huh? properly used, sic should be in square brackets (italicized because it is a foreign word?), and used when you suspect an error but wish to pass the buck. "fillum" should probably be categorized as dialect and wouldn't be sicced, otherwise Huckleberry Finn would be unreadable. In addition, I personally don't think it should be used as a "nyah-nyah tag" but as a "look, I'm quoting this because it's important, so I don't want to alter the meaning, but it seems a little broken for reasons I don't know."
First, you are essentially agreeing with what I said, another clause needed to be added to carve out the exception you are looking for. I wasn't claiming the argument was illogical, but that starting with some first principles and apply logic doesn't necessarily arrive at a satisfying answer.
To illustrate, you say that placing a digital logo on "typical" (there's the catch) advertising space does not create an implication of an endorsement. Well, so I guess you are saying that CBS should not be allowed to paste their logo onto the Transamerica building, or onto the Epcot Dome... but they might be allowed to paste it onto the sign at the top of a plainer office tower that happens to be a competitor's corporate headquarters? Or only on "advertizing space" like billboards that companies have paid rent on just like they pay the rent on their office tower? It just seems difficult to draw a clear line to me.
I'd rather look at it not as a Talmudic exercise of drawing conclusions from a set of axioms, but from point of view of what are the practical results we wish to achieve. Commercial speech is more regulatable than political speech. For children's television, for example, ads are required to "look like" ads. (I'm not endorsing the efficacy of that law, but I understand the motivation.) Seems to me that a just as good a rule for the future (forgetting about what has happened) is that if you pay someone to put up your ad, there it is. If CBS doesn't want to show it, they don't have to point their camera that way. They can put a disclaimer off to the side saying Coke is paying us to remind you that they would never put up an ugly billboard like bad-old Pepsi in the picture.
Just for fun (I'm not really arguing this) I enjoyed considering this "chutzpah" defense: your honor, when you turn your head in the direction of this billboard, you are not seeing the actual billboard, you are constructing that image in your head from the stream of photons which is arriving at your retina. I have simply altered the stream of photons just like CBS did by applying a coat of paint to the billboard. The original ad is intact right where it always was!
Thanks for taking the time to try to help. But, Why start with the most complex of the C++ architecture of the project? is, that's the part I'm interested in. I'm an experienced coder, been doing OOP for years and years and years. I've written way more than my share of makefiles, too, which is where the high standards come from, along with the unwillingness to keep writing them for other people.
I'm going to stop complaining now, nobody wants to hear it:) I just wanted originally to make the point [repeating] if the shopkeeper is wondering what some of the people who walk into the shop are thinking when they walk out empty handed, that help I'm willing to provide. After I tell the shopkeeper, I don't like him to tell me that I'm wrong. I want to hear,
"oh, we have what you are looking for here",
or "we'll try to get it for you,"
or "thanks for giving us the chance, we're sorry we don't have what you want"
If my feedback is not useful to the shopkeeper, that's cool too, I'll just continue on down the street.
sounds great! if that's all it is, put that in your HowToBuildOnRedHat and it'll be 95% shorter and you can get rid of the "out of date" label! Hmmm... sure sounds easy, doesn't it?:)
If the build instructions bother you, what about filing a bug?
:) I read this as, "if you don't like the way we do A, come and learn how we do B,", meaning, have you looked at your bug-filing system? I have, that's something else I poured effort into. It's pages and pages of rules and standards, including the instruction that I review all of the existing bugs first. Look at that link! Ouch! Where is the build system? I'm looking to dip my toe in the water, and you are offering me assimilation into a Borg hive.
I'm not saying there is nothing good about the work you've done, you have to meet the needs of the people on the project, I understand. But if there was a vacation package maybe I'd like it enough to come back and buy a home later.
Or not! I freely admit the project may not need people like me.
I do feel that NBC has no right to ask for reparations.
So, since CBS has every right also to show your picture on TV if you are watching the fireworks, do they have every right to put a Microsoft cap on your head, and you have no right to ask for reparation? I can't imagine that you would agree with that, but without inventing an exception it fits within your framework.
I've read, heard, and seen various debunkings at various times (I really really really apologize for not being able to provide citations) but FWIW, much of the supposed "honesty" of various golden ages of journalism are the fabrications of self-promoting journalists. There've been honest and principaled journalists working alongside charlatans in roughly the same proportions throughout the century, but Hint: I wouldn't think the ones who get to be big and famous with the repeated big scoops are probably the scrupulously honest ones, given the way hype and lightning seem to work, wouldn't you think?
