Oh we communicated effectively all right. The problem is that many of our representatives just won't listen, period. Apparently they they think they're not obliged to. And if they don't listen they can't hear, no matter how effective our communication is.
[Bolkenstein's...] line of thinking is 'good for corporations = good for the economy = good for the people'... he will give more weight to the opinion of large corporations... the least weight of all is given to the voice of an individual person... they believe that most issues are way too complex for the common people... they think they act in our interests even if they go against our express wishes... professors and garbage collectors are all equally ignored... the only groups that have this politician's ear are corporations, unions, and other politicians.
Until very recently I was an enthusiastic Euro-Federalist. But having participated in this public lobbying process for a while I now understand what was meant by the antis when they said that the EU is insufficiently democratic. Actually the whole edifice seems to be rotten to the core.
The parliament is largely composed of MEPs who don't listen to the majority of their constituents, and who bitch and whine about "aggressive", "irrational" and even "improper" lobbying when we are only attempting to exercise our democratic rights and get their attention.
Since they complained that we were wrong to fight the directive because we didn't understand the facts, then let it be noted that they never made the slightest attempt to engage with us and explain their position properly. Not once. Despite the strength of protest, they just didn't care.
And then it turns out that even if we do manage to get our MEPs to vote responsibly, the Council of Ministers - whom nobody voted for - can overturn any decision on a whim. And that Council is dominated by men who represent big business.
I'm finding it hard to see anything worth saving in these institutions. It begins to look like they offer nothing to the private citizen at all. But sadly, the same malaise is also deeply embedded in the UK's own political institutions, so no relief there either.
Just what the fuck do we have to *do* to get effective representation in government around here?
I'm with the earlier poster who said one day there will be an epiphany. Thing is, they can only get away with this shit as long as most people are comfortable enough to be able to ignore it. And we here all know - perhaps better than most - that there are major economic shifts under way right now which are due to wipe the smiles right off the faces of most of the middle class some time pretty soon.
It's quite a big middle class so you can expect there to be a major and noticeable interruption to law and order when it gets to that point. Especially if the notion has by then seeped into the public consciousness that those vacuous, smirking and self-serving fools in government only let us down because they forgot who the hell they were supposed to be working for.
In the meantime: if a corrupt stoolpigeon of vested interests like Bolkenstein can't, as a government appointee, be removed by electoral means then I suppose we can only hope his health isn't too good.
If it's a really slow morning,/. , then just dont post anything.
Now that's just being dense. Of course this is big news, especially for systems builders too small to be able to swing a good deal with MS. Moreover, it's the first time anything like this has happened with Linux, and if it results in even the tiniest bit more exposure of open source OS to hoi polloi, then so much the better.
This is for small "white box builders". Those brave souls and small businesses who are still trying to make a living building cheap computers for resale.
Yeah - one possible outcome is that China won't be able to participate in global markets - another more likely possibility is that China will export it's homegrown technologies, at unprecedented price levels, undercutting *both* Intel and Microsoft. No wonder Intel are scared.
China already have the manufacturing infrastructure to do all this. They just need to develop their own IP. It's a no-brainer for them.
There's nobody here disputing any of that. I agree in principle with what you are trying to achieve and I have written several letters to my MEP stating broadly the same things.
Where I do disagree is that I don't think a community-held patent portfolio can be made into a practical defence strategy.
Try to remember that patent law has evolved (like most law) to serve the wealthy and powerful, at everyone else's expense. Under current "intellectual property" law (and I do mean patents, trademarks *and* copyright), in most cases - no matter who is actually right - the winner is the one with the most money. This rule of thumb is only broken when both parties have sufficient legal resources to go all the way.
As I pointed out, it is unlikely that the EFF could accumulate sufficient resources out of subscription fees to fight even one patent lawsuit against a major player. I'd go further: I don't think the OSS community will ever be able to match those industry giants' investment in IP protection. They can afford to spend all that, and they even like it that way because in the end they make even more money out of it. Whereas we don't make any money out of it even if we win.
