the best idea in that previous post was: present a picture of the world where the wheel was closed source, and owned and dominated by one company. Also show an open-source wheel world where all sorts of round refinements exist: gears, clocks, disks, etc.
I like ideas that show that open source grows and evolves from it's openness... I'm just going to stream ideas here, to see if they trigger anybody else to think of any more... these don't all work admittedly, but it's brainstorming, not blamestorming... so...
something based on that familiar sequence of fish walking out of the water and progressively turning into an ape, then into a man, except this time into a penguin, except this time all the creatures are "leonardo-esque" line-drawings that show their "design", i.e. open source.
other leonardo-based ideas, show leonardo alive today coding opensource. or then-and-now: machiavelli and leonardo. now: gates and collection of linus, stallman, etc. hey, how about leonardo evolves into a hacker, machievelli into gates?
some allegory based on opensource people standing on the shoulders of giants. maybe the closed source giants shrugging people off, or the people don't have instructions to climb up. or a high jump or height competition where you can cooperate and build on what/who came before, or you can't. BTW, I like the.sig I once saw, "if I have not seen as far as some others it is because I stand in the footprints of giants.":)
how about closed-source leonardo's notebook where the bird's wings are moving too fast so you can't see how it flies, or you see water pumping but you can't why... illustrate other "great ideas" from science history closed up: a world where the wheel was closed source and it's primitive and dominated by Microwheel, while another world is open and also has gears and clocks and cds and other round things
or, the escher hand drawing a hand, except indicate that it's programming, not drawing...
or some other escheresque open architecture where the building is populated by programmers but as it winds around it gets more "better" because it can build on itself. perhaps against a backdrop of a flat, proprietary closed landscape of pretty things, but things that are broken because they can't be fixed.
or, some take-off on the famous Apple commercials, all of the lemmings, except instead of falling off the cliff, they are smiling happily and walking onto a giant pyramid of cooperating lemmings...
or biblical tower of microsoft/sun/oracle babel barely getting off the ground as seen from the top of the successfully towering opensource ivory tower...
how about a picture of the rosetta stone, except add more panels to it, keep translating more languages until you eventually get some opensource code. show people using it productively while there are a bunch of other folks as slaves to hooded figures casting very confusing microsoft spells at stonehenge.
show apes like at the beginning of 2001, jumping around ineffectually in front of MSDN cd-roms while, while fully evolved humans do something more meaningful with obelisks of opensource code
show the end of the planet of the apes, except sticking up out of the ground is the remnants of microsoft, oracle and sun, and the apes are the dunces still using proprietary software
show some cathedral v. bazaar allegory (if you get it right, maybe I'd understand it finally) with bill gates sitting on a big pile of money with employees waiting to kiss his ring, but like a political cartoon, show the original ideas that he stole (yep, every single one of em) sticking out of his pockets. show a big crowd in front purchasing, but people around the fringe of that crowd are starting to notice all the nicer free stuff coming from a many new sources.
several big complicated rube goldberg designs that don't work but it's not obvious why to the users because they're closed. then, some opensource rube goldberg designs that are progressively and transparently copied and made better. Rube Goldberg designs are a good example of algorithms that average people can understand, and only because they are opensource.
the proprietary emperor has no clothes, but the prescient little kid is an opensource hacker
johnny appleseed comes to mind as a "giving" figure who left behind stuff that grew.
"new yorker's view of the US" map, except now it's proprietary software view of the world where every thing in the foreground is owned and the distance is barren, vs. the opensource view, where the latter landscape has lots of happy people sharing as far as the eye can see.
opensource movement as the american revolution in the face of various imperial forms of government (sorry, all you ferners reading slashdot, but this is the world's oldest democracy, where the modern ideas of freedom first took root) where all governments had a bill of rights but the non-democratic kept it a secret. soviet union as closed source bill of rights? how about closed source 10 commandments? hmm... they are closed source.
ok, my ideas are getting lousier (regardless of where they started) so I'll quit while I'm still ahead... of where I will be if I keep going.
my problem with all of the arguments in favor of "accessibility" laws is their selectivity, all the while pretending to be the opposite.
who is more "deserving" of internet access: a few middle-class blind people who live in a wealthy society, whose needs are mostly taken care of, or vast swaths of the impoverished third world who might use internet access for the economic opportunity to feed themselves.
and if there is the majority of people in favor of the ADA, where were all you big-hearted people before the ADA? I didn't see 1/2 the population installing ramps on their own etc. It's all about greed folks, making other people pay for the things you want, and it's about control, legislating your morality and forcing it on other people
Don't misinterpret me, I'm mostly in favor of the ADA, I just don't dress it up in flowery language. It's moral and economic fascism, "making the trains run on time" for my handicapped neighbors because I like them better than I do people halfway round the world, and it's getting other people to pitch in and help with my personal morality because I like my personal morality better.
But, whether you are in favor of it or not, the ADA pretty clearly applies to AOL, though IMHO the truly handicapped are all of the people who use AOL.
Just like WWII bombers used tinfoil to confuse enemy radar, I want a patch that will randomly pick titles from the CDDB and then submit them to Real. It can run any time my machine is idle. Then, Real can enlist the aid of SETI to see if they can find any sign of intelligent musical life in my "tin-eared foil,", the random datastream.