Example I can recall: a few weeks ago on NPR I heard a famous newsman recount how everyone thinks they heard a big-band interrupted to announce the beginning of WWII but that's only because it was fabricated after the fact for a documentary.
interesting logic: you imply that abortion does not destroy the life of the child? that's clearly wrong.
but more subtly wrong is your speculation that "unwantedness" destroys the lives of a people. Hmmm... might lead to periods of anguish and suffering, I'll give you that, but I'll betcha most "formerly unwanted" people cherish their lives just as much as you do, and would even kill you in self-defense if you tried prove to them that they should be dead.
When a corporation is organized, by law (and in some cases regulations close to being laws) it must have
a President, the person who "presides" over the company making day to day decisions. Everybody in the company reports (directly or indirectly through other managers) to the president.
The president works for the shareholders, the owners, but indirectly through an group elected by the shareholders, the board of directors who represent the owners interests. The person who presides over the board of directors is the Chairman. For a small company, the board of directors is likely to be the investors themselves (VCs, for example). For a large company, then you see execs from other companies. (somebody here (Cliff Stoll?) said "go to the library" -- uh, there's this new thing, I like to call it the "web"? take a look here:) The board meets quarterly, sometimes more, and hears a pitch from the President, who then leaves while the board discusses and votes. Some decisions require board approval, but the President mostly better do what they say because they can fire her. They decide things like "we need to sell a new chunk of shares to raise money to buy AOL" or "we are not going to pay a dividend this quarter because we wish to use the money to pay down our debt"
a Treasurer who is in charge of keeping track of the cash, the shares and the debts and the assets
I think there are other jobs like "counsel" (a lawyer) and "secretary" (keeps track of the decisions) which I will ignore. Remember, these positions must exist by law.
Now, in large organizations and those where insiders are the shareholders and they maintain a lot of control, it can be convenient for them to switch some of the roles around, consolidating and delegating on the basis of the needs of the business or the particular strengths of the personalities. This is where we get unofficial but descriptive titles like
CEO, the Chief Executive Officer, the person who makes day to day but strategic decisions. It can be the President or the Chairman, or in rare cases neither. This is very likely to be a charismatic person who you identify with the company (Jobs or Trump) or the shrewd "brains" (Buffet) or a really good manager (Welch at GE). They are very future oriented, and keep the collective eyes on the ball.
COO is important to a company that has extensive operations. Think of IBM, with its vast manufacturing and service networks with bezillions of employees. Day to day they don't make glamorous decisions, but they make sure the rubber meets the road.
CFO keeps track of the financial big picture (there is way more to this than you can imagine). Generally the Treasurer, the CFO keeps track of the long-term money (from investors) with a bean counter underneath called the Controller keeping track of the short term money from/to customers/suppliers. There are probably examples of visionary CFOs who have a starched Treasurer working for them.
CIO for companies that rely heavily on their information (Wall Street, Airlines)
CTO, mostly bullshit so some techie with a lot of stock feels important, but can be a real job. Think of companies that use technology strategically (FedEx) not companies that produce it (Microsoft).
I'm not 100% convinced by your interpretation. It says "all third parties under the license" IANAL, but it occurs to me that it might mean "all third parties to whom you have given the binaries". Thank you much for doing the legwork to look it up for us, though:)
And while I'm here let me mention something else that just occured to me. Thinking back to Stallman's original complaint about working with software he couldn't get the source too... who are the "parties" that the license is talking about? The GPL will do more of what it is supposed to if "parties" means "end-users" rather than "owners". For example, what if some company is so huge that their employees make up a sizeable market. Those employees ("users") ought to have access to the source, not the "owners" of the computers or the modified GPLed code.
"pitch in" is good advice in general, but I've looked into working on Mozilla a number of times over the past couple of years and they don't make it easy.
the first couple of times I just downloaded the FAQ, tarballs, INSTALLING, whatever, and I'd plod along following the instructions and after wasting a few hours I discover: no motif, no build. jerkoffs, why didn't they mention that before? The only place that little message was "documented" was in a make error message.
so, things have moved a bit since then, but "fool me once..."... now when I get the urge to work on it, I go and read ahead as much as possible, last time was last summer. Always, I get this queasy feeling that the people inside the project have carved out a little world for themselves that makes them happy, but an "outsider" is going to have to go through a maze of twisty turny passages to get there. This is a big project, and it's a big maze, so the fun of contributing seems way off in the distance...
OK, I didn't want to shoot off my mouth without checking again. Here's today's report. It's brief because they managed to disconvince me again in a couple of sentences. From the hacking docs, and my quotes are paraphrasals, not literal.
1. Mozilla has "a great build system that has scaled to 100s of developers, so follow the rules and don't break it." OK? OK! I can follow rules.
