My point was that these are definitions with added correct political spin that would pass the chinese censors - NOT that they were real definitions for the words.
I sure doesn't pay to be subtle with this crowd - jeez.
The joke backfired because the "spin" definitions ARE real defintions for the words.
I was hoping others would chime in with other 'communist approved' definitions.
You mean like:
Due process - the presumuption of innocence until proven guilty, and the right to a speedy trial, unless the government suspects you of anti-government activity...in which case for the good of all citizens such people are immediately arrested and transferred to isolated facilities for interrogation and re-education.
Free Election - the process of electing leaders wherein each citizen is entitled to cast a ballot for their choice according to their conscience. All ballots are then duly collected and counted by the previously elected government. The government in power will be entrusted with the responsibility for establishing what the totals were and appointing the new leaders or reaffirming existing leaders.:)
That's like the people who think their computer is slow because they have too many icons on the desktop...
Ironically, on a marginal system that can seriously impact its performance. Just as opening a folder with several hundred items in it can "lag" out windows explorer, having a lot of crap on your desktop can have the same effect; except you feel it every time the desktop is refreshed, which can be pretty often.
Not all their product is bad. I've had plenty of success with macs and linksys too; but the negative experiences I had were difficult and time consuming to diagnose and ultimately impossible to get proper support for.
Linksys support simply flatly stated they didn't support macs; as if the operating system I'm using should matter with a router.
For example their WAP11 froze up everytime I tried to transfer a file more than 100 megabytes from a Mac; it was ok for small files, and it could handle large files if the speed was low (e.g. a download over ADSL at 150k per second was passed through it, but as soon as I did anything big on the WLAN where you'd expect sustained 700+ kbps and it would just lock up and I'd have to powercycle the WAP11 to get it going again.
In fact most of my negative mac/linksys experiences have been with performance or load considerations. The linksys devices always worked, but then were either unreliable, or became unreliable under load.
For example I recently swapped out an 8 port router that was causing problems with the macs -- the only symptom was that people were complaining about intermittent problems from both macs AND pcs -- they felt the network was too slow. (A complaint that many IT admins wouldn't even take seriously; it could be variance at the ISP, or just unrealistic users...)
It took a fair bit of effort to troubleshoot, because the PCs were affected too. And every isolation test we ran on a given component came back fine... so we were testing the wiring in the wall, the switch stack, hassling the ISP for support. Just a royal pain.
It turned out that when anyone was doing a sustained transfer from a Mac the router would crap out and start "stalling", and then everyone had problems until the transfer was done. But only on sustained transfers; on a short burst like downloading a web page or an email the macs got peak throughput, and got in and out without a hitch. But if someone started downloading a big file on a mac, or listened to itunes radio from a mac then the router would fail... instead of sustained transfer we'd get it in little bursts; full speed, 3 second stall, full speed, 3 second stall... and all the units on the network were stalled during the stalls.
So we thought it might be the ISP, but swapped in replacement router from linksys (same model) just in case we had a dud router, no improvmenet. Pushed back to the ISP...finally swapped in a netgear router, problem solved.
Linksys was thoroughly unhelpful throughout. And while, to your point, most of the time it works fine, and in a home envirnonment with a single pc or light usage patterns the issue might not even have ever been noticed, to me its just not worth the hassle, especially when they wash their hands of support it.
Dlink and the many others proudly proclaim mac and linux support; so they'll get my business.
Freedom: A right or the power to engage in certain actions without control or interference as long as these actions do not undermine the authority of the state.
For example, like your freedom to complaining about the government inside of a government sanctioned and isolated "free speech zone".
In the US these zones are roped off and out of the way and sight of anybody "important", in China they've taken it a little further -- they're in the privacy of your own home, in the shower, with the water running. The US will catch up soon, I'm sure.
Democracy: Government of the people by wealthy people.
Biased definition to be sure, but insofar as the USA is concerned, entirely accurate.:(
Communism: Government of the people by the people where the people collectively own all property and the state takes care of you so everyone is happy.
That is pretty much the textbook definition. China may not have really reached this ideal, but I can't really complain about the defintion.
Capitalism: An economic system based on a free market, open competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production as supervised and governed by the state
Linksys has a terrible track record with Macs. I'm not sure how a basic 8-port router can fuck up tcp/ip traffic but it managed it.
Their wireless products frequently choke on Mac clients too; and heaven help you if you turn appletalk on.
Usually upgrading or *downgrading* the f/w will resolve the issues, but I prefer dlink or netgear where I don't ever have these problems in the first place.
I tell you I was in your kitchen, in your pantry, in your medicine cabinet, in your wifes bedroom, in your childrens bedroom. I swam in your pool, and played with your dog.
I have a pool? Woot!:) Although I'm a little disappointed my wife has her own bedroom...:(
If you can honestly say you would have no problem with that, then you are a better man than I.
Alright, you make a good point. But I'm sorry, a guy walking around my house when I'm not there is not the same as a guy in another country with remoting into my computer.... consider this:
Now what if instead of him actually being in my home, I merely set up a couple web cam to watch my place while i was on vacation, but inadvertantly left it unpassword protected.
When I get home, I notice in the logs that some guy from the UK has connected to my webcams, and evidently spent a couple hours looking around my house.
I'd be annoyed (as much at my own stupidity as the "intrusion"), and sure even a little creeped out.
Should the government track him down and have him extradited to face prosecution for criminal activity with lengthy jail sentences, for "unauthorized access and use of computer systems" and other disproportionately "big" crimes?
This whole case amounts to little more than a guy looking in the window of the pentagon with a telescope. While he should have known what he was doing was "wrong" and "stupid", he should really be getting a slap on the wrist.
