Competition is good, but regulation is needed to ensure competition. If not, the profit maximizing strategy often is consolidation and the construction of barriers to entry. E.g. phones - if the large players merge and disallowed competitors to talk to people on their own network, almost no competition would be created until new, disruptive technologies came forward. Handsome profits could be made, and service levels reduced.
Wow, what a complete lack of critical thinking skills.
Just because they are currently out-selling the competition is meaningless to this discussion. Without DRM they could/would be selling even more. Maybe LOTS more. That is the point.
Or a lot less. If the DRM is effective and stops people from copying as easily as they might have done without it. For me, DRM is a negative item - it stops purchases. But I'm not obvlivious to the fact that effective DRM probably has a good effect to sales as well. The question is - is that effect big enough to cancel out the ones who both know and care about it?
Definitely.
Being obnoxious on the Internet is good, but I wish I could make it relax a bit more on private networks. "Accept by default, but tell me if it changed".
And with their new salary scheme (minimum wage), how many experienced programmers with COBOL on their CV will they attract?
If I was an employee there, I would wonder if they were allowed to do it (unilaterally change my pay, rather than adhere to the contract), but if there was a shadow of a chance this would happen, goodbye. Not a whole lot of reason to work for 10-15% of what one should get.
Now, after a few years of me depriving Uwe Boll, SNL spinoff actor, and a few Wayans brothers of their livelyhood, eventually I'll reach a point where I won't immediately recognize the crap. At that point, I may be out of a job, but the films will be better.
"The Matrix" was pretty good, despite having Keanu Reeves as the main.
You need to define superior as well. The product with the 50% success rate may be superior in other ways - e.g. if the 100% effective drug costs 1 billion to make, while the 50% success rate one costs $10, the latter will save more lives. Or if mass production is possible on one of them, but not the other.
Site licensing for the home user? *pause for sardonic laughter* Yea, right, that's going to happen about the time Ballmer gay marries Steve Jobs.
They already have a similar licensing scheme for Office, home edition - you can install it on up to three systems (at least the one for Mac). Apple does the same thing - they offer family packs for use within the household. They cost 50% more than a normal singleuser package, but can be used on up to 5 systems.
I don't see what the deal of having an ID number of is, so you can be uniquely identified in official registers (birth, death, taxes, police etc). Name isn't unique enough.
In Europe, the debate is different - in US, the state knowing anything is considered bad but companies (insurance, marketing, banks, ISPs, google etc) are OK. Here, there is less focus on the government and the Big Bad Bully and more on the risks of what companies can know about you, share about you and expose about you. E.g, it is Europe who started pressuring Google on how long they'll be able to keep data on your online habits. The US just don't care about that.
Property tax is the most onerous of all taxes. You don't pay income tax unless you make money, you don't pay sales tax unless you have money to spend, but if you don't have money for property tax you can lose* your home.
It can be argued that property tax is good:
Property can't be outsourced, moved out of the country etc
taxing property doesn't change economic behaviour as much as other taxes - e.g. taxing work reduces the efficiency in the economy. Property is just there
So if the total tax level is set, a property tax being part of it might not be such a bad thing.
We know that many of our emails never reach their destination.
[citation needed] I call bullshit on that one.
That happens all the time - one common reason being various forms of anti-spam techniques. Sad as it is, the tradeoff (that you will lose a tiny bit of "real" email) is worth it.
In reality, though, the bandwidth is only "expensive" to Time Warner if it leaves their network. It seems like Apple could cut a deal where it places an iTunes mirror inside Time Warner's corner of the internet, with all TW users being directed to that server instead of the normal one. Seems like this is one of the problems Akamai was supposed to solve- distributed media delivery.
Except that Time-Warner sells movies via their cable systems... this highlights why laissez-faire doesn't map into free markets. Monopolies will be used to conquer adjacent markets.
The Bible commands us to give 10% of our produce to the church so the leaders don't have to have a 40 hour job + 30 hour job coming up with a 30 minute speech every week.
I thought they were supposed to give 10% to the poor, not to the church leaders?
Not entirely true. Some free markets can turn into monopolies if not watched right, and if they do, actions need to be taken to promote competition - and avoiding stagnation and overcharging.
The headline could just have been "man sued for improperly using first aid techniques he learned from a video game".