2. "Confirm that your code works on all the different platforms before checking it in. Don't break the build!" OK? Nah uh! You guys don't have a build system, you have a makefile called from a shell script. Asking me to build on more than one platform is too much. I actually write code for multiple platforms and I think it's too much. What about all the people who don't? E-mail code to a pal and have them test it? Sheesh, that is primitive, not to mention I don't have any pals on Mozilla... yeah, I could hang around... Look, build just the tiniest bit of support for it into the source repository, and organize a buddy system for me. If one person breaking something wastes 100*1 man-hours (mythical?:) then spend that time to make the build system deal. That way you won't have to excoriate me for breaking the build before I've even downloaded the source. You could say, happy things like, "come on in and contribute, we'll help you, we'll make it easy for you, we'll show you how"
ok, but forge ahead, Mann, perhaps it'll be ok....hmmm, I don't know about this, there are a lot of tools to upgrade. No, not their fault, gotta have tools, but certainly not something I want to contemplate if this isn't going to work out...
Oh look! the instructions for Linux (the largest open OS platform) Redhat (the largest distro) are labelled "out of date". So, I'm going to be on my own here... I think I'll check back in a few months, maybe after the release.
ya know, if it's three guys in a garage, sure, they can't keep it all going and porting is the sort of help they need. but 100s of engineers with a paid staff are telling me that this is a great system? They want me to help them, and contribute under a license that the FUD tells me is suspect to begin with? Fine, then roll out the red carpet for me by making it as easy to get started as the linux kernel. "make config ; make dep ; make bzImage ; make modules " Then, after I've played around a bit, if I have something interesting to say, give me a way to share it. But just 10 minutes of scrolling through their stuff on top of the time I've wasted in the past tells me that they love working on the "cool" parts of the code and don't pay much attention to infrastructure, infrastructure that is by definition huge and important because this is a crossplatform system with hundreds of engineers.
Don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing them. I'm not? No, I'm not. They are writing a lot of code and giving it away, how could I criticize that? I think it's great! I think they are great:):) But if the shopkeeper wants to know why I came in and browsed around the shop and then walked out without buying anything...
It's not them it's me? Yep, probably that's it, the system is working fine. They successfully sent away somebody who shouldn't be working on it:)
If you are a BugTraq subscriber, you might want to know...
OK, not exactly on this topic (if you say "offtopic" they don't mark you offtopic:) but in a related and interesting coincidence:
I just now got a message from BugTraq saying that their mailing list has gotten blocked by ORBS because their ISP blocks ORBS probes. I think (I'm not an expert on this) that ORBS (anti-spam police) is probing to see if above.net's sendmail will allow "open relaying", but above.net blocks the probes. So, ORBS is treating the ISP as if they allow open relaying... does ORBS have "proof" that some machines in that domain are relaying, or is this a "play ball our way or screw off" (you know, kinda like cookies on Slashdot:) move?
Here's the email (I've corrected some errors to make it readable):
Subject: Administrivia: ORBS
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 11:09:22 -0800 From: Elias Levy To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
It seems the folks at ORBS (orbs.org) have decided that since our mail server is hosted at above.net, and above.net is filtering [ORBS's] probes since [Above] claims they are a DoS, ORBS is adding any mail servers connected via above.net (including ours) to their spam relaying list, regardless that our servers have never performed relaying functions. I've emailed them but so far they have not responded. You may wish to email them (orbs@orbs.org) and voice your dissatisfaction. Of course if our email to you is being blocked by ORBS then you will probably not receive this message;-)
You cannot begin to imagine how uninterested I am in your vapid arguments. You think that "the common people's life [sic] [is] safer" in a police state? You've repeated that in two posts now, rejecting the smarter words I tried to put into your mouth, and, to paraphrase Kaa's law, in any sufficiently large group of people that is still an jawdroppingly stupid position to take. Police states are among the most dangerous places to live.
The original poster said that Reno's proposal would amount to nothing.He got a "5" and I thought it was worth pointing out that his argument was wrong, I think it will amount to something.
You, on the other hand, think we are dealing with Big Brother. That means, compared to him, you are on my side, you think that this is about something, not nothing. Since you disagree with him more than you disagree with me, you should post back in the main thread or pour your energy into trying to nitpick him to death, just as soon as you have finished with your nitpicking reply to this message, of course.
The difference between your strawmen and mine, is that yours disprove your point:) I wouldn't agree with you that one is safe and secure in a police state. I think you meant to say that the way to make sure that the littering crime rate is zero is to have a police state, but I wasn't advocating anything even close to that.
I don't really want to go back and forth on a critique of what I wrote outside of the context of the original post. I think my criticisms of the original post are valid but I'm not sure if you are defending the original. By the time a cybercrime has taken place, it is too late to traceroute: logs are required. And if my downstairs neighbor breaks into my computer to leave me a death threat, it's a crime, all in the U.S. even if he goes through a box in the Czech republic. International cooperation is the only way to track that down. Yes, there are all sorts of ways in which such a tracking system could be abused, but lets talk about how to stop the abuse. The tracking system is coming (hi Echelon) and it is not a +5 comment to say "this will never work because it is impractical, but we need to fear it because it is practical." I recognize the impulse behind the comments, but I think it's kinda naive.