The real crime is the criminal negligence exhibited by the IT personell who left sensitive documents available on a totally unsecured server... or posted them on a pin-up board you could see through the window of the pentagon, to finish that metaphor up.
I can understand banning VOIP. Not that everybody's going to like it, but it's at least rational.
About as rational and popular as the idea of banning the insertion of Music CDs into PC cd-rom drives.
They're in the business of providing telephone service, after all.
So? That's like saying Home Depot should be allowed to ban you from using the tools it sells to build things it sells assembled.... I'm sorry sir, but before we sell you this hammer you have to sign this agreement stating that you won't use it to build picnic tables, door frames, kitchen cabinets, or anything else in this long list of products we also provide; we're in the business of selling these items and it won't do us any good if we enable you to bypass us...
It seems likely that a large percentage of the people who get this service will end up violating the agreement without even thinking about it, just because it's habit.
I hate quotes like that in news stories. They amount to "there's nothing happening right now, and I dont know if anything is going to happen, as the situation could change as soon as I finish telling you everything is fine". An eight-year-old could have offered us as much insight.
Blame retarded journalists. Seriously.
Journalists asks Geologist "Is it going to blow up? [I hope it will... that would be a big story...]
Geologist answers: [/sigh...Trapped. I can't categorically just say "No", because the situation could change... and of course the answer isn't "Yes", so I have to make some pointless statement an 8 year old could have figured out. Hopefully they'll clue in that there is simply nothing of consequence to report on that.]
"No. Its fine for now, nothing to worry about, but the situation could change."
Journalist: [damn... no story... except for that part about the situation changing... I'll report that....]
"Local geologist claims that while there is no reason to beleive there will be an eruption, he warns that the situation may change. We'll monitor the situation and provide hourly updates..."
Geologist: [Dammit]
Journalist: "In other news today, no terrorists were captured, but we might find one tomorrow so be vigilant... and the price of gas at the pump is reaching record highs but it could go down again if the situation changes. Stay tuned for an update on all of these breaking stories..."
How can they say something like this wiht a straight face?
I see where you are going, but you would be wrong.
Actually this is what they typically charged customers for it previously. Its not some magical artificial suggested retail price that nobody ever actually paid... that they plucked out of their ass; people actually did pay around 3k for a modest Blackberry Enterprise Server package.
I expect the educational version, and standard version (for "home use") will include ads in the near future. Only the corporate enterprises licenses will dodge them for any length of time.
I already despise the new acrobat reader for including that annoying pink toolbar button to take you to its online print services. Its just a matter of days before that button starts rotating other "services" I might want.
I don't expect it yet on the desktop itself...yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see "adcenter" be part of Vista's successors "home" edition user experience. Aeroglass ads...:/
:and has extremely little support for any useful formatting or metadata that you would want in an office format.
Huh? The formatting is there, and styles would appear to be kept. I've done thirty-page reports with graphics, styles, automatic TOC etc., and I don't remember losing anything saving them in RTF.
Perhaps he should have said 'meta-meta-data':)
The automatic ToC is a good example. The actual contents of the ToC are retained. (The "data"), the tabular formatting of the ToC is retained (The "metadata"), but the the fact that that table is an automatic ToC is gone (the "meta-meta-data"?).
Saving it to rtf is in some sense, like saving it to html, pdf, or even rendering to a jpeg image. Even if it looks perfect, it loses a chunk of the metadata describing how it works. The jpeg might look perfect, but when you open it back up to modify it - its just an image, there is no paragraphs, no table of contents, not even any text.
The same is true for rtf, html, and pdf... these all at least hang onto the text, and can usually manage to make it it *look* right, but it doesn't work anymore if you try to edit it... it won't know if the image X is supposed to be right -there- or if its supposed to float down as you add more text, the automatic toc won't update page numbers, and so on.
Finally... (and I don't know offhand if this is true of word-rtf or not), but I've seen several companies export to "open formats" while storing additional meta-stuff inside it... e.g. exporting to html, while storing a pile of meta-information in html comments... so the html looks right in a browser, and if you re-open the html in the application that created it is able to completely restore its meta-data -- by using the meta information it hid in the comments.
That sort of trick is actually pretty handy for end users; it allows for the format to be a lot more portable. People don't have to save in special formats to let others read the documents... its veiwable by any browser, and simultaneously the software is limited by htmls lack of meta support, because its stuffing the comments with all the information it needs to properly recreate the document.
The downside of course, is that while its viewer portable, the format is not INTEROPERABLE. The only application that can reliably *edit* the files is the application that created them. Sure another html editor can open, and see the contents, and even edit them. But then they become regular html files, and all the extra 'proprietary meta-information' hidden inside gets lost, and the original application treats it as a just an html file, instead of being able to 'automagically' preserve revision history, automatically updating tocs, vector artwork, and whatever else it had hidden inside.
The trouble is, sometimes the name brand really is much better. I've paid 45 bucks for a "brand name t-shirt" and seen "the identical shirt for $15 w/o the logo"... and some times it IS the identical shirt, but as often as not, after your wash them 3 or 4 times the $25 shirt has practically disintegrated, while the good version still looks brand new.
It may have looked the same, but the dye quality, cotton quality, stitching quality etc were vastly different.
In other cases, the name brand and generic brand are made at the same factory, but are not the same product. For example, film is supplied by the same company to both Fuji, and a generic brand... but they AREN'T the same product.
In yet other cases, the generic brand will be marginal product; made by the brand name company, but within looser specifications. Where the best batches are brand name, and lesser runs are generics. Soaps and detergents might be more variable in terms of strength, and ph than what gets labeled as brand name, etc.
