Just because people chose to exercise their right to assemble into a group, does not mean they have to give up their other rights.
That's right. Of course, you don't need to recognize the group itself as having the rights of an individual to acheive this, since the people can exercise their other rights freely whether or not the group is recognized as having any legal status or rights.
The Corporation only has the powers of the individuals that own it.
A corporation is (unlike, say, a conventional -- not limited-liability -- partnership) not a product of the exercise of the right to free association. Its a product of a government (in most cases in the U.S., a state government) exercising its powers to create a special entity with special privileges and immunities for its shareholders (essentially, it creates the rights to benefit and control like a direct owner of a business enterprise, with a special protection from liability for the debts incurred through that enterprise.)
It is, essentially, a tool of government to direct a subsidy at public expense to private parties in the hope of acheiving a public benefit.
There is no reason why that tool of government ought to be free to engage directly in electoral politics, any more than, say, executive branch agencies should be free to expend their budgeted funds on political campaigns.
Can someone tell the judge to not use so many caps?
The notice on the website refers to the a court order (written -- or, at least, approved -- by a judge), but is not itself a court order, and most likely is written by someone responsible for LimeWire's website (no doubt, on directions from one of their attorneys) after they received the order.
Ah yes, the USA. Where the number of thriving political parties is as vast as the number of oceans it touches, and where political philosophies are as varied as the mastodons that roam its plains.
I think you need to stop posting kneejerk responses and go back and reread GP; particularly, note the difference between the description of the number of parties and the number of viable parties, and the description of the cause for that difference.
Because corporations cannot contribute to political candidates (though they can expend independently to support or oppose them), and because employees can and these donations are required to be publicly disclosed, its a fairly common (but, as you point out) misleading method to describe the political leaning of a corporation by the aggregated contributions of its employees.
For any business, since they exist to serve the interest of their owners not, except where this is the same thing (as in labor coops), their employees, it would make more sense, if you were going to judge a corporation's politics by looking at individual donations, to look at the donations of their shareholders, weighted by the proportion of ownership.
The vast majority in tech I know lean more towards the libertarian side of things. These kind of tests, due to their flaws of being linear, usually fail to capture that. ("Left" comes up more commonly than "right" for many libertarians because of how self-extreming "right" has become lately.)
Well, no. Measuring employee donations to political candidates by party of candidate is not linear; it can vary in as many directions as there are different political parties (in the US, that's quite a lot.)
The fact that results for different firms fall on a spectrum where the only substantial variation is the split between Democratic and Republican candidates reflects the fact that the US political spectrum is very close to one-dimensional, which is pretty well-established to be an effect of electoral systems like ours (as the number of viable parties an electoral system can support tends to, empirically, drive the variation in political views and identities.)
The first that comes to mind is how Android is all about tossing aside everything that is open source as we know it and reinventing the wheel. The catch is that the wheel has not necessarily been improved, and now it's all under the control of Google, who does development behind closed doors and only allows hardware vendors to participate in the process.
FIrst, Google doesn't own Android, the Open Handset Alliance does (Google did briefly, when it bought Android and before the OHA was put together.)
Second, Android development is done through the Android Open Source Project. Nothing excludes participants (including individuals) who are not "hardware vendors" from participating.
Which is unsurprising, given that most of the Open Handset Alliance members themselves aren't hardware vendors, including the software and online services companies that no doubt have just as much interest in the actual Android platform software as the hardware companies.
Whose standards will those products follow once there is only one mobile OS that matters?
Easy! Google's of course.
Except (assuming Android wins), Google doesn't own Android.
One of the first things Google did when it purchased Android was to create the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) and transfer Android to the OHA. (Which is one of the driving factors behind Android; many of the carriers, handset vendors, etc., pushing Android are part of the organization that owns Android.)
It sounds like an attempt at filling the gap left by the lack of meditation our society experiences. Nobody plays Go (or Chess; but Go is a superior game), nobody quietly contemplates, nobody does listening meditations or anything.
This is only true for rather loose definitions of nobody. Practitioners of Eastern meditative traditions, New Age traditions influenced by Eastern meditative traditions, Christian meditative traditions -- native or adopted from other sources, etc., are not exactly hard to find in the U.S.