Government has no interest in promoting the privacy of the individuals Strictly as an aside, I wouldn't want to let this pass. Governments have all sorts of interests in promoting the interests of their citizens. Where do you live, Cuba? Yes, individuals within governments who are given narrow responsibilities often see their own jobs made easier by "violating" privacy -- for instance, tracking a tuberculosis epidemic, like tracking down looters, like footnoting a term paper, is simpler if you have info. The question is how do we balance the individual's interests against the group's, and this is what governments do, and they do a pretty good job of it, at least in Western countries.
[in a breakup...] each separate company would retain it's own intellectual property... there is no viable solution that would rob a company of its intellectual property
Here you are comparing to "open sourcing" and I see what you are trying to say, but there is another solution you are neglecting to consider. Splitting the OS company into 10 OS companies all sharing rights to the same intellectual property [please bear with this simplification:] all owned by Bill Gates would not be taking any intellectual property from Bill Gates. He would own everything he owned before. What he would lose is monopoly power, but monopoly power should be considered as immoral as holding a gun to someone's head, by true capitalists and by communist alike.
The threatening part of Microsoft is not their OS is on 95% of the computers, but that the monopoly gives them the power to to force their applications software onto those platforms
Bzzzzt! It is exactly the OS monopoly that is the problem. Not to be too repetitive, but once again you are 100% correct about the the legal case, but the point needs to be made that in terms of the economic well-being of consumers, the economic impact of an extra $50 or $100 per computer skimmed from the consumer (not to mention all of the consumers who on margin do not purchase) is outright theft and should be treated like stealing bread from widows and orphans because that's exactly what it eventually trickles down to doing.
The fact that the OS monopoly (loan sharking) can be used to force the applications market (white slavery) is just gravy on the monopolist's (organized criminal's) plate.
What you wrote is pretty accurate from the point of view of someone who understands the issues, but I think you haven't explained it well enough for people less informed on the subject. So, while not specifically disagreeing with you, I would put a whole different slant on the issues. Take it all in good fun, of course (I'll post each point individually for ease of reply.)
It is not illegal to be a monopoly! There's nothing wrong with...
Bzzzzt! You switch from "illegal" to "nothing wrong". You are correct that monopoly is not iillegal about monopoly, but there is still something wrong with them, most economists would contend. I would go further and say that that monopoly should be illegal: "Perfect markets" are cool because they achieve the free marketeer and the socialist's dream of being profit-free while producing vast quantities and varieties of both products and wealth.
However, they cannot be free of regulation. Perfect markets do not allow monopolies by definition. In the big debate between left and right, communism vs. capitalism, socialism vs. libertarianism, this central point is so often missed by both sides. "Free markets" are not "perfect markets". Perfect markets should be our goal.
I would note also as a quibble, that under civil law, officers of a corporation are required to profit maximize. For monopolies profit maximization is achieved by abusing monopoly power, so the legal requirement would be for the officers of a monopoly to abuse their power as much as they can while still staying below the threshold of prosecution... but parking in front of hydrants just when the police aren't looking is still anti-social, dangerous and illegal. I would contend that monopolists should be treated as social pariahs.
However, I also think the principle of one-stroke symbols for easier computer recognition is also genuinely innovative,
I do see what you are saying, but how long do you think that you'd have to work on handwriting recognition before you thought of the same thing? The idea of tracing the ds/dt of the stroke and not just looking at the bit raster may not be obvious to everybody who looks at the problem, but I think it would become obvious to significant numbers of people. Once you are "stroking" your way to character recognition, it would be hard not to come up with a special alphabet.
Maybe that's all it takes to get a patent (one click!) but it doesn't give me faith that the patent system is working.
How did you get moderated to 5 for this? Your criticism is like saying "the police shouldn't use speed radar because (1) small scope (2) speed limits differ and (3) people can use radar detectors." On Slashdot, of course, everybody would say "yeah!" "yeah!" and meanwhile, the police will be pulling people over left and right for... you guessed it, speeding! And though the police probably could lie and say you were speeding when you weren't, it'll turn out that so many people are speeding, they don't need to.
First, you rule out "financial crimes etc."? Why? Reno didn't rule them out, or did I miss something?
Second, the example cited in the article of breaking into a large commercial site and stealing people's personal and financial information and holding them for ransom, is illegal (and should be), if not everywhere, than in enough places that having international cooperation of police forces arranged in advance is both feasible and effective at combatting crime.
Crime is a Bad Thing, being safe, secure and protected are Good Things. I'm not in favor of abuse of police powers in meatspace and I share the concerns about cyberspace. But don't stick your head in the sand. Just like they trace phone calls of people who phone in bomb threats, they're going to be tracerouting packets of people who download other people's credit cards. In order to score more cheap political dividididends for our side, I say, "Thank you Janet Reno, you're doing a great job... let me work with you to make sure that people's privacy is in fact protected.
