it promise that IE isn't giving him that he really cares about?
Meanwhile with Chrome we can anticipate google telling him to download it every time he searches, everytime he checks his mail? So visibility is covered. It will also tell him it will make all this better, sites he's already using will be 'better' and its free too? he'll jump all over that.
Next consider how many people install their damned toolbar? Clearly if google puts up a link and says 'hey install our crap, it will make your gmail / gdoc / gmap / glife better', people WILL do it. We've already got evidence of that.
And if Google does the carrot of dangling extra features for using THEIR browser, people just wont use them and migrate to other services.
That must be why Internet Explorer failed, when IE started dangling extra features... oh wait.
As long as search, gmail, etc, works in IE and firefox people aren't going to stop using the services. And yes they may well switch to Chrome for a feature carrot they can't get elsewhere. Or maybe users will just pressure MS and Mozilla to implement that feature so they can use it in IE or FF too... and google sits in the coveted position of being able to create defacto standards.
And if google can get a few other players like myspace and facebook to utilize whatever new features google stuffs into chrome that would just be gravy on top...
Let's say that we go 10,000 years back. Why would a man not screw around as much as possible?
Lots of reasons...
Inability to find good mates... Ideal mothers for your children would reject you knowing that you wouldn't provide for them?
Low chance of offspring surviving... mothers would be unable to care for your children, and unable to find mates willing help them?
Societal acceptance... e.g. The other men would stone him? Stone the women he cheated with? Stone his offspring?
Monogamy exists in nature. There are reasons for why it works where it exists.
And if love existed, who's to say that it lasted for long periods?
Indeed. Monogamy isn't necessarily 'till death to we part' in modern society at least it simply means not cheating on your partner. It is entirely possible to marry, raise a child, separate, marry someone else, and even raise another child, all within the confines of monogamy.
Hell when I was a teen, most of us were pretty monogamous; its not that we all married our first crush, but rather that our teen years were a succession of monogamous relationships of varying lengths, some quite brief, and punctuated with periods of being 'single'.
And yes some people who were supposedly 'in a relationship' cheated, and when caught it carried a stigma, one that I would say definitely impacted their dating prospects in the circles where it was known that they cheated (applied to both males and females).
Really, Firefox's competitor isn't Chrome, it's diluting standards based browser compatibility. If Google can come in and hammer out some market share and re-establish even further the importance for developers to stick to standards, it might be all that FF/Safari/Opera needs to really muscle over the 30-50% market share, and just enough credibility to keep Microsoft at bay.
Maybe. Or maybe its just going to be a vehicle to push their agenda. Want gmail to work its best? Use Chrome. Want extra features from Youtube? Want google docs to work better? Use chrome...
Sure its OSS and you can fork it, and integrate features into alternative browsers, but so what? As long as they are dictating what those features are and how they work, what do they care what browser you actually use? They are in the enviable and powerful position of defining standards. Whenever they want something, they make it a feature of gmail and their apps and implement it in Chrome, and then wait for the rest of the world to get in line...
I actually agree with the GP, languages are trivial, architecture is not.
The traditional response to that is: "Did you ever see architect try to build something?"
I'm not saying languages are as hard as architecture, but don't kid yourself, being a great software architect doesn't confer you mastery of any and all languages with trivial effort. You still need to clock in some serious time to master a language.
Wow. Why aren't we in the US trying to do this?
The US would be too afraid of terrorists attacking it to risk building it.
We used to be so worried about the Communists beating us. But now it's like we don't even care. Where's the fire?
Too busy watching American Idol while the economy tanks. ;)
Seriously though, I think the biggest reason is that there isn't anyone to build it. Its too much money and too much risk of not being profitable enough or at all, and would require too much cooperation from the state and federal government (in terms of permits, granting rights of way to lay track etc) for private enterprise to attempt it.
Meanwhile the current political environment would make it impossible for the government to do a major project like this on its own. Critics on every side would dominate the debate shouting their political position that it should be privatized (republican), that its fiscally irresponsible, that the money should go towards schools, or health care (democrat) or that if the government has this kind of scratch lying around they should be reducing taxes (libertarian) instead of building world class projects like this.
