It is worse than him just being a businessman. He is a businessman with a bad temper, who would probably catapult a few chairs at the next guy to pie him in the face.
No, the problem with community networks is a manifestation of the public goods and commons problem. If you are your neighbors decide to put together a community WiFi network, who will pay? The higher the bandwidth costs, the more necessary it becomes for each user to contribute their share to the project, but most people will do nothing and just let everybody else pay, then use the network for free. The only real solution is for the local government to pay for the network, simply to ensure it is possible. I believe that municipal wifi should fall under the same category as other public services, like roads and parks. Of course, how many people who already have a cable modem in their home will be willing to pay even slightly higher taxes to support such an effort?
Very few people are strong enough to lead themselves all the time, and most people need to be led by somebody else. In a pure capitalist system, we assume that everybody is seeking to profit by trading one asset for another -- but the people who need to be led will inevitably lose to the people who do not. This is why the law of demand breaks down when it comes to labor -- even when there is a high demand for a certain form of labor, the people who set wages are the "leaders" and the people who do the labor are the ones being led.
The claim that people are better off because of capitalism is never made by the people who can't afford to feed their families, despite working a full-time job. I have never met a person who has made this claim that has ever been hungry.
And if you ask an anthropologist, you will be told that our lives are not "naturally" based on competition with each other, and will cite one culture after another that is based on cooperation. No, these are not cultures with supercomputers and missions to mars, but these are cultures that lack things like poverty, or situations where some people grow fat while others have to beg for food.
As Rawls very wisely put it: If you were blind to your position in society, you would favor a policy that helped the poor [losers] more.
Pedophiles don't send these things in plaintext anymore. Everything is encrypted, and good encryption schemes pad the data with random bytes to ensure that there won't be a duplicate, even if the same data is encrypted with the same key. Hashing won't catch the real bad guys, who are producing large volumes of this stuff, it will only catch the guy who look at this stuff, and maybe decides to send some to his friend. Putting these people in jail is not going to stop the problem, any more than suing P2P users stopped people from downloading music.
I find that my hatred is more of a commodity -- I produce loads of it for companies like SCO and Microsoft, and they buy it from me. Only in this market, the law of supply is inverted: the greater the supply of hatred, the greater the cost.
I completely agree. I telecommute for some of my work, and I do not even think of putting confidential information on my laptop -- it is always on a secure server, with strong password policies. I can think of only on situation where I would want that data on my laptop, and that is if I happen to be working while flying, where I cannot get a connection. Beyond that? There is no reason to carry sensitive data with you -- it is asking for trouble.
Environmentalism on the moon? You're kidding, right?
I believe in reducing the amount of mining we do here on Earth. It is horrible for our environment, mainly because of the effect it has on living things. There is no life on the moon, and no atmosphere, so mining on the moon would actually be better for our environment (less mining on Earth), but only if better transportation was developed (imagine the impact of releasing all that exhaust, albeit from hydrogen fuel, from so many spaceflights).
As an example, consider the current method for mining gold. We have essentially mined most of the gold ore out of the ground, so the new method is to get it right out of the sand. You make a HUGE pile of dirt/granite/sand, pour HUGE amounts of cyanide and other healthy stuff over it, and out comes a bit of gold. The byproducts are depleted...dirt...and lots of whatever you poured over the pile, all of which kinda seeps into rivers and streams and such. Now imagine that instead of doing this on the Earth, we do it on the moon, where rivers don't exist and there is no ecosystem to damage. The challenge would really be getting so much cyanide/other stuff up there, but once there you could apply the same technique to moon dust, since it is basically the same stuff we are mining gold out of now. Sadly, this will not be economically advantageous for a long, long time -- basically, until mining gold out of dirt becomes so expensive here on Earth (you can only mine so much without running out) that the moon becomes a cheaper option.
