They can't make you sign something like that unless they offer some incentive like higher pay. And even then, if you refuse, it's very unlikely they can take punitive action. In most jurisdictions, the courts would severely frown on that.
I never save in MSOffice formats and I almost never distribute docs in that format. OpenOffice is free; if someone wants to collaborate with me on editing files, it's far cheaper for that person to obtain OpenOffice than it would be for me to obtain MSOffice (which I couldn't run anyway since I have no Windoze boxes.)
...that most of modern Physics is just one giant put-on? That string theory, branes, etc. are about as grounded in reality as counting angels on pinheads?
Now if only we could sue idiots who listen to portable music players on the bus and turn the volume up just loud enough to (a) liquefy their brains and (b) annoy the hell out of fellow passengers...
At least two, perhaps even three of those points may well fit the behaviour of the US at this point in time. Are you saying that the US cannot produce scientific results?
The US is indeed in danger. The power of fundamentalists needs watching and the whole "Creation Science" fiasco is worrying rather than laughable. At the same time, the United States still has 200+ years of tradition and institutions that guarantee freedom of expression and a long history of free enterprise. So while there are danger signs, I don't think the USA is in deep trouble just yet. I don't live in the United States or in an Islamic Society, but I sure know which I'd pick if I had to.
It's incoherent because it mixes up the level of discussion: conjecture, opinion, talking points, flamebait and discussions of cause and effect are all presented as facts.
I took facts about most Muslim societies and conjectured that's why they lagged Western societies. That's all.
The post was interesting in highlighting problems, but it was mostly a troll because by its tone it assumes that all Muslims are fanatics who exemplify the worst that their society has to offer
No, you're reading that in. You have to be very careful to distinguish between Muslims, most of whom are no more fanatical than anyone else and who just want to live in peace and make a good living, and self-proclaimed Islamic countries which are for the most part basket-cases. Islam itself is the cause of a lot of problems, and until the Islamic world comes to terms with the fact that Islam (well, any religion really) is not a good basis for running a modern society, Islamic countries will lag. The Christian world went through its dark ages a while ago and has emerged into modernity. It's time for the Islamic world to do the same.
Your post is basically incoherent and intentionally offensive neo-con blogblather
In what way is it incoherent? Maybe skip the ad-hominem attacks and discuss the substance of my posts. Do you disagree that women face terrible injustice and discrimination in many Islamic countries? (Hint: Look up "honor killing." Look at how the justice system reacts when a woman is raped in Pakistan.) Do you disagree that in many Islamic countries, blaspheming Islam is serverely punished? Do you disagree that the publication of some vaguely-offensive cartoons was met with deadly riots that were encouraged if not outright instigated by many Islamic leaders? These are all facts.
Neo-con? Well, I've been called a miserable rotten SOB by leftists and rightists, so I must be doing something right. Just because I criticize Islamic society doesn't mean I agree with American neo-cons. In fact, I think they're more of a danger to the United States than the worst Islamic radicals, because the neo-cons actually can impact policy.
On the other hand, idea of gender equality is a new one. Yeah that's right! Prosperity has NOTHING to do with human rights (also a new idea).
So you say. Why, then, is there such a strong correlation between prosperity and {democracy, capitalism, egalitarianism, human rights} today? Maybe I have cause-and-effect reversed, but either way: It doesn't bode well for modern Islamic societies.
Do you see the logical fallacy in your argument?
No, do you? Read what I wrote again: "Any system that claims a monopoly on truth and mandates severe punishment for those who question the system cannot produce scientific progress."
The rest of your post adds even less usefulness to the discussion, so I won't bother with it.
Ancient Greece was advanced for its time, but it was not competing against industrialized capitalist democracies in which women and men had equal rights. Maybe Islamic societies would have worked well 2500 years ago, but they are clearly failing today.
Re: Soviet Union
Science and technology was a priority in the Soviet Union because of the cold war. However, the USSR was not particularly well advanced in science and technology. Its space technology was unbelievably crude (remember the picture of Mir with cables and tubes coming through a hatch that was supposed to be able to be sealed??) and its economy was a basket-case.