It said right in the article, "Windows in one company, software in another," which endorses what so many have said before. Just like a biological virus does not have enough parts to be considered "alive", Microsoft Windows does not have enough of what it would need to be considered "software":)
Thanks! It easily illustrates (1) why Xerox stuff never caught on and (2) why Xerox will lose this lawsuit. If they had included in their patent and in their character set the concept that "strokes are at least vaguely reminiscent of latin alphabet" they might have invented and patented what 3Com came up with, and people might have used it.
Their one leg to stand on is that they make a big deal out of "uni-strokes"... but PalmPilot has a number of characters that are not uni-, and regular old alphabets tend to stress uni- too, so where's the novelty in that?
If the going gets tough for 3Com, they could just switch to displaying the characters the same way they are entered -- by now I know that alphabet just as well;) Seems to me the only "patentable" thing would be some clever algorithm for processing the strokes.
I think I think that the networks should do this stuff all they want, 'cuz it's cool and will lead to a more fun Matrix...
But they should simultaneously lose "freedom of the press" protection. It is time to stop treating them like they are the defenders of truth since now they are just doing with video backdrops what they have been doing all along with the content: creating myth and crass commercial entertainment, good things, but not worthy of high-falutin' principled philosophy.
Instead, they should have to label their packages like Twinkies:
Fiber (filler): 80%
Fat (will kill you): 18%
Protein: 1%
Preservatives: 1% (not enough; by next week you will forget all about it)
Active ingredients: T&A, truth stretching
Inert ingredients: Sam Donaldson
Oh yeah, and cable operators should be allowed to mask their ads over the networks', and then if somebody wants to give me a free TV, it should be allowed to put their ads over the cable operators', then my free "active" contact lenses could put... why not?:)
I thought this M&M thing was funny too, so I showed it to my girlfriend. She found it strangely exciting, getting this funny look in her eye, and then becoming all fidgety. For a minute, with her eyes half closed I thought I was about to be the beneficiary of an upwelling of lust, but she shoved me away, grabbed the bag of M&Ms, and slipped out the door...
So, anyway, left to my own devices I figured I'd try a few experiments of my own. Always intrigued by miscegenation, I bought a few different packets of candy from the machine in my dorm and held a little mixer on the desk. But even with the lights turned low, there wasn't a lot of action... I decided to help things along by bringing my own peculiar oral skills to the table, except when I was done eating each one, quickly achieving satiety, it was in no state to continue participating. Finally, when it came down to the last two pieces, I encouraged one final union, between a kit-kat and an M&M, and side by side before me they entered into a strange sexual congress that I can only describe to you as: slash-dot.
Slashdot Mirror
huh? properly used, sic should be in square brackets (italicized because it is a foreign word?), and used when you suspect an error but wish to pass the buck. "fillum" should probably be categorized as dialect and wouldn't be sicced, otherwise Huckleberry Finn would be unreadable. In addition, I personally don't think it should be used as a "nyah-nyah tag" but as a "look, I'm quoting this because it's important, so I don't want to alter the meaning, but it seems a little broken for reasons I don't know."
To illustrate, you say that placing a digital logo on "typical" (there's the catch) advertising space does not create an implication of an endorsement. Well, so I guess you are saying that CBS should not be allowed to paste their logo onto the Transamerica building, or onto the Epcot Dome... but they might be allowed to paste it onto the sign at the top of a plainer office tower that happens to be a competitor's corporate headquarters? Or only on "advertizing space" like billboards that companies have paid rent on just like they pay the rent on their office tower? It just seems difficult to draw a clear line to me.
I'd rather look at it not as a Talmudic exercise of drawing conclusions from a set of axioms, but from point of view of what are the practical results we wish to achieve. Commercial speech is more regulatable than political speech. For children's television, for example, ads are required to "look like" ads. (I'm not endorsing the efficacy of that law, but I understand the motivation.) Seems to me that a just as good a rule for the future (forgetting about what has happened) is that if you pay someone to put up your ad, there it is. If CBS doesn't want to show it, they don't have to point their camera that way. They can put a disclaimer off to the side saying Coke is paying us to remind you that they would never put up an ugly billboard like bad-old Pepsi in the picture.
Just for fun (I'm not really arguing this) I enjoyed considering this "chutzpah" defense: your honor, when you turn your head in the direction of this billboard, you are not seeing the actual billboard, you are constructing that image in your head from the stream of photons which is arriving at your retina. I have simply altered the stream of photons just like CBS did by applying a coat of paint to the billboard. The original ad is intact right where it always was!