Can you be sued for e.g. trying to stop heavy bleeding or doing CPR in the US? And if so, can you be sued if you don't? (e.g. because you're afraid to be sued)
A market based economy can't exist in many forms of medicine - you're extremely unlikely to have the perfect knowledge of the market _and_ be in a physical location to make use of that.
So the complaint that KDE is not as "open" as Gnome is no longer valid?
It isn't. Gnome libraries are LGPL. QT is GPL v3. You can develop non-free applications on both - however, if you want to to do it on KDE, you have to pay the Trolltech toll booth. And since QT is GPL v3, you don't even have the option of writing GPL v2 code - and I'm unsure how using GPL v2 only code would work out too. Thus, Gnome is still far more open.
I'm from Belgium, and here there are a lot of parties. The orange (catholics), the blue (they seem to be for the people not working for the state, people who like to keep as much money they earn), the red (the socialists, but do not think this is some kind of communism, the world is not black & white you know;) ), the greens, and so on...
How long have you been without a government now?:p
(on compulsory voting)I am glad I do not live in Australia, based on this law alone.
It does have its advantages too... in a two party system with low attendance, extremist groups gain far more influence than they should. Extremistic Christians and gun nuts in the US being two examples.
The first adopters bleed more often that not - letting someone else find the problems before you migrate your own systems is good. Not many would say that adopting Vista at day 1 would be giving them an operational advantage - even though it has some features that are compelling for corporate IT.
Another good thing with Mac, are those small and useful things which still don't work quite right with Linux:
Suspend/resume. Everything just work with that on the mac. I've still not had the pleasure of having that fully working on Linux (at one time, I could suspend as long as I switched to console mode first and killed X).
plug and play multi monitors. Just plugging a laptop into a projector and having it work... or switching from road warrior (laptop screen) to desk setup (large monitor).
still haven't had any luck with zeroconf printers in Fedora - I can find the devices with an avahi browser, but they don't just show up as available printers when I want to print
video chat, without having to use SIP.
Java development, network debugging, running servers I still prefer to do on Linux, but for me it's more effective to use Mac clients and Linux servers atm
Slashdot Mirror
Competition is good, but regulation is needed to ensure competition. If not, the profit maximizing strategy often is consolidation and the construction of barriers to entry. E.g. phones - if the large players merge and disallowed competitors to talk to people on their own network, almost no competition would be created until new, disruptive technologies came forward. Handsome profits could be made, and service levels reduced.
Wow, what a complete lack of critical thinking skills. Just because they are currently out-selling the competition is meaningless to this discussion. Without DRM they could/would be selling even more. Maybe LOTS more. That is the point.
Or a lot less. If the DRM is effective and stops people from copying as easily as they might have done without it. For me, DRM is a negative item - it stops purchases. But I'm not obvlivious to the fact that effective DRM probably has a good effect to sales as well. The question is - is that effect big enough to cancel out the ones who both know and care about it?
Definitely. Being obnoxious on the Internet is good, but I wish I could make it relax a bit more on private networks. "Accept by default, but tell me if it changed".
And with their new salary scheme (minimum wage), how many experienced programmers with COBOL on their CV will they attract?
If I was an employee there, I would wonder if they were allowed to do it (unilaterally change my pay, rather than adhere to the contract), but if there was a shadow of a chance this would happen, goodbye. Not a whole lot of reason to work for 10-15% of what one should get.
Too bad we don't have access to the source code :( If this was an open source project, we'd be able to add in features like that.
You can find out how to get the firefox source code here and the web kit/safari source code here.
Now, after a few years of me depriving Uwe Boll, SNL spinoff actor, and a few Wayans brothers of their livelyhood, eventually I'll reach a point where I won't immediately recognize the crap. At that point, I may be out of a job, but the films will be better.
"The Matrix" was pretty good, despite having Keanu Reeves as the main.
You need to define superior as well. The product with the 50% success rate may be superior in other ways - e.g. if the 100% effective drug costs 1 billion to make, while the 50% success rate one costs $10, the latter will save more lives. Or if mass production is possible on one of them, but not the other.
Site licensing for the home user? *pause for sardonic laughter* Yea, right, that's going to happen about the time Ballmer gay marries Steve Jobs.