It may be a little harder to find meditative practices practiced outside the context of a religious tradition, but there's quite a bit of that around, too. (Even if most of the practices themselves are adapted from one or more of the religious traditions.)
I don't believe the handset manufacturer is selling them 2-for-1. That's the profit hole you're talking about, right?
I don't believe I mentioned a "profit hole" anywhere in GP.
Apple fans like to insinuate that comparing the actual sales numbers isn't fair or meaningful because some carriers have, at some times, adopted 2-for-1 promotions that affected some Android handsets.
But the price the consumer has to pay to acquire the device is a real factor in market success, so even if those specials do lower the minimum price of Android handsets, so what? The fans' claim that the comparison isn't meaningful amounts to a plea that Apple should get "extra credit" for its devices being, at the end of the day, more expensive than the competition.
Hey global-warming robots, we can't change world economies on a dime.
Actually, we can. And have.
The evidence needs to be extremely solid, which it isn't.
The direct evidence that global temperatures are rising at a rapid and accelerating rate is extremely strong.
The direct evidence that this is linked to concentrations of CO2 and other so-called "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere is extremely strong.
The evidence, outside of the realm of specific current Earth climate studies, of the mechanisms by which greenhouse gas concentration would contribute to warming is also extremely strong.
There is no component for which the evidence is not extremely strong.
I wonder if people using the term "deniers" will ever stop setting up strawman and accept that people are questioning the causes of climate change, not whether the climate actually changes.
Its not a strawman. Deniers do, among other claims, deny the fact of the current, unprecedentedly rapid, climate change, not merely the attribution of much of it to human-produced causes.
There are also some that posit alternate causes for the current change (often, simply by asserting that as the main factors those which research has established are either not factors or are contributing factors that make a much smaller contribution than himan causes.)
These groups of deniers have some overlap, as well, as some deny both the significance of the current warming trend and the atttribution of much of it to human causes.
Bzzzz. The most civilized culture during the 500-1400 dark ages was the Eastern Rome Empire, centered around Constantinople (Istanbul).
As if "degree of civilization" had a widely accepted, objective, measurable definition against which there were reliable, uncontroversial measures for historical societies which could justify such a claim.
I desperately hope that Google don't have aspirations to make Android like iOS, because I think it's already the better system and that would be a big step backwards.
Its worth noting that Google doesn't own Android, the Open Handset Alliance does. And that includes carriers, software/services companies, handset makers, and semiconductor firms. Keeping that group together is pretty incompatible with establish Apple-like control.
It's kind of hard to compete with market share when the other guys are doing 2-for-1 specials.
2-for-1 specials are basically equivalent to selling at half the price. Being overpriced compared to the competition is no virtue, though I can understand how Apple fans would see it that way (or, rather, I can see how people who see it that way would tend to become Apple fans.)
I may be missing something, but what does it matter if it's 3.0, 2.3, named strawberry pie, or whatever?
I believe Google said that tablets should wait for 3.0 (not any particular codename). If Gingerbread isn't 3.0, that means that there is at least one more significant release than people expected between now and the time Google thinks Android is tablet-ready. This probably matters to some people.
Book prices will still remain close to $100. You'll lose your right to resell your old books.
A bigger issue is that you lose the right to retain your textbooks. Given rapid edition changes, the right to resell was often of limited value and theoretical anyway; OTOH, most of the people I know kept many of their textbooks and occasionally reference them even a decade or more after leaving school; during high school, one of the ways I learned things outside of school was from my fathers old college texts.
Who thought of that stupid idea? My job is to keep the servers running. My job is NOT to make sure the developers write good code.
Developers writing good code that gets deployed to your servers makes the job of keeping the server running easier than developers writing bad code that gets deployed to your servers. For the same reason business users being involved in developing test scenarios is important, system administrators of the systems to which code is to be deployed need to be involved in developing test scenarios that verify that their needs are being met.
This may or may not mean "writing unit tests", specifically, of course.