I'm going to stop complaining now, nobody wants to hear it :) I just wanted originally to make the point [repeating] if the shopkeeper is wondering what some of the people who walk into the shop are thinking when they walk out empty handed, that help I'm willing to provide. After I tell the shopkeeper, I don't like him to tell me that I'm wrong. I want to hear,
If my feedback is not useful to the shopkeeper, that's cool too, I'll just continue on down the street.
sounds great! if that's all it is, put that in your HowToBuildOnRedHat and it'll be 95% shorter and you can get rid of the "out of date" label! Hmmm... sure sounds easy, doesn't it? :)
If the build instructions bother you, what about filing a bug?
:) I read this as, "if you don't like the way we do A, come and learn how we do B,", meaning, have you looked at your bug-filing system? I have, that's something else I poured effort into. It's pages and pages of rules and standards, including the instruction that I review all of the existing bugs first. Look at that link! Ouch! Where is the build system? I'm looking to dip my toe in the water, and you are offering me assimilation into a Borg hive.
I'm not saying there is nothing good about the work you've done, you have to meet the needs of the people on the project, I understand. But if there was a vacation package maybe I'd like it enough to come back and buy a home later.
Or not! I freely admit the project may not need people like me.
So, since CBS has every right also to show your picture on TV if you are watching the fireworks, do they have every right to put a Microsoft cap on your head, and you have no right to ask for reparation? I can't imagine that you would agree with that, but without inventing an exception it fits within your framework.
Example I can recall: a few weeks ago on NPR I heard a famous newsman recount how everyone thinks they heard a big-band interrupted to announce the beginning of WWII but that's only because it was fabricated after the fact for a documentary.
but more subtly wrong is your speculation that "unwantedness" destroys the lives of a people. Hmmm... might lead to periods of anguish and suffering, I'll give you that, but I'll betcha most "formerly unwanted" people cherish their lives just as much as you do, and would even kill you in self-defense if you tried prove to them that they should be dead.
When a corporation is organized, by law (and in some cases regulations close to being laws) it must have
For a small company, the board of directors is likely to be the investors themselves (VCs, for example). For a large company, then you see execs from other companies. (somebody here (Cliff Stoll?) said "go to the library" -- uh, there's this new thing, I like to call it the "web"? take a look here
The board meets quarterly, sometimes more, and hears a pitch from the President, who then leaves while the board discusses and votes. Some decisions require board approval, but the President mostly better do what they say because they can fire her. They decide things like "we need to sell a new chunk of shares to raise money to buy AOL" or "we are not going to pay a dividend this quarter because we wish to use the money to pay down our debt"
I think there are other jobs like "counsel" (a lawyer) and "secretary" (keeps track of the decisions) which I will ignore. Remember, these positions must exist by law.
Now, in large organizations and those where insiders are the shareholders and they maintain a lot of control, it can be convenient for them to switch some of the roles around, consolidating and delegating on the basis of the needs of the business or the particular strengths of the personalities. This is where we get unofficial but descriptive titles like
They switched so that Ballmer will get some of the experience he needs to run one of the post breakup baby-Bills.
And while I'm here let me mention something else that just occured to me. Thinking back to Stallman's original complaint about working with software he couldn't get the source too... who are the "parties" that the license is talking about? The GPL will do more of what it is supposed to if "parties" means "end-users" rather than "owners". For example, what if some company is so huge that their employees make up a sizeable market. Those employees ("users") ought to have access to the source, not the "owners" of the computers or the modified GPLed code.
the first couple of times I just downloaded the FAQ, tarballs, INSTALLING, whatever, and I'd plod along following the instructions and after wasting a few hours I discover: no motif, no build. jerkoffs, why didn't they mention that before? The only place that little message was "documented" was in a make error message.
so, things have moved a bit since then, but "fool me once..." ... now when I get the urge to work on it, I go and read ahead as much as possible, last time was last summer. Always, I get this queasy feeling that the people inside the project have carved out a little world for themselves that makes them happy, but an "outsider" is going to have to go through a maze of twisty turny passages to get there. This is a big project, and it's a big maze, so the fun of contributing seems way off in the distance ...
OK, I didn't want to shoot off my mouth without checking again. Here's today's report. It's brief because they managed to disconvince me again in a couple of sentences. From the hacking docs, and my quotes are paraphrasals, not literal.
1. Mozilla has "a great build system that has scaled to 100s of developers, so follow the rules and don't break it." OK? OK! I can follow rules.