Or it might be the 'same' product, but without the same Quality Control or where QC has looser guidelines. Sometimes its the same, but sometimes its not, as units that would have failed for brand name labelling are ok for generics.
When you buy a generic, you just don't know. Its often not just straight up artificial market segmentation. Most of the time generics will skimp on quality or materials, because they can get away with it, the unanswered question for most products is just how much??
Fahrenheit 9/11 was aimed at the "I'm too stupid to actually educate myself on policy, so I'll watch this movie by a fat sweaty retard and then ACT like I know what the fuck is going on crowd"
That "fat sweaty retard" made $12,000,000 making fun of the government?? What is retarded about that?
As for the movie, yup, it was over the top, but so what? (And yes I called it a movie not a documentary on purpose!) The pro-war-on-terror bullshit and rhetoric that spews from Washington is just as over the top, and has made Dick Cheney and friends far more money, at the expense of the American public both in dollars and in lives.
Moore made a movie, that's what he does for a living, that's no secret. That it raised some important questions is all the better. The worst thing anyone can say about it is that its been marketed as a genuine documentary; but on some level I find it that its part of the parody -- like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" being dressed up as a news show.
That some people take it as the 'gospel truth' is unfortunate, but even that is far less damaging to America than beleiving what the governments been telling you.
People don't watch "serious documentaries" in America. Perhaps the *best* way to generate awareness that something is wrong is with comedy, parody, and over the top nonsense -- at least its entertaining enough that lots of people will watch it, and if people talk about it, or start having conversations about just what was true what wasn't, and just how over the top it was, it will accomplish far more than some dry documentary presented on the history channel that nobody watched and nobody talks about ever has.
I will not admit that they are programmed to discard votes for Democrats or in any way systematically favor Republicans.
Whether you beleive it or not isn't the issue. The issue is that we shouldn't have to take it on FAITH that the voting process isn't being screwed with with those machines.
No democracy is safe from tampering if the voting process isn't open, if the voters can't be genuinely assured their votes are being counted properly. Otherwise the whole thing is a farce. Even if the "mistakes" were "innocent".
As for DRM, I honestly don't give a shit. I am a reasonably strong supporter of a free market economy, and if some company wants to sell me music that I can't copy, then so be it.
DRM and DMCA have nothing to do with the free market, and everything to do with *control*. Who owns your computer and its contents? Who controls it? Who has the right to run programs on it? Who has the right to choose not to run programs on it? Who has the right to decide the program can refuse to run if you own certain other programs?
It used to be *you*. DRM/DMCA have transferred those rights to external corporations, in the name of "protecting their assets".
Start down this slippery slope and its only a matter of time before your car dealership will have the legal right to come into your house and tow your car in for its regular maintenance, and while doing so they will check the onboard computer to see if its been driven over the limit and report you to the police and your insurance company, they will also log your driving habits, and will demand additional fees if you drove it more than 6000 miles since their last inspection, even though you "own" the vehicle; finally they will have the right to search your house and refuse to release your car back into your possession if they discover you have tools that would be capable of modifying the car in anyway, especially its logging and reporting functions, or even just capable of performing the oil change at home. (Which may be "unsafe", as you are not a factory certified technician).
Or perhaps next time you enter the mall you will be asked for identification papers, not from the government, but from the merchants association representing the mall, to ensure the safety of their employees and security of their property. They'll also reserve the right to search your person, and require you to have a microchip implant... and anyone that refuses to submit will be tagged and reported to the police as a likely criminal, or perhaps "terrorist".
Of course, you could choose not to buy those cars, or shop at these malls, or from members of these "merchants associations"...
To that I say "Good luck with that". I expect you'll be as successful with that as finding cable providers with commercial free content...
Frankly, I think these celebrities are a bunch of attention-whoring narcissists who want people to care more about this crap then they honestly should.
Frankly I think DRM/DMCA is FAR more important than most of the things celeb's protest about, and one of the few things they protest about that actually impacts them directly.
Uh... Tomb Raider was a beyond stupid movie. Think about it... all Lara Croft had to do at pretty much ANY stage of that movie to save the world was stay at home.
If she hadn't kept showing up in the exotic locales, to "solve the problem" or "contribute the missing piece" the window of opportunity the villains were seeking to exploit would have closed. No muss, no fuss.
Mortal Kombat, however, *was* bearable, given what it had as source material. MK2 wasn't though.
A much much better example of "movie of a game" that was actually good would have been "Resident Evil".
I disagree. "3500 registered users" is not the right metric to valuate on. First it merely represents the number of people who have signed up to a project that has *just* been launched. At least give it a couple years before using "registered users"; or use some other more reasonable metric like I did: households or even households + businesses.
And to address your specfic points:
For point 1 and 3 -- New faster technology is not that relevant, they're building "last leg" infrastructure. Assuming its 802.11g that's 50mbps, around 10x faster than any of the cable, dsl, or satellite offerings around here, and even 802.11b is faster than what most of us can subscribe to.
While I'm sure they will need to upgrade to a new technology eventually, they could probably run 802.11g for a decade or more before they need to do it.
As for your second point about ballooning costs. Right now its $40/household per YEAR, that's less than 4 bucks a month. While I'll freely admit that "government" in general is pretty wasteful, its going to take a LOT of waste before this is a bad idea.
Additionally, this is a very small city -- 28k residents is barely a city in my books; (and I should know I live in a "city" of 25,000). "City councils" for entities this size (and smaller) tend to be very fiscally responsible, compared to what might go on in a regional government, or even a larger city for that matter.
