If this is true, then birds themselves may not only be carriers of diseases like influenzae, but actually be actively developing the viruses in their own DNA. That would make sense as birds are typically the first species to be attacked by such viruses. The endoviruses embedded in their DNA may be involved in new virus creation.
A cookbook isn't designed to teach you anything. You don't learn how to boil water or heat up a pan when you buy a cookbook. It isn't a textbook or beginner's manual.
A cookbook provides recipes. It may provide some background and hints on how to adapt recipes to fit your needs, but it is not there to discuss why something works, only the steps to make it work.
So if you were disappointed that the first five chapters were about mundane things like string manipulation, then you've sorely missed the point. These are problems that exist and the book presents the best solutions to solve them. If you think string manipulation is unnecessary to expound upon, then skip those chapters. There's no rule that you have to read a cookbook all the way through.
A cookbook can only be judged on two things. Thoroughsity and correctness. If a cookbook is sufficiently thorough in its coverage of the topic and the recipes it provides are better than adequate, it has done its job. Judging it on standards best reserved for textbooks is ridiculous since the domain is completely different.
Sure, but they make the bulk of it licensing it directly to hardware manufacturers. Most users who acquire the software on its own pirate it. Microsoft has accepted this fact and found alternate means of making money that works around the software pirates.
If someone steals a jewel from a jewelry store, the physical item is no longer in the store's hands. Likewise, if someone buys a jewel from a jewelry store, the property transfers to the customer.
But software is infinitely reproducible for next to no cost. A copy "stolen" has no value, and a copy sold does not reduce the ability of the software producer to continue making copies.
Your analogy isn't bad. It's completely incorrect.
If you release a binary, it will be copied. The very act of releasing it is tacit acknowledgement that you have given up absolute control over it. Companies that develop software should accept this and consider alternative income methods like support contracts and priority upgrade access.
As long as software companies think that their software has any monetary worth, they will continue to fight a losing battle to technology itself.
I once went to a restaurant and ordered a steak, medium-rare. I know a lot of people would rather have their steaks cooked well-done, grey all the way through. I'm not one of them. I like the tenderness that a little undercooking provides. The blood filling the plate is a delectable gravy to be sopped up with some bread. There really isn't anything I like better than a thick slab of ribeye cooked crispy on the outside and pink all the way through.
You can imagine my surprise when they delivered a mash of ground beef and some wretched oil-soaked fries on the side. I said to the waitress, this isn't what I ordered. She was unmoved. I demanded that I talk to a manager. This little pissant 20-something comes out and asks me if there is anything he can help me with. I shoved the order in his face and asked him if he thought it was a steak, medium-rare.
No, sir. Then why the hell did you serve it to me? Are you telling me I can't order my meal the way I want it and expect a modicum of service? Sir, this is Burger King. You can have it your way, within the bounds of our menu.
I suppose I should have gone to the steak restaurant if I wanted steak.
A normal human will get reamed in court without a lawyer.
And since this isn't a problem of GPL copyright but rather copyright ownership itself, a lawyer would be infinitely better to talk to than the bozos here on Slashdot.
What you need to take away from all this is the same simple advice Homer gave Bart. "Never try"
All you gain from trying to make this software GPL is a lot of heartache and lost time. In the worst case, you can lose a lot of money to lawyers and ultimately the whole source base and copyright.
Consider that selling a list of users and their preferred content information to advertisers could result in a huge profit for Twitter. Then imagine a captive audience forced to receive what is essentially spam tweets.
This is definitely a feature, not a bug. And this disabling of the feature for the time being is a temporary measure to let the furor blow over before reactivating it later.
Twitter isn't a public utility. It's a business just like Google and Microsoft. They will find a way to monetize your behaviors.
Faster networking speeds in the home and office (and coffee shops, I guess) is always a good thing, and we should hope that technologies that bring this about continue to progress.
But the real problem for many mobile users is networking speeds outside the office. At customer sites, in transit, and during leisure time activities, having fast, reliable network access is still a dream. You can expect slow and unreliable cellular service most places, but it's like stepping back to the bad old days of 56kbps to use the cellular data network.