My point is that empirical evidence shows that free, egalitarian, capitalist societies tend to do better in the modern world. Most Islamic countries are not free, not egalitarian, and not capitalist, and they're foundering. Just look at the Human Development Index. Of the top 30 countries, every single one is an industrialized capitalist democracy. Not one is an Islamic country.
Islamic societies are horribly backward in terms of economic and scientific development. It doesn't require a genius to figure out why:
A society that takes away rights from 50% of its population cannot prosper. Societies that oppress women are invariably under-developed, strife-riven and backward.
Any system that proclaims a monopoly on truth and mandates severe punishments for those who question the system cannot produce scientific progress.
Any society that produces riots in response to satirical cartoons cannot progress in the modern world.
Any society that always blames outsiders for its troubles will forever wallow in its own backwardness.
So Apple makes expensive stuff that's marginally better than the cheap stuff everyone else makes. Why does anyone care about Apple's products? Applie is as evil as MSFT (if not more) and should be avoided by anyone who cares about software freedom. I just don't get the hype about Apple's products.
We sell commercial software. It requires a license key.
However, our software ships with source, so it would be trivial for anyone to disable the license-key check. Basically, the purpose of the license key is to remind honest customers when it's time to renew maintenance/support.
We recognize that anyone determined to rip us off will rip us off, and we're not about to make our honest customers' lives more difficult because of a few crooks.
Phoning home if it's not prominently disclosed up front is completely unethical. So is remotely disabling software (and that might even be illegal in some circumstances.)
... or at least he might as well be one. Even as far back as 1999 at his rambling incoherent talk at Ottawa Linux Symposium, it was obvious that Miguel was in love with himself and with MSFT and hated anything UNIXy. He has about as much credibility left as ESR.
I phoned the ACM and got it sorted out. As you see now on their site, it's freely-available. The ACM was reasonable and reacted quickly. That isn't always the case.
The problem is one of architecture. There is no excuse in the modern world for running a secondary MX server that lacks knowledge about local recipient addresses. While this architecture may have been OK 10 years ago, it no longer is. Just don't run a secondary MX unless you have a way to transfer your account list to the secondary in a way that the secondary can have local knowledge of valid addresses even if the primary is unreachable.
Unilaterally deciding to ignore an RFC (or part of an RFC) just because you don't like it is almost never a good idea. When Microsoft does it, everyone (correctly!) gets up in arms. DynDNS shouldn't get off any easier.
At most, I would agree with a temporary block of NDRs to a particular user or domain if a large joe-job run is recognized. But this should never be made permanent or blanket.
Our server checks every half hour to see if a laptop is on the network. If it finds it, it does rsync-over-ssh to back up the laptop (we use a special SSH key for the purpose.)
Our script also won't back up a given laptop more than once every 8 hours.
This assumes that the laptops run Linux or some kind of UNIX. If you run Windoze, then you'll probably have to look for an expensive inflexible proprietary solution, but you should be used to that by now.
We sell commercial (closed-source) code on Linux. However, we are rather unusual because we ship our products with full source code and allow our customers to modify the code. They cannot redistribute it, however, which is what makes the product a traditional closed-source one.
I though about going to all kinds of lengths to obfuscate the source code, and came to the conclusion that it's not worth it. If someone is determined to rip us off, we'll be ripped off. And the great advantage of shipping with source is we sometimes get patches from clueful customers!:-)
I think the ship-with-source proprietary model is a great way to go; I'd encourage you to consider it. In addition to the benefits I mentioned above, it also lets our software run on a wide variety of UN*X-like systems, some of which we don't even have in-house.
All you proprietary PBX vendors out there: Be very afraid. Asterisk is quirky, has a crappy configuration language and seven bazillion configuration files.
And it's still better than all of your proprietary products.
We switched to Asterisk about a year ago and haven't looked back. It integrates seamlessly with our CRM system, our trouble-ticketing system, etc., etc. It's amazingly liberating to be in control of your own PBX.