Lets see... 28,000 residents (lets call that 10,000 households) $2,000,000 outlay = $71 per resident ($200 per household) $400,000/year = $14 per resident PER YEAR ($40 per household PER YEAR)
So $200 setup free, and $40 bucks a year for wireless internet. Where do I sign up?
Around here I'd pay $300.00/year (EVERY YEAR) for ADSL "Lite", and I can only use that in my house, not anywhere in the city. Even craptastic dialup at $9/month costs more than this after a very short time!!
This may not be free, but it seems to a smoking good deal no matter how you slice it.
That's wireless internet for $40/household per year -- vs the $40 per MONTH I'm paying for internet now. (Not even counting my evdo usage...)
You're way too caught up in picking a career by the "current market trend". If you're great at what you do, there will always be a market for your skill set.
Mostly I agree with you, but you do have to keep yourself current. The market for human calculators (people able to perform long division, or compute logarithms, etc) for example is dead... no matter how good you are at it.
In computing today the market for VisualBasic 6, or ASP 3.0 is starting to die out; there will be a need for people to port and maintain existing projects in these for years to come, but I'd say new development is pretty much dead, and positions for these will become increasingly scarce...
But yeah, someone good at IT management, programming, gathering specifications, desinging user interfaces, debugging, troubleshooting networks, or WHATEVER, will be in demand for the foreseeable future.
I think its important to distinguish between a "natural monopoly" and a "monopoly". There is nothing natural about Microsofts monopoly. Microsoft is not creating or maintaining a natural monopoly. It is just creating and maintaining a regular monopoly.
In response to point 3, you are correct, the conditions that are conducive to a natural monopoly can disappear as the result of technology. The natural monopoly created as a result of all the copper telephone wires started to unravel as cellular and voip over cable arrived, and may disappear entirely if we achieve p2p wireless mesh networks... so I think we agree here. Except that microsofts monopoly was never natural in the first place.
Finally open standards are not really a market disruption in the sense that that they are only preventable in the first place if there are IP laws in place. Thus the REAL market disruption is IP law. Without those companies cannot enforce "vender lock-in" via technology because there is nothing stopping competitors from simply reverse engineering, or outright copying what they need to make it interoperate.
The only reason your car works with aftermarket exhaust systems is because there is nothing the manufacturer can do to stop ANYONE from taking it apart, seeing the interface, and forming an alternative that will connect in the appropriate places. Exhaust systems aren't "open standards", but the interfaces can't be protected either.
We've already seen a few examples of manufacturers that try to incoporate unneeded "software" into such systems to "sign and authorize" devices to try and lock alternatives out via the DMCA, EULAs, patents, copyright etc. Using IP to lock-out interoperability is only going to get worse as time goes on.
Yeah, I had a feeling someone would come along and score a few mod points with that angle... but still... there is a difference.
Each of those crimes you outline is separate, would be charged as separate, and you'd be convicted and punished for each of them "separately". (even if all in one trial).
The difference here is that the ToS is one "contract". Violating one term or all of them or doing it x50 has exactly the same net effect -- you trigger their reaction to cancel and ban your account(s) when they catch you, that's it. Once you've broken it you've pretty much exposed yourself to the maximum penalty. Breaking a few more of them doesn't really change anything.
Better analagies would be is if you are already going 5 over the limit... why not 7 over? or 10? (But there is a limit... at 150 over, you're breaking new laws, with higher consequences.)
The ultimate goal of a business is to maximize market share, with the peak being 100% or full monopoly.
True, but a properly functioning market would make that pretty much impossible. That is why a functioning market called: "self-regulating".
In addition, certain types of products and services lend themselves to few providers.
Agreed. Natural Monopoloies are a separate category from other monopolies, principally because natural monopolies *are* the most efficient way of providing those products/services.
However, natural monopolies must be regulated by law because the market can't regulate even natural monopolies by itself.
However, a natural monopoly is hard to create and even harder to maintain.
Quite the opposite, a NATURAL monopoly is easy to create, and maintain because its the most efficient way to deliver the product, if a product is a good candidate for a natural monopoly the market will force it to become one.
The OS market only has any tendancies towards being a monopoly due to OTHER artificial legal considerations -- particularly intellectual property, copyright, and patents.
Take those away and every tom, dick, and harry could start make some changes to windows, add firefox or itunes, and start hawking it as an alternative to Microsoft.
There is NOTHING natural about Microsofts monopoly. It was created thanks to laws creating *artificial* barriers to entry, and it must be regulated by further laws.
The market can't fix this one on its own.
Even the idea that the OS market inherently favours only a few players is flawed. The only reason this is remotely true is because people want interoperability. And the EASIEST way to acheive interoperability is to have as few players as possible -- if there is only one kind of car its easy to ensure a product works with all cars. However, there are other ways to ensure interoperability and that is having OPEN STANDARDS. There are dozens of mail servers and mail clients after all... as long as there are standards in place to ensure interoperability you can have have lots competitors without any major issues.
Possibly because having multiple active accounts is against ebay's terms of service....:)
Next you should just start selling yourself stuff and pumping your own feedback rating...of course that might look suspeicious so you'll need to open and nurture a whole network of accounts...
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My point was that these are definitions with added correct political spin that would pass the chinese censors - NOT that they were real definitions for the words.
:)
I sure doesn't pay to be subtle with this crowd - jeez.
The joke backfired because the "spin" definitions ARE real defintions for the words.
I was hoping others would chime in with other 'communist approved' definitions.
You mean like:
Due process - the presumuption of innocence until proven guilty, and the right to a speedy trial, unless the government suspects you of anti-government activity...in which case for the good of all citizens such people are immediately arrested and transferred to isolated facilities for interrogation and re-education.
