What, we're going to cry out for them to sue themselves for releasing software under the GPL? Or we're going to cry out for them to sue companies that try to rip them off?
Yes, the BSD license is better for government-produced works, though technically, they should all be 100% public-domain. But not for the reasons you give.
Sounds like they copied some comments over. After all, most of the people reading it aren't going to be coders. (Coders wouldn't risk their livelihood signing that NDA) So they're not going to really understand the code, but they will be able to spot similarities in the comments right away.
Yeah, its going to crash as every single SCO executive sells every share they own and emigrates to some place with no extradition treaties with the USA.
Or they produce something really cool and innovative... And then market it for something its completely unsuited for. You can see countless examples of this with Java and various Java technologies - Sun marketing hypes it as one thing, which it is obviously horrible at, and ignores another (often much more useful thing) that its better at.
Oh yeah. Jabber is great. Sure, the big servers (jabber.org/com, mostly) have been blocked by AOL, but having one big server that everyone was on was never the objective of Jabber. They wanted something like E-Mail, with a bunch of smaller servers. So if you pick a smaller server that offers good services, you can still use the transports. And since you can use transports on servers other than the one you're logged in to...
Strange, isn't this just what Caldera always said they wanted? But they had no proprietary kernel to claim Linux stole source code from. Now they do, and they're trying to take control. Of course, their arguments are total vapor (witness how they keep changing their story about exactly what is infringing - from trademarks to copyrights to patents to copyrights to trade secrets to "unspecified IP"), but they're still trying. As they have been for years and years.
Well, Psi is a pretty nice client. I'd say its a quality client. I've also never had problems with transports getting blocked - all of the servers I've used have been able to connect to ICQ and AIM without problems. Of course, any attempt to interoperate with ICQ and AIM is eventually doomed - AOL has made it clear that they want people using their client and ONLY their client. The problem with doing all that client-side is that each program needs to implement its own ICQ/AIM/etc. handling, and can still be trivially blocked. The servers I use are smaller ones, so that might help. And if its really an issue, you can run your own server just for the transports. (Remember that you can access transports and ohter services on servers other than the one you're logged in to!)
I also haven't used file transfer for years, even when I was using a full-ICQ client. Too much hassle. Though it would be nice, its not big selling point for me.
As for killer features, how about trivially extensible servers through the services system? Groupchat? GOOD user directories? (I haven't seen those since ICQ murdered its whitepages service a few years back)
Except, and if you'd even looked at any article about Jabber for more than five seconds you'd know this, Jabber does let you talk to your friends using MSN/ICQ/AIM/Yahoo. And without any wierd client-side stuff, either! In fact, that's what I use Jabber for right now - a nicer client for talking to all my friends who use ICQ/AIM/whatever.
Determining how Jabber performs this magic is left as an exercise for the reader.
Actually, that's the funny thing. Someone did say impeachment.
CNN, in an article from (IIRC) Findlaw. Two days ago. They're the only American media company I've seen even mention the word, but they did mention it... And though the article was seeded with the "well, I am sure our troops will find WMDs, please don't let the men with black helecopters come and take me away to Cuba" CYA phrases, it was pretty clear that the writer not only thought Bush had lied, but that there was a decent chance he might be called on it.
Right, but that's not much help to AOL. Because from this article, the only upgrades to IE, ever (with the possible exception of security upgrades), will be part of OS upgrades. So if AOL wants a browser change, or some new feature, they have to go through MS. And if MS adds a new feature, AOL can't advertise it, or rely on it in any way, because any users that haven't stayed on the upgrade treadmill won't have it. This is as opposed to the situation now, where AOL licenses IE and can (IIRC) include an upgrade as part of new versions, to make sure that everyone's using the same version.
Except that their customers aren't their listeners. Their customers are advertisers and music labels. (Both of whom pay them for air time) So Clear Channel today is what big media wants, not what the public wants. Yet they're using increasingly large percentages of our airwaves for stuff we don't want.