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They can't make you sign something like that unless they offer some incentive like higher pay. And even then, if you refuse, it's very unlikely they can take punitive action. In most jurisdictions, the courts would severely frown on that.
I never save in MSOffice formats and I almost never distribute docs in that format. OpenOffice is free; if someone wants to collaborate with me on editing files, it's far cheaper for that person to obtain OpenOffice than it would be for me to obtain MSOffice (which I couldn't run anyway since I have no Windoze boxes.)
...that most of modern Physics is just one giant put-on? That string theory, branes, etc. are about as grounded in reality as counting angels on pinheads?
Now if only we could sue idiots who listen to portable music players on the bus and turn the volume up just loud enough to (a) liquefy their brains and (b) annoy the hell out of fellow passengers...
At least two, perhaps even three of those points may well fit the behaviour of the US at this point in time. Are you saying that the US cannot produce scientific results?
The US is indeed in danger. The power of fundamentalists needs watching and the whole "Creation Science" fiasco is worrying rather than laughable. At the same time, the United States still has 200+ years of tradition and institutions that guarantee freedom of expression and a long history of free enterprise. So while there are danger signs, I don't think the USA is in deep trouble just yet. I don't live in the United States or in an Islamic Society, but I sure know which I'd pick if I had to.
It's incoherent because it mixes up the level of discussion: conjecture, opinion, talking points, flamebait and discussions of cause and effect are all presented as facts.
I took facts about most Muslim societies and conjectured that's why they lagged Western societies. That's all.
The post was interesting in highlighting problems, but it was mostly a troll because by its tone it assumes that all Muslims are fanatics who exemplify the worst that their society has to offer
No, you're reading that in. You have to be very careful to distinguish between Muslims, most of whom are no more fanatical than anyone else and who just want to live in peace and make a good living, and self-proclaimed Islamic countries which are for the most part basket-cases. Islam itself is the cause of a lot of problems, and until the Islamic world comes to terms with the fact that Islam (well, any religion really) is not a good basis for running a modern society, Islamic countries will lag. The Christian world went through its dark ages a while ago and has emerged into modernity. It's time for the Islamic world to do the same.
Your post is basically incoherent and intentionally offensive neo-con blogblather
In what way is it incoherent? Maybe skip the ad-hominem attacks and discuss the substance of my posts. Do you disagree that women face terrible injustice and discrimination in many Islamic countries? (Hint: Look up "honor killing." Look at how the justice system reacts when a woman is raped in Pakistan.) Do you disagree that in many Islamic countries, blaspheming Islam is serverely punished? Do you disagree that the publication of some vaguely-offensive cartoons was met with deadly riots that were encouraged if not outright instigated by many Islamic leaders? These are all facts.
Neo-con? Well, I've been called a miserable rotten SOB by leftists and rightists, so I must be doing something right. Just because I criticize Islamic society doesn't mean I agree with American neo-cons. In fact, I think they're more of a danger to the United States than the worst Islamic radicals, because the neo-cons actually can impact policy.
On the other hand, idea of gender equality is a new one. Yeah that's right! Prosperity has NOTHING to do with human rights (also a new idea).
So you say. Why, then, is there such a strong correlation between prosperity and {democracy, capitalism, egalitarianism, human rights} today? Maybe I have cause-and-effect reversed, but either way: It doesn't bode well for modern Islamic societies.
Do you see the logical fallacy in your argument?
No, do you? Read what I wrote again: "Any system that claims a monopoly on truth and mandates severe punishment for those who question the system cannot produce scientific progress."
The rest of your post adds even less usefulness to the discussion, so I won't bother with it.
Re: Ancient Greece:
Ancient Greece was advanced for its time, but it was not competing against industrialized capitalist democracies in which women and men had equal rights. Maybe Islamic societies would have worked well 2500 years ago, but they are clearly failing today.
Re: Soviet Union
Science and technology was a priority in the Soviet Union because of the cold war. However, the USSR was not particularly well advanced in science and technology. Its space technology was unbelievably crude (remember the picture of Mir with cables and tubes coming through a hatch that was supposed to be able to be sealed??) and its economy was a basket-case.