After nearly 20 years of programming experience, I have come to the conclusion that programming languages are totally irrelevant when it comes to "being a master". The real art lies in being able to analyze the problem, and making abstractions to come up with an elegant solution. The rest is implementation, and wether you write it in C++, Java or bash, it all remains more or less the same.
Agreed. However, 'being a master' programmer and then picking up a new language is still going to leave you making noob mistakes with it. Additionally, some languages are enough of a paradigm shift (C++ to Lisp, for example) that the elegant abstractions you might make for C++ is like ramming a square peg into a round hole if you apply it to Lisp.
To put it another way, when you are a master with a hammer, every problem becomes one of how to bang a nail... if someone hands you a pair of pliers... you might find yourself using it expertly to hammer something.
You can know every little detail of C++ e.g., and still be a lousy programmer.
Agreed 100%. But not knowing the language you are using isn't a recipe for success either. ;)
There is a phase in most programmers life (mine too) where they think "Cool, C++ has multiple inheritance, so I'm going to use that if I can". But after a while you'll learn to say "I'm going to use that if I really have to".
20 years experience you said. You should hit the point of saying, "I'm just not going to use multiple inheritance. Period." soon. I kid, I kid.
So, please, go ahead and learn new languages if you want, it won't do any harm, but you'll only advance as a programmer by constantly questioning your own designs and thinking about how they can be improved.
Exposing yourself to more languages is helpful for multiple reasons. It helps you learn to separate the programming problem from the language. Its much easier to think in abstract terms if you have multiple languages in your belt. And of course, having more tools in your belt means that when you approach a new problem you can reach for the best one.
The signature is not a security feature. Unless you want to train tens of millions of clerks in precision handwriting analysis techniques.
Think about it from the otehr side. Only a tiny fraction of them are ever challenged, and so they only need a few experts working for the CC company to look at them in the event of a disputed charge.
It's merely a token of accession to contract terms. Having people write, "yes" would be just as effective.
The signature -is- however legal evidence that you did accede to the contract terms. So if you dispute the charge, the first thing they do is review the evidence -- if you signed it, and the clerk actually remembers your face, game over. If you just signed it, and their handwriting experts testify that its your signature, game over.
If you genuinely didn't sign it, then your handwriting experts will testify that its not your signature, and you are in the clear.
Granted, you can abuse this by deliberately signing off handed and different than normal, and then disputing it, and you might get away a couple times, but they'll catch on and sooner or later they'll be able to produce a clerk who remembers you and surveillance tapes to back it up, and then your on the hook for a criminal fraud charge...
No, it is an attempt to prevent misleading marketing from unnecessarily driving up the price of meat. About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
Right. 50x the cost of testing. What is that exactly? If it currently works out to 0.1 cent per pound of beef, then the price of 100% tested beef is a whopping 5 cents more per pound.
There's a point beyond which testing leaves the realm of statistical cost-effectiveness.
Agreed. Isn't that something the free market should regulate. If people =want= it, and are willing to the pay the cost, even though it doesn't actually do anything, so what?
The only value of such testing is to trick a public which doesn't understand statistics into thinking they're getting some worthwhile value for the extra cost of that testing.
Perhaps.
But this is an economy where my shampoo is advertised to give me 50% more shine thanks to its unique formulation that infuses it with time released nutrients, and my gasoline should have 'techron' lest my engine become hopeless clogged, and cocoa-puff cereal is part of a well balanced breakfast -- why all the sudden now are they worried someone might say something misleading?
Just because Japan and Korea have decided to cave and let misguided public sentiment trump sound mathematical policy is no reason for the U.S. to follow suit.
Sorry. That ship sailed years ago.
If anything, I would rather we spend that extra money to teach people basic statistics as part of the required educational curriculum.
Its not -your- money. Its -their- money. The people who want to test all of it, and the people who want to buy tested meat. Granted if that somehow pressures all companies to do it, you'll end up paying for it... but hey, you spend more money on pointless packaging and advertising than the contents for half the foods you eat already... its the American way.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you in principle, but its absurd for them to draw a line in the sand on this OF ALL THINGS. There is SO much misinformation and FUD in marketing and advertising and it really should all be cleaned up. So it just comes off as asinine to finally draw a line in the sand and protect the american public from 'too much safety testing'.
as an early 80's baby, still just seems like magic to me.