Incidentally, there is not a lot of gold available on the moon, this was just a possible example of what could happen. If other metals could be mined out of the moon, the moon could become a pretty good launching platform for other missions, since the spacecraft could be assembled on the moon and less fuel would be required.
The kernel is written in C, and so are those system calls. I don't believe you can overload a C function.
You can. Remember how C allows functions to take a variable number of parameters? This is, in essence, how you could go about overloading. You don't even need a special marker parameter to tell you how many parameters there are, since the difference of EBP and ESP will. On the other hand, if the number of parameters does not differ, but the types do, then you will need a marker of some sort (think about printf/scanf).
Saying you can't overload in C is like saying you can't do object oriented programming in C. You can, you just need to handle it yourself, rather than allowing your compiler to hold your hand.
There has been a prohibition against other drugs for decades now, some preceding the original prohibition against alcohol, none particularly effective at stopping people from using drugs -- and a law prohibiting online gambling will not prevent people from gambling online. You can add this gambling law to the long list of drug laws that have left our prisons filled to the brim with nonviolent, innocent Americans who did not harm others (even if you can argue they harmed themselves, but when did that become a crime in the US? I know it was in Nazi Germany...).
The unfortunate (meaning natural and good) fact of the matter is that laws which are not representative of the will of the people are virtually impossible to enforce.
The real problem here is determining who is actually breaking the law in this bill. Suppose that I post a link to a online gambling website on a bulletin board hosted in WA (bear in mind that I live in NYC). Is the guy who hosts the board responsible? Am I? Is the owner of the server responsible? What if I provide a link to an overseas website that provides both gambling and "legitimate" activity? Or a link to a casino in Vegas?
A bill that leaves so many questions about who is actually the violator, and what is actually a violation, is a bill that is intended to target a specific group. Unfortunately, in our current political climate, this is viewed as being completely acceptable, and even worse, a common practice (PATRIOT act?). If it is impossible to legitimately use the American legal system to make something a crime, the government will simply pass laws with overly vague definitions to effectively make something a crime.
The reason Windows remains the dominant desktop OS at this point is strictly status quo. Nobody wants to switch, because Windows is essentially associated with PCs -- that is why, despite Ubunutu's ease of use and Windows' terrible security record, there hasn't been any mass migration. However, it is this same phenomenon that will make it hard for Microsoft to get anywhere in places like the server market. Look at how long Microsoft has been fighting the server battle, just to get a 30% share! Ignoring Google for so long has created the same situation in that market -- they allowed Google to be associated with web search (and other services), and now people just go to www.google.com when they are looking for something. This is the mistake Microsoft made. PDAs? Same mistake, only Microsoft managed to make something that was legitimately better than PalmOS.
Settlers set up forts. Invaders get hit with cannon fire.
My last project on rent-a-coder: $200. Lines of code: approx. 3000.
My current project, negotiated independently: $2000. Lines of code: approx. 4000
Rent-a-Coder: ripoff. Only reason I bother is that I can say I have worked as a programmer before. I am sorry if I insult people from India, but essentially, Indian coders turned RAC into a piece of crap. In addition, I have noticed a lot of foreign coders who do things like copy/paste GPL code into a non-GPL project, something which would ruin my reputation here in New York. Yeah, I know the laws of India are different, but unfortunately, the buyer who intends to resell that code must abide by US law -- and those who even notice the discrepancy don't come back to RAC looking for American work, they say, "RAC is shit and nearly ruined my business" and leave. Don't misunderstand me, I am all for GPL code and am an exclusive Linux user, but the laws and business views of this country do not agree with me.
The US picks and chooses which of its laws it will enforce in other countries -- the general trend seems to be that if there is a belief that some US corporation can profit from the law being enforced, it will be; otherwise, the US government couldn't give a shit. Consider the laws here in the states (and recognized by several international groups) regarding chemical factories. Does the US start meddling with other countries when a US chemical company decides to open up a plant somewhere and blatantly breaks the laws it would be required to follow here in America? No. Labor laws? No. But turn it around,so that the company is producing its products here in the states and selling them overseas, and suddenly, the US is interested in enforcing American laws outside of America. Double standard?