Free Election - the process of electing leaders wherein each citizen is entitled to cast a ballot for their choice according to their conscience. All ballots are then duly collected and counted by the previously elected government. The government in power will be entrusted with the responsibility for establishing what the totals were and appointing the new leaders or reaffirming existing leaders.
That's like the people who think their computer is slow because they have too many icons on the desktop...
Ironically, on a marginal system that can seriously impact its performance. Just as opening a folder with several hundred items in it can "lag" out windows explorer, having a lot of crap on your desktop can have the same effect; except you feel it every time the desktop is refreshed, which can be pretty often.
Not all their product is bad. I've had plenty of success with macs and linksys too; but the negative experiences I had were difficult and time consuming to diagnose and ultimately impossible to get proper support for.
Linksys support simply flatly stated they didn't support macs; as if the operating system I'm using should matter with a router.
For example their WAP11 froze up everytime I tried to transfer a file more than 100 megabytes from a Mac; it was ok for small files, and it could handle large files if the speed was low (e.g. a download over ADSL at 150k per second was passed through it, but as soon as I did anything big on the WLAN where you'd expect sustained 700+ kbps and it would just lock up and I'd have to powercycle the WAP11 to get it going again.
In fact most of my negative mac/linksys experiences have been with performance or load considerations. The linksys devices always worked, but then were either unreliable, or became unreliable under load.
For example I recently swapped out an 8 port router that was causing problems with the macs -- the only symptom was that people were complaining about intermittent problems from both macs AND pcs -- they felt the network was too slow. (A complaint that many IT admins wouldn't even take seriously; it could be variance at the ISP, or just unrealistic users...)
It took a fair bit of effort to troubleshoot, because the PCs were affected too. And every isolation test we ran on a given component came back fine... so we were testing the wiring in the wall, the switch stack, hassling the ISP for support. Just a royal pain.
It turned out that when anyone was doing a sustained transfer from a Mac the router would crap out and start "stalling", and then everyone had problems until the transfer was done. But only on sustained transfers; on a short burst like downloading a web page or an email the macs got peak throughput, and got in and out without a hitch. But if someone started downloading a big file on a mac, or listened to itunes radio from a mac then the router would fail... instead of sustained transfer we'd get it in little bursts; full speed, 3 second stall, full speed, 3 second stall... and all the units on the network were stalled during the stalls.
So we thought it might be the ISP, but swapped in replacement router from linksys (same model) just in case we had a dud router, no improvmenet. Pushed back to the ISP...finally swapped in a netgear router, problem solved.
Linksys was thoroughly unhelpful throughout. And while, to your point, most of the time it works fine, and in a home envirnonment with a single pc or light usage patterns the issue might not even have ever been noticed, to me its just not worth the hassle, especially when they wash their hands of support it.
Dlink and the many others proudly proclaim mac and linux support; so they'll get my business.
Freedom: A right or the power to engage in certain actions without control or interference as long as these actions do not undermine the authority of the state.
:(
For example, like your freedom to complaining about the government inside of a government sanctioned and isolated "free speech zone".
In the US these zones are roped off and out of the way and sight of anybody "important", in China they've taken it a little further -- they're in the privacy of your own home, in the shower, with the water running. The US will catch up soon, I'm sure.
Democracy: Government of the people by wealthy people.
Biased definition to be sure, but insofar as the USA is concerned, entirely accurate.
Communism: Government of the people by the people where the people collectively own all property and the state takes care of you so everyone is happy.
That is pretty much the textbook definition. China may not have really reached this ideal, but I can't really complain about the defintion.
Capitalism: An economic system based on a free market, open competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production as supervised and governed by the state
Seems about right again.
What was your point exactly?
Linksys has a terrible track record with Macs. I'm not sure how a basic 8-port router can fuck up tcp/ip traffic but it managed it.
Their wireless products frequently choke on Mac clients too; and heaven help you if you turn appletalk on.
Usually upgrading or *downgrading* the f/w will resolve the issues, but I prefer dlink or netgear where I don't ever have these problems in the first place.
I tell you I was in your kitchen, in your pantry, in your medicine cabinet, in your wifes bedroom, in your childrens bedroom. I swam in your pool, and played with your dog.
:) Although I'm a little disappointed my wife has her own bedroom... :(
I have a pool? Woot!
If you can honestly say you would have no problem with that, then you are a better man than I.
Alright, you make a good point. But I'm sorry, a guy walking around my house when I'm not there is not the same as a guy in another country with remoting into my computer.... consider this:
Now what if instead of him actually being in my home, I merely set up a couple web cam to watch my place while i was on vacation, but inadvertantly left it unpassword protected.
When I get home, I notice in the logs that some guy from the UK has connected to my webcams, and evidently spent a couple hours looking around my house.
I'd be annoyed (as much at my own stupidity as the "intrusion"), and sure even a little creeped out.
Should the government track him down and have him extradited to face prosecution for criminal activity with lengthy jail sentences, for "unauthorized access and use of computer systems" and other disproportionately "big" crimes?
This whole case amounts to little more than a guy looking in the window of the pentagon with a telescope. While he should have known what he was doing was "wrong" and "stupid", he should really be getting a slap on the wrist.
The real crime is the criminal negligence exhibited by the IT personell who left sensitive documents available on a totally unsecured server... or posted them on a pin-up board you could see through the window of the pentagon, to finish that metaphor up.
I can understand banning VOIP. Not that everybody's going to like it, but it's at least rational.
... I'm sorry sir, but before we sell you this hammer you have to sign this agreement stating that you won't use it to build picnic tables, door frames, kitchen cabinets, or anything else in this long list of products we also provide; we're in the business of selling these items and it won't do us any good if we enable you to bypass us...
