even if there had been another democracy at the time, if it ceased since then, then the US would be also be the oldest. There wasn't any other at the time, so it's just a quibble.
and my scholarship was being attacked, not my patriotism. As we see in the case of China and Cuba today, patriotism has nothing to do with democracy. Of course, my scholarship and patriotism are unimpeachable, so once again, it's just a quibble.
to simplify and rethread, I'm going to post one reply to all of the "other contender" posts right here.
divine right of kings I'd rule out Iceland because till early in the 20th century, it was a colony of Denmark, which had a king. I'd rule out England because it had a powerful King (George III at the time of the American Revolution).
suffrage The landowner "quibble" is a good one, but by the standards I'm talking about, I don't think it would be completely "undemocratic" to require landownership. Though "democracy" sounds like a black and white, it's really a gray issue with details like that. For example, In the US, the voting age is 18. Not too long ago, it was 21. Did that mean we did not used to be a democracy, or that we are not one now (kidz should be allowed to vote!:)? I don't think so: IHMO (and I didn't make this up, others think it too) the salient feature is the rejection of the divine right of kings, and of its might makes right counterpart, "power comes from the end of a gun."
That is what contemporary civilized people found so jawdropping at the time: this was a new thing in the modern world. Then, once the "American Experiment" started, I believe it was a straight line to the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage, two other reasonable objections to a claim of democracy. This is the salient point: deciding who is a voter is a small accounting problem once you establish that (a) there is a right to vote and (b) the voters control everything, not just what the king doesn't. That's what a democracy is, and how much liberty the democracy provides, and who gets to vote are finer points left up to the voters.
I'd love to know what went on behind the scenes at Dell to make this decision. It would be really cool if Dell chose to do this, resisting MSWindows-only pressure from Microsoft, but the realist in me suspects that the DOJ case has Microsoft laying low, or even encouraging "competition".
None of that changes the reality of course: as an OS, Linux was "real" years ago, even on laptops. What's nice to see, now and for whatever reason, is the increasing "corporate" acceptence of Linux which will lead to more apps and options for users, and more interesting and rewarding work for developers.
Still, though, I want to know: is Micros~1 still trying for exclusivity, are they neutral, or are they encouraging at least the appearance of competition?
What's so irritating about Jon Katz is the "attitude". The United States has traditionally seen itself as the cradle of liberty because the United States was the cradle of liberty by dint of the fact that the United States of America was, is, and remains, the world's oldest democracy. When the United States was formed, there were no other democracies in the world. Zero. Europeans, and residents of other despotisms, found it quite astonishing at the time that commoners would think they could govern themselves.
What's weird is that Jon Katz doesn't see it that way. Now, if he had started his article with, "The United States is the cradle of liberty, and yet..." then I might have some respect for his position, but it just bleeds through that he has a chip on his shoulder, so I stop listening.
What? Where have you been? It's not stealing, it's ok to copy linux. It would be larcenous to download it over and over, 100,000 times, stealing all that bandwidth.
It would be grand larceny, conspiracy, and crossing state lines if one were to buy a copy of NT for each of those machines, and it would teach you the lesson that there is no honor among theives, when you discovered that you couldn't cluster them, and your co-conspirator walked away with all the booty.
P.S. BTW, I didn't say it was ok for me to do it. What I said was, "you could."
kinda good article (nice picture anyway) about the moon on abcnews this week. Explains the "why does the moon look so big on the horizon" paradox. And it's pretty interesting.
plot summary: seeing steroscopic stuff in the foreground drives home the point to your brain that the moon is far away. Your brain says, "wow, moderate the size of that sucker up!"
Microsoft misunderstood and thought they were required to do this by law? Shouldn't that be, Microsoft's lawyer's misunderstood... and probably because a poorly worded law, written by other lawyers, was ambiguous. And out of that pool of lawyers come politicians who select, from that pool of lawyers, judges and patent clerks...
I don't want to engage in totally mindless lawyer bashing. We need a legal system, ours is pretty good, but it is also important to remind us and them from time to time that lawyers are fallible people and they should keep that in the front of their minds when they do stuff like crush eToy.