This patch would have the nice added feature of confusing the pricks at CDDB too, who've stamped a copyright on what once was shared, mutually created data.
Would this policy annoy Real? I don't think so, it meets their own criteria. First, I would not be accumulating the data, I would submit it and forget it. Second, I would only release or sell aggregate statistics, stuff like "65536 records submitted to two music related websites". And, third, I can go them one better and apologize in advance: Sorry, Real, truly sorry... but, as you know, I was never on the board of the EFF, nor have I received a TRUSTe seal of approval so I can't be expected to be cognizant of on-line privacy issues. And you see, since they never published what the API they were running on my machine was for, who is to say it's not for sending random data to?
So, is this deciphered data format published someplace?
The reason education should not be "free" is that the primary, overwhelming beneficiary of the education is the student receiving it. That's simple economics, a classic case where micro works. The beneficiary of a meal should pay for the meal, and the beneficiary of an education should pay for it.
Now, the egalitarian impulse to make education available to all so that the economic opportunity is available to all reflects not only a valid moral impulse, but a valid economic impulse as well: The expenses of education are completely front-loaded, while the benefits continue to accrue over a lifetime.
So, there's a simple solution: the government should grant unlimited loans to anyone for any education. Then, withhold the loan repayment from your paycheck just like the social security deduction. It can be a moderate withholding for low income people, providing a natural subsidy for art historians who may never pay it back, and a honkin' big tax on capital gains for the folks who IPO.
This is another classic from economics, the "lifecycle theory" where you borrow while young, save in middle age, and spend down in maturity to basically evenly spread the same standard of living throughout your life.
people who are "brought back" to life from death or near-death fare much better, have much less brain-damage, if they've been chilled. for example, if you drown in frigid water (or perhaps suffer a heart attack having an affair with my mother-in-law (ouch! I'm in trouble now!)) they will attempt a resuscitation after a much longer period of time, I think because the tissue in the brain goes to sleep and doesn't run out of O2.
BTW, my pet ideas for CPU cooling are more broad-brush, once-and-for-all sorts of things:
convert an old glass-doored refrigerator to a rack, and stick in the boxen... and a case of Jolt.
more esoteric, they sell kits for converting a spare closet into a "wine cellar" consisting of staple-up insulation and a little compressor and a hose. Benefit is that it is designed to run at 60 degrees F rather than in the low single digits C.
Somebody test these out and get back to me. Oh, that's me "whining" in that closet, hiding from my mother-in-law. Can't she see that my joke was just a "cryo" for help?:)
"Massachusetts", the Indian name for Blue Hill, is routinely referred to as "the commonwealth" in the local media, pronounced "cawmonwealth". So, calling it the "dot commonwealth" is just a natural pun, and a pretty good one, actually.
Boston, BTW, is often referred to as the Hub: that too could be changed perhaps to something more modern. Yes, a switch might very well be just the thing.
Oh, and lookee here: slashdot has the word "dot" in it. What suit came up with that, and isn't it making you all sick? Maybe lame dot signatures would be a better name for this site judging from all of the rip-snorting good humor I see here. Of course, theah in New England, John Hancock will always be THE dot signature guy for being first to add his public, key, authenticating mark on the Declaration of Independence, giving us all a general public license to speak our minds.
Of course, they do pronounce open source as open sawce which sounds just like free beer to my ear.
I really like his stuff on Gosper and Greenblatt and
yep, I agree. I also liked that bittersweet (yes, Spock, that's "an emotion", probably off-topic) scene where one of 'em went to Cape Canavaral and watched the shuttle take off, and he was awed by the magnitude of the accomplishment, especially considering how totally lame NASA and the government are, especially considering how not lame how all the hackers were but how lame their accomplishments were, accomplishments like "Eliza == AI".
So, it's gratifying that finally, with Linux and the open and free software movements, we are seeing the hackers' Space Shuttle start to lift off.
Great ideas here and all over this forum. But I don't think they are expansive enough, or simple enough.
The way to make this truly useful, and a new way to compute a la Neuromancer, is to not clamp down on the metaphor. Don't make rooms be processes or machines or any other fixed metaphor, and don't make "weapons" be tools from some vast and complicated "stateful" array.
Make each room you are in able to have it's own metaphor, and have the objects in the room be manipulable via some simple message passing tools in your hand.
So, starting with the kill processes room as described, make the doorways be "portals" to other rooms (but don't limit it...) which may contain other metaphors. So, I can enter the spreadsheets room where I can calculate, or I can enter the Beowulf maze where I can get performance stats, or I can enter the weather forecasting room which is just the metaphor for the processes that're running on the Beowulf cluster.
I.E., the "dungeon" is just your desktop as you know and love it, with a 3d-visual cartoon rendering whenever you roll your mouse somewhere and launch something. And make it be that easy: screw complicated maneuvering in favor of point-and-click only. Give the visual appearance of doing cool stuff, but make the user only point and click.