About as rational and popular as the idea of banning the insertion of Music CDs into PC cd-rom drives.
They're in the business of providing telephone service, after all.
So? That's like saying Home Depot should be allowed to ban you from using the tools it sells to build things it sells assembled.
It seems likely that a large percentage of the people who get this service will end up violating the agreement without even thinking about it, just because it's habit.
Unless they simply block the traffic.
Yes the press made a big deal out of it, and in some circles it was even important.
But I meant obscure as in "irrelevant to the operation of the pentium" for the general public.
Even when intel ultimately offered to replace all the 'flawed' cpus, few people actually bothered to take them up on it.
Yeah, strangely everyone remembers the FDIV flaw but nobody seems to remember this: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/24/ 1537231
;)
Pentium 4 has 64 flaws, Core Duo has 34 and counting...
At this point releasing a CPU with only one obscure FDIV bug would probably be a day to celebrate.
I hate quotes like that in news stories. They amount to "there's nothing happening right now, and I dont know if anything is going to happen, as the situation could change as soon as I finish telling you everything is fine". An eight-year-old could have offered us as much insight.
/sigh...Trapped. I can't categorically just say "No", because the situation could change... and of course the answer isn't "Yes", so I have to make some pointless statement an 8 year old could have figured out. Hopefully they'll clue in that there is simply nothing of consequence to report on that.]
Blame retarded journalists. Seriously.
Journalists asks Geologist
"Is it going to blow up? [I hope it will... that would be a big story...]
Geologist answers:
[
"No. Its fine for now, nothing to worry about, but the situation could change."
Journalist:
[damn... no story... except for that part about the situation changing... I'll report that....]
"Local geologist claims that while there is no reason to beleive there will be an eruption, he warns that the situation may change. We'll monitor the situation and provide hourly updates..."
Geologist: [Dammit]
Journalist:
"In other news today, no terrorists were captured, but we might find one tomorrow so be vigilant... and the price of gas at the pump is reaching record highs but it could go down again if the situation changes. Stay tuned for an update on all of these breaking stories..."
[I'm such a great journalist... ]
"Valued at $3000". By who?
:)
RIM of course.
How can they say something like this wiht a straight face?
I see where you are going, but you would be wrong.
Actually this is what they typically charged customers for it previously. Its not some magical artificial suggested retail price that nobody ever actually paid... that they plucked out of their ass; people actually did pay around 3k for a modest Blackberry Enterprise Server package.
Freebie version? Nah... lower cost version ... maybe.
:/
I expect the educational version, and standard version (for
"home use") will include ads in the near future. Only the corporate enterprises licenses will dodge them for any length of time.
I already despise the new acrobat reader for including that annoying pink toolbar button to take you to its online print services. Its just a matter of days before that button starts rotating other "services" I might want.
I don't expect it yet on the desktop itself...yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see "adcenter" be part of Vista's successors "home" edition user experience. Aeroglass ads...
:and has extremely little support for any useful formatting or metadata that you would want in an office format.
:)
Huh? The formatting is there, and styles would appear to be kept. I've done thirty-page reports with graphics, styles, automatic TOC etc., and I don't remember losing anything saving them in RTF.
Perhaps he should have said 'meta-meta-data'
The automatic ToC is a good example. The actual contents of the ToC are retained. (The "data"), the tabular formatting of the ToC is retained (The "metadata"), but the the fact that that table is an automatic ToC is gone (the "meta-meta-data"?).
Saving it to rtf is in some sense, like saving it to html, pdf, or even rendering to a jpeg image. Even if it looks perfect, it loses a chunk of the metadata describing how it works. The jpeg might look perfect, but when you open it back up to modify it - its just an image, there is no paragraphs, no table of contents, not even any text.
The same is true for rtf, html, and pdf... these all at least hang onto the text, and can usually manage to make it it *look* right, but it doesn't work anymore if you try to edit it... it won't know if the image X is supposed to be right -there- or if its supposed to float down as you add more text, the automatic toc won't update page numbers, and so on.
Finally... (and I don't know offhand if this is true of word-rtf or not), but I've seen several companies export to "open formats" while storing additional meta-stuff inside it... e.g. exporting to html, while storing a pile of meta-information in html comments... so the html looks right in a browser, and if you re-open the html in the application that created it is able to completely restore its meta-data -- by using the meta information it hid in the comments.
That sort of trick is actually pretty handy for end users; it allows for the format to be a lot more portable. People don't have to save in special formats to let others read the documents... its veiwable by any browser, and simultaneously the software is limited by htmls lack of meta support, because its stuffing the comments with all the information it needs to properly recreate the document.
The downside of course, is that while its viewer portable, the format is not INTEROPERABLE. The only application that can reliably *edit* the files is the application that created them. Sure another html editor can open, and see the contents, and even edit them. But then they become regular html files, and all the extra 'proprietary meta-information' hidden inside gets lost, and the original application treats it as a just an html file, instead of being able to 'automagically' preserve revision history, automatically updating tocs, vector artwork, and whatever else it had hidden inside.
The trouble is, sometimes the name brand really is much better. I've paid 45 bucks for a "brand name t-shirt" and seen "the identical shirt for $15 w/o the logo" ... and some times it IS the identical shirt, but as often as not, after your wash them 3 or 4 times the $25 shirt has practically disintegrated, while the good version still looks brand new.
It may have looked the same, but the dye quality, cotton quality, stitching quality etc were vastly different.
In other cases, the name brand and generic brand are made at the same factory, but are not the same product. For example, film is supplied by the same company to both Fuji, and a generic brand... but they AREN'T the same product.