My point is that empirical evidence shows that free, egalitarian, capitalist societies tend to do better in the modern world. Most Islamic countries are not free, not egalitarian, and not capitalist, and they're foundering. Just look at the Human Development Index. Of the top 30 countries, every single one is an industrialized capitalist democracy. Not one is an Islamic country.
Political correctness at its worst... parent was marked as Troll.
I guess the truth hurts.
So Apple makes expensive stuff that's marginally better than the cheap stuff everyone else makes. Why does anyone care about Apple's products? Applie is as evil as MSFT (if not more) and should be avoided by anyone who cares about software freedom. I just don't get the hype about Apple's products.
InfoWorld used to be a Dead Tree Magazine, but they stopped killing trees and went Web-only a few months back.
We sell commercial software. It requires a license key.
However, our software ships with source, so it would be trivial for anyone to disable the license-key check. Basically, the purpose of the license key is to remind honest customers when it's time to renew maintenance/support.
We recognize that anyone determined to rip us off will rip us off, and we're not about to make our honest customers' lives more difficult because of a few crooks.
Phoning home if it's not prominently disclosed up front is completely unethical. So is remotely disabling software (and that might even be illegal in some circumstances.)
... or at least he might as well be one. Even as far back as 1999 at his rambling incoherent talk at Ottawa Linux Symposium, it was obvious that Miguel was in love with himself and with MSFT and hated anything UNIXy. He has about as much credibility left as ESR.
I wrote it so I'm biased, but Remind is the smallest (about 120kB) but by far the most flexible personal calendar tool I've seen.
I phoned the ACM and got it sorted out. As you see now on their site, it's freely-available. The ACM was reasonable and reacted quickly. That isn't always the case.
The problem is one of architecture. There is no excuse in the modern world for running a secondary MX server that lacks knowledge about local recipient addresses. While this architecture may have been OK 10 years ago, it no longer is. Just don't run a secondary MX unless you have a way to transfer your account list to the secondary in a way that the secondary can have local knowledge of valid addresses even if the primary is unreachable.
Unilaterally deciding to ignore an RFC (or part of an RFC) just because you don't like it is almost never a good idea. When Microsoft does it, everyone (correctly!) gets up in arms. DynDNS shouldn't get off any easier.
At most, I would agree with a temporary block of NDRs to a particular user or domain if a large joe-job run is recognized. But this should never be made permanent or blanket.
RFC-Ignorant doesn't "blacklist" anyone. It just informs people that such-and-such-domain does not follow a particular part of an RFC.
... is the same as Microsoft's attitude towards standards: Use when convenient; ignore when not.
Our server checks every half hour to see if a laptop is on the network. If it finds it, it does rsync-over-ssh to back up the laptop (we use a special SSH key for the purpose.)
Our script also won't back up a given laptop more than once every 8 hours.
This assumes that the laptops run Linux or some kind of UNIX. If you run Windoze, then you'll probably have to look for an expensive inflexible proprietary solution, but you should be used to that by now.
Remember, Ubuntu validates as genuine Windows.
We sell commercial (closed-source) code on Linux. However, we are rather unusual because we ship our products with full source code and allow our customers to modify the code. They cannot redistribute it, however, which is what makes the product a traditional closed-source one.
I though about going to all kinds of lengths to obfuscate the source code, and came to the conclusion that it's not worth it. If someone is determined to rip us off, we'll be ripped off. And the great advantage of shipping with source is we sometimes get patches from clueful customers! :-)
I think the ship-with-source proprietary model is a great way to go; I'd encourage you to consider it. In addition to the benefits I mentioned above, it also lets our software run on a wide variety of UN*X-like systems, some of which we don't even have in-house.
All you proprietary PBX vendors out there: Be very afraid. Asterisk is quirky, has a crappy configuration language and seven bazillion configuration files.
And it's still better than all of your proprietary products.
We switched to Asterisk about a year ago and haven't looked back. It integrates seamlessly with our CRM system, our trouble-ticketing system, etc., etc. It's amazingly liberating to be in control of your own PBX.