In this case, for a change, a rapacious and immoral monopolist accidently gave back a crumb of the wedding cake it has stolen over the past decade and a half. Best cake I've had in a while!
Not everybody wants to (or is able to/or should have to) start a company and market a product to be compensated for their hard work. you raise a good point, I hadn't thought of it necessarily, but getting compensated for ideas that way could be covered by contract law. "I don't want to develop this idea, but you pay me for it and you develop it." Patents would make that sort of transaction a little easier because they obviate the need for a non-disclosure agreement, or rather, a non-"if you tell me your idea I promise I won't develop it" agreement, but as the patent system was designed to encourage disclosure, so this is a bit of a sideline (that's not necessarily a reason to be against it, of course.)
There are real advances in computer sciance, and I think that the people thinking them up should get some compensation.
The flaw in your argument as stated: you are assuming that without a patent, inventors of things will get no compensation. But, many software companies make money from much unpatented software. Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft BASIC and DOS, Oracle, etc., these things were not patented, and their inventors got plenty of compensation.
To sharpen your argument, I think you mean to say that you feel
market and monopoly forces allow established competitors to copy ideas from new entrants before the new entrants can get enough market share to enable them to collect some morally fair reward, and
some generally beneficial types of R&D might be so expensive (money and/or time) that they won't be undertaken without some non-linear reward encouragement, such as that afforded by the patent system.
Not that I agree with you, but if I'm to argue against the idea I'd at least like it to make sense first;)
Patent its "viral nature", and rename it the "General Pageview License".
Then, advertizing revenues from online flamewars will belong to the owners of the virus, the FSF. BSDers can't complain because they wouldn't presume to tell anyone what to do. Discussion forum operators will still run them because what else can they put up on slow news days.
OK, IANAL, but I know that there's more to this than meets the eye.
this posting is directed at Slashdot's editors as much as to the throng. the editors could steer the topic toward a little bit more solid ground since it is too much, being realistic, to ask that everybody become expert.
It is not just trademark infringement to "steal" a trademark, but also to "tarnish" or "disparage" a one. Trademarks, it should also be noted, only cover commercial use of a name for the owner, but once a trademark exists in the commercial realm, talking about that word may be considered commercial speech and subject to restrictions. Again, I am not a lawyer, and I'm especially not familiar with the history of eToy, but it occurs to me that this is what the law may attempting to decide:
eToy did not have a registered trademark. They were using the name first, yes, and that does give them some rights, yes, but it's not clear (esp. to me) that were engaging in trade.
eToys came along and grabbed more or less the same name. It is very important whether they exercised "due diligence" in doing this. The law requires that they take reasonable steps to ensure that others are not already using the name commercially, but words that are already in use non-commercially are available as trademarks. But, once they get the name, they are both allowed and required to defend it against both dilution and disparagement.
I think the question that is important to answer is: did eToy change its behavior in response to eToys "existence"? If eToy's web "art" said "fuckfuckfuck" before and after, ok it's free speech, but if it said "flowersflowersflowers" before and "fuckfuckfuck eToys.com" after, that's not "innocent" free speech.
Now, you may be a free speech absolutist, and you may be against trademarks, but the law is not. There are other restrictions on free speech, things that I'm not allowed to say to you or about you. Trademarks have a lot of the same attributes, you can't slander or libel them either.
A quick search of the web found me this page which looks good but I didn't read it in detail.
For 2,000,000 drivers for linux my dear, We'll need 2,000,000 signers this year, We'll take Win down, and bounce 'em (those clowns)! We're 2,000,000 booters of linux: Free beer!
For 2,000,000 drivers for linux my dear, We'll need 1,999,999 signers this year, We'll take Win down, just bounce 'em, those clowns! We're 2,000,000 booters of linux free beer!
it appears that the nation has overwhelmingly "spoken", and given the candidate the authority to go "do his/her X thing", when that really isn't the case.
You make a good point, but another good point is that they don't actually "do their thing" either.
Due to the way the Congress works, it's a feedback system with local political concerns battling the vigor with which people defend their special interests, and the way middle-aged people don't really disagree with each other that much... the political center doesn't really move that far. Is there really that much difference between life under Reagan, Bush, or Clinton, or the R congress instead of the D? The ways in which things have changed (I'll choose one: affirmative action) reflect true shifts in beliefs at large. And, it hasn't even moved that much either.