In yet other cases, the generic brand will be marginal product; made by the brand name company, but within looser specifications. Where the best batches are brand name, and lesser runs are generics. Soaps and detergents might be more variable in terms of strength, and ph than what gets labeled as brand name, etc.
Or it might be the 'same' product, but without the same Quality Control or where QC has looser guidelines. Sometimes its the same, but sometimes its not, as units that would have failed for brand name labelling are ok for generics.
When you buy a generic, you just don't know. Its often not just straight up artificial market segmentation. Most of the time generics will skimp on quality or materials, because they can get away with it, the unanswered question for most products is just how much??
Fahrenheit 9/11 was aimed at the "I'm too stupid to actually educate myself on policy, so I'll watch this movie by a fat sweaty retard and then ACT like I know what the fuck is going on crowd"
That "fat sweaty retard" made $12,000,000 making fun of the government?? What is retarded about that?
As for the movie, yup, it was over the top, but so what? (And yes I called it a movie not a documentary on purpose!) The pro-war-on-terror bullshit and rhetoric that spews from Washington is just as over the top, and has made Dick Cheney and friends far more money, at the expense of the American public both in dollars and in lives.
Moore made a movie, that's what he does for a living, that's no secret. That it raised some important questions is all the better. The worst thing anyone can say about it is that its been marketed as a genuine documentary; but on some level I find it that its part of the parody -- like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" being dressed up as a news show.
That some people take it as the 'gospel truth' is unfortunate, but even that is far less damaging to America than beleiving what the governments been telling you.
People don't watch "serious documentaries" in America. Perhaps the *best* way to generate awareness that something is wrong is with comedy, parody, and over the top nonsense -- at least its entertaining enough that lots of people will watch it, and if people talk about it, or start having conversations about just what was true what wasn't, and just how over the top it was, it will accomplish far more than some dry documentary presented on the history channel that nobody watched and nobody talks about ever has.
I will not admit that they are programmed to discard votes for Democrats or in any way systematically favor Republicans.
Whether you beleive it or not isn't the issue. The issue is that we shouldn't have to take it on FAITH that the voting process isn't being screwed with with those machines.
No democracy is safe from tampering if the voting process isn't open, if the voters can't be genuinely assured their votes are being counted properly. Otherwise the whole thing is a farce. Even if the "mistakes" were "innocent".
As for DRM, I honestly don't give a shit. I am a reasonably strong supporter of a free market economy, and if some company wants to sell me music that I can't copy, then so be it.
DRM and DMCA have nothing to do with the free market, and everything to do with *control*. Who owns your computer and its contents? Who controls it? Who has the right to run programs on it? Who has the right to choose not to run programs on it? Who has the right to decide the program can refuse to run if you own certain other programs?
It used to be *you*. DRM/DMCA have transferred those rights to external corporations, in the name of "protecting their assets".
Start down this slippery slope and its only a matter of time before your car dealership will have the legal right to come into your house and tow your car in for its regular maintenance, and while doing so they will check the onboard computer to see if its been driven over the limit and report you to the police and your insurance company, they will also log your driving habits, and will demand additional fees if you drove it more than 6000 miles since their last inspection, even though you "own" the vehicle; finally they will have the right to search your house and refuse to release your car back into your possession if they discover you have tools that would be capable of modifying the car in anyway, especially its logging and reporting functions, or even just capable of performing the oil change at home. (Which may be "unsafe", as you are not a factory certified technician).
Or perhaps next time you enter the mall you will be asked for identification papers, not from the government, but from the merchants association representing the mall, to ensure the safety of their employees and security of their property. They'll also reserve the right to search your person, and require you to have a microchip implant... and anyone that refuses to submit will be tagged and reported to the police as a likely criminal, or perhaps "terrorist".
Of course, you could choose not to buy those cars, or shop at these malls, or from members of these "merchants associations"...
To that I say "Good luck with that". I expect you'll be as successful with that as finding cable providers with commercial free content...
Frankly, I think these celebrities are a bunch of attention-whoring narcissists who want people to care more about this crap then they honestly should.
Frankly I think DRM/DMCA is FAR more important than most of the things celeb's protest about, and one of the few things they protest about that actually impacts them directly.
Uh... Tomb Raider was a beyond stupid movie. Think about it... all Lara Croft had to do at pretty much ANY stage of that movie to save the world was stay at home.
If she hadn't kept showing up in the exotic locales, to "solve the problem" or "contribute the missing piece" the window of opportunity the villains were seeking to exploit would have closed. No muss, no fuss.
Mortal Kombat, however, *was* bearable, given what it had as source material. MK2 wasn't though.
A much much better example of "movie of a game" that was actually good would have been "Resident Evil".
I disagree. "3500 registered users" is not the right metric to valuate on. First it merely represents the number of people who have signed up to a project that has *just* been launched. At least give it a couple years before using "registered users"; or use some other more reasonable metric like I did: households or even households + businesses.
And to address your specfic points:
For point 1 and 3 -- New faster technology is not that relevant, they're building "last leg" infrastructure. Assuming its 802.11g that's 50mbps, around 10x faster than any of the cable, dsl, or satellite offerings around here, and even 802.11b is faster than what most of us can subscribe to.
While I'm sure they will need to upgrade to a new technology eventually, they could probably run 802.11g for a decade or more before they need to do it.
As for your second point about ballooning costs. Right now its $40/household per YEAR, that's less than 4 bucks a month. While I'll freely admit that "government" in general is pretty wasteful, its going to take a LOT of waste before this is a bad idea.
Additionally, this is a very small city -- 28k residents is barely a city in my books; (and I should know I live in a "city" of 25,000). "City councils" for entities this size (and smaller) tend to be very fiscally responsible, compared to what might go on in a regional government, or even a larger city for that matter.
