OTOH, it's hard for me to feel any sympathy for someone who wants to be paid for the same work over and over again.
Studios get paid for the advertisements shown with every television show aired, no matter how long it's been in syndication. Why not writers, actors, directors, and the other creative people?
Microsoft publishes and maintains a networking API (six revisions of it, actually) to make it easy for my manufacturer to provide a working driver on a CD when I buy my laptop. Which is far more work than Linux ever did.
Linux kernel hackers are willing to write and maintain the driver for your hardware manufacturer, which is far more work than Microsoft is willing to do for them.
Pretend I'm functionally illiterate and couldn't find a single statistic on either page that supported your assertion that most F/OSS hackers are in the employ or under contract to IBM, Novell, Sun, Red Hat, or other large businesses. No one disputes that those companies contribute to development of F/OSS. What leads you to believe that those companies contribute more to F/OSS than individuals do on their own, and how do you measure that?
The Clone Wars animated series actually makes the third movie make sense. There's no reason the third movie couldn't mostly stand on its own, but it's at least comprehensible in plot after watching the Clone Wars.
I agree that social networking data should be under the direct control of the user and not locked up in any single walled garden, but for now that data mostly is.
Brian added UDF support for other languages quite a while ago (see Embedding Perl in MySQL for example). Of course, I promised to polish up his code and embed Parrot in MySQL a while ago too, so blame me for part of that.
Are iPhone users really that interested in Java? Given that it's an interpreted environment, I question its efficiency.
I don't see why it's necessarily inefficient. I wouldn't expect a phone application to perform a lot of number crunching (except for media decoding), so the kinds of apps developed for a phone are likely either network or UI bound, if not both. It doesn't really matter what language you use when your app spends most of its time blocking.
Also, I've heard lots of complaints about the responsiveness of OpenOffice. I'm presuming that these are from people who are using versions that aren't compiled with gcj...
OpenOffice.org is primarily C++. As I understand it, a few parts of the database layer use Java, but most of the source code is and always has been C++.
In some ways, Mono has more features than.NET, and in some cases (Silverlight 1.1) is ahead of Microsoft.
... until you have to license binary blob codecs to use certain Silverlight applications. Fortunately, you can pay Novell money for those codecs, if you have an approved operating system and processor.
The question is--how can inanimate particles combine to form a living thing? Is that question inappropriate for science?
Yes, that is indeed an appropriate question for science to answer, as is "Can inanimate particles combine to form a living thing?" However, it's not the question I asked, and both depend on the answer to the question "What is life?"
Anyone who proposes the definitive answer to how life began on this planet needs either access to a time machine or to abandon the pretense that it's empirically verifiable. That doesn't mean that the question is not worth asking or that no one will ever propose the right answer, just that it's not a question that the scientific method can answer.
I suspect that any one person's answer to the question I asked depends on whether that person is a materialist, as the answer has more to do with philosophy than verifiable observation in controlled, repeatable conditions.
Anyway, the attack on abiogenesis is easy because you can turn skeptic and say "you can't falsify this, so it's not science,"
Very few historical questions are empirically determinate. That doesn't mean that science is bad, or that science can't help establish what may have happened, or that there's a problem with empiricism. It just means that the scientific method is inappropriate for that question, or vice versa.
If you want to believe that disease is caused by demonic possession...
I asked if the assertion that life on this planet began through abiogenesis is falsifiable. How in the world did you get demon possession out of that question?
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Studios get paid for the advertisements shown with every television show aired, no matter how long it's been in syndication. Why not writers, actors, directors, and the other creative people?
Linux kernel hackers are willing to write and maintain the driver for your hardware manufacturer, which is far more work than Microsoft is willing to do for them.
Pretend I'm functionally illiterate and couldn't find a single statistic on either page that supported your assertion that most F/OSS hackers are in the employ or under contract to IBM, Novell, Sun, Red Hat, or other large businesses. No one disputes that those companies contribute to development of F/OSS. What leads you to believe that those companies contribute more to F/OSS than individuals do on their own, and how do you measure that?
Citation, please?
The Clone Wars animated series actually makes the third movie make sense. There's no reason the third movie couldn't mostly stand on its own, but it's at least comprehensible in plot after watching the Clone Wars.
Introducing new characters because they make good toys and not because they're important to the story is lazy and irresponsible writing.
I thought Inside XML needed editing, and I certainly don't recall giving it a numeric score. Timothy probably added one just before posting it.
Because Apple sells hardware. The software was a loss leader for the hardware, until they realized that they could charge $129 for upgrades.
Will you also fix uncountable numbers of existing links to TinyURL? If not, the problem remains.
It seems to me that hiring barely-competent monkeys to maintain software you care about is the real problem.
I agree that social networking data should be under the direct control of the user and not locked up in any single walled garden, but for now that data mostly is.
What kind of bar or street contains only data, which is only scarce if someone actually does lock it up?
Brian added UDF support for other languages quite a while ago (see Embedding Perl in MySQL for example). Of course, I promised to polish up his code and embed Parrot in MySQL a while ago too, so blame me for part of that.
I don't see why it's necessarily inefficient. I wouldn't expect a phone application to perform a lot of number crunching (except for media decoding), so the kinds of apps developed for a phone are likely either network or UI bound, if not both. It doesn't really matter what language you use when your app spends most of its time blocking.
Ads. Is Google Search commercially successful?
Did I really misspell Jon Postel's name? Ugh.
OpenOffice.org is primarily C++. As I understand it, a few parts of the database layer use Java, but most of the source code is and always has been C++.
Parody is only protected free speech if it's non-commercial? That's a dangerous metric for an inalienable right.
You have to lock Windows down to make it barely usable now?
... until you have to license binary blob codecs to use certain Silverlight applications. Fortunately, you can pay Novell money for those codecs, if you have an approved operating system and processor.
Have you read the other comments on this story?
The Via Dolorosa's pretty narrow. Also, it's in Jerusalem.
Yes, that is indeed an appropriate question for science to answer, as is "Can inanimate particles combine to form a living thing?" However, it's not the question I asked, and both depend on the answer to the question "What is life?"
Anyone who proposes the definitive answer to how life began on this planet needs either access to a time machine or to abandon the pretense that it's empirically verifiable. That doesn't mean that the question is not worth asking or that no one will ever propose the right answer, just that it's not a question that the scientific method can answer.
I suspect that any one person's answer to the question I asked depends on whether that person is a materialist, as the answer has more to do with philosophy than verifiable observation in controlled, repeatable conditions.
Very few historical questions are empirically determinate. That doesn't mean that science is bad, or that science can't help establish what may have happened, or that there's a problem with empiricism. It just means that the scientific method is inappropriate for that question, or vice versa.
I asked if the assertion that life on this planet began through abiogenesis is falsifiable. How in the world did you get demon possession out of that question?