I see your point, but it's not just one person. let's say you are the person reading the emails. if the flood is from a sufficient number of wackos, you'll get more tired of reading them more quickly, you won't be able to propose a workable plan to your boss. Your cause will seem more futile.
It's the same logic that says keep boycotting: the response has to be a non-linear function of the offense so that bystanders will say, "I better not only not do that, I better not even hint at doing that."
hmmm... but can you see the benefit of illogic and emotion? "Honey, this man is saying really crazy stuff... don't try to reason with him, just stop doing whatever is pissing him off..." The problem with being too logical is that people realize exactly how far they can push you.
And while I'm here, let me second the call for the boycott continuation: given that we can never catch all of the criminals, the punishments have got to be worse than the crimes to make the expected-values come out right. Too logical? OK, how about because we just don't like eToys any more, and maybe we're feeling just a little kooky... "Honey, that man is still following us. Don't look, DON'T LOOK..."
Hey, if someone makes Slashdot delete messages, doesn't that mean that they are assuming the role of "editor", and that they then become liable for everything said on Slashdot? Sorry if I sound confused, but I've been trying to actually listen to what the lawyers say...
Free the software, the chinese people will follow.
on
Red Caps Adopt Red Hat
·
· Score: 3
One billion communists are not adopting Linux as their platform of choice. That is speculation.
Absolutely correct. The official announcement from China stated that they would make "a billion free copies of free operating system softwares for the free Chinese people." 3chelon picked up that communique inadvertantly as part of its program to monitor the FSF, but dropped its hand to enlist Stallman's help in deciphering it. In this case, he has taken the position that only the latter usage is appropriate: "think of them as LGPLed", he said. TomC joined the discussion to say the Chinese government could do whatever it wanted with its software or its people as he would never presume to coerce anyone, and asked, did we know that they call Larry, "The Great Wall"?
To get to the truth, industry has been surveyed:
Redhat has reported 1 download of 6.1 through China's internet gateway
Microsoft has reported selling 1 copy of Windows 98 in China (an upgrade from Win3.1, actually), and 2 copies of NT (um, let's see, yes, 1 server and 1 workstation), both as competitive upgrades from OS/2 through a local retailer called Hundred Year Old Egghead.
Microsoft has also reported several attempted downloads of Windows 2000 but they were from a Netscape browser and had not yet been successful, though the spokesman did twitch and then robotically issue an assurance of total browser compatibility, and went on to promise the imminent release of IE for linux which would "make the whole thing work more smoothly, that is if you can trust an unstable, unsupported kernel, with nobody to sue."
Mac Warehouse indicated that they sold a Mac G3 and a Torx toolkit, but both were returned (for merchandise credit to resolve a lengthy dispute over whether stripped screwheads indicated that the cover had or had not been opened)
after consulting the many factions, it was also determined that no copies of BSD had been downloaded, but it was pointed out that the core of Win2000 could legally be BSD for all anybody knew, and then the line went dead, then switched to a modem carrier right after shouts of "hey, let's grep for 'Regents!'" "Yeah!" "hey, grep for my name, grep for my name"
This is plain paranoia. There's no way changes in the microcode could represent a security threat: it's DoS at worse. Something as low-level as microcode has no way of knowing what's going on inside the computer, or draw any useful information from what it sees, let alone communicate it outside.
Never say never? I'm not an expert by any means, but how about something like this for an exploit:
change the microcode for "return from interrupt" to do a scan of video memory (since there are single instructions for scanning, this one could just do the same) for a certain signature before it really returns from interrupt. Interrupts take an indeterminate amount of time anyway so scan time will not be noticed. If signature is found, branch to it. Now, I email you a link to a.GIF with "signed" hostile code embedded in it... G.I.Joe is now 6.1.J03 in the army of the apocalypse...
or, is some instruction most often used for processing network packets? make it scan the packets and vector off of a signature
Heck, change that "scan block of memory" instruction's microcode to look out for that signature...
