Are you trying to say that the use of these images was directly generating revenue for the companies in question? I doubt anyone actively sought out these articles for the pictures. More like readers came to the site to read an article that happened to have some picture on it.
So in the examples listed, are the authors making any money off the image...? If so, no harm done right? Because when software/movies/music/etc. are pirated for non-financial gain, it's no big deal. At least that's what I've heard on
OK, I've gotta know. Where exactly do you live that dialup is $65 a month? That would've been an unheard-of price even ten years ago.
Hmm I would lean towards it being a "general law", otherwise extended warranties wouldn't be so profitable, now would they?
It's not usually explained in articles like these, but extended warranties are useless because the product reliability tends to follow a "bathtub model". If you chart the number of expected repairs a product (y-axis) against time (x-axis), you'll see a large number of them initially (i.e., initial product failure) which quickly slopes downward towards zero and plateaus for several years. Then, many years out, you'll see that number quickly ramp up again (i.e., end of life product failure). Extended warranties aren't for that period of time, they're for the period of time when product reliability is highest.
Assembly is best for optimizing limited sections of code where your specific domain knowledge can allow you to make optimizations the compiler wouldn't know about. It makes sense in those situations, and that's it. Writing an entire, non-trivial application (or OS in this case) is a waste of time since
And most importantly, for everything except the most critical number-crunching algorithms your app deals with, any performance edge you may gain against a compiler will be so minuscule as to not matter.
It's not *that* far fetched. A successful software engineer can pull down $100-200K per year in the USA, and if s/he's single, it's quite easy to buy a $100K car on that kind of salary.
Err, yeah. There's not THAT many software engineers making >$100K, and if they are, you have to consider that they're certainly in higher cost of living areas and, more importantly, you can expect the number of software engineers getting paid that kind of money to decrease dramatically as jobs are shipped overseas.
There are many people who can afford a $100K car without breaking the bank. On a 5 year loan, financing $80K of the price, it's around $1500/month at 6% loan rate. Plenty of people can do that.
Plenty of highly paid doctors and lawyers, perhaps. But even then they'd probably think twice about it. $1500 a month is more than a mortgage/insurance/tax payment on a $200K house, and you think people who aren't EXTREMELY wealthy would be willing to drop that much a month for five years ON TOP of a $20K downpayment? On a depreciating asset? In an economy that's going to stay ugly for years to come? Get real. It's out of reach for a large percentage of the population.
A good book to read on copyrights and other IP related matters would be Boldrin and Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly.
Is there somewhere I can download that book for free?
Hmm, I'd venture to say that your bosses got mad because they came to rely on a piece of software that would cause them to have to open source their entire project. And as for re-implementing it, I wonder what the GPL says, as anyone who's worked with the code in question is effectively contaminated.
So... the picture is located where?
Precisely. That's why you say "if you don't do X, Y, and Z, you can't say you're compliant with the spec." Sun does this all the time to Java EE appserver vendors and what do you know? They all implement the specs fully (with the inevitable bugs of course).
The problem with standards is that if you leave too much open to "interpretation" you get a mess of incompatibilities. I'm a firm believer that standards organizations need to make the truly important parts of the spec completely mandatory, i.e., if you don't support <video> and all the listed codecs, you can't claim HTML5 compatibility.
That's all correct.
However, California and other states acted like the boom times would never end, and budgeted accordingly. Now that revenues have fallen to more realistic levels, they can't afford boom time spending. Instead of accepting this fact, they're trying to increase revenue.
It's a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
The sum of the Universe is zero.
