The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on July 10, 2004

This is an amalgam of various stupidities:

1.) A commercial which states “People prefer the taste of new Lays (whatever they're called) over Pringles. Why? Because they taste better!”. Well gee folks; if people prefer the taste, then might it be because they taste better?

2.) A commercial which states “What does the phone company know about selling satellite dishes? At Cox communications, we know television; it's what we do. Some come to us for Digital Television, Digital Cable and Digital Telephone”.

The first part of this makes sense. What does the phone company, hystoricall a purveyor of symmetrical Tx/Rx technologies know about a broadcast-based method of content delivery?

Of ocurse, this means that Cox's position is affected by the converse. What does a broadcast-based company know about symmertical systems like telephone and internet? Maybe that's why cable modems are so high-latency and have such poor upstream bandwidth. (Actually, it is. Cable modems function by polling each one on the switch in series asking if it has data to send (increasing latency) then stuffs you the data you're requesting. It's silly and brain damaged).

3.) News article. Allegedly, a MS employee stole proprietary technology from Altavista before he came to work at MS. There is speculation that he might have used that stolen technology in MSN search.

But, I thought that this was one of the reasons that the GPL was bad? You know, the whole “we don't know where Linux code comes from and its likely that people stole it from Unix and put it in there” bit that SCO and MS are trying to push, and how “proprietary companies have strict auditing to determine where code came from, so this doesn't happen” stuff.

Yeah, right. In reality, in either model, the code comes from some developer and the company assumes that the developer didn't steal it. Often, this is enumerated by contract. If somethign does happen, and the company gets sued, it would be traced back to that developer, who would be fired, and the code would be removed as part of whatever settlement there was (or the defendant would license the code from the plaintiff).

4.) Americans read fewer books. Maybe because of that there internet thing? Plus, this just seems to take into account dead-tree books, and not what people are reading on the internet. I don't know about the rest of you, but I actually read MORE books now than in the past few years, because I'm out of school and have the time to.

Category: LJ Import
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