Finally, they should work on extending whatever POSIX compatibility they still have left until Windows 8 can reliably run code originally written on Linux and OS X. Why? Because it would bridge one of the last gaps between Windows 7 and OS X.
Making it easier to develop software that works on both Windows and Linux means reducing the barrier to switching between Windows and Linux.
Given the relative market strength of each of those OS's in the desktop market, Microsoft has everything to lose there and nothing much to gain.
In the server market, that's less true, but MS server strategy, which seems to be doing tolerably well, seems to be based more around integrating their server products with the desktop products and using their dominance of the desktop. So, weakening their lock on the desktop would force a radical change in strategy in the server market.
All-in-all, its at best a big gamble with a pretty weak business motivation. It would be good for consumer choice, but not particularly all that likely to be good for Microsoft.
I think the parent is talking about why MS is trying to get us to buy an upgrade as if it is a new release with all the problems of switching.
Because now that the PC penetration has plateaued for quite some time, the main way MS makes money from its OS business (aside from leveraging it to sell other software) is selling new OS versions rather than selling OSes to people who don't have an OS already.
Consequently, regular major upgrades with the associated costs.
And oddly enough, MS itself doesn't benefit either because more and more companies simply ain't upgrading. Or downgrading.
Microsoft does benefit, because some are upgrading. The ones that aren't have no effect, not a negative effect, and so don't offset the ones that are. And the ones that are downgrading are paying for the new OS with downgrade rights to the old one, so they are indistinguishable, from a revenue perspective, to purchases of the new OS.
Why would digital cameras have tens of megapixels?
Why doesn't really matter in terms of the prediction, since its accuracy doesn't depend on the reason, and the fact that digital cameras already have tens of megapixels means that the prediction is pretty conservative. Even in high-end consumer models they're already pushing 20 megapixels (The Canon Rebel T2i has 18 megapixels.) And, of course, pro gear goes even higher; the Leica S2 has 37.5MP and I think there are some models with even higher pixel counts. So "tens of megapixels" is now, not the speculative future.
We've pretty much plateaued for megapixel counts on digital cameras for a few years now.
No, we haven't. In the last few years high-end consumer gear has gone from topping out around 8 MP, to around 12 MP, to around 15 MP, to the 18 MP of the T2i (which I think is the top of the consumer DSLR range right now.)
These have usually been, I think, about 1-2 years apart.
There is a point where you get diminishing returns for more pixels, and you're better served by better sensors instead of more pixels.
Certainly, more pixels don't do anything without better sensors, but the same cameras that are the first to sport better sensors often do so with, unsurprisingly, more pixels.
Gnome is basically Windows XP/MacOS/Solaris/every other GUI for the last twenty years. KDE is... actually I don't really know what it is, it just seems like a mess every time I try to use it.
To me, Gnome's stock look is visually similar to the interface of MacOS while KDE's stock look is similar to Windows, but even there the resemblance is pretty superficial for both.
I think I like Gnome better, but I'm not sure how much of that is "KDE isn't as good" vs. "Canonical doesn't put together Kubuntu releases as well as core Ubuntu", since most of my recent KDE/Gnome comparison have been Kubuntu v. Ubuntu.
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That's right. Of course, you don't need to recognize the group itself as having the rights of an individual to acheive this, since the people can exercise their other rights freely whether or not the group is recognized as having any legal status or rights.
A corporation is (unlike, say, a conventional -- not limited-liability -- partnership) not a product of the exercise of the right to free association. Its a product of a government (in most cases in the U.S., a state government) exercising its powers to create a special entity with special privileges and immunities for its shareholders (essentially, it creates the rights to benefit and control like a direct owner of a business enterprise, with a special protection from liability for the debts incurred through that enterprise.)
It is, essentially, a tool of government to direct a subsidy at public expense to private parties in the hope of acheiving a public benefit.
There is no reason why that tool of government ought to be free to engage directly in electoral politics, any more than, say, executive branch agencies should be free to expend their budgeted funds on political campaigns.
Under the law, the fact that A committed and is responsible for action X does not imply that B is not also responsible.
As found by the court, they had profited by knowingly fostering and enabling copyright infringement.