They are just stalling for time. Nobody would even think about Vista if Microsoft said, "Well, we aren't really doing anything, just wasting time, and you will just have to wait to get you copy."
My theory? This is about marketing. Vista's resource requirements are so extreme that before releasing it, they need to make sure that people actually have computers capable of running it. Any reasonable excuse for a delay is considered fine -- it is similar to the tactic that they used with XP (remember, the brief delay while "security problems" were addressed?). I recently purchased a new laptop marked as "Vista ready" (and immediately installed Mandriva 10.4). People tend to upgrade their computers every three years, so by waiting until most people have upgraded, Microsoft can reach a broader audience (assuming, of course, that the Vista install process is simple enough -- a rather significant assumption).
There is nothing in the GPL that states that you cannot sell GPL code, and there is nothing in it that says you cannot use it for internal operations without releasing changes you make to it. If GPL code is so good, then it just demonstrates the lack of need to keep every algorithm top secret. Intellectual property rights have spiraled so completely out of control that people cannot even fathom the idea of making money without secrets -- even in cases where the software itself is given away for free! I was recently talking to a colleague about why I don't use iTunes, and I mentioned the fact that it is not open source. Interrupting me, he said that it is obvious that it shouldn't be, because Apple needs to make money. iTunes is given away freely, and unless the "Fairplay" algorithm is so poorly designed that access to the source code would provide a method of circumventing it, there is absolutely no reason not to open it. This is but one of many, many examples.
Remember the days when software was purchased in source form? Like Unix? Remember how much innovation there was back then? Yeah.
Yes, it is the existence of DRM that is the problem. The very nature of DRM is a problem, because it is basically granting control over the consumers' computers to the corporations that push DRM'd formats. What could possibly be less free that having a large entity control what you can do? What could be less capitalist than being told that you can buy something, but never sell it to somebody else?
It is still a proprietary format. There are plenty of non-proprietary formats out there, which could still be used. It should be noted that there are music stores out there that sell MP3s, legally, and are not having trouble doing business. As one such site put it, people are less inclined to share what they pay for, and people who are not willing to pay for something will find a way not to. DRM exists because it allows our free capitalist system to be warped by corporations which have more power than the governments of some countries.
Either you meant "story" or "Atari"...sadly, either one is relevant, and despite my college education, I still believe that either one would be grammatically correct in your sentence.
Also, wasn't a short clip of this game featured in a South Park episode?
Because Microsoft has been attacking OSS for years now, so the OSS guys shoot down anything pro-Microsoft for fear that it is just another attack on OSS. It is like an abused child not trusting any adults. This is especially true because everybody remembers what happened with Netscape, what happened to Java, and every other product that became a hit before Microsoft set their sights on it. Anything that could potentially indicate that either Microsoft is trying the bandwagon approach again or that Microsoft is gaining ground terrifies the OSS guys.
For its shortcomings, PDF is an open standard. Can you say that about XPS?
Imagine what would have happened if Microsoft tried to force a proprietary networking protocol on you, rather than just complying with TCP/IP?
Seriously, why should I care whether Microsoft knows when my computer is switched on or not? (Please avoid making reference to evil things they might hypothetically do in the future. I'm interested in knowing what's bad about what they're doing now, not what people's paranoid fantasies are.)
What they are doing now is not the issue; it is what they could potentially do that is the issue. There is nothing paranoid about worrying about that, anymore than it was paranoid to put a free speech clause in the constitution before the US government tried to infringe upon it. Having a single company in control of whether or not you can use your computer is a very, very bad thing. With the shrub administration in office, it is not entirely unreasonable to say that the computers used by an anti-war group might suddenly become inoperable when they are targeted by the government. The power to do such a thing should not exist.