More WiMax and other truly ubiquitous wireless networks are what is really needed at this time. That means both support at the infrastructure level as well as the personal hardware level. When we are truly free to move around and access data anywhere we want, there will be a huge explosion of uptake and new users, I think.
Bill Gates talked about Information Fatigue years ago when Microsoft was trying to bring together disparate information systems with their backend server tools.
The idea was that it wasn't too much information coming in that was the problem. Rather it was too much pure data and "dumb" information being presented to users. This led to users getting too wrapped up in filtering this information themselves and spending too little time with the data that they truly needed.
Pascal once wrote "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter." Cutting through the vast amount of unnecessary data to get to important intelligence is time consuming. Obama is right, but he's also a decade late.
Are there non-computer industries where this would be fatal?
Would the computer industry be ruined by such a sweeping move to remove IP protection from companies?
You think that there's a problem with standards now? What the hell do you expect to happen when companies are forced to give up their IP if they ever join a consortium?
I'm not being facetious when I suggest this, but why doesn't the government just nationalize the communications infrastructure?
If they are so worried about every kid missing out on viagra spam and cartoon porn, they should be out there putting lines into the ground instead of waiting for the efficient hand of business (laff) to reach out and touch the poor and underclass who aren't going to be able to pay anyway.
The idea that everyone needs internet is mistaken. Let's concentrate on getting real books into the hands of students. And ones without little penises drawn on them and without Creationism taught alongside Evolutionism.
It's a noble idea to get unfettered, free access to everyone, but if you want to keep business in the loop, you're either going to get extremely draconian with laws and enforcement or you'll have to give up trying to police them altogether. There isn't any way to trust businesses to do anything that isn't in their own interest without threat from above.
Take away that business and the government can run the Internet as it sees fit.
Look at Google and Facebook, arguably among the top users of massive databases. They have petabytes upon petabytes of data stored and are constantly growing. But what happens if they lose some data?
Nothing. They can always go back and regenerate that data. It's just a matter of time.
So at this large scale, it doesn't make any sense at all to focus on data integrity beyond making sure that fopen() and fread() don't return garbage. It's the smaller databases that contain critical information that need data integrity. These are typically sub-terabyte, though some may creep over that limit in a few uncommon instances.
And realistically, if you don't want your data to be hacked up, lost, then thrown out with a bad drive, ReiserFS or any other modern journaling filesystem is the right choice.
I wouldn't bet money on distributed filesystems just yet.
I'm glad that you welcome my help, because I'd rather stab you in the back and steal all your loot than help you defeat whatever it is that you think needs defeating.
If you're going to take away the freedom of movement and self-direction in a game, I'd rather go play something else where I can loot, steal, and kill to my heart's content.
If you don't have a driver's license, I can't see any reason not to carry a passport - an official government identification device that is relatively simple to keep on your person
A passport is far from "relatively simple to keep on your person", though. Unless you carry a purse. Do you carry a purse?
A passport is a document for foreign travel. Its primary role is not to prove your citizenship to a police officer.
this is the first law I have seen since the creation of Homeland Security that actually puts a communist mark on the US
You mean "totalitarian". Communist societies may typically devolve into totalitarianism, and in fact that may be its natural state, but totalitarianism can exist in any form of political structure. As we see in this particular case, even democratic societies can devolve into totalitarianism.
It used to be said that no one could sell themselves into slavery. Well, here we are voting ourselves into the governmental equivalent.
Dual citizenship is not permitted under U.S. law (though it is tolerated in practice), so a child born in the U.S. who moves overseas and spends most of his life there may renounce his citizenship. In fact, overseas consulates hold programs for exactly this purpose.
Having known several U.S.-born foreigners, I'd say this isn't as uncommon as you'd think. It may be just a blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things, but there are definitely people who fall into this crack.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is true, then birds themselves may not only be carriers of diseases like influenzae, but actually be actively developing the viruses in their own DNA. That would make sense as birds are typically the first species to be attacked by such viruses. The endoviruses embedded in their DNA may be involved in new virus creation.
That's pretty cool! And scary...
A cookbook isn't designed to teach you anything. You don't learn how to boil water or heat up a pan when you buy a cookbook. It isn't a textbook or beginner's manual.
A cookbook provides recipes. It may provide some background and hints on how to adapt recipes to fit your needs, but it is not there to discuss why something works, only the steps to make it work.