The notice on the website refers to the a court order (written -- or, at least, approved -- by a judge), but is not itself a court order, and most likely is written by someone responsible for LimeWire's website (no doubt, on directions from one of their attorneys) after they received the order.
I think you need to stop posting kneejerk responses and go back and reread GP; particularly, note the difference between the description of the number of parties and the number of viable parties, and the description of the cause for that difference.
No, its not odd that corporate products are deceptively labeled.
Because corporations cannot contribute to political candidates (though they can expend independently to support or oppose them), and because employees can and these donations are required to be publicly disclosed, its a fairly common (but, as you point out) misleading method to describe the political leaning of a corporation by the aggregated contributions of its employees.
For any business, since they exist to serve the interest of their owners not, except where this is the same thing (as in labor coops), their employees, it would make more sense, if you were going to judge a corporation's politics by looking at individual donations, to look at the donations of their shareholders, weighted by the proportion of ownership.
Well, no. Measuring employee donations to political candidates by party of candidate is not linear; it can vary in as many directions as there are different political parties (in the US, that's quite a lot.)
The fact that results for different firms fall on a spectrum where the only substantial variation is the split between Democratic and Republican candidates reflects the fact that the US political spectrum is very close to one-dimensional, which is pretty well-established to be an effect of electoral systems like ours (as the number of viable parties an electoral system can support tends to, empirically, drive the variation in political views and identities.)
FIrst, Google doesn't own Android, the Open Handset Alliance does (Google did briefly, when it bought Android and before the OHA was put together.)
Second, Android development is done through the Android Open Source Project. Nothing excludes participants (including individuals) who are not "hardware vendors" from participating.
Which is unsurprising, given that most of the Open Handset Alliance members themselves aren't hardware vendors, including the software and online services companies that no doubt have just as much interest in the actual Android platform software as the hardware companies.
Whose standards will those products follow once there is only one mobile OS that matters?
Easy! Google's of course.
Except (assuming Android wins), Google doesn't own Android.
One of the first things Google did when it purchased Android was to create the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) and transfer Android to the OHA. (Which is one of the driving factors behind Android; many of the carriers, handset vendors, etc., pushing Android are part of the organization that owns Android.)
This is only true for rather loose definitions of nobody. Practitioners of Eastern meditative traditions, New Age traditions influenced by Eastern meditative traditions, Christian meditative traditions -- native or adopted from other sources, etc., are not exactly hard to find in the U.S.
It may be a little harder to find meditative practices practiced outside the context of a religious tradition, but there's quite a bit of that around, too. (Even if most of the practices themselves are adapted from one or more of the religious traditions.)
I don't believe I mentioned a "profit hole" anywhere in GP.
Apple fans like to insinuate that comparing the actual sales numbers isn't fair or meaningful because some carriers have, at some times, adopted 2-for-1 promotions that affected some Android handsets.
But the price the consumer has to pay to acquire the device is a real factor in market success, so even if those specials do lower the minimum price of Android handsets, so what? The fans' claim that the comparison isn't meaningful amounts to a plea that Apple should get "extra credit" for its devices being, at the end of the day, more expensive than the competition.
Actually, we can. And have.
The direct evidence that global temperatures are rising at a rapid and accelerating rate is extremely strong.
The direct evidence that this is linked to concentrations of CO2 and other so-called "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere is extremely strong.
The evidence, outside of the realm of specific current Earth climate studies, of the mechanisms by which greenhouse gas concentration would contribute to warming is also extremely strong.
There is no component for which the evidence is not extremely strong.
Its not a strawman. Deniers do, among other claims, deny the fact of the current, unprecedentedly rapid, climate change, not merely the attribution of much of it to human-produced causes.
There are also some that posit alternate causes for the current change (often, simply by asserting that as the main factors those which research has established are either not factors or are contributing factors that make a much smaller contribution than himan causes.)
These groups of deniers have some overlap, as well, as some deny both the significance of the current warming trend and the atttribution of much of it to human causes.
Bzzzz. The most civilized culture during the 500-1400 dark ages was the Eastern Rome Empire, centered around Constantinople (Istanbul).
