They could just fix the "Add or Remove Software" applet so it points towards a collection of optional software hosted on a secure server.
Sort of like a useful "Application" that's used to "Get" other applications. They could call it "Application Getter" or just appl-get for short. No, it wouldn't be confusing.
There's a Solaris machine at my job that doesn't let me specify the normal parameters in grep to drill down into the directory tree to find the declaration/usage of functions and variables in my program, so I've taken to the following as a helper:
I'm clueless on the topic... so I will just ask the question. What royalties are their for file formats? Does this basically mean that Microsoft pays for the different codecs that are included in Windows Media Player and that Adobe pays for the different formats that it can export to?
How can you say that the reason isn't money (using big CAPITAL LETTERS) and then argue for vouchers (which represent money)?
Now... to nitpick why vouchers are NOT economically sound... imagine there is a neighborhood where a family lives in low income housing earning $20k per year and has 2 children. They rent and are free from property taxes that are used to fund public education. Their effective education cost burden to send the kids to school is $0. Now, if I am to understand vouchers, this family would receive a $2k to $3k annual credit to send their kids to schools that cost anywhere from $4k to $20k per year. Guess where the kids are going to end up? Yeah... they're going to end up making $20k a year supporting their own families in the low income housing projects.
Fact is... education is the ladder that fulfills the "pursuit of happiness" promise in the Declaration. Without it, poverty is at best a self-fulfilling prophesy and at worse a vicious cycle that contributes more to violent crime in the first world than any other influence. Children of impoverished parents deserve the chance to break free from the cycle. And what I know about vouchers is that "spread the cost" of education to make it more affordable for the rich and less for the poor. And while you can argue that 30 year old deadbeats don't deserve welfare handouts, I'll rip off your head and shit down your throat if you say that underprivileged 8 year olds shouldn't get the help they need to develop into contributing members of society.
Why should the president, or the government, have a role in "making everyone smarter"?
America competes in the global economy as in industrial leader. China competes as a manufacturing leader. The Middle Eastern nations compete as resource leaders. Other nations have their independent niches that are filled to drive the global economy.
Now, one day the resources that drive the Middle Eastern market will be depleted. There is a large effort to transform their economy to accommodate tourism. This is a pretty good strategy for them to have.
For America to abandon our pursuit of education, it would almost certainly ensure that the industrial innovation that it has fostered during the 20th Century will not continue throughout the 21st Century. Meanwhile, there is no strategy to replace industrial savvy with something else. So, unless you've got a 'dumb' idea that would serve America (and the world) better than maintaining its industrial intelligence, I suggest you vote for your local school's budget next year and for Obama tomorrow.
spoon-fed a pre-packaged education
I understand that in countries that score better than the US on standardized exams, students are taught rote memorization techniques with emphasis on memorizing every little fact. When I passed through it, problem solving was a much bigger part of the US curriculum than the pre-package education that you seem to be complaining about. Maybe you're too old to give a valid assessment?
I don't support the philosophy of socialism, which is really wealth redistribution from the working middle class to the lazy bums.
You have been grossly misinformed as to the nature of socialism and its implication on tax policy- you might find this useful.
Additionally, accusing the middle class of hoarding their wealth from lazy bums fails to accurately identify where the wealth has been hoarded. Now, I don't want to get into a philosophical debate about whether enterprising individuals who have the resources to amass billions of dollars should be made to share... but I do pay $25k of my sub-$100k annual income to Uncle Sam and aside from road construction and the support of the local police force I don't see much of that value back (oh, and 12 times a year the USPS delivers my rent checks to my landlord for a reasonable fee so I don't have to make the trip myself!).
exceptionally savvy home users are not going to pay for a tape drive and enough tapes to archive serious data, more less handle shipping the backups offsite professionally.
The costs of buying the equipment aside, I think home users could cart a backup tape to a nearby friend or family member once a week to secure that they don't lose all their porn if their building went up in flames.