So if you were disappointed that the first five chapters were about mundane things like string manipulation, then you've sorely missed the point. These are problems that exist and the book presents the best solutions to solve them. If you think string manipulation is unnecessary to expound upon, then skip those chapters. There's no rule that you have to read a cookbook all the way through.
A cookbook can only be judged on two things. Thoroughsity and correctness. If a cookbook is sufficiently thorough in its coverage of the topic and the recipes it provides are better than adequate, it has done its job. Judging it on standards best reserved for textbooks is ridiculous since the domain is completely different.
Selling access to the servers and developing apps for handset makers seems like a way to do that.
Sure, but they make the bulk of it licensing it directly to hardware manufacturers. Most users who acquire the software on its own pirate it. Microsoft has accepted this fact and found alternate means of making money that works around the software pirates.
If it is useful software, people will develop for it for free. This is the core concept of Open Source software.
If someone steals a jewel from a jewelry store, the physical item is no longer in the store's hands. Likewise, if someone buys a jewel from a jewelry store, the property transfers to the customer.
But software is infinitely reproducible for next to no cost. A copy "stolen" has no value, and a copy sold does not reduce the ability of the software producer to continue making copies.
Your analogy isn't bad. It's completely incorrect.
If you release a binary, it will be copied. The very act of releasing it is tacit acknowledgement that you have given up absolute control over it. Companies that develop software should accept this and consider alternative income methods like support contracts and priority upgrade access.
As long as software companies think that their software has any monetary worth, they will continue to fight a losing battle to technology itself.
Language is critical. Without it, we could not convey our thoughts. But the important thing is the thought, not the language.
I once went to a restaurant and ordered a steak, medium-rare. I know a lot of people would rather have their steaks cooked well-done, grey all the way through. I'm not one of them. I like the tenderness that a little undercooking provides. The blood filling the plate is a delectable gravy to be sopped up with some bread. There really isn't anything I like better than a thick slab of ribeye cooked crispy on the outside and pink all the way through.
You can imagine my surprise when they delivered a mash of ground beef and some wretched oil-soaked fries on the side. I said to the waitress, this isn't what I ordered. She was unmoved. I demanded that I talk to a manager. This little pissant 20-something comes out and asks me if there is anything he can help me with. I shoved the order in his face and asked him if he thought it was a steak, medium-rare.
No, sir.
Then why the hell did you serve it to me? Are you telling me I can't order my meal the way I want it and expect a modicum of service?
Sir, this is Burger King. You can have it your way, within the bounds of our menu.
I suppose I should have gone to the steak restaurant if I wanted steak.
I'm just going to go ahead and call it.
2011: Year of the soap bar
Maybe for you. But luckily you aren't the arbitrator of value for everyone.
Fuck you Microsoft. I can't believe (wait, yes I can) that you would continue to screw over your loyal customers.
I've had it. I'm switching all my machines to Linux today.
See ya'll in 24 hours.
Ownership is the same as renting. It just has an indefinite termination date.
A normal human will get reamed in court without a lawyer.
And since this isn't a problem of GPL copyright but rather copyright ownership itself, a lawyer would be infinitely better to talk to than the bozos here on Slashdot.
A lawyer will be able to help you.
What you need to take away from all this is the same simple advice Homer gave Bart. "Never try"
All you gain from trying to make this software GPL is a lot of heartache and lost time. In the worst case, you can lose a lot of money to lawyers and ultimately the whole source base and copyright.
Was it worth it?
Consider that selling a list of users and their preferred content information to advertisers could result in a huge profit for Twitter. Then imagine a captive audience forced to receive what is essentially spam tweets.
This is definitely a feature, not a bug. And this disabling of the feature for the time being is a temporary measure to let the furor blow over before reactivating it later.
Twitter isn't a public utility. It's a business just like Google and Microsoft. They will find a way to monetize your behaviors.
So what should you do? Stop using Twitter?
Faster networking speeds in the home and office (and coffee shops, I guess) is always a good thing, and we should hope that technologies that bring this about continue to progress.