OK, probably all implausible? But like I said, I don't know what I'm talking about, and I've only been at this for a few minutes. Seems dangerous to me. You said that the microcode can only be loaded in real mode: that'd be perfect for a boot sector virus, wouldn't it?.
It's now 7PM. Do you know where your Intel CPUs are?
Come on now, the grunts want to play Unreal Tournament with the rest of us!
now, before you reignite that whole flamewar about how good/bad the military is on principal, can we reword this to "the grunts want to play Unreal Tournament just like the rest of us"
You absolutely want as little variation on your hardware as possible with these machines. This will up the price of each machine. However, it will also make... it so that if it turns out you have some future software incompatibility with a piece of your hardware, all your machines will fail instead of just a percentage:)
Please, don't detail the adminstrative savings of uniformity, I know, I know, they're obvious. But with machines as with people, there is also value in diversity, and since in the long run you cannot remain uniform (all mfr's release new versions all the time), why not just get used to it in the short run.
... and not just for those models in the pictures:)
"They say it can be proven that in many cases nothing is better than 'Moore's Thong'," I winced to myself as the founder of Intel twirled before me wearing naught but a cheesecutter. And knowing, yea, loathing what lay ahead, still I found myself screaming, "TAKE IT OFF, PLEASE, nothing would be better than that thong!"
He smiled at me and said, "you want that I 86 it?"
...when suddenly I awoke. Luckily, it had all been a dream.
It's too bad, because the 8086 set PC software back 5 years.
I heartily endorsed your idea till I remembered that Jobs did use the 68K for the Mac, and he independently managed to set personal computer software back, ironically even further by coming up with a machine good enough to last longer, but with software so broken it disallowed multitasking for more than a decade! Why is it that people like Gates and Jobs wind up with the "supervisor bit", and are even lauded for technical wizardry?
Women's clothing made from computer parts will get twice as skimpy every 18 months.
Researchers in the lab are reportedly bumping up against physical limits, so frequently that it doesn't seem accidental. They hope many of the obstacles will turn out to be surmountable, though it will require a breakthrough to get beyond the current limit, the so-called "Moore's thong".
Slashdot Mirror
even if there had been another democracy at the time, if it ceased since then, then the US would be also be the oldest. There wasn't any other at the time, so it's just a quibble.
and my scholarship was being attacked, not my patriotism. As we see in the case of China and Cuba today, patriotism has nothing to do with democracy. Of course, my scholarship and patriotism are unimpeachable, so once again, it's just a quibble.
divine right of kings I'd rule out Iceland because till early in the 20th century, it was a colony of Denmark, which had a king. I'd rule out England because it had a powerful King (George III at the time of the American Revolution).
suffrage The landowner "quibble" is a good one, but by the standards I'm talking about, I don't think it would be completely "undemocratic" to require landownership. Though "democracy" sounds like a black and white, it's really a gray issue with details like that. For example, In the US, the voting age is 18. Not too long ago, it was 21. Did that mean we did not used to be a democracy, or that we are not one now (kidz should be allowed to vote! :)? I don't think so: IHMO (and I didn't make this up, others think it too) the salient feature is the rejection of the divine right of kings, and of its might makes right counterpart, "power comes from the end of a gun."
That is what contemporary civilized people found so jawdropping at the time: this was a new thing in the modern world. Then, once the "American Experiment" started, I believe it was a straight line to the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage, two other reasonable objections to a claim of democracy. This is the salient point: deciding who is a voter is a small accounting problem once you establish that (a) there is a right to vote and (b) the voters control everything, not just what the king doesn't. That's what a democracy is, and how much liberty the democracy provides, and who gets to vote are finer points left up to the voters.
None of that changes the reality of course: as an OS, Linux was "real" years ago, even on laptops. What's nice to see, now and for whatever reason, is the increasing "corporate" acceptence of Linux which will lead to more apps and options for users, and more interesting and rewarding work for developers.
Still, though, I want to know: is Micros~1 still trying for exclusivity, are they neutral, or are they encouraging at least the appearance of competition?
What's weird is that Jon Katz doesn't see it that way. Now, if he had started his article with, "The United States is the cradle of liberty, and yet..." then I might have some respect for his position, but it just bleeds through that he has a chip on his shoulder, so I stop listening.