I disagree. It's unbridled socialism. In a capitalist market, the network would be taxed so that doing business over it would be a paid service. Want to send a letter to somebody in the mail? You pay the government or a private industry gatekeeper. Want to make a phone call? Again, pay the private industry gatekeeper. Want to send an e-mail message? Due to the fact that there is no gatekeeper, opportunities exist for everybody to do whatever they want. Society has an equal opportunity to use the network, and I think everybody would agree that this is a good thing (TM). Meanwhile, the capitalist Google does a DANDY job filtering my spam messages so I never have to see them. Ergo, I am perfectly content to look at the advertisements that Google wants me to see. THAT'S CAPITALISM.
If you can afford them, keep running through juries till you get one that gives you the answer you want.
Juries are cheap. Judges are expensive. Unless they start buying the juries... in which case they will have gone far beyond the world of suing grandmothers and people who don't own computers.
I'd like to see them release source code for the Original Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans. I played through the first three demo levels of that and then bought Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness because it was the "new thing". But seriously, the original version can't be worth that much to Blizzard right now and giving it to the Open Source community would be a splendid gift.
The only thing I ask, do it better than the equivalent of FreeCiv and the id Software releases of their game engines. Each of these has the feel that it had been thrown over the wall and didn't live up to my expectations when I got my hands on it. Install these games on modern systems like Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Ubuntu 8, and Red Hat 6. If they can't be ported to Mac/Linux then include enough instruction so that a user can run an open source emulator (i.e. Wine) to make it work.
That is to say... target gamers who just want to PLAY the games. If any sort of userbase develops for these old titles, then it's ensured that hackers and coders will develop school projects to mod the original content to create fun things that'll garner attention and positive press for the gaming industry as a whole.
The FCC addresses this on their "Is it true?" rumors page. Click here.
Short answer: There is shaky evidence which suggests the telecommunications and avionics conflict with each other, and the decision to not allow them to interoperate during certain times is a precaution.
Moment of Insight: Passengers are asked to put their gadgets away so that their attention can focus on important messages in case an emergency actually occurs.
I'm not sure if you are trolling, but I am guessing that you aren't an artist who has ever considered making some creative work for financial gain. If you ever accomplish this, you win the right to comment. But until that point, realize that you are arguing against somebody who shares your opinion that intellectual property is a flawed concept and you are a goddamned moron for flaming without understanding that.
Part of the problem is that most anti-IP ideals (consumers gain SO MUCH from piracy!) ignore the fact that their are artists who gain so much from the financial gain of their art. By simply supporting the abolition of IP, you are throwing mud into the faces of artists everywhere and culture will suffer in the long term.
Not to long ago I submitted a letter to Senator Leahy urging him to consider an alternative approach to the PRO IP legislation. See the full text here, but this is the jist of the alternative that I think would (a) empower consumers, (b) empower artists, and (c) bitchslap business execs who hoard IP:
But if you'll allow me to go off on a tangentially related rant.... it's my belief to strive for an economy where artists do it for the love of creation, the desire for fame/notoriety, and not the greed of monetary gain. In that spirit, I am going to suggest a financial encumberance that will downplay greed and cut "Big Business" out from the position of funding the creation of most types of art (arguably, BB would still maintain control over mediums of art that require large-scale co-ordination and efforts to orchestrate (such as big budget movies and video games)).
My proposal would be to offer tax incentives (via a "deduction" applied to decrease the "gross income" of creators during the year so that their overall tax burden is lessened). This would have the effect (in my opinion) of enticing businessmen and laborers to create and support art in their free time. Meanwhile, "starving artists" would benefit from this by earning the right to claim a high "artistic deduction" which would position them to be supported by minimium wage occupations. This would work so that an individual who has significant artistic talent could work at McDonald's to earn $25k and create art that qualifies him for a $50k tax deduction. As such, his "taxes" would be calculated based on $0 income. The additional $25k (because his previous gross was in the poverty range) would be refunded based on some TBD percentage. Meanwhile, a person who works as a bank manager might make $75k per year and dabble in performing arts during the holiday season. Let's say for the sake of argument that these performances (made to the public) would qualify him for a $10k tax deduction so that his annual tax burden is decreased to $65k. This presents a good incentive for him to continue to do this year to year.