As if "degree of civilization" had a widely accepted, objective, measurable definition against which there were reliable, uncontroversial measures for historical societies which could justify such a claim.
Its worth noting that Google doesn't own Android, the Open Handset Alliance does. And that includes carriers, software/services companies, handset makers, and semiconductor firms. Keeping that group together is pretty incompatible with establish Apple-like control.
2-for-1 specials are basically equivalent to selling at half the price. Being overpriced compared to the competition is no virtue, though I can understand how Apple fans would see it that way (or, rather, I can see how people who see it that way would tend to become Apple fans.)
I believe Google said that tablets should wait for 3.0 (not any particular codename). If Gingerbread isn't 3.0, that means that there is at least one more significant release than people expected between now and the time Google thinks Android is tablet-ready. This probably matters to some people.
Hmm... What will 'I' be?
After Gingerbread, the next two have already been announced: Honeycomb and Ice Cream.
Yes, the cost of printing books (which isn't just the cost of paper) has been going up faster than the general rate of inflation for quite some time.
A bigger issue is that you lose the right to retain your textbooks. Given rapid edition changes, the right to resell was often of limited value and theoretical anyway; OTOH, most of the people I know kept many of their textbooks and occasionally reference them even a decade or more after leaving school; during high school, one of the ways I learned things outside of school was from my fathers old college texts.
Developers writing good code that gets deployed to your servers makes the job of keeping the server running easier than developers writing bad code that gets deployed to your servers. For the same reason business users being involved in developing test scenarios is important, system administrators of the systems to which code is to be deployed need to be involved in developing test scenarios that verify that their needs are being met.
This may or may not mean "writing unit tests", specifically, of course.
Making it easier to develop software that works on both Windows and Linux means reducing the barrier to switching between Windows and Linux.
Given the relative market strength of each of those OS's in the desktop market, Microsoft has everything to lose there and nothing much to gain.
In the server market, that's less true, but MS server strategy, which seems to be doing tolerably well, seems to be based more around integrating their server products with the desktop products and using their dominance of the desktop. So, weakening their lock on the desktop would force a radical change in strategy in the server market.
All-in-all, its at best a big gamble with a pretty weak business motivation. It would be good for consumer choice, but not particularly all that likely to be good for Microsoft.
Because now that the PC penetration has plateaued for quite some time, the main way MS makes money from its OS business (aside from leveraging it to sell other software) is selling new OS versions rather than selling OSes to people who don't have an OS already.
Consequently, regular major upgrades with the associated costs.
Microsoft does benefit, because some are upgrading. The ones that aren't have no effect, not a negative effect, and so don't offset the ones that are. And the ones that are downgrading are paying for the new OS with downgrade rights to the old one, so they are indistinguishable, from a revenue perspective, to purchases of the new OS.
Why doesn't really matter in terms of the prediction, since its accuracy doesn't depend on the reason, and the fact that digital cameras already have tens of megapixels means that the prediction is pretty conservative. Even in high-end consumer models they're already pushing 20 megapixels (The Canon Rebel T2i has 18 megapixels.) And, of course, pro gear goes even higher; the Leica S2 has 37.5MP and I think there are some models with even higher pixel counts. So "tens of megapixels" is now, not the speculative future.
No, we haven't. In the last few years high-end consumer gear has gone from topping out around 8 MP, to around 12 MP, to around 15 MP, to the 18 MP of the T2i (which I think is the top of the consumer DSLR range right now.)
These have usually been, I think, about 1-2 years apart.
Certainly, more pixels don't do anything without better sensors, but the same cameras that are the first to sport better sensors often do so with, unsurprisingly, more pixels.
To me, Gnome's stock look is visually similar to the interface of MacOS while KDE's stock look is similar to Windows, but even there the resemblance is pretty superficial for both.
I think I like Gnome better, but I'm not sure how much of that is "KDE isn't as good" vs. "Canonical doesn't put together Kubuntu releases as well as core Ubuntu", since most of my recent KDE/Gnome comparison have been Kubuntu v. Ubuntu.