You were born too late. The computers you could get from 80-85 machines were both instant on and silent. From the Apple's to the TRS-80s to the Commodore's.
Granted the disk drives / tape drives of the time were noisy clunkers, but still, those were external peripherals... the computer itself was silent.
Apple is only losing value, as the software it subsidizes to add value to its own hardware is being used by Pystar, without permission an in a way contrary to the license Apple is selling it under.
Then Apple has an easy out, they can charge OSX what its worth, and then they don't have to worry if someone buys it and uses it in a way they don't like.
Violating the GPL to use Linux to add value to your device would result in similar legal action from the FSF, as Linksys and Tivo discovered. Except that Pystar supporters in this thread didn't cry about that action because they have emotional attachments to the GPL they lack for Apple.
Using Linux to add value to a linksys isn't illegal. The violation was that they were distributing modified code without distributing the modified source according to the GPL that gave them permission to redistribute. By not following the GPL their right to re-distribute code was revoked, and by doing so they were violationg basic copyright law.
Apple is trying to TAKE AWAY a right to use that you have by default, that you are explicitly granted by copyright law. The GPL GRANTS YOU RIGHTS to redistribute that you don't otherwise have. This makes a huge difference.
We covered this already.
I'm only stating facts.
No. You are making them up.
As for your argument that copyright only applies to duplication: you're wrong. You can't remix and resell music you buy.
You can't remix and resell COPIES of music you buy. If you could somehow record your brother rapping on top an original led zepplin CD you bought, you could resell that.
More importantly: with software there is a SPECIFIC EXCLUSION IN COPYRIGHT THAT ALLOWS YOU TO INSTALL YOUR SOFTWARE. So that one copy, from the installation CD onto the PC is ALWAYS legal, doesn't require any special license, and yes, you are also allowed to "modify it" so that it works. Even the DMCA contains an exclusion that allows you to modify software so that it works.
Note that the same exclusions don't come with music. So music is a poor analogy.
Apple has no legal obligation to license its technology to competitors just because they want it.
Correct. However by selling copies of OSX at retail, where Psystar is buying them, they are providing them with all the licensing they really need.
Lets say you invented the DVD player. And then some other company approached you because they wanted to build a TV/DVD player combo device and wanted to license your technology, and you said no, you didn't want to license your technology to them. You could do that.
But if they decided to head over to walmart and buy your dvd players at retail, and then created a combo box with a slot to hold your dvd player, and then stuck your dvd player in it and then sold it as a package, there is NOTHING you can do about it. They aren't violating your IP. By purchasing a DVD player from you for each package they sell they have all the licensing they need to make and resell their packages. They are even allowed to 'mod' the dvd player to make it integrate more smoothly with their combo box.
If you buy a Potter book (and please don't just on my account), and then rewrite the ending to please a given audience, and then sell it as the work of the Potter author, you are not operating a book store, but rather violating copyright.
There are three separate questions there.
1) Am I tearing the pages off the original Potter book and then stapling my own ending on? Or am I selling copies of this book with my ending on it. There is a significant difference.
2) What constitutes 'modifiying'? Psystar advertises that their computers run an unmodified leopard kernel. It sounds as though they have redirected the updater to check with psystar before showing apple updates, to ensure compatibility. That's about as nefarious as installing a web proxy so that safari checks a 3rd party to make sure a page is 'safe' before loading the page... is this sort of software extension an 'illegal modification' or simply another software application.
People install software all the time that modifies the way their OS behaves, or adds support for hardware not supported by the os out of the box.
3) Selling a modified book as being the original work of someone else is almost definitely not a copyright violation. It might be a trademark issue, it might be a truth-in-advertising issue, but its NOT a copyright issue.