Now the trouble becomes determining how to calculate how much the "tax deduction" should be, and that comes down to picking values. For example, if you did a painting that was accepted to be displayed in a public place you'd get a $2,000 tax deduction. You took photographs of a natural phenomenon and published them on the internet in a noteworthy archive? A $500 tax deduction. You metaphrasted Shakespeare's Sonnets? A $1,000 tax deduction. You donated $40 to charity at a public concert? Write it off as a tax deduction. Additionally, some types of art require multiple years to create (books, animations, statues), so there would be additional consideration to let people claim a certain amount of time and evaluate that using a predetermined rate (say, $10/hr).
Again, this is letting people work on their own projects in their free time in a manner that will allow them to lower their tax burden for the express purpose of producing a work of art that will be free of copyright to be enjoyed by the general public.
Now, politicians would argue that all these "tax deductions" would be lowering the government's income. Meanwhile, others would clamor that the corruption of big businesses would see the lucrative value of the deductions and take advantage of them for greedy purposes. But these arguments wouldn't understand the goals of the proposal in the first place. The whole point of the exercise is to expand the culture of creation. There are gains when Joe Smith has an incentive to get toge
The only reason this doesn't happen in practice with cars is that finding "the same" car to replace the borrowed one is not necessarily easy
Especially with those pesky Vehicle Identification Numbers!!! I suppose a 2003 White Saab with a scratched out VIN would be the same as every other 2003 White Saab with a scratched out VIN... so just make sure the car you are renting in the first place doesn't have this pesky self-identifying information and your car scam will work beautifully!!!
How about the ability to block ANY advertisement? If they came out with a chip that could detect and BLOCK any commercial the way a V-Chip can block shows rated TV-MA, I would fully support it.
I don't consumer products based on broadcast advertising anyway. I consume based on word-of-mouth, past experiences with brands, and products having the specs that I desire...
The results of rocket science are exciting. The path to get there is filled with many hours of tedious testing and years of carefully inching towards your goals.
Real looks to be pulling a publicity stunt. I bet their original game play was to get the MPAA to sue them to attract attention to their terrible company to drive revenues up. The best response for the MPAA would be to ignore this with the expectation that nothing Real can do will save their company and to claim that there are individual pirates on the P2P networks who deserve more attention than Real's childishness.
I already see some misunderstanding in other threads in this conversation. (a) people say the military won't give back the changes they make to GPL software. (b) people say that because it is GPL, the "bad guys" will get it.
For the first point, the GPL does not require changes to be merged back into the main development area. It allows (and encourages) projects to FORK the source code into new projects when different applications are desired. This keeps the original projects clean from "feature creep" and gives the different (competing) development teams control of their own development. The limitation that the GPL imposes is that if an organization wants to DISTRIBUTE the executable versions of their software, they would need to include an offer to distribute the source as well. Since it is not in the US military's interest to distribute their software, there is no real concern of (b) the "bad guys" getting the software.
In that vain, the "bad guys" would have access to the baseline version if they can figure out what software has been forked into military applications. If the US military is foolish enough to operate this using defaults that are hackable, then it serves them right. I personally think that they are more qualified than that.
A last concern is (c) THIS IS BEING FUNDED BY TAXPAYER MONEY AND IT SHOULD BE OWNED BY THE TAXPAYERS. This is false. I mean, the funding does come from taxes, but the public has no more of a claim for software that is developed for military applications using FOSS software than they do over the software, hardware, and designs of any other piece of military equipment ever designed. These instruments are created for the purpose of providing national security. If the designs were made public, then security WOULD be compromised. Ergo, in the interests of national security it's important for that information to be kept private.
Final point, the GPR (Government Purpose Rights) license. This is a thinly veiled government source license that I have seen the military force on subcontractors in recent years to force Boeing, Lockheed, and all the rest to "play nice". The GPR license is a requirement on contracts so that the government gains the right to send software developed by Lockheed over to Boeing for further analysis. Believe it or not, frequently in legacy codebases you see "Proprietary of XYZ Corporation" and for the most part the government tries to acknowledge these rights. However, they realize that many things are developed over and over again by different companies because they are prevented from leveraging off of each others work (at the cost of the taxpayers). It is encouraging, therefore, to see the government prevent this with GPR.
Shouldn't that be more like:: Value = quality / price
Value is quite obviously maximized when quality is high and price is low, and minimized when quality is low and price is high... so the ratio formula seems to be quite logical.