Now that is an interesting point. MS got AOL to back down on the browser wars by giving them what amounts to a permanent license to IE for next to nothing. Now they're saying that there won't be an independant IE anymore for AOL to license or use. So AOL gets stuck with a out-of-date browser, or has to force its users to keep on the Windows upgrade treadmill. It also looses any chance of ever competing with Microsoft, and can now be killed any time Microsoft feels like it. (Through the old "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run" tricks)
Wow. Those Time-Warner executives who're calling the shots are so much more business-savvy than the AOL ones who were in charge before. Why is it that whenever a company starts doing something criminal and anticompetitive, other companies start lining up to get their heads chopped off?
And it would be hard to change, because the original rationale for the ban was (IIRC) that the same processes could be used to produce very, very nasty nuclear weapons. Which now will be brought up by anyone who wants to block the move, as pieced together with words like "terrorism", "rogue nation", and "dirty bomb", any opponents will have plenty of media ammo to manufacture a outcry.
the management team will never work again in corporate America,
Heh, you wish. The coders and maybe the lawyers involved will find their careers down shit creek without a paddle. The executives that pulled the trigger, if they don't wind up behind bars (and what're the chances of that? Compared to Enron, this is small fry!) will find this the fast track to the upper echelons. After all, they've shown that they're willing to do whatever it takes to line their own pockets, and that is (of course) the most desirable characteristic for a high-level manager or CEO, right?
Wait, its not? Maybe someone should tell corporate America about this...
90% is actually pretty good when you consider the problems involved. We're talking finding really small objects in a really big volume of space, and some of these things are hard to spot. Not only that, but once you spot one, you've got to work out where its going. And then you have to work out (or rather, estimate, as multiple-body gravity problems are very, very hard to solve) the changes that will be made to its orbit by assorted gravitational influences.
Of course, the real question is what the margin of error will be for those computations.
There's gotta be new thinking in people moving...focusing not just on environment, but quality of life and practicality,
Read the site. They focus on just that - quality of life and practicality. The base systems of the city are incredibly simple, and the entire thing is designed around what humans find comfortable, enjoyable, and convenient. Sure, it might be a little impractical for machines, but we don't build cities for machines, do we? We build them for humans. Combine this with modern architecture theories (I believe the main book is called "A Pattern Language" or some such?) and you get a city that is enjoyable to live in instead of a chore.
This isn't a problem with the Internet. This is a problem with the American legal system, which encourages frivolous, aggressive lawsuits for ends that, pursued any other way, would be totally illegal. Unfortunately, there are no penalties for bringing a grounds-less lawsuit, or even intimidation-by-lawsuit. Never mind there being no penalties for judges or politicians who fail to admit conflict of interest (Jackson, Cheney) or take bribes through "corporate donations".
Of course, the real problem comes from recognizing immoral, bodiless organizations as persons.
Remember back when the DMCA was being written. The content cartels were justifying it by saying that the content was digital, and thus existing copyright laws didn't apply to and/or didn't adequately protect it. Because it was digital, it was All Different and needed an entirely new set of laws.
Unfortunately for us, techies at the time agreed with them. "Hey," they thought, "copyright laws for the digital millennium, where things are All Different! Cool!" Of course, they didn't seem to notice who was writing these laws (a group of content consortium lawyers) or that the law did exactly the opposite of what it had been billed as doing.
2030 - Google-AI develops quantum technology. Now you can not only query it to see what you did before, but what you WILL do up to a week from now. Or rather, what you would have done had you not seen your schedule. Google-AI provides no garuntees about what those forewarned of their schedule will do.
Actually, it looks like that might be the current business theory of the day. Making money by pissing off your entire customer base, that is. After all, SCO's trying it, Microsoft's trying it, Intel's trying it, the MPAA and RIAA are trying it... Heck, I can't think of one American company that isn't!
Hopefully they'll all go out of business in a year or five and the startups that replace them will... I don't know... Care about their customers and community?