2. "Confirm that your code works on all the different platforms before checking it in. Don't break the build!" OK? Nah uh! You guys don't have a build system, you have a makefile called from a shell script. Asking me to build on more than one platform is too much. I actually write code for multiple platforms and I think it's too much. What about all the people who don't? E-mail code to a pal and have them test it? Sheesh, that is primitive, not to mention I don't have any pals on Mozilla... yeah, I could hang around ... Look, build just the tiniest bit of support for it into the source repository, and organize a buddy system for me. If one person breaking something wastes 100*1 man-hours (mythical? :) then spend that time to make the build system deal. That way you won't have to excoriate me for breaking the build before I've even downloaded the source. You could say, happy things like, "come on in and contribute, we'll help you, we'll make it easy for you, we'll show you how"
ok, but forge ahead, Mann, perhaps it'll be ok. ...hmmm, I don't know about this, there are a lot of tools to upgrade. No, not their fault, gotta have tools, but certainly not something I want to contemplate if this isn't going to work out...
Oh look! the instructions for Linux (the largest open OS platform) Redhat (the largest distro) are labelled "out of date". So, I'm going to be on my own here... I think I'll check back in a few months, maybe after the release.
ya know, if it's three guys in a garage, sure, they can't keep it all going and porting is the sort of help they need. but 100s of engineers with a paid staff are telling me that this is a great system? They want me to help them, and contribute under a license that the FUD tells me is suspect to begin with? Fine, then roll out the red carpet for me by making it as easy to get started as the linux kernel. "make config ; make dep ; make bzImage ; make modules " Then, after I've played around a bit, if I have something interesting to say, give me a way to share it. But just 10 minutes of scrolling through their stuff on top of the time I've wasted in the past tells me that they love working on the "cool" parts of the code and don't pay much attention to infrastructure, infrastructure that is by definition huge and important because this is a crossplatform system with hundreds of engineers.
Don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing them. I'm not? No, I'm not. They are writing a lot of code and giving it away, how could I criticize that? I think it's great! I think they are great :) :) But if the shopkeeper wants to know why I came in and browsed around the shop and then walked out without buying anything...
It's not them it's me? Yep, probably that's it, the system is working fine. They successfully sent away somebody who shouldn't be working on it :)
OK, not exactly on this topic (if you say "offtopic" they don't mark you offtopic :) but in a related and interesting coincidence:
I just now got a message from BugTraq saying that their mailing list has gotten blocked by ORBS because their ISP blocks ORBS probes. I think (I'm not an expert on this) that ORBS (anti-spam police) is probing to see if above.net's sendmail will allow "open relaying", but above.net blocks the probes. So, ORBS is treating the ISP as if they allow open relaying... does ORBS have "proof" that some machines in that domain are relaying, or is this a "play ball our way or screw off" (you know, kinda like cookies on Slashdot :) move?
Here's the email (I've corrected some errors to make it readable):
The original poster said that Reno's proposal would amount to nothing.He got a "5" and I thought it was worth pointing out that his argument was wrong, I think it will amount to something.
You, on the other hand, think we are dealing with Big Brother. That means, compared to him, you are on my side, you think that this is about something, not nothing. Since you disagree with him more than you disagree with me, you should post back in the main thread or pour your energy into trying to nitpick him to death, just as soon as you have finished with your nitpicking reply to this message, of course.
those bastards! they've killed punchcards!
I don't really want to go back and forth on a critique of what I wrote outside of the context of the original post. I think my criticisms of the original post are valid but I'm not sure if you are defending the original. By the time a cybercrime has taken place, it is too late to traceroute: logs are required. And if my downstairs neighbor breaks into my computer to leave me a death threat, it's a crime, all in the U.S. even if he goes through a box in the Czech republic. International cooperation is the only way to track that down. Yes, there are all sorts of ways in which such a tracking system could be abused, but lets talk about how to stop the abuse. The tracking system is coming (hi Echelon) and it is not a +5 comment to say "this will never work because it is impractical, but we need to fear it because it is practical." I recognize the impulse behind the comments, but I think it's kinda naive.
Government has no interest in promoting the privacy of the individuals Strictly as an aside, I wouldn't want to let this pass. Governments have all sorts of interests in promoting the interests of their citizens. Where do you live, Cuba? Yes, individuals within governments who are given narrow responsibilities often see their own jobs made easier by "violating" privacy -- for instance, tracking a tuberculosis epidemic, like tracking down looters, like footnoting a term paper, is simpler if you have info. The question is how do we balance the individual's interests against the group's, and this is what governments do, and they do a pretty good job of it, at least in Western countries.
[in a breakup...] each separate company would retain it's own intellectual property... there is no viable solution that would rob a company of its intellectual property
Here you are comparing to "open sourcing" and I see what you are trying to say, but there is another solution you are neglecting to consider. Splitting the OS company into 10 OS companies all sharing rights to the same intellectual property [please bear with this simplification:] all owned by Bill Gates would not be taking any intellectual property from Bill Gates. He would own everything he owned before. What he would lose is monopoly power, but monopoly power should be considered as immoral as holding a gun to someone's head, by true capitalists and by communist alike.