However, normalization between quality and price is necessary to make complex decisions that are not mathematical in nature easier to solve. Quality can be measured in lifetime, image quality, speed, or ease-of-use. Price can be measured in fixed or variable costs, cost to repair, and cost to replace. All these factors evaluate together so individual consumers can decide value for themselves (and it varies widely from person to person).
Thus, "price" and "quality" are reduced to numbers between 0.0 and 1.0 so that summing them together can produce a "value" measurement where a value > 1.0 would indicate a product which should be considered for purchase.
For me, I don't think Comcast will ever get a 1.0 for value (on my arbitrary rating system).
when I don't need much bandwidth, they're going to give me more?
Prioritization is not the same as giving you more bandwidth. You packets are just dispatched through their servers faster than the lower priority ones. The net effect is that you get less bandwidth when the routers are overloaded (which is VERY sensible), but when the routers are not overloaded then you will get the quicker speeds (at least, that would be a fair understanding of how it *should* work).
The theory is that casual users are more deserving of the higher speeds and more appreciative of getting content quicker, whereas somebody who is spending 15+ minutes downloading a single thing is going to be more forgiving that it takes 4 hours instead of 2 hours to arrive.
Personally, I think Comcast's goal is to degrade internet streaming video to the point where it matches their cable services with the "Occasional 5 Second Pause" (TM) where the service goes apeshit and becomes unusable.
Full disclosure: I won't give Comcast a dime, and am waiting patiently for more capable internet to come to my neighborhood. Value = price + quality... and IMHO Comcast is simply a bad value.
Slashdot Mirror
They could just fix the "Add or Remove Software" applet so it points towards a collection of optional software hosted on a secure server.
Sort of like a useful "Application" that's used to "Get" other applications. They could call it "Application Getter" or just appl-get for short. No, it wouldn't be confusing.
I think the software was developer by a company called Shell
The oil company? No wonder they are so rich!
There's a Solaris machine at my job that doesn't let me specify the normal parameters in grep to drill down into the directory tree to find the declaration/usage of functions and variables in my program, so I've taken to the following as a helper:
grep SearchString `find . -name "*.c"`
I'm clueless on the topic... so I will just ask the question. What royalties are their for file formats? Does this basically mean that Microsoft pays for the different codecs that are included in Windows Media Player and that Adobe pays for the different formats that it can export to?
How can you say that the reason isn't money (using big CAPITAL LETTERS) and then argue for vouchers (which represent money)?
Now... to nitpick why vouchers are NOT economically sound... imagine there is a neighborhood where a family lives in low income housing earning $20k per year and has 2 children. They rent and are free from property taxes that are used to fund public education. Their effective education cost burden to send the kids to school is $0. Now, if I am to understand vouchers, this family would receive a $2k to $3k annual credit to send their kids to schools that cost anywhere from $4k to $20k per year. Guess where the kids are going to end up? Yeah... they're going to end up making $20k a year supporting their own families in the low income housing projects.
Fact is... education is the ladder that fulfills the "pursuit of happiness" promise in the Declaration. Without it, poverty is at best a self-fulfilling prophesy and at worse a vicious cycle that contributes more to violent crime in the first world than any other influence. Children of impoverished parents deserve the chance to break free from the cycle. And what I know about vouchers is that "spread the cost" of education to make it more affordable for the rich and less for the poor. And while you can argue that 30 year old deadbeats don't deserve welfare handouts, I'll rip off your head and shit down your throat if you say that underprivileged 8 year olds shouldn't get the help they need to develop into contributing members of society.
Why should the president, or the government, have a role in "making everyone smarter"?
America competes in the global economy as in industrial leader. China competes as a manufacturing leader. The Middle Eastern nations compete as resource leaders. Other nations have their independent niches that are filled to drive the global economy.
Now, one day the resources that drive the Middle Eastern market will be depleted. There is a large effort to transform their economy to accommodate tourism. This is a pretty good strategy for them to have.