Not obviously, they aren't; and even if they are, it certainly isn't "rapidly". You can tell this by the fact that Linux's market-share is not impinging on Windows' market-share to any significant degree. Practically all Linux's gains have been at the expense of proprietary Unix, not Windows.
The reason Windows maintains a dominant market share has nothing to do with its quality, anymore than it did with VHS vs. Betamax. Windows is dominant in the PC because when consumers purchase an appliance, they don't think about the software that runs the appliance. If they buy a PC, the fact that it is running Windows is no more important to them than the fact that their cell phone runs Symbian or their TV runs TRON. Most end-users have no problem using KDE/Linux; the interface is familiar enough that within an hour they are already doing what they would have done with Windows, except for gamers. If a new user got a computer with KDE/Linux pre-installed, they would have no trouble figuring out what to do.
I'm not even convinced it's better. I run both Windows and Linux, I use both regularly, I'm comfortable and experienced at using both, and I prefer Windows. Sorry if that shatters your worldview.
Nobody cares about your view either, and you are in the minority just by having enough brain cells to know that Linux exists.
Admittedly, I still have Office 97 which is arguably inferior to Office 2003, but why should I shell out big bucks every few years for what is essentially the same product?
Er... what? Either Office 2003 is better than Office 97, or it's the same product. You can't have it both ways.
Office 2003 is better than 97 for some tasks, especially very complex documents. I rarely find myself making very complex documents, so if I were an Office user, I would not switch.
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It is worse than him just being a businessman. He is a businessman with a bad temper, who would probably catapult a few chairs at the next guy to pie him in the face.
No, the problem with community networks is a manifestation of the public goods and commons problem. If you are your neighbors decide to put together a community WiFi network, who will pay? The higher the bandwidth costs, the more necessary it becomes for each user to contribute their share to the project, but most people will do nothing and just let everybody else pay, then use the network for free. The only real solution is for the local government to pay for the network, simply to ensure it is possible. I believe that municipal wifi should fall under the same category as other public services, like roads and parks. Of course, how many people who already have a cable modem in their home will be willing to pay even slightly higher taxes to support such an effort?
The claim that people are better off because of capitalism is never made by the people who can't afford to feed their families, despite working a full-time job. I have never met a person who has made this claim that has ever been hungry.
And if you ask an anthropologist, you will be told that our lives are not "naturally" based on competition with each other, and will cite one culture after another that is based on cooperation. No, these are not cultures with supercomputers and missions to mars, but these are cultures that lack things like poverty, or situations where some people grow fat while others have to beg for food.
As Rawls very wisely put it: If you were blind to your position in society, you would favor a policy that helped the poor [losers] more.
Pedophiles don't send these things in plaintext anymore. Everything is encrypted, and good encryption schemes pad the data with random bytes to ensure that there won't be a duplicate, even if the same data is encrypted with the same key. Hashing won't catch the real bad guys, who are producing large volumes of this stuff, it will only catch the guy who look at this stuff, and maybe decides to send some to his friend. Putting these people in jail is not going to stop the problem, any more than suing P2P users stopped people from downloading music.
I find that my hatred is more of a commodity -- I produce loads of it for companies like SCO and Microsoft, and they buy it from me. Only in this market, the law of supply is inverted: the greater the supply of hatred, the greater the cost.
I completely agree. I telecommute for some of my work, and I do not even think of putting confidential information on my laptop -- it is always on a secure server, with strong password policies. I can think of only on situation where I would want that data on my laptop, and that is if I happen to be working while flying, where I cannot get a connection. Beyond that? There is no reason to carry sensitive data with you -- it is asking for trouble.