However, allowing Paystar to represent that it is selling a functional equivalent to an Apple Mac would be more than lost money for Apple,
Lost money based on what? People are paying for the Apple product they want. Are you saying they lost money because apple didn't get to sell them hardware too? So what? The customer chose Psystar because they wanted OSX and didn't WANT Apple hardware. If I buy your brand of pencil you don't get to dictate what brand of paper I purchase to write on it. Why should apple be allowed to tie these products together?
it would be a brand smear and potentially expose Apple to liability.
Again based on what?
but some small business or litigious retired couple that buys a Paystar PC being marketed as a cheap Mac will at some point demand that Apple solve their problems because they think they have a legal license.
1) We don't know that apple can actually invalidate the product simply because you chose not to use their hardware. Apple claims they can, but it has yet to be tested. So maybe they -do- have a legal license.
2) If its being marketed as a 'cheap mac' deceptively then it will be a trademark lawsuit brought against Psystar, not a copyright one.
3) When in the history of computing has using a product with unapproved hardware resulted in a liability for the vender? They have universally and invariably told cusotmers that their product is not, can not, and will not be supported on unsupported/unapproved hardware.
ie Apple may or may not have a legal right to dictate what hardware you use OSX with but they definitely have the right right to support OSX only on hardware they approve of.
4) Have you been to the website, do you see an apple logo? Do you see it being represented as a cheap Mac? It is clearly marketed as generic PC hardware capable of running Apple's OS X Leopard, that they will preinstall for you and include with your purchase.
btw its Psystar not Paystar.
The problem is that Paystar is modifying and reselling software it has neither a license nor any copyright to modify and resell. It also lacks any right to even to distribute Apple's software against the terms of its license.
You don't normally need one. If I buy a Harry Potter book, and then resell it, I don't need a license to do this.
If I buy a Harry Potter book, write my name on it, and then resell it (modified by me), I don't need a license to do that either.
It's no different than selling software that is licensed as NFR, or selling Windows OEM without hardware, or any number of other uncontested legal mechanisms.
NFR has been successfully challenged in court (not a supreme court precedent or anything, but still...)
Selling 'OEM without qualifying hardware' is another interesting case, because the legal conundrum falls not on the seller but on the buyer, because it states that the license isn't "valid" unless it was sold with qualifying hardware. Since the seller isn't bound by the license, if he acquires OEM software and resells it there is squat the vendor can do to him. (This has been tested by the courts as well.) Its the end user that has an 'invalid' license (assuming the terms even hold, as they themselves have never been tested.)
But there really isn't much point in going after them individually, now is there?
And Microsoft, for its part hasn't historically cared to go after the end user if they bought OEM windows without hardware. (They have from time to time cracked down on the reseller by taking away their 'preferred Microsoft partner status' or taking away a discount they receive on buying microsoft software... but really that's about all they can do. And as of late they have been very tolerant of OEM software sold bare.)
All your arguments apply to DnD as well as WoW.
Trivially that's not true. You can lose DnD. If your party dies, you lose, and get to start over.
Apple's license also establishes the conditions under which they allow users to make copies of their software. Without a copyrights both Apple and Gnu's licenses would be toothless.
Except that you don't actually legally need a license to USE software that you PURCHASED.
And that's all fine and good, but if I buy a copy off the shelf, I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
Suppose you sell hammers, and then as a convenience to customers sell replacement / upgraded rubber grips for your hammers. What happens if someone comes along, sees those grips, and then decides they would work great on his hatchet, and so he buys a pile of your grips puts them on his hatchets and then re-sells them.
Do you, as grip manufacturer, get to squawk about how those grips are just for your hammer customers?
The fact that you made them, and sold them, shouldn't constrain what I do when I buy them, even if that isn't your intended purpose.
it also means the GLP can be dismissed by any corporation who doesn't want to follow it because they think they can make more profits ignoring it.
No that's not true.
If a company decides to ignore the GPL, their legal problems aren't really from violation of the license, but from violation of copyright.
Remember, by DEFAULT Tivo, Linksys, etc have no right to redistribute GPL code. The GPL is what grants them the right. So if they decide to redistribute without adhering to the GPL they are violating copyright.
Sprite-based games were obviously limited to that resolution, because with the technology sprites could not be scaled for arbitrary resolutions.
They didn't have to scale it, they could have simply let you see more onscreen at once. They didn't to keep a level playing field.