They already have a similar licensing scheme for Office, home edition - you can install it on up to three systems (at least the one for Mac). Apple does the same thing - they offer family packs for use within the household. They cost 50% more than a normal singleuser package, but can be used on up to 5 systems.
I'd say that Project Management involves juggling three things - Schedule, Scope and Budget (think of it as a triangle).
It is common to include a fourth factor, quality - thus making it a pyramid.
No? The earlier versions of the software continue to run, they don't magically stop working when 10.6 is out.
I think the point was more about overselling jobs with ridiculous job descriptions and titles, rather than the job being the worst you can find.
I don't see what the deal of having an ID number of is, so you can be uniquely identified in official registers (birth, death, taxes, police etc). Name isn't unique enough.
In Europe, the debate is different - in US, the state knowing anything is considered bad but companies (insurance, marketing, banks, ISPs, google etc) are OK. Here, there is less focus on the government and the Big Bad Bully and more on the risks of what companies can know about you, share about you and expose about you. E.g, it is Europe who started pressuring Google on how long they'll be able to keep data on your online habits. The US just don't care about that.
Property tax is the most onerous of all taxes. You don't pay income tax unless you make money, you don't pay sales tax unless you have money to spend, but if you don't have money for property tax you can lose* your home.
It can be argued that property tax is good:
- Property can't be outsourced, moved out of the country etc
- taxing property doesn't change economic behaviour as much as other taxes - e.g. taxing work reduces the efficiency in the economy. Property is just there
So if the total tax level is set, a property tax being part of it might not be such a bad thing.We know that many of our emails never reach their destination.
That happens all the time - one common reason being various forms of anti-spam techniques. Sad as it is, the tradeoff (that you will lose a tiny bit of "real" email) is worth it.[citation needed] I call bullshit on that one.
In reality, though, the bandwidth is only "expensive" to Time Warner if it leaves their network. It seems like Apple could cut a deal where it places an iTunes mirror inside Time Warner's corner of the internet, with all TW users being directed to that server instead of the normal one. Seems like this is one of the problems Akamai was supposed to solve- distributed media delivery.
Except that Time-Warner sells movies via their cable systems... this highlights why laissez-faire doesn't map into free markets. Monopolies will be used to conquer adjacent markets.
The Bible commands us to give 10% of our produce to the church so the leaders don't have to have a 40 hour job + 30 hour job coming up with a 30 minute speech every week.
I thought they were supposed to give 10% to the poor, not to the church leaders?
Not entirely true. Some free markets can turn into monopolies if not watched right, and if they do, actions need to be taken to promote competition - and avoiding stagnation and overcharging.
The headline could just have been "man sued for improperly using first aid techniques he learned from a video game".
Can you be sued for e.g. trying to stop heavy bleeding or doing CPR in the US? And if so, can you be sued if you don't? (e.g. because you're afraid to be sued)
A market based economy can't exist in many forms of medicine - you're extremely unlikely to have the perfect knowledge of the market _and_ be in a physical location to make use of that.
So the complaint that KDE is not as "open" as Gnome is no longer valid?
It isn't. Gnome libraries are LGPL. QT is GPL v3. You can develop non-free applications on both - however, if you want to to do it on KDE, you have to pay the Trolltech toll booth. And since QT is GPL v3, you don't even have the option of writing GPL v2 code - and I'm unsure how using GPL v2 only code would work out too. Thus, Gnome is still far more open.
I'm from Belgium, and here there are a lot of parties. The orange (catholics), the blue (they seem to be for the people not working for the state, people who like to keep as much money they earn), the red (the socialists, but do not think this is some kind of communism, the world is not black & white you know ;) ), the greens, and so on...
How long have you been without a government now? :p
(on compulsory voting)I am glad I do not live in Australia, based on this law alone.
It does have its advantages too... in a two party system with low attendance, extremist groups gain far more influence than they should. Extremistic Christians and gun nuts in the US being two examples.A rather idiotic story, about how the two candidates who lost on both sides where anti-gaming, as if voters in Iowa care.
This is where they sell all those copies of "Deer Hunter XX"
The first adopters bleed more often that not - letting someone else find the problems before you migrate your own systems is good. Not many would say that adopting Vista at day 1 would be giving them an operational advantage - even though it has some features that are compelling for corporate IT.
Java development, network debugging, running servers I still prefer to do on Linux, but for me it's more effective to use Mac clients and Linux servers atm