P.S. by the way, I proposed a similar scheme a while ago to some VRML vermin who were looking in a discussion group for "how to make VRML" more appealing to business users. The whole problem I saw with VRML was that it was visually cool, but too hard to use. Gamers may be familiar with lots of controls, but some of us aren't interested in that and they just create barriers to entry. Give me a point and click VRML UI with cool visuals, or an Id engine, and I can get people to click on your ads, guaranteed: Oooh! that tickles, stop it, you rascal!
hey, ok, in the light of a new day, it wasn't funny. but it wasn't off-topic! I said HotSynque Vites was "Euro support for faster you-know-what" to explain the stupid joke, but the "you-know-what" was not a reference to...sex? who knows what you thought it was, it was a reference to that being the only word in that joke that did not require explanation: synque==sync. I feared that some Philistine might not know that vites means fast in French, and might need help with "synque" as a Euro spelling.
Dumb joke? so sue me. but it was on topic, particularly because the rest of the post was making a real point. [sigh]You probably don't know what zaftig means either, so allow me to apologize for being too sophistcated.
Look, nobody likes to wade through a posting that has a zillion point-by-point refutations of some previous posting, so, I'll try to restrain myself... but, it's not fair to fill your postings with a blizzard of half-truths which beg for tedious refutation. I think you did a good job of presenting a central argument, but did you have to gussy it up so much?
no critical responses yes there were to this kneejerk apologist for America-as-it-is you are a knee-jerk anti-American. Sure, I was acting as an apologist for those patriotic citizens all across our spectrum, who dig into their own pockets and contribute money to promote the political discourse in the tradition of Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. OK? don't bother to criticize that, I admit it was way over the top. Just admit that your screed was over the top in the other direction and we'll both move on to the meat of the discussion.
The burden of proof... is on someone [who holds] that wealth should automatically confer entitlement to have one's speech more effectively heard.
Well, well, well, not only do you know the noun "straw man", you know how to erect one. I have no idea if the burden of proof rests on that guy, but I do know that it wasn't my argument. Quit reading between the lines and just read the lines:
It is obvious that wealth confers advantages in having one's speech heard. It is also obvious that "freedom" (as in "leaving people to act as they wish") is a good thing. So, the question is, do the advantages that the rich have in the speech department make it worth revoking their freedom? I say "no", and I think that the burden of proof is on those who say that we should.
I didn't say that wealth was inherently irrelevant in the shaping of political discourse, I say that it is effectively irrelevant in the resulting shape because experience shows that there are destitute wackos all over the political spectrum, and wealthy ones, and a lot more people in the middle of wealth, sanity, and political viewpoint. So, since we can't a priori find a bias, do we find one in practice? Call me an apologist, but I think all viewpoints in America are being heard just fine, as I pointed out in a previous posting. Lay it on the line, what viewpoints aren't being heard?
So, why do we need so much money in our politics? Because it is goddamn expensive to talk to 200 million people! That many postage stamps (for 1 mailing from 1 candidate) costs $70 million! For one measley mailing! (Give me first class postage, and I'll ignore the envelope stuffers who cost even more.) Not to mention TV, radio, multiple candidates, multiple issues, primaries, elections, referenda.... it takes big bucks in toto, but per head it's kind of reasonable given what we get from our democracy.
I do think the situation can be changed for the better: eliminate the anti-1st-amendment, free speech limitations on political spending. The alternative to that which I keep hearing is to allow some central committee of the government to decide who gets money for speech, the lifeblood of democracy: who says that's better and who do you think has the burden of proof?
that was explicitly not my conclusion. What I said was limiting political spending does not accomplish the goal of limiting the political power of big money.
You seem to argue that since rich people are distributed evenly along the political spectrum, big money has no inherent political bias What you're forgetting, however, is that the real money isn't with the rich people, it's with the rich corporations, and their influence tends to be much more homogenous.
Well, I don't want get you on an "inherent" technicality so let me remake the argument: I think it's easy to demonstrate that rich people are distributed widely across the political spectrum, though I have no idea how evenly. I'd sure like to hear the points of view that are supposedly not being heard, I'll bet I've already heard them. I've sure already heard all the ones you presented, defense, NAFTA, alcohol, tobacco... I don't feel like I or anybody is underinformed on those issues. Those debates actually tire people out and they shout "gridlock" and form third parties, though I've no idea what their fresh perspective is. As to the law which emerges from those debates? It doesn't seem to me that it has swung one way or the other. We still have tobacco, but not as much or as free, we still have defense spending, but not as much. NAFTA? Hell if I know which way it went. We still have lots of imports and lots of exports and lots of Americans working home and abroad, and lots of foreigners working here. The system is pretty much working, isn't it?
And the debate is working so well because big corporations with all of their big money are owned by the same rich people who come from all across the spectrum. Have you met the officers of your and other companies? All the "suits" I've ever gotten to know personally have turned out to have ideas from all across the same spectrum. "Suits" are just people who wear suits.
I think the gripe I'm hearing is really that the system is not open-sourced: we don't get to see how the decisions are made.
I say, anybody should spend as much money as they want, hey, hire all the lobbyists you want, I don't care. But it should all be on CSPAN... no wait, it should all be on Slashdot... no more secrets, no more closed source. What do you wish to tell my congressman, or my president that you don't want me to hear? If we had open campaigning, open meetings, and open lobbying, we really would get the best government that all of that money could buy for us.