But the real problem for many mobile users is networking speeds outside the office. At customer sites, in transit, and during leisure time activities, having fast, reliable network access is still a dream. You can expect slow and unreliable cellular service most places, but it's like stepping back to the bad old days of 56kbps to use the cellular data network.
More WiMax and other truly ubiquitous wireless networks are what is really needed at this time. That means both support at the infrastructure level as well as the personal hardware level. When we are truly free to move around and access data anywhere we want, there will be a huge explosion of uptake and new users, I think.
Bill Gates talked about Information Fatigue years ago when Microsoft was trying to bring together disparate information systems with their backend server tools.
Here's an article from 2006
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2006/05-17eim.mspx
The idea was that it wasn't too much information coming in that was the problem. Rather it was too much pure data and "dumb" information being presented to users. This led to users getting too wrapped up in filtering this information themselves and spending too little time with the data that they truly needed.
Pascal once wrote "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter." Cutting through the vast amount of unnecessary data to get to important intelligence is time consuming. Obama is right, but he's also a decade late.
Are there non-computer industries where this would be fatal?
Would the computer industry be ruined by such a sweeping move to remove IP protection from companies?
You think that there's a problem with standards now? What the hell do you expect to happen when companies are forced to give up their IP if they ever join a consortium?
I'm not being facetious when I suggest this, but why doesn't the government just nationalize the communications infrastructure?
If they are so worried about every kid missing out on viagra spam and cartoon porn, they should be out there putting lines into the ground instead of waiting for the efficient hand of business (laff) to reach out and touch the poor and underclass who aren't going to be able to pay anyway.
The idea that everyone needs internet is mistaken. Let's concentrate on getting real books into the hands of students. And ones without little penises drawn on them and without Creationism taught alongside Evolutionism.
It's a noble idea to get unfettered, free access to everyone, but if you want to keep business in the loop, you're either going to get extremely draconian with laws and enforcement or you'll have to give up trying to police them altogether. There isn't any way to trust businesses to do anything that isn't in their own interest without threat from above.
Take away that business and the government can run the Internet as it sees fit.
Look at Google and Facebook, arguably among the top users of massive databases. They have petabytes upon petabytes of data stored and are constantly growing. But what happens if they lose some data?
Nothing. They can always go back and regenerate that data. It's just a matter of time.
So at this large scale, it doesn't make any sense at all to focus on data integrity beyond making sure that fopen() and fread() don't return garbage. It's the smaller databases that contain critical information that need data integrity. These are typically sub-terabyte, though some may creep over that limit in a few uncommon instances.
And realistically, if you don't want your data to be hacked up, lost, then thrown out with a bad drive, ReiserFS or any other modern journaling filesystem is the right choice.
I wouldn't bet money on distributed filesystems just yet.
You mean print from your remote PC to your local printer, right?
And what about device recognition? Drag/Drop capability? Touch panel integration? USB/DVD device detection?
I use remote desktop software on a daily basis as well, and these issues vex me.
I'm glad that you welcome my help, because I'd rather stab you in the back and steal all your loot than help you defeat whatever it is that you think needs defeating.
If you're going to take away the freedom of movement and self-direction in a game, I'd rather go play something else where I can loot, steal, and kill to my heart's content.
If you don't have a driver's license, I can't see any reason not to carry a passport - an official government identification device that is relatively simple to keep on your person
A passport is far from "relatively simple to keep on your person", though. Unless you carry a purse. Do you carry a purse?
A passport is a document for foreign travel. Its primary role is not to prove your citizenship to a police officer.
this is the first law I have seen since the creation of Homeland Security that actually puts a communist mark on the US
You mean "totalitarian". Communist societies may typically devolve into totalitarianism, and in fact that may be its natural state, but totalitarianism can exist in any form of political structure. As we see in this particular case, even democratic societies can devolve into totalitarianism.
It used to be said that no one could sell themselves into slavery. Well, here we are voting ourselves into the governmental equivalent.
Dual citizenship is not permitted under U.S. law (though it is tolerated in practice), so a child born in the U.S. who moves overseas and spends most of his life there may renounce his citizenship. In fact, overseas consulates hold programs for exactly this purpose.
Having known several U.S.-born foreigners, I'd say this isn't as uncommon as you'd think. It may be just a blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things, but there are definitely people who fall into this crack.