For these reason the *only* way we can hope to retain control of the fruits of our labours is to seek a change in the law, and specifically one which drastically reduces the role of courts and lawyers for arbitration purposes. This would level the playing field so that all participants could seek protection under the law without incurring huge legal bills. A patent office that was more open and didn't grant stupid patents would be a start; a law that clearly forbade patents on abstract processes such as software and business methods would more or less eliminate the problem altogether.
So if there are any limited resources available to be spent on fighting this issue I think the EFF are absolutely right to be concentrating on seeking changes in the law and the way it is applied.
BTW I know what you mean about IBM, one does almost get the warm fuzzy feeling about them these days. But that's only because it suits them to snuggle up to the OSS community as things stand right now, with IBM in its current form. That could all change pretty quickly if they decide to de-emphasize their software support and consultancy business. So do beware of any cross-licensing deals containing a revocation clause - because then IBM could do to us exactly what SCO is trying to do to IBM right now.
Sorry, meant to say 3.1.2. For a good many applications in that release, at least, selecting "Help"..." Handbook" just takes you to the main KDE desktop help page. Pathetic.
I don't know if it's still the case, but certainly up until recently at least, many help pages would just state the program name and version and along with a list of empty headings there was a single brief comment along the lines of "Sorry, we don't have time to write documentation".
In my humble opinion (as someone who develops software for a living) if you can't document then you shouldn't be pushing software in the first place. Who else is going to do it? Is some telepathic volunteer supposed to read their minds?
If as you suggest this problem has receded somewhat in recent versions, that's a good thing.
I would like to see a situation where maybe 50,000 developers initially (there are 500,000 registered in sourceforge) volunteer to join an association for under $10 bux per month
Okay so lets say you succeed and there is $5 million flowing into the bank account each year. How much would it cost to fight just one patent lawsuit against a major software company like SCO or, heaven forbid, IBM? More like $25 million probably judging by extant examples. So I don't think the math is working in your favour.
In the latest version of OpenBSD for instance there were at least 5 excellent patentable innovations
Faced with patent portfolios like that, which represent annual R&D and legal expenditure in the billions industry-wide, I don't see how parity can ever be achieved. So how can we ever achieve parity in order to bring the buggers to the negotiating table? Rather than let us have access to their huge number of patents in exchange for a paltry few, they might consider it cheaper to just invent their own alternative. Or to fight it in court and bleed us dry that way, as noted above.
Agreed. Government by dictat is a just a huge confidence trick, relying on the people's fear of what will happen to them if they dare to withdraw its authority, pending political reform (actually nothing would happen, except more controlled government).
They also try to promote the idea that they are so powerful that you can't force them to acquiesce to to the public's expectations on any given issue. A major riot exposes that lie quickly enough (in teh UK anyway...remember Thatcher's aborted Poll Tax? Labour's attempted petrol tax hikes?), but they know that as long as the middle classes are comfortable enough, there will never be a sufficient number of people willing to risk exposing themselves to a face full of tear gas and a night in the cells.
Whenever government meddling results in the middle classes hurting badly enough to take to the streets, therefore, you can bet it wasn't done on purpose. But that doesn't excuse it. If we are ever to achieve peace, justice and representative government then the habitual arrogance of incumbent government must be broken and they must be placed on a leash. Of course those in power always like it just the way it is so I don't believe any kind of meaningful political reform will ever be possible without direct action from a massive popular movement.
Unfortunately a handful of disgruntled geeks isn't it.
Weren't you listening? The only EU representatives we elect are sent to the EU parliament, which has no power.
Decisions are taken by the Council of Ministers, who are appointed by the national governments of the day. Who as we all know, turned out in practice not to be who we thought we were electing.