But don't think I'm calling for this too loudly, because most of the system is working. This is a better time, richer, freeer, healthier, cleaner, funner, you name it, to be alive than ever before in the history of man. Yes, some people don't have all of all of those things, but that's the "the glass is 1% empty" point of view, because vastly more people in the world have all of those things, and there's no reason to think that more won't tomorrow.
Too rosy? Heck, 10 years ago there was no Linux, and 20 years ago there was no opensource. Yeah, we have AIDS to worry about, and NT, but things are getting much better.
yeah, but nobody ever went to their old site. The PalmPilot could have passed that loadtest.
But now all the slashdotters (a force greater than Linux+Apache)are going to run over and pound their server to a pulp and the royal family is going to interpret it as an over-exuberant show of support from the subjects, and shall endeavour to recolonize us.
Somebody bring Prince Chuck up to date: today it's free and open source upon which the sun never sets, and they should rededicate their efforts to more important issues: why, after all, if everybody had been using Imperial measurements, we wouldn't have lost that satellite, now would we?
New features include a doubling of the maximum HotSync speed, HoySync-over-IR, Euro support, and network logon enhancements.
OK, what was I bitching about yesterday? Yes, Microsoft Windows is bloatware, but can't PalmOS be at least zaftig? I mean, "HotSyncque Vites" [hee hee, I that's Euro support for faster you-know-what]: that's it? Oooh la la! let me run right out! [yawn]
Among Encyclopaediae, Brittanica rulez Encarta,
And now we webber, webber, webbers shall be smarta!
... and freer from monopoly. Yup, one restrictive copyright's the same as another, but it's fun to watch competition drive the prices down down down. Ads or no ads, access to a big database is always better than no access.
Of course advocating for a candidate is covered by campaign finance laws. Limiting campaign financing is limiting speech, equals-equals it's censorship.
It is a widely held populist belief that if we allow big money, then the rich will control everything. The proper ACLU-approved response to this is it doesn't matter, free speech is absolute and the proper rational response to this is it doesn't matter because it's not true.
The reason that free speech is important is that ideas are important and it's important to hear all sides and judge. Everybody gets to vote, rich or poor, nobody's taking that away. Yes, if unlimited free speech is allowed (yay!) then the rich will get more of it, but they already have more of it, campaign finance law has not and will never change that, and it's specious anyway because rich people come from all parts of the political spectrum too, from BarbAra Streisand to Charlton Heston. In fact, it is easier for the little guy, a dark horse candidate to convince a few rich people to support him/her than it is for that candidate to pound the pavement and fly all over the country raising peanuts here and there and ultimately getting nowhere. That's how George McGovern got in. It's only nowadays after we've had campaign spending limits lots of good candidates are complaining that they can't raise enough money.
When speech is controlled by the government, that's when you lose freedom. Campaign finance law is part-and-parcel of dictatorship, as is public financing. If we were to get public financing, do you think any current office holders or entrenched civil servants will not use it to their own advantage?
And, right back on topic, if you attempt to limit free speech/spending speech you are always going to get people figuring out how to get around it as we saw with PACs, soft money, private individuals running advocacy ads (banned) and private individuals setting up private websites (which has to be banned for the same reason).
The answer is simple: stop limiting free speech, whatever form it takes, and how ever much it costs.
Of course, I feel compelled to add, sometimes free-speech (in the form of campaign shindigs) does equal free-beer if you can wangle an invitation.
it's not clear to me what "prior art" is if the prior-artist is me.
You can be held liable for patent infringement if you have made, used, sold or imported, without a license, something that is claimed by a valid patent owned by another.
if I write software that I don't particularly publicize or that I do particularly publicize, and then someone develops, applies for, and is granted a patent, am I protected? Let's assume that I can "prove" when I did it: How much does my own publicity enter into the question of whether my art is prior?
Also, BTW, you (and others) use phrases like
The legal fiction that supposedly justifies this result is that a patentee... is given this very strong right in exchange for disclosing an invention to the public.
Look, call it an historical fiction, a raw deal, a moral fiction, all sort of things, but it's not a "legal fiction" because it is a legal reality. The bit about "software is not patentable" is a legal fiction since it's legally not true.
I'd sorta like it if i could -- gasp, heresy -- run the linux kernel as a Win32 app.
yeah, I know, there's vmware, and yeah, I know, there's dual boot and all sorts of other things, but on many occasions I have to sit down at somebody else's machine running one of Microsoft's windowing operating systems, and I'd like to be able to unpack a little archive and run linux, and be able to assure the owner of the machine that all I did was put a bunch files in one directory and they can be deleted.
Then, they'd love using the various things I'd install and there'd be another linux convert.
BTW, all of those "other ways to do it" say to me: hey, most of this work is already done, just bring the pieces together. Anybody know of a reason why this might be too hard to do?
IBM always enters and leaves markets. It's hardly news. In a year or so, they'll reenter with a new strategy. Capitalism and competitive markets are creative destruction, and you have to keep changing to stay afloat, even if you don't stay afloat as IBM doesn't at the low end.
Look, the market doesn't have preferences much different from your own: sometimes you want something right away so you go to a retail store next door, and other times you think you might be returning it soon so you go to a retail store next door, and sometimes you think you'll need post-sales in-person support so you go to the retail store next door, and the rest of the time you like the quiet, low-cost, efficiency of the giant mail-order places so you order from them.