Not to mention Vimy Ridge. Or the invasion of Italy during WWII. Or the Korean War. Or this little operation called "Operation Overlord". Or the Battle of Britain. Nope, no Canadian involvement in any major military operations in the past century at all.
Hopefully [the Ontario government has] learned a lesson from all of this.
Not likely. Last I checked, they're still refusing to provide as much as a dime for use for quarantine enforcement, monitoring of quarantined individuals, or wages for quarantined individuals. (To encourage them to stay home) Meanwhile, they've put together a $118 million funds package for... Not research, not public health improvements, not (god forbid) a proper information campaign, but for a PR campaign to rebuild the city's "international image" and tourist industry.
Because they're only targeting web browsers. For now. Once they've established a solid base of precident, I'm sure they'll be expanding the scope of their attacks. Web browsers are just an easy target, because they're "new" and "digital". Which means that many judges and lawyers don't really understand the material involved, and can easily be bowled over by bad analogies and dubious arguments. We've seen the same thing countless times in the past, most prominently with the DMCA. Why should we expect this to be any different?
The thing is, Wall Street is still insisting on these growth rates, even though we're in the middle of what's looking more and more like a bad recession. But that's no surprise, because the focus of business for the past ten-twenty years has been on short-term profits over long-term sustainable growth. In fact, that's pretty much the definition of the tech bubble. Circumstances don't matter, viability five years down the road doesn't matter. All that matters is the stock price and next quarter projections until the current stockholders can cash out with a good ROI.
All these publications about how the bubble hasn't really burst, and how techies and the tech market (and R&D) haven't really been hurt are bull. They're just the executives trying to convince themselves that their cash grab didn't really hurt anyone. And that outsourcing every job they can justify to third-world nations for a tenth of what the work is worth is good for the domestic economy.
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What, we're going to cry out for them to sue themselves for releasing software under the GPL? Or we're going to cry out for them to sue companies that try to rip them off?
Yes, the BSD license is better for government-produced works, though technically, they should all be 100% public-domain. But not for the reasons you give.
Sounds like they copied some comments over. After all, most of the people reading it aren't going to be coders. (Coders wouldn't risk their livelihood signing that NDA) So they're not going to really understand the code, but they will be able to spot similarities in the comments right away.
Yeah, its going to crash as every single SCO executive sells every share they own and emigrates to some place with no extradition treaties with the USA.
I think he means that the other seven people there looking at the code were from Microsoft. Brace for FUD, people!
Though it would be very amusing if Linux wasn't in violation and Microsoft, through whatever means, was.
Or they produce something really cool and innovative... And then market it for something its completely unsuited for. You can see countless examples of this with Java and various Java technologies - Sun marketing hypes it as one thing, which it is obviously horrible at, and ignores another (often much more useful thing) that its better at.
Oh yeah. Jabber is great. Sure, the big servers (jabber.org/com, mostly) have been blocked by AOL, but having one big server that everyone was on was never the objective of Jabber. They wanted something like E-Mail, with a bunch of smaller servers. So if you pick a smaller server that offers good services, you can still use the transports. And since you can use transports on servers other than the one you're logged in to...
Strange, isn't this just what Caldera always said they wanted? But they had no proprietary kernel to claim Linux stole source code from. Now they do, and they're trying to take control. Of course, their arguments are total vapor (witness how they keep changing their story about exactly what is infringing - from trademarks to copyrights to patents to copyrights to trade secrets to "unspecified IP"), but they're still trying. As they have been for years and years.
Well, Psi is a pretty nice client. I'd say its a quality client. I've also never had problems with transports getting blocked - all of the servers I've used have been able to connect to ICQ and AIM without problems. Of course, any attempt to interoperate with ICQ and AIM is eventually doomed - AOL has made it clear that they want people using their client and ONLY their client. The problem with doing all that client-side is that each program needs to implement its own ICQ/AIM/etc. handling, and can still be trivially blocked. The servers I use are smaller ones, so that might help. And if its really an issue, you can run your own server just for the transports. (Remember that you can access transports and ohter services on servers other than the one you're logged in to!)