Your right ... its not free...
Lets see... 28,000 residents (lets call that 10,000 households)
$2,000,000 outlay = $71 per resident ($200 per household)
$400,000/year = $14 per resident PER YEAR ($40 per household PER YEAR)
So $200 setup free, and $40 bucks a year for wireless internet. Where do I sign up?
Around here I'd pay $300.00/year (EVERY YEAR) for ADSL "Lite", and I can only use that in my house, not anywhere in the city. Even craptastic dialup at $9/month costs more than this after a very short time!!
This may not be free, but it seems to a smoking good deal no matter how you slice it.
That's wireless internet for $40/household per year -- vs the $40 per MONTH I'm paying for internet now. (Not even counting my evdo usage...)
You're way too caught up in picking a career by the "current market trend". If you're great at what you do, there will always be a market for your skill set.
Mostly I agree with you, but you do have to keep yourself current. The market for human calculators (people able to perform long division, or compute logarithms, etc) for example is dead... no matter how good you are at it.
In computing today the market for VisualBasic 6, or ASP 3.0 is starting to die out; there will be a need for people to port and maintain existing projects in these for years to come, but I'd say new development is pretty much dead, and positions for these will become increasingly scarce...
But yeah, someone good at IT management, programming, gathering specifications, desinging user interfaces, debugging, troubleshooting networks, or WHATEVER, will be in demand for the foreseeable future.
I think its important to distinguish between a "natural monopoly" and a "monopoly". There is nothing natural about Microsofts monopoly. Microsoft is not creating or maintaining a natural monopoly. It is just creating and maintaining a regular monopoly.
In response to point 3, you are correct, the conditions that are conducive to a natural monopoly can disappear as the result of technology. The natural monopoly created as a result of all the copper telephone wires started to unravel as cellular and voip over cable arrived, and may disappear entirely if we achieve p2p wireless mesh networks... so I think we agree here. Except that microsofts monopoly was never natural in the first place.
Finally open standards are not really a market disruption in the sense that that they are only preventable in the first place if there are IP laws in place. Thus the REAL market disruption is IP law. Without those companies cannot enforce "vender lock-in" via technology because there is nothing stopping competitors from simply reverse engineering, or outright copying what they need to make it interoperate.
The only reason your car works with aftermarket exhaust systems is because there is nothing the manufacturer can do to stop ANYONE from taking it apart, seeing the interface, and forming an alternative that will connect in the appropriate places. Exhaust systems aren't "open standards", but the interfaces can't be protected either.
We've already seen a few examples of manufacturers that try to incoporate unneeded "software" into such systems to "sign and authorize" devices to try and lock alternatives out via the DMCA, EULAs, patents, copyright etc. Using IP to lock-out interoperability is only going to get worse as time goes on.
Yep. Someone else already pointed that out. I could have sworn, back when I signed up, that you were limited to one... but I can't prove that.
Anyhow, its interesting to know they do actively support it. Thanks to both replies for setting the record straight.
Yeah, I had a feeling someone would come along and score a few mod points with that angle... but still... there is a difference.
... at 150 over, you're breaking new laws, with higher consequences.)
Each of those crimes you outline is separate, would be charged as separate, and you'd be convicted and punished for each of them "separately". (even if all in one trial).
The difference here is that the ToS is one "contract". Violating one term or all of them or doing it x50 has exactly the same net effect -- you trigger their reaction to cancel and ban your account(s) when they catch you, that's it. Once you've broken it you've pretty much exposed yourself to the maximum penalty. Breaking a few more of them doesn't really change anything.
Better analagies would be is if you are already going 5 over the limit... why not 7 over? or 10? (But there is a limit
I disagree that a monopoly is a market failure.
;) Look it up.
... as long as there are standards in place to ensure interoperability you can have have lots competitors without any major issues.
Then you'd be wrong
The ultimate goal of a business is to maximize market share, with the peak being 100% or full monopoly.
True, but a properly functioning market would make that pretty much impossible. That is why a functioning market called: "self-regulating".
In addition, certain types of products and services lend themselves to few providers.
Agreed. Natural Monopoloies are a separate category from other monopolies, principally because natural monopolies *are* the most efficient way of providing those products/services.
However, natural monopolies must be regulated by law because the market can't regulate even natural monopolies by itself.
However, a natural monopoly is hard to create and even harder to maintain.
Quite the opposite, a NATURAL monopoly is easy to create, and maintain because its the most efficient way to deliver the product, if a product is a good candidate for a natural monopoly the market will force it to become one.
The OS market only has any tendancies towards being a monopoly due to OTHER artificial legal considerations -- particularly intellectual property, copyright, and patents.
Take those away and every tom, dick, and harry could start make some changes to windows, add firefox or itunes, and start hawking it as an alternative to Microsoft.
There is NOTHING natural about Microsofts monopoly. It was created thanks to laws creating *artificial* barriers to entry, and it must be regulated by further laws.
The market can't fix this one on its own.
Even the idea that the OS market inherently favours only a few players is flawed. The only reason this is remotely true is because people want interoperability. And the EASIEST way to acheive interoperability is to have as few players as possible -- if there is only one kind of car its easy to ensure a product works with all cars. However, there are other ways to ensure interoperability and that is having OPEN STANDARDS. There are dozens of mail servers and mail clients after all
Possibly because having multiple active accounts is against ebay's terms of service.... :)
Next you should just start selling yourself stuff and pumping your own feedback rating...of course that might look suspeicious so you'll need to open and nurture a whole network of accounts...
Once you break one rule... why not all of them ?