Sometimes you use the phone to call your vendors, sometimes you'll use the web, and sometimes you'll use "sneaker-net" and walk over there.
And, yep, web will allow more virtual reality inspection of products in the future, and will enable complex retail relationships where you order centrally nationally customizedforyouably and the computer will get delivered with your Peapod/HomeRuns/Whatever grocery service.
Various retail channels will change, but they're all pretty much here to stay.
from your "fake" 192.168. ip address, it occurs to me to mention that the Network Address Translation/masquerading needs to take place on the "internet" network adapter, not on the private network side.
Notice that the other suggestors are including a "-i ethX" argument. You should have one too, referring to the "external internet" network adapter.
Hey, any editors want to delete my previous and just use this one?
I don't know what you are referring to, but the BP6 motherboard which is extremely popular right now comes with the "normal" complement of IDE drives, and with a "new" set of IDE connectors for ATA66/UDMA6 drives. So, theoretically, you can plug in 8 IDE devices.
FWIW, the BIOS "implementation" is similar to motherboard SCSI. There's that entry that says "boot from A/C/SCSI" except now it's the extra IDEs. Then, when you boot, after the normal drive detection , there is the extra drive just like the "Hit Ctrl-A" SCSI boot.
jeez, what a moron (me). I scoured your posting and only afterward did I see that your forwarding *is* on.
however, here's another suggestion: from your "fake" 192.168. ip address, it occurs to me to mention that the Network Address Translation/masquerading needs to take place on the "internet" network adapter, not on the private network side.
Slashdot Mirror
reposted to make it easy to see.
something based on that familiar sequence of fish walking out of the water and progressively turning into an ape, then into a man, except this time into a penguin, except this time all the creatures are "leonardo-esque" line-drawings that show their "design", i.e. open source.
other leonardo-based ideas, show leonardo alive today coding opensource. or then-and-now: machiavelli and leonardo. now: gates and collection of linus, stallman, etc. hey, how about leonardo evolves into a hacker, machievelli into gates?
some allegory based on opensource people standing on the shoulders of giants. maybe the closed source giants shrugging people off, or the people don't have instructions to climb up. or a high jump or height competition where you can cooperate and build on what/who came before, or you can't. BTW, I like the .sig I once saw, "if I have not seen as far as some others it is because I stand in the footprints of giants." :)
how about closed-source leonardo's notebook where the bird's wings are moving too fast so you can't see how it flies, or you see water pumping but you can't why... illustrate other "great ideas" from science history closed up: a world where the wheel was closed source and it's primitive and dominated by Microwheel, while another world is open and also has gears and clocks and cds and other round things
or, the escher hand drawing a hand, except indicate that it's programming, not drawing...
or some other escheresque open architecture where the building is populated by programmers but as it winds around it gets more "better" because it can build on itself. perhaps against a backdrop of a flat, proprietary closed landscape of pretty things, but things that are broken because they can't be fixed.
or, some take-off on the famous Apple commercials, all of the lemmings, except instead of falling off the cliff, they are smiling happily and walking onto a giant pyramid of cooperating lemmings...
or biblical tower of microsoft/sun/oracle babel barely getting off the ground as seen from the top of the successfully towering opensource ivory tower...
how about a picture of the rosetta stone, except add more panels to it, keep translating more languages until you eventually get some opensource code. show people using it productively while there are a bunch of other folks as slaves to hooded figures casting very confusing microsoft spells at stonehenge.
show apes like at the beginning of 2001, jumping around ineffectually in front of MSDN cd-roms while, while fully evolved humans do something more meaningful with obelisks of opensource code
show the end of the planet of the apes, except sticking up out of the ground is the remnants of microsoft, oracle and sun, and the apes are the dunces still using proprietary software
show some cathedral v. bazaar allegory (if you get it right, maybe I'd understand it finally) with bill gates sitting on a big pile of money with employees waiting to kiss his ring, but like a political cartoon, show the original ideas that he stole (yep, every single one of em) sticking out of his pockets. show a big crowd in front purchasing, but people around the fringe of that crowd are starting to notice all the nicer free stuff coming from a many new sources.
several big complicated rube goldberg designs that don't work but it's not obvious why to the users because they're closed. then, some opensource rube goldberg designs that are progressively and transparently copied and made better. Rube Goldberg designs are a good example of algorithms that average people can understand, and only because they are opensource.
the proprietary emperor has no clothes, but the prescient little kid is an opensource hacker
johnny appleseed comes to mind as a "giving" figure who left behind stuff that grew.
"new yorker's view of the US" map, except now it's proprietary software view of the world where every thing in the foreground is owned and the distance is barren, vs. the opensource view, where the latter landscape has lots of happy people sharing as far as the eye can see.
opensource movement as the american revolution in the face of various imperial forms of government (sorry, all you ferners reading slashdot, but this is the world's oldest democracy, where the modern ideas of freedom first took root) where all governments had a bill of rights but the non-democratic kept it a secret. soviet union as closed source bill of rights? how about closed source 10 commandments? hmm... they are closed source.
ok, my ideas are getting lousier (regardless of where they started) so I'll quit while I'm still ahead... of where I will be if I keep going.
who is more "deserving" of internet access: a few middle-class blind people who live in a wealthy society, whose needs are mostly taken care of, or vast swaths of the impoverished third world who might use internet access for the economic opportunity to feed themselves.
and if there is the majority of people in favor of the ADA, where were all you big-hearted people before the ADA? I didn't see 1/2 the population installing ramps on their own etc. It's all about greed folks, making other people pay for the things you want, and it's about control, legislating your morality and forcing it on other people
Don't misinterpret me, I'm mostly in favor of the ADA, I just don't dress it up in flowery language. It's moral and economic fascism, "making the trains run on time" for my handicapped neighbors because I like them better than I do people halfway round the world, and it's getting other people to pitch in and help with my personal morality because I like my personal morality better.