Environmentalism on the moon? You're kidding, right? I believe in reducing the amount of mining we do here on Earth. It is horrible for our environment, mainly because of the effect it has on living things. There is no life on the moon, and no atmosphere, so mining on the moon would actually be better for our environment (less mining on Earth), but only if better transportation was developed (imagine the impact of releasing all that exhaust, albeit from hydrogen fuel, from so many spaceflights). As an example, consider the current method for mining gold. We have essentially mined most of the gold ore out of the ground, so the new method is to get it right out of the sand. You make a HUGE pile of dirt/granite/sand, pour HUGE amounts of cyanide and other healthy stuff over it, and out comes a bit of gold. The byproducts are depleted...dirt...and lots of whatever you poured over the pile, all of which kinda seeps into rivers and streams and such. Now imagine that instead of doing this on the Earth, we do it on the moon, where rivers don't exist and there is no ecosystem to damage. The challenge would really be getting so much cyanide/other stuff up there, but once there you could apply the same technique to moon dust, since it is basically the same stuff we are mining gold out of now. Sadly, this will not be economically advantageous for a long, long time -- basically, until mining gold out of dirt becomes so expensive here on Earth (you can only mine so much without running out) that the moon becomes a cheaper option. Incidentally, there is not a lot of gold available on the moon, this was just a possible example of what could happen. If other metals could be mined out of the moon, the moon could become a pretty good launching platform for other missions, since the spacecraft could be assembled on the moon and less fuel would be required.
You can. Remember how C allows functions to take a variable number of parameters? This is, in essence, how you could go about overloading. You don't even need a special marker parameter to tell you how many parameters there are, since the difference of EBP and ESP will. On the other hand, if the number of parameters does not differ, but the types do, then you will need a marker of some sort (think about printf/scanf).
Saying you can't overload in C is like saying you can't do object oriented programming in C. You can, you just need to handle it yourself, rather than allowing your compiler to hold your hand.
The unfortunate (meaning natural and good) fact of the matter is that laws which are not representative of the will of the people are virtually impossible to enforce.
A bill that leaves so many questions about who is actually the violator, and what is actually a violation, is a bill that is intended to target a specific group. Unfortunately, in our current political climate, this is viewed as being completely acceptable, and even worse, a common practice (PATRIOT act?). If it is impossible to legitimately use the American legal system to make something a crime, the government will simply pass laws with overly vague definitions to effectively make something a crime.
Settlers set up forts. Invaders get hit with cannon fire.
My current project, negotiated independently: $2000. Lines of code: approx. 4000
Rent-a-Coder: ripoff. Only reason I bother is that I can say I have worked as a programmer before. I am sorry if I insult people from India, but essentially, Indian coders turned RAC into a piece of crap. In addition, I have noticed a lot of foreign coders who do things like copy/paste GPL code into a non-GPL project, something which would ruin my reputation here in New York. Yeah, I know the laws of India are different, but unfortunately, the buyer who intends to resell that code must abide by US law -- and those who even notice the discrepancy don't come back to RAC looking for American work, they say, "RAC is shit and nearly ruined my business" and leave. Don't misunderstand me, I am all for GPL code and am an exclusive Linux user, but the laws and business views of this country do not agree with me.
The US picks and chooses which of its laws it will enforce in other countries -- the general trend seems to be that if there is a belief that some US corporation can profit from the law being enforced, it will be; otherwise, the US government couldn't give a shit. Consider the laws here in the states (and recognized by several international groups) regarding chemical factories. Does the US start meddling with other countries when a US chemical company decides to open up a plant somewhere and blatantly breaks the laws it would be required to follow here in America? No. Labor laws? No. But turn it around,so that the company is producing its products here in the states and selling them overseas, and suddenly, the US is interested in enforcing American laws outside of America. Double standard?
My theory? This is about marketing. Vista's resource requirements are so extreme that before releasing it, they need to make sure that people actually have computers capable of running it. Any reasonable excuse for a delay is considered fine -- it is similar to the tactic that they used with XP (remember, the brief delay while "security problems" were addressed?). I recently purchased a new laptop marked as "Vista ready" (and immediately installed Mandriva 10.4). People tend to upgrade their computers every three years, so by waiting until most people have upgraded, Microsoft can reach a broader audience (assuming, of course, that the Vista install process is simple enough -- a rather significant assumption).