For America to abandon our pursuit of education, it would almost certainly ensure that the industrial innovation that it has fostered during the 20th Century will not continue throughout the 21st Century. Meanwhile, there is no strategy to replace industrial savvy with something else. So, unless you've got a 'dumb' idea that would serve America (and the world) better than maintaining its industrial intelligence, I suggest you vote for your local school's budget next year and for Obama tomorrow.
spoon-fed a pre-packaged education
I understand that in countries that score better than the US on standardized exams, students are taught rote memorization techniques with emphasis on memorizing every little fact. When I passed through it, problem solving was a much bigger part of the US curriculum than the pre-package education that you seem to be complaining about. Maybe you're too old to give a valid assessment?
I don't support the philosophy of socialism, which is really wealth redistribution from the working middle class to the lazy bums.
You have been grossly misinformed as to the nature of socialism and its implication on tax policy- you might find this useful.
Additionally, accusing the middle class of hoarding their wealth from lazy bums fails to accurately identify where the wealth has been hoarded. Now, I don't want to get into a philosophical debate about whether enterprising individuals who have the resources to amass billions of dollars should be made to share... but I do pay $25k of my sub-$100k annual income to Uncle Sam and aside from road construction and the support of the local police force I don't see much of that value back (oh, and 12 times a year the USPS delivers my rent checks to my landlord for a reasonable fee so I don't have to make the trip myself!).
I looked at the source code of his new webpage and he ISN'T using Frontpage.
exceptionally savvy home users are not going to pay for a tape drive and enough tapes to archive serious data, more less handle shipping the backups offsite professionally.
The costs of buying the equipment aside, I think home users could cart a backup tape to a nearby friend or family member once a week to secure that they don't lose all their porn if their building went up in flames.
spam is a direct result of unbridled capitalism
I disagree. It's unbridled socialism. In a capitalist market, the network would be taxed so that doing business over it would be a paid service. Want to send a letter to somebody in the mail? You pay the government or a private industry gatekeeper. Want to make a phone call? Again, pay the private industry gatekeeper. Want to send an e-mail message? Due to the fact that there is no gatekeeper, opportunities exist for everybody to do whatever they want. Society has an equal opportunity to use the network, and I think everybody would agree that this is a good thing (TM). Meanwhile, the capitalist Google does a DANDY job filtering my spam messages so I never have to see them. Ergo, I am perfectly content to look at the advertisements that Google wants me to see. THAT'S CAPITALISM.
If you can afford them, keep running through juries till you get one that gives you the answer you want.
Juries are cheap. Judges are expensive. Unless they start buying the juries... in which case they will have gone far beyond the world of suing grandmothers and people who don't own computers.
I'd like to see them release source code for the Original Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans. I played through the first three demo levels of that and then bought Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness because it was the "new thing". But seriously, the original version can't be worth that much to Blizzard right now and giving it to the Open Source community would be a splendid gift.
The only thing I ask, do it better than the equivalent of FreeCiv and the id Software releases of their game engines. Each of these has the feel that it had been thrown over the wall and didn't live up to my expectations when I got my hands on it. Install these games on modern systems like Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Ubuntu 8, and Red Hat 6. If they can't be ported to Mac/Linux then include enough instruction so that a user can run an open source emulator (i.e. Wine) to make it work.
That is to say... target gamers who just want to PLAY the games. If any sort of userbase develops for these old titles, then it's ensured that hackers and coders will develop school projects to mod the original content to create fun things that'll garner attention and positive press for the gaming industry as a whole.
Yeah, I liked it better when it was just the drawings of a guy flowing around the world in a barrel.
The FCC addresses this on their "Is it true?" rumors page. Click here.
Short answer: There is shaky evidence which suggests the telecommunications and avionics conflict with each other, and the decision to not allow them to interoperate during certain times is a precaution.
Moment of Insight: Passengers are asked to put their gadgets away so that their attention can focus on important messages in case an emergency actually occurs.
And I quote:
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
QED
I'm not sure if you are trolling, but I am guessing that you aren't an artist who has ever considered making some creative work for financial gain. If you ever accomplish this, you win the right to comment. But until that point, realize that you are arguing against somebody who shares your opinion that intellectual property is a flawed concept and you are a goddamned moron for flaming without understanding that.
Part of the problem is that most anti-IP ideals (consumers gain SO MUCH from piracy!) ignore the fact that their are artists who gain so much from the financial gain of their art. By simply supporting the abolition of IP, you are throwing mud into the faces of artists everywhere and culture will suffer in the long term.