I also haven't used file transfer for years, even when I was using a full-ICQ client. Too much hassle. Though it would be nice, its not big selling point for me.
As for killer features, how about trivially extensible servers through the services system? Groupchat? GOOD user directories? (I haven't seen those since ICQ murdered its whitepages service a few years back)
Except, and if you'd even looked at any article about Jabber for more than five seconds you'd know this, Jabber does let you talk to your friends using MSN/ICQ/AIM/Yahoo. And without any wierd client-side stuff, either! In fact, that's what I use Jabber for right now - a nicer client for talking to all my friends who use ICQ/AIM/whatever.
Determining how Jabber performs this magic is left as an exercise for the reader.
Actually, that's the funny thing. Someone did say impeachment.
CNN, in an article from (IIRC) Findlaw. Two days ago. They're the only American media company I've seen even mention the word, but they did mention it... And though the article was seeded with the "well, I am sure our troops will find WMDs, please don't let the men with black helecopters come and take me away to Cuba" CYA phrases, it was pretty clear that the writer not only thought Bush had lied, but that there was a decent chance he might be called on it.
Right, but that's not much help to AOL. Because from this article, the only upgrades to IE, ever (with the possible exception of security upgrades), will be part of OS upgrades. So if AOL wants a browser change, or some new feature, they have to go through MS. And if MS adds a new feature, AOL can't advertise it, or rely on it in any way, because any users that haven't stayed on the upgrade treadmill won't have it. This is as opposed to the situation now, where AOL licenses IE and can (IIRC) include an upgrade as part of new versions, to make sure that everyone's using the same version.
Except that their customers aren't their listeners. Their customers are advertisers and music labels. (Both of whom pay them for air time) So Clear Channel today is what big media wants, not what the public wants. Yet they're using increasingly large percentages of our airwaves for stuff we don't want.
Now that is an interesting point. MS got AOL to back down on the browser wars by giving them what amounts to a permanent license to IE for next to nothing. Now they're saying that there won't be an independant IE anymore for AOL to license or use. So AOL gets stuck with a out-of-date browser, or has to force its users to keep on the Windows upgrade treadmill. It also looses any chance of ever competing with Microsoft, and can now be killed any time Microsoft feels like it. (Through the old "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run" tricks)
Wow. Those Time-Warner executives who're calling the shots are so much more business-savvy than the AOL ones who were in charge before. Why is it that whenever a company starts doing something criminal and anticompetitive, other companies start lining up to get their heads chopped off?
And it would be hard to change, because the original rationale for the ban was (IIRC) that the same processes could be used to produce very, very nasty nuclear weapons. Which now will be brought up by anyone who wants to block the move, as pieced together with words like "terrorism", "rogue nation", and "dirty bomb", any opponents will have plenty of media ammo to manufacture a outcry.
the management team will never work again in corporate America,
Heh, you wish. The coders and maybe the lawyers involved will find their careers down shit creek without a paddle. The executives that pulled the trigger, if they don't wind up behind bars (and what're the chances of that? Compared to Enron, this is small fry!) will find this the fast track to the upper echelons. After all, they've shown that they're willing to do whatever it takes to line their own pockets, and that is (of course) the most desirable characteristic for a high-level manager or CEO, right?
Wait, its not? Maybe someone should tell corporate America about this...
90% is actually pretty good when you consider the problems involved. We're talking finding really small objects in a really big volume of space, and some of these things are hard to spot. Not only that, but once you spot one, you've got to work out where its going. And then you have to work out (or rather, estimate, as multiple-body gravity problems are very, very hard to solve) the changes that will be made to its orbit by assorted gravitational influences.
Of course, the real question is what the margin of error will be for those computations.