The threatening part of Microsoft is not their OS is on 95% of the computers, but that the monopoly gives them the power to to force their applications software onto those platforms
Bzzzzt! It is exactly the OS monopoly that is the problem. Not to be too repetitive, but once again you are 100% correct about the the legal case, but the point needs to be made that in terms of the economic well-being of consumers, the economic impact of an extra $50 or $100 per computer skimmed from the consumer (not to mention all of the consumers who on margin do not purchase) is outright theft and should be treated like stealing bread from widows and orphans because that's exactly what it eventually trickles down to doing.
The fact that the OS monopoly (loan sharking) can be used to force the applications market (white slavery) is just gravy on the monopolist's (organized criminal's) plate.
It is not illegal to be a monopoly! There's nothing wrong with...
Bzzzzt! You switch from "illegal" to "nothing wrong". You are correct that monopoly is not iillegal about monopoly, but there is still something wrong with them, most economists would contend. I would go further and say that that monopoly should be illegal: "Perfect markets" are cool because they achieve the free marketeer and the socialist's dream of being profit-free while producing vast quantities and varieties of both products and wealth.
However, they cannot be free of regulation. Perfect markets do not allow monopolies by definition. In the big debate between left and right, communism vs. capitalism, socialism vs. libertarianism, this central point is so often missed by both sides. "Free markets" are not "perfect markets". Perfect markets should be our goal.
I would note also as a quibble, that under civil law, officers of a corporation are required to profit maximize. For monopolies profit maximization is achieved by abusing monopoly power, so the legal requirement would be for the officers of a monopoly to abuse their power as much as they can while still staying below the threshold of prosecution... but parking in front of hydrants just when the police aren't looking is still anti-social, dangerous and illegal. I would contend that monopolists should be treated as social pariahs.
I do see what you are saying, but how long do you think that you'd have to work on handwriting recognition before you thought of the same thing? The idea of tracing the ds/dt of the stroke and not just looking at the bit raster may not be obvious to everybody who looks at the problem, but I think it would become obvious to significant numbers of people. Once you are "stroking" your way to character recognition, it would be hard not to come up with a special alphabet.
Maybe that's all it takes to get a patent (one click!) but it doesn't give me faith that the patent system is working.
First, you rule out "financial crimes etc."? Why? Reno didn't rule them out, or did I miss something?
Second, the example cited in the article of breaking into a large commercial site and stealing people's personal and financial information and holding them for ransom, is illegal (and should be), if not everywhere, than in enough places that having international cooperation of police forces arranged in advance is both feasible and effective at combatting crime.
Crime is a Bad Thing, being safe, secure and protected are Good Things. I'm not in favor of abuse of police powers in meatspace and I share the concerns about cyberspace. But don't stick your head in the sand. Just like they trace phone calls of people who phone in bomb threats, they're going to be tracerouting packets of people who download other people's credit cards. In order to score more cheap political dividididends for our side, I say, "Thank you Janet Reno, you're doing a great job... let me work with you to make sure that people's privacy is in fact protected.
It said right in the article, "Windows in one company, software in another," which endorses what so many have said before. Just like a biological virus does not have enough parts to be considered "alive", Microsoft Windows does not have enough of what it would need to be considered "software" :)
The reason I feel sorry for the crew of the Natalie is that they don't seem to have... a Beowulf cluster!
Their one leg to stand on is that they make a big deal out of "uni-strokes"... but PalmPilot has a number of characters that are not uni-, and regular old alphabets tend to stress uni- too, so where's the novelty in that?
If the going gets tough for 3Com, they could just switch to displaying the characters the same way they are entered -- by now I know that alphabet just as well ;) Seems to me the only "patentable" thing would be some clever algorithm for processing the strokes.
I think I think that the networks should do this stuff all they want, 'cuz it's cool and will lead to a more fun Matrix...
But they should simultaneously lose "freedom of the press" protection. It is time to stop treating them like they are the defenders of truth since now they are just doing with video backdrops what they have been doing all along with the content: creating myth and crass commercial entertainment, good things, but not worthy of high-falutin' principled philosophy.
Instead, they should have to label their packages like Twinkies:
Oh yeah, and cable operators should be allowed to mask their ads over the networks', and then if somebody wants to give me a free TV, it should be allowed to put their ads over the cable operators', then my free "active" contact lenses could put... why not? :)
So, anyway, left to my own devices I figured I'd try a few experiments of my own. Always intrigued by miscegenation, I bought a few different packets of candy from the machine in my dorm and held a little mixer on the desk. But even with the lights turned low, there wasn't a lot of action... I decided to help things along by bringing my own peculiar oral skills to the table, except when I was done eating each one, quickly achieving satiety, it was in no state to continue participating. Finally, when it came down to the last two pieces, I encouraged one final union, between a kit-kat and an M&M, and side by side before me they entered into a strange sexual congress that I can only describe to you as: slash-dot.