But, whether you are in favor of it or not, the ADA pretty clearly applies to AOL, though IMHO the truly handicapped are all of the people who use AOL.
yeah, and if any of your friends has too much to drink, let 'em "crash" at your place.
This patch would have the nice added feature of confusing the pricks at CDDB too, who've stamped a copyright on what once was shared, mutually created data.
Would this policy annoy Real? I don't think so, it meets their own criteria. First, I would not be accumulating the data, I would submit it and forget it. Second, I would only release or sell aggregate statistics, stuff like "65536 records submitted to two music related websites". And, third, I can go them one better and apologize in advance: Sorry, Real, truly sorry... but, as you know, I was never on the board of the EFF, nor have I received a TRUSTe seal of approval so I can't be expected to be cognizant of on-line privacy issues. And you see, since they never published what the API they were running on my machine was for, who is to say it's not for sending random data to?
So, is this deciphered data format published someplace?
Now, the egalitarian impulse to make education available to all so that the economic opportunity is available to all reflects not only a valid moral impulse, but a valid economic impulse as well: The expenses of education are completely front-loaded, while the benefits continue to accrue over a lifetime.
So, there's a simple solution: the government should grant unlimited loans to anyone for any education. Then, withhold the loan repayment from your paycheck just like the social security deduction. It can be a moderate withholding for low income people, providing a natural subsidy for art historians who may never pay it back, and a honkin' big tax on capital gains for the folks who IPO.
This is another classic from economics, the "lifecycle theory" where you borrow while young, save in middle age, and spend down in maturity to basically evenly spread the same standard of living throughout your life.
people who are "brought back" to life from death or near-death fare much better, have much less brain-damage, if they've been chilled. for example, if you drown in frigid water (or perhaps suffer a heart attack having an affair with my mother-in-law (ouch! I'm in trouble now!)) they will attempt a resuscitation after a much longer period of time, I think because the tissue in the brain goes to sleep and doesn't run out of O2.
BTW, my pet ideas for CPU cooling are more broad-brush, once-and-for-all sorts of things:
- convert an old glass-doored refrigerator to a rack, and stick in the boxen... and a case of Jolt.
- more esoteric, they sell kits for converting a spare closet into a "wine cellar" consisting of staple-up insulation and a little compressor and a hose. Benefit is that it is designed to run at 60 degrees F rather than in the low single digits C.
Somebody test these out and get back to me. Oh, that's me "whining" in that closet, hiding from my mother-in-law. Can't she see that my joke was just a "cryo" for help?Boston, BTW, is often referred to as the Hub: that too could be changed perhaps to something more modern. Yes, a switch might very well be just the thing.
Oh, and lookee here: slashdot has the word "dot" in it. What suit came up with that, and isn't it making you all sick? Maybe lame dot signatures would be a better name for this site judging from all of the rip-snorting good humor I see here. Of course, theah in New England, John Hancock will always be THE dot signature guy for being first to add his public, key, authenticating mark on the Declaration of Independence, giving us all a general public license to speak our minds.
Of course, they do pronounce open source as open sawce which sounds just like free beer to my ear.
yep, I agree. I also liked that bittersweet (yes, Spock, that's "an emotion", probably off-topic) scene where one of 'em went to Cape Canavaral and watched the shuttle take off, and he was awed by the magnitude of the accomplishment, especially considering how totally lame NASA and the government are, especially considering how not lame how all the hackers were but how lame their accomplishments were, accomplishments like "Eliza == AI".
So, it's gratifying that finally, with Linux and the open and free software movements, we are seeing the hackers' Space Shuttle start to lift off.
The way to make this truly useful, and a new way to compute a la Neuromancer, is to not clamp down on the metaphor. Don't make rooms be processes or machines or any other fixed metaphor, and don't make "weapons" be tools from some vast and complicated "stateful" array.
Make each room you are in able to have it's own metaphor, and have the objects in the room be manipulable via some simple message passing tools in your hand.
So, starting with the kill processes room as described, make the doorways be "portals" to other rooms (but don't limit it...) which may contain other metaphors. So, I can enter the spreadsheets room where I can calculate, or I can enter the Beowulf maze where I can get performance stats, or I can enter the weather forecasting room which is just the metaphor for the processes that're running on the Beowulf cluster.
I.E., the "dungeon" is just your desktop as you know and love it, with a 3d-visual cartoon rendering whenever you roll your mouse somewhere and launch something. And make it be that easy: screw complicated maneuvering in favor of point-and-click only. Give the visual appearance of doing cool stuff, but make the user only point and click.