There's gotta be new thinking in people moving...focusing not just on environment, but quality of life and practicality,
Read the site. They focus on just that - quality of life and practicality. The base systems of the city are incredibly simple, and the entire thing is designed around what humans find comfortable, enjoyable, and convenient. Sure, it might be a little impractical for machines, but we don't build cities for machines, do we? We build them for humans. Combine this with modern architecture theories (I believe the main book is called "A Pattern Language" or some such?) and you get a city that is enjoyable to live in instead of a chore.
This isn't a problem with the Internet. This is a problem with the American legal system, which encourages frivolous, aggressive lawsuits for ends that, pursued any other way, would be totally illegal. Unfortunately, there are no penalties for bringing a grounds-less lawsuit, or even intimidation-by-lawsuit. Never mind there being no penalties for judges or politicians who fail to admit conflict of interest (Jackson, Cheney) or take bribes through "corporate donations".
Of course, the real problem comes from recognizing immoral, bodiless organizations as persons.
No, that's not the justification.
Remember back when the DMCA was being written. The content cartels were justifying it by saying that the content was digital, and thus existing copyright laws didn't apply to and/or didn't adequately protect it. Because it was digital, it was All Different and needed an entirely new set of laws.
Unfortunately for us, techies at the time agreed with them. "Hey," they thought, "copyright laws for the digital millennium, where things are All Different! Cool!" Of course, they didn't seem to notice who was writing these laws (a group of content consortium lawyers) or that the law did exactly the opposite of what it had been billed as doing.
You missed the last step:
2030 - Google-AI develops quantum technology. Now you can not only query it to see what you did before, but what you WILL do up to a week from now. Or rather, what you would have done had you not seen your schedule. Google-AI provides no garuntees about what those forewarned of their schedule will do.
Actually, it looks like that might be the current business theory of the day. Making money by pissing off your entire customer base, that is. After all, SCO's trying it, Microsoft's trying it, Intel's trying it, the MPAA and RIAA are trying it... Heck, I can't think of one American company that isn't!
Hopefully they'll all go out of business in a year or five and the startups that replace them will... I don't know... Care about their customers and community?
Not to mention Vimy Ridge. Or the invasion of Italy during WWII. Or the Korean War. Or this little operation called "Operation Overlord". Or the Battle of Britain. Nope, no Canadian involvement in any major military operations in the past century at all.
Hopefully [the Ontario government has] learned a lesson from all of this.
Not likely. Last I checked, they're still refusing to provide as much as a dime for use for quarantine enforcement, monitoring of quarantined individuals, or wages for quarantined individuals. (To encourage them to stay home) Meanwhile, they've put together a $118 million funds package for... Not research, not public health improvements, not (god forbid) a proper information campaign, but for a PR campaign to rebuild the city's "international image" and tourist industry.
Great job solving the real problem there, guys.
Because they're only targeting web browsers. For now. Once they've established a solid base of precident, I'm sure they'll be expanding the scope of their attacks. Web browsers are just an easy target, because they're "new" and "digital". Which means that many judges and lawyers don't really understand the material involved, and can easily be bowled over by bad analogies and dubious arguments. We've seen the same thing countless times in the past, most prominently with the DMCA. Why should we expect this to be any different?
The thing is, Wall Street is still insisting on these growth rates, even though we're in the middle of what's looking more and more like a bad recession. But that's no surprise, because the focus of business for the past ten-twenty years has been on short-term profits over long-term sustainable growth. In fact, that's pretty much the definition of the tech bubble. Circumstances don't matter, viability five years down the road doesn't matter. All that matters is the stock price and next quarter projections until the current stockholders can cash out with a good ROI.
All these publications about how the bubble hasn't really burst, and how techies and the tech market (and R&D) haven't really been hurt are bull. They're just the executives trying to convince themselves that their cash grab didn't really hurt anyone. And that outsourcing every job they can justify to third-world nations for a tenth of what the work is worth is good for the domestic economy.