Remember the days when software was purchased in source form? Like Unix? Remember how much innovation there was back then? Yeah.
Oh, wait, wrong country.
Yes, it is the existence of DRM that is the problem. The very nature of DRM is a problem, because it is basically granting control over the consumers' computers to the corporations that push DRM'd formats. What could possibly be less free that having a large entity control what you can do? What could be less capitalist than being told that you can buy something, but never sell it to somebody else?
It is still a proprietary format. There are plenty of non-proprietary formats out there, which could still be used. It should be noted that there are music stores out there that sell MP3s, legally, and are not having trouble doing business. As one such site put it, people are less inclined to share what they pay for, and people who are not willing to pay for something will find a way not to. DRM exists because it allows our free capitalist system to be warped by corporations which have more power than the governments of some countries.
Were the pictures nude?
Also, wasn't a short clip of this game featured in a South Park episode?
Because Microsoft has been attacking OSS for years now, so the OSS guys shoot down anything pro-Microsoft for fear that it is just another attack on OSS. It is like an abused child not trusting any adults. This is especially true because everybody remembers what happened with Netscape, what happened to Java, and every other product that became a hit before Microsoft set their sights on it. Anything that could potentially indicate that either Microsoft is trying the bandwagon approach again or that Microsoft is gaining ground terrifies the OSS guys.
For its shortcomings, PDF is an open standard. Can you say that about XPS? Imagine what would have happened if Microsoft tried to force a proprietary networking protocol on you, rather than just complying with TCP/IP?
Seriously, why should I care whether Microsoft knows when my computer is switched on or not? (Please avoid making reference to evil things they might hypothetically do in the future. I'm interested in knowing what's bad about what they're doing now, not what people's paranoid fantasies are.)
What they are doing now is not the issue; it is what they could potentially do that is the issue. There is nothing paranoid about worrying about that, anymore than it was paranoid to put a free speech clause in the constitution before the US government tried to infringe upon it. Having a single company in control of whether or not you can use your computer is a very, very bad thing. With the shrub administration in office, it is not entirely unreasonable to say that the computers used by an anti-war group might suddenly become inoperable when they are targeted by the government. The power to do such a thing should not exist.
Not obviously, they aren't; and even if they are, it certainly isn't "rapidly". You can tell this by the fact that Linux's market-share is not impinging on Windows' market-share to any significant degree. Practically all Linux's gains have been at the expense of proprietary Unix, not Windows.
The reason Windows maintains a dominant market share has nothing to do with its quality, anymore than it did with VHS vs. Betamax. Windows is dominant in the PC because when consumers purchase an appliance, they don't think about the software that runs the appliance. If they buy a PC, the fact that it is running Windows is no more important to them than the fact that their cell phone runs Symbian or their TV runs TRON. Most end-users have no problem using KDE/Linux; the interface is familiar enough that within an hour they are already doing what they would have done with Windows, except for gamers. If a new user got a computer with KDE/Linux pre-installed, they would have no trouble figuring out what to do.
I'm not even convinced it's better. I run both Windows and Linux, I use both regularly, I'm comfortable and experienced at using both, and I prefer Windows. Sorry if that shatters your worldview.
Nobody cares about your view either, and you are in the minority just by having enough brain cells to know that Linux exists.
Admittedly, I still have Office 97 which is arguably inferior to Office 2003, but why should I shell out big bucks every few years for what is essentially the same product?
Er... what? Either Office 2003 is better than Office 97, or it's the same product. You can't have it both ways.
Office 2003 is better than 97 for some tasks, especially very complex documents. I rarely find myself making very complex documents, so if I were an Office user, I would not switch.