P.S. by the way, I proposed a similar scheme a while ago to some VRML vermin who were looking in a discussion group for "how to make VRML" more appealing to business users. The whole problem I saw with VRML was that it was visually cool, but too hard to use. Gamers may be familiar with lots of controls, but some of us aren't interested in that and they just create barriers to entry. Give me a point and click VRML UI with cool visuals, or an Id engine, and I can get people to click on your ads, guaranteed: Oooh! that tickles, stop it, you rascal!
Dumb joke? so sue me. but it was on topic, particularly because the rest of the post was making a real point. [sigh]You probably don't know what zaftig means either, so allow me to apologize for being too sophistcated.
no critical responses yes there were to this kneejerk apologist for America-as-it-is you are a knee-jerk anti-American. Sure, I was acting as an apologist for those patriotic citizens all across our spectrum, who dig into their own pockets and contribute money to promote the political discourse in the tradition of Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. OK? don't bother to criticize that, I admit it was way over the top. Just admit that your screed was over the top in the other direction and we'll both move on to the meat of the discussion.
Well, well, well, not only do you know the noun "straw man", you know how to erect one. I have no idea if the burden of proof rests on that guy, but I do know that it wasn't my argument. Quit reading between the lines and just read the lines:It is obvious that wealth confers advantages in having one's speech heard. It is also obvious that "freedom" (as in "leaving people to act as they wish") is a good thing. So, the question is, do the advantages that the rich have in the speech department make it worth revoking their freedom? I say "no", and I think that the burden of proof is on those who say that we should.
I didn't say that wealth was inherently irrelevant in the shaping of political discourse, I say that it is effectively irrelevant in the resulting shape because experience shows that there are destitute wackos all over the political spectrum, and wealthy ones, and a lot more people in the middle of wealth, sanity, and political viewpoint. So, since we can't a priori find a bias, do we find one in practice? Call me an apologist, but I think all viewpoints in America are being heard just fine, as I pointed out in a previous posting. Lay it on the line, what viewpoints aren't being heard?
So, why do we need so much money in our politics? Because it is goddamn expensive to talk to 200 million people! That many postage stamps (for 1 mailing from 1 candidate) costs $70 million! For one measley mailing! (Give me first class postage, and I'll ignore the envelope stuffers who cost even more.) Not to mention TV, radio, multiple candidates, multiple issues, primaries, elections, referenda.... it takes big bucks in toto, but per head it's kind of reasonable given what we get from our democracy.
I do think the situation can be changed for the better: eliminate the anti-1st-amendment, free speech limitations on political spending. The alternative to that which I keep hearing is to allow some central committee of the government to decide who gets money for speech, the lifeblood of democracy: who says that's better and who do you think has the burden of proof?
that was explicitly not my conclusion. What I said was limiting political spending does not accomplish the goal of limiting the political power of big money.
You seem to argue that since rich people are distributed evenly along the political spectrum, big money has no inherent political bias
What you're forgetting, however, is that the real money isn't with the rich people, it's with the rich corporations, and their influence tends to be much more homogenous.
Well, I don't want get you on an "inherent" technicality so let me remake the argument: I think it's easy to demonstrate that rich people are distributed widely across the political spectrum, though I have no idea how evenly. I'd sure like to hear the points of view that are supposedly not being heard, I'll bet I've already heard them. I've sure already heard all the ones you presented, defense, NAFTA, alcohol, tobacco... I don't feel like I or anybody is underinformed on those issues. Those debates actually tire people out and they shout "gridlock" and form third parties, though I've no idea what their fresh perspective is. As to the law which emerges from those debates? It doesn't seem to me that it has swung one way or the other. We still have tobacco, but not as much or as free, we still have defense spending, but not as much. NAFTA? Hell if I know which way it went. We still have lots of imports and lots of exports and lots of Americans working home and abroad, and lots of foreigners working here. The system is pretty much working, isn't it?
And the debate is working so well because big corporations with all of their big money are owned by the same rich people who come from all across the spectrum. Have you met the officers of your and other companies? All the "suits" I've ever gotten to know personally have turned out to have ideas from all across the same spectrum. "Suits" are just people who wear suits.
I think the gripe I'm hearing is really that the system is not open-sourced: we don't get to see how the decisions are made.
I say, anybody should spend as much money as they want, hey, hire all the lobbyists you want, I don't care. But it should all be on CSPAN... no wait, it should all be on Slashdot... no more secrets, no more closed source. What do you wish to tell my congressman, or my president that you don't want me to hear? If we had open campaigning, open meetings, and open lobbying, we really would get the best government that all of that money could buy for us.
But don't think I'm calling for this too loudly, because most of the system is working. This is a better time, richer, freeer, healthier, cleaner, funner, you name it, to be alive than ever before in the history of man. Yes, some people don't have all of all of those things, but that's the "the glass is 1% empty" point of view, because vastly more people in the world have all of those things, and there's no reason to think that more won't tomorrow.
Too rosy? Heck, 10 years ago there was no Linux, and 20 years ago there was no opensource. Yeah, we have AIDS to worry about, and NT, but things are getting much better.
But now all the slashdotters (a force greater than Linux+Apache)are going to run over and pound their server to a pulp and the royal family is going to interpret it as an over-exuberant show of support from the subjects, and shall endeavour to recolonize us.