What? Where have you been? It's not stealing, it's ok to copy linux. It would be larcenous to download it over and over, 100,000 times, stealing all that bandwidth.
It would be grand larceny, conspiracy, and crossing state lines if one were to buy a copy of NT for each of those machines, and it would teach you the lesson that there is no honor among theives, when you discovered that you couldn't cluster them, and your co-conspirator walked away with all the booty.
P.S. BTW, I didn't say it was ok for me to do it. What I said was, "you could."
You could download linux, then buy one box per credit card, and build one huge beowulf cluster :)
plot summary: seeing steroscopic stuff in the foreground drives home the point to your brain that the moon is far away. Your brain says, "wow, moderate the size of that sucker up!"
I don't want to engage in totally mindless lawyer bashing. We need a legal system, ours is pretty good, but it is also important to remind us and them from time to time that lawyers are fallible people and they should keep that in the front of their minds when they do stuff like crush eToy.
In this case, for a change, a rapacious and immoral monopolist accidently gave back a crumb of the wedding cake it has stolen over the past decade and a half. Best cake I've had in a while!
Not everybody wants to (or is able to/or should have to) start a company and market a product to be compensated for their hard work. you raise a good point, I hadn't thought of it necessarily, but getting compensated for ideas that way could be covered by contract law. "I don't want to develop this idea, but you pay me for it and you develop it." Patents would make that sort of transaction a little easier because they obviate the need for a non-disclosure agreement, or rather, a non-"if you tell me your idea I promise I won't develop it" agreement, but as the patent system was designed to encourage disclosure, so this is a bit of a sideline (that's not necessarily a reason to be against it, of course.)
The flaw in your argument as stated: you are assuming that without a patent, inventors of things will get no compensation. But, many software companies make money from much unpatented software. Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft BASIC and DOS, Oracle, etc., these things were not patented, and their inventors got plenty of compensation.
To sharpen your argument, I think you mean to say that you feel
Not that I agree with you, but if I'm to argue against the idea I'd at least like it to make sense first ;)
Patent its "viral nature", and rename it the "General Pageview License".
Then, advertizing revenues from online flamewars will belong to the owners of the virus, the FSF. BSDers can't complain because they wouldn't presume to tell anyone what to do. Discussion forum operators will still run them because what else can they put up on slow news days.
this posting is directed at Slashdot's editors as much as to the throng. the editors could steer the topic toward a little bit more solid ground since it is too much, being realistic, to ask that everybody become expert.
It is not just trademark infringement to "steal" a trademark, but also to "tarnish" or "disparage" a one. Trademarks, it should also be noted, only cover commercial use of a name for the owner, but once a trademark exists in the commercial realm, talking about that word may be considered commercial speech and subject to restrictions. Again, I am not a lawyer, and I'm especially not familiar with the history of eToy, but it occurs to me that this is what the law may attempting to decide:
- eToy did not have a registered trademark. They were using the name first, yes, and that does give them some rights, yes, but it's not clear (esp. to me) that were engaging in trade.
- eToys came along and grabbed more or less the same name. It is very important whether they exercised "due diligence" in doing this. The law requires that they take reasonable steps to ensure that others are not already using the name commercially, but words that are already in use non-commercially are available as trademarks. But, once they get the name, they are both allowed and required to defend it against both dilution and disparagement.
- I think the question that is important to answer is: did eToy change its behavior in response to eToys "existence"? If eToy's web "art" said "fuckfuckfuck" before and after, ok it's free speech, but if it said "flowersflowersflowers" before and "fuckfuckfuck eToys.com" after, that's not "innocent" free speech.
Now, you may be a free speech absolutist, and you may be against trademarks, but the law is not. There are other restrictions on free speech, things that I'm not allowed to say to you or about you. Trademarks have a lot of the same attributes, you can't slander or libel them either.A quick search of the web found me this page which looks good but I didn't read it in detail.
For 2,000,000 drivers for linux my dear,
We'll need 2,000,000 signers this year,
We'll take Win down, and bounce 'em (those clowns)!