Not to long ago I submitted a letter to Senator Leahy urging him to consider an alternative approach to the PRO IP legislation. See the full text here, but this is the jist of the alternative that I think would (a) empower consumers, (b) empower artists, and (c) bitchslap business execs who hoard IP:
But if you'll allow me to go off on a tangentially related rant.... it's my belief to strive for an economy where artists do it for the love of creation, the desire for fame/notoriety, and not the greed of monetary gain. In that spirit, I am going to suggest a financial encumberance that will downplay greed and cut "Big Business" out from the position of funding the creation of most types of art (arguably, BB would still maintain control over mediums of art that require large-scale co-ordination and efforts to orchestrate (such as big budget movies and video games)).
My proposal would be to offer tax incentives (via a "deduction" applied to decrease the "gross income" of creators during the year so that their overall tax burden is lessened). This would have the effect (in my opinion) of enticing businessmen and laborers to create and support art in their free time. Meanwhile, "starving artists" would benefit from this by earning the right to claim a high "artistic deduction" which would position them to be supported by minimium wage occupations. This would work so that an individual who has significant artistic talent could work at McDonald's to earn $25k and create art that qualifies him for a $50k tax deduction. As such, his "taxes" would be calculated based on $0 income. The additional $25k (because his previous gross was in the poverty range) would be refunded based on some TBD percentage. Meanwhile, a person who works as a bank manager might make $75k per year and dabble in performing arts during the holiday season. Let's say for the sake of argument that these performances (made to the public) would qualify him for a $10k tax deduction so that his annual tax burden is decreased to $65k. This presents a good incentive for him to continue to do this year to year.
Now the trouble becomes determining how to calculate how much the "tax deduction" should be, and that comes down to picking values. For example, if you did a painting that was accepted to be displayed in a public place you'd get a $2,000 tax deduction. You took photographs of a natural phenomenon and published them on the internet in a noteworthy archive? A $500 tax deduction. You metaphrasted Shakespeare's Sonnets? A $1,000 tax deduction. You donated $40 to charity at a public concert? Write it off as a tax deduction. Additionally, some types of art require multiple years to create (books, animations, statues), so there would be additional consideration to let people claim a certain amount of time and evaluate that using a predetermined rate (say, $10/hr).
Again, this is letting people work on their own projects in their free time in a manner that will allow them to lower their tax burden for the express purpose of producing a work of art that will be free of copyright to be enjoyed by the general public.
Now, politicians would argue that all these "tax deductions" would be lowering the government's income. Meanwhile, others would clamor that the corruption of big businesses would see the lucrative value of the deductions and take advantage of them for greedy purposes. But these arguments wouldn't understand the goals of the proposal in the first place. The whole point of the exercise is to expand the culture of creation. There are gains when Joe Smith has an incentive to get toge
The only reason this doesn't happen in practice with cars is that finding "the same" car to replace the borrowed one is not necessarily easy
Especially with those pesky Vehicle Identification Numbers!!! I suppose a 2003 White Saab with a scratched out VIN would be the same as every other 2003 White Saab with a scratched out VIN... so just make sure the car you are renting in the first place doesn't have this pesky self-identifying information and your car scam will work beautifully!!!
How about the ability to block ANY advertisement? If they came out with a chip that could detect and BLOCK any commercial the way a V-Chip can block shows rated TV-MA, I would fully support it.
I don't consumer products based on broadcast advertising anyway. I consume based on word-of-mouth, past experiences with brands, and products having the specs that I desire...
Rocket Science = EXCITING!
The results of rocket science are exciting. The path to get there is filled with many hours of tedious testing and years of carefully inching towards your goals.
Real looks to be pulling a publicity stunt. I bet their original game play was to get the MPAA to sue them to attract attention to their terrible company to drive revenues up. The best response for the MPAA would be to ignore this with the expectation that nothing Real can do will save their company and to claim that there are individual pirates on the P2P networks who deserve more attention than Real's childishness.
Also, preemptive lawsuit? WTF?