Somebody bring Prince Chuck up to date: today it's free and open source upon which the sun never sets, and they should rededicate their efforts to more important issues: why, after all, if everybody had been using Imperial measurements, we wouldn't have lost that satellite, now would we?
OK, what was I bitching about yesterday? Yes, Microsoft Windows is bloatware, but can't PalmOS be at least zaftig? I mean, "HotSyncque Vites" [hee hee, I that's Euro support for faster you-know-what]: that's it? Oooh la la! let me run right out! [yawn]
I think web TV was designed for exactly this use.
It is a widely held populist belief that if we allow big money, then the rich will control everything. The proper ACLU-approved response to this is it doesn't matter, free speech is absolute and the proper rational response to this is it doesn't matter because it's not true.
The reason that free speech is important is that ideas are important and it's important to hear all sides and judge. Everybody gets to vote, rich or poor, nobody's taking that away. Yes, if unlimited free speech is allowed (yay!) then the rich will get more of it, but they already have more of it, campaign finance law has not and will never change that, and it's specious anyway because rich people come from all parts of the political spectrum too, from BarbAra Streisand to Charlton Heston. In fact, it is easier for the little guy, a dark horse candidate to convince a few rich people to support him/her than it is for that candidate to pound the pavement and fly all over the country raising peanuts here and there and ultimately getting nowhere. That's how George McGovern got in. It's only nowadays after we've had campaign spending limits lots of good candidates are complaining that they can't raise enough money.
When speech is controlled by the government, that's when you lose freedom. Campaign finance law is part-and-parcel of dictatorship, as is public financing. If we were to get public financing, do you think any current office holders or entrenched civil servants will not use it to their own advantage?
And, right back on topic, if you attempt to limit free speech/spending speech you are always going to get people figuring out how to get around it as we saw with PACs, soft money, private individuals running advocacy ads (banned) and private individuals setting up private websites (which has to be banned for the same reason).
The answer is simple: stop limiting free speech, whatever form it takes, and how ever much it costs.
Of course, I feel compelled to add, sometimes free-speech (in the form of campaign shindigs) does equal free-beer if you can wangle an invitation.
You can be held liable for patent infringement if you have made, used, sold or imported, without a license, something that is claimed by a valid patent owned by another.
if I write software that I don't particularly publicize or that I do particularly publicize, and then someone develops, applies for, and is granted a patent, am I protected? Let's assume that I can "prove" when I did it: How much does my own publicity enter into the question of whether my art is prior?
Also, BTW, you (and others) use phrases like
The legal fiction that supposedly justifies this result is that a patentee ... is given this very strong right in exchange for disclosing an invention to the public.
Look, call it an historical fiction, a raw deal, a moral fiction, all sort of things, but it's not a "legal fiction" because it is a legal reality. The bit about "software is not patentable" is a legal fiction since it's legally not true.
yeah, I know, there's vmware, and yeah, I know, there's dual boot and all sorts of other things, but on many occasions I have to sit down at somebody else's machine running one of Microsoft's windowing operating systems, and I'd like to be able to unpack a little archive and run linux, and be able to assure the owner of the machine that all I did was put a bunch files in one directory and they can be deleted.
Then, they'd love using the various things I'd install and there'd be another linux convert.
BTW, all of those "other ways to do it" say to me: hey, most of this work is already done, just bring the pieces together. Anybody know of a reason why this might be too hard to do?
Look, the market doesn't have preferences much different from your own: sometimes you want something right away so you go to a retail store next door, and other times you think you might be returning it soon so you go to a retail store next door, and sometimes you think you'll need post-sales in-person support so you go to the retail store next door, and the rest of the time you like the quiet, low-cost, efficiency of the giant mail-order places so you order from them.
Sometimes you use the phone to call your vendors, sometimes you'll use the web, and sometimes you'll use "sneaker-net" and walk over there.
And, yep, web will allow more virtual reality inspection of products in the future, and will enable complex retail relationships where you order centrally nationally customizedforyouably and the computer will get delivered with your Peapod/HomeRuns/Whatever grocery service.
Various retail channels will change, but they're all pretty much here to stay.
from your "fake" 192.168. ip address, it occurs to me to mention that the Network Address Translation/masquerading needs to take place on the "internet" network adapter, not on the private network side.
Notice that the other suggestors are including a "-i ethX" argument. You should have one too, referring to the "external internet" network adapter.
Hey, any editors want to delete my previous and just use this one?
FWIW, the BIOS "implementation" is similar to motherboard SCSI. There's that entry that says "boot from A/C/SCSI" except now it's the extra IDEs. Then, when you boot, after the normal drive detection , there is the extra drive just like the "Hit Ctrl-A" SCSI boot.
see the motherboard at http://www.bp6.com/
jeez, what a moron (me).
I scoured your posting and only afterward
did I see that your forwarding *is* on.
however, here's another suggestion:
from your "fake" 192.168. ip address, it
occurs to me to mention that the Network
Address Translation/masquerading needs to
take place on the "internet" network
adapter, not on the private network side.
Is IP Forwarding on?
easiest way is probably
last foldertab, forwarding checkbox,
then I think you need to restart networking.
the hard way is to look inside of
/etc/sysconfig/network
and make sure it has
FORWARD_IPV4=yes