We're 2,000,000 booters of linux: Free beer!
For 2,000,000 drivers for linux my dear,
We'll need 1,999,999 signers this year,
We'll take Win down, just bounce 'em, those clowns!
We're 2,000,000 booters of linux free beer!
You make a good point, but another good point is that they don't actually "do their thing" either.
Due to the way the Congress works, it's a feedback system with local political concerns battling the vigor with which people defend their special interests, and the way middle-aged people don't really disagree with each other that much... the political center doesn't really move that far. Is there really that much difference between life under Reagan, Bush, or Clinton, or the R congress instead of the D? The ways in which things have changed (I'll choose one: affirmative action) reflect true shifts in beliefs at large. And, it hasn't even moved that much either.
It's the same logic that says keep boycotting: the response has to be a non-linear function of the offense so that bystanders will say, "I better not only not do that, I better not even hint at doing that."
hmmm... but can you see the benefit of illogic and emotion? "Honey, this man is saying really crazy stuff... don't try to reason with him, just stop doing whatever is pissing him off..." The problem with being too logical is that people realize exactly how far they can push you.
And while I'm here, let me second the call for the boycott continuation: given that we can never catch all of the criminals, the punishments have got to be worse than the crimes to make the expected-values come out right. Too logical? OK, how about because we just don't like eToys any more, and maybe we're feeling just a little kooky... "Honey, that man is still following us. Don't look, DON'T LOOK..."
Hey, if someone makes Slashdot delete messages, doesn't that mean that they are assuming the role of "editor", and that they then become liable for everything said on Slashdot? Sorry if I sound confused, but I've been trying to actually listen to what the lawyers say...
Absolutely correct. The official announcement from China stated that they would make "a billion free copies of free operating system softwares for the free Chinese people." 3chelon picked up that communique inadvertantly as part of its program to monitor the FSF, but dropped its hand to enlist Stallman's help in deciphering it. In this case, he has taken the position that only the latter usage is appropriate: "think of them as LGPLed", he said. TomC joined the discussion to say the Chinese government could do whatever it wanted with its software or its people as he would never presume to coerce anyone, and asked, did we know that they call Larry, "The Great Wall"?
To get to the truth, industry has been surveyed:
Never say never? I'm not an expert by any means, but how about something like this for an exploit:
OK, probably all implausible? But like I said, I don't know what I'm talking about, and I've only been at this for a few minutes. Seems dangerous to me. You said that the microcode can only be loaded in real mode: that'd be perfect for a boot sector virus, wouldn't it?.
It's now 7PM. Do you know where your Intel CPUs are?
now, before you reignite that whole flamewar about how good/bad the military is on principal, can we reword this to "the grunts want to play Unreal Tournament just like the rest of us"
Please, don't detail the adminstrative savings of uniformity, I know, I know, they're obvious. But with machines as with people, there is also value in diversity, and since in the long run you cannot remain uniform (all mfr's release new versions all the time), why not just get used to it in the short run.
"They say it can be proven that in many cases nothing is better than 'Moore's Thong'," I winced to myself as the founder of Intel twirled before me wearing naught but a cheesecutter. And knowing, yea, loathing what lay ahead, still I found myself screaming, "TAKE IT OFF, PLEASE, nothing would be better than that thong!"
He smiled at me and said, "you want that I 86 it?"
...when suddenly I awoke. Luckily, it had all been a dream.
I heartily endorsed your idea till I remembered that Jobs did use the 68K for the Mac, and he independently managed to set personal computer software back, ironically even further by coming up with a machine good enough to last longer, but with software so broken it disallowed multitasking for more than a decade! Why is it that people like Gates and Jobs wind up with the "supervisor bit", and are even lauded for technical wizardry?
Researchers in the lab are reportedly bumping up against physical limits, so frequently that it doesn't seem accidental. They hope many of the obstacles will turn out to be surmountable, though it will require a breakthrough to get beyond the current limit, the so-called "Moore's thong".
http://domain.com/any.lawyer.who/quotes.this.url/g ives.permission/for.his.residence.to.be. searched/any.bootleg.audio/video/tape.found/nullif ies.legal.and.moral.standing/dvd-source. txt