I already see some misunderstanding in other threads in this conversation. (a) people say the military won't give back the changes they make to GPL software. (b) people say that because it is GPL, the "bad guys" will get it.
For the first point, the GPL does not require changes to be merged back into the main development area. It allows (and encourages) projects to FORK the source code into new projects when different applications are desired. This keeps the original projects clean from "feature creep" and gives the different (competing) development teams control of their own development. The limitation that the GPL imposes is that if an organization wants to DISTRIBUTE the executable versions of their software, they would need to include an offer to distribute the source as well. Since it is not in the US military's interest to distribute their software, there is no real concern of (b) the "bad guys" getting the software.
In that vain, the "bad guys" would have access to the baseline version if they can figure out what software has been forked into military applications. If the US military is foolish enough to operate this using defaults that are hackable, then it serves them right. I personally think that they are more qualified than that.
A last concern is (c) THIS IS BEING FUNDED BY TAXPAYER MONEY AND IT SHOULD BE OWNED BY THE TAXPAYERS. This is false. I mean, the funding does come from taxes, but the public has no more of a claim for software that is developed for military applications using FOSS software than they do over the software, hardware, and designs of any other piece of military equipment ever designed. These instruments are created for the purpose of providing national security. If the designs were made public, then security WOULD be compromised. Ergo, in the interests of national security it's important for that information to be kept private.
Final point, the GPR (Government Purpose Rights) license. This is a thinly veiled government source license that I have seen the military force on subcontractors in recent years to force Boeing, Lockheed, and all the rest to "play nice". The GPR license is a requirement on contracts so that the government gains the right to send software developed by Lockheed over to Boeing for further analysis. Believe it or not, frequently in legacy codebases you see "Proprietary of XYZ Corporation" and for the most part the government tries to acknowledge these rights. However, they realize that many things are developed over and over again by different companies because they are prevented from leveraging off of each others work (at the cost of the taxpayers). It is encouraging, therefore, to see the government prevent this with GPR.
Shouldn't that be more like:: Value = quality / price
Value is quite obviously maximized when quality is high and price is low, and minimized when quality is low and price is high... so the ratio formula seems to be quite logical.
However, normalization between quality and price is necessary to make complex decisions that are not mathematical in nature easier to solve. Quality can be measured in lifetime, image quality, speed, or ease-of-use. Price can be measured in fixed or variable costs, cost to repair, and cost to replace. All these factors evaluate together so individual consumers can decide value for themselves (and it varies widely from person to person).
Thus, "price" and "quality" are reduced to numbers between 0.0 and 1.0 so that summing them together can produce a "value" measurement where a value > 1.0 would indicate a product which should be considered for purchase.
For me, I don't think Comcast will ever get a 1.0 for value (on my arbitrary rating system).
I think the old error message ABORT, RETRY, FAIL? pretty much sums up Vista.
I guess they have choosen RETRY.
But it's not vista Beta 3 as much as it named after the movie SEVEN.
Vista Beta 3? Isn't the third installment always where the franchise jumps the shark?
it's got the seven deadly sins including sloth and gluttony.
Don't forget Envy of Linux, Lust of Apple, and Greed of Money.
And at the end, you'll with it was your head in the box.
Is a "Head in the Box" going to be Windows 8? Any clues when we can look forward to "Dick in the Box"? Maybe by Windows 15?
when I don't need much bandwidth, they're going to give me more?
Prioritization is not the same as giving you more bandwidth. You packets are just dispatched through their servers faster than the lower priority ones. The net effect is that you get less bandwidth when the routers are overloaded (which is VERY sensible), but when the routers are not overloaded then you will get the quicker speeds (at least, that would be a fair understanding of how it *should* work).
The theory is that casual users are more deserving of the higher speeds and more appreciative of getting content quicker, whereas somebody who is spending 15+ minutes downloading a single thing is going to be more forgiving that it takes 4 hours instead of 2 hours to arrive.
Personally, I think Comcast's goal is to degrade internet streaming video to the point where it matches their cable services with the "Occasional 5 Second Pause" (TM) where the service goes apeshit and becomes unusable.
Full disclosure: I won't give Comcast a dime, and am waiting patiently for more capable internet to come to my neighborhood. Value = price + quality... and IMHO Comcast is simply a bad value.