In any event I've been recently finding out just how hard of hearing those MEPs are. If the EU parliament did obtain executive power, it would hardly make any difference. Most of them don't claim to represent you or me, once elected: they just do whatever they like. Usually this means following the party whip in order to boost their career prospects. They're so very far away from their consituents you see.
Actually that can make things worse. It leads to pendulum politics, where the political and legislative environment changes so abruptly every 5-10 years that it becomes perpetually impossible for the citizen to adapt.
In the UK, people brought up during a socialist era struggled to cope with the capitalist revolution imposed by Thatcher throughout the 1980's. Those who managed to adapt were then thrown to the wolves when the Tories were deposed by New Labour in the early 1990's.
Nobody wants to live like that. Most people will find it difficult to prosper without stability and a degree of certainty. You learn the rules and you figure out how you can make a living within that. If the rug keeps getting pulled out from under your feet, it gets hard to stay on your feet.
I think a better solution is to reform the electoral and political systems so that it becomes impossible (or at least very difficult) for one party to obtain a large majority. That way, the only legislation that can get passed is legislation with broad cross-party support, eliminating laws based upon party ideology and also leading to fewer laws crafted to serve the interests of a small and influential minority.
Critics of proportional representation say that you must allow large majorities or else you don't get "strong government". I say, to hell with "strong government". No more serial dictatorship! Let the people run their own lives.
Your idea of a OSS-community-held patent portfolio has been advanced before, but it is never going to work either.
The OSS "community", such as it is, is composed mainly of a great horde of geeks who like to get neat stuff for free, and relatively few actual contributing developers.
It is as much as "we" can do just to keep churning out code for bugfixes and upgrades. They simply don't, as a general rule, command the resources to get patents written up, registered, and defended in the courts - all expensive and time consuming processes.
As to your suggestion that we form an association and each contribute $100 annually - we already have, in the EFF, an organization capable of looking after this, and they need that money already if you're offering. They are already short of funds. Why? It's not that we don't care really, but $100 is a fair sized chunk of money for a geek to find, expecially in these straitened times. Those of us lucky enough to still be in work are no longer paid as well as we used to be. And the rest of us are out of work.
For the sake of argument let's posit the existence of a group of people turned on by patent law. We'll call this hypothetical bunch "patent geeks" (we already know there are *some* people like us working on the legal side; people like Eben Moglen, Lawrence Lessig, and the contributors to Greplaw and the OpenLaw project, both hosted at Harvard).
Now if the efforts of OSS developers were only matched by legal i-dotting and t-crossing by those hypothetical patent geeks, then each software project could be backed up by proper legal protection.
But guess what - the people mentioned above may be interested, and can sometimes help out when critical cases get to court, but they are not patent draftsmen. I see no sign of *any* hobbyist patent draftmen willing to lend out their services pro bono, actually.
In reality, dotting i's and crossing t's have always been the OSS community's weak spot. Many applications (i.e. the entire gamut of KDE applications EVEN AT VERSION 3.2) *still* don't come with adequate (or even *any*) documentation, for example. Even worse, some projects' output is distributed in such a raw form that it can only be coaxed into life by an expert after weeks of experimentation.
But this is tolerated because it is the very absence of the usual rigorous standards required by paying customers, which allows these projects to exist in the first place, and which allows their fruits to be distributed at such low cost. It is those "flexible" standards which allows open source to exist and compete with commercial softwre in the first place.
You can surely see by now where I'm going with this. If every OSS software development project needed to be shadowed by a team of volunteer patent lawyers then most software projects would simply wither and die. The cost of operating would be too great for small players and the only projects able to survive would be those capable of going commercial like Linux, BIND, Apache, Sendmail, Samba, the GNU compiler suite.
So to sum up: many users won't pay for patent registration and defence; the larger projects may end up being forced to do it themselves, but if it were to become a universal necessity owing to increasing frequency of aggressive patent lawsuits then the only possible result is a much smaller open source universe. We need therefore to focus our efforts on changing the law to provide a more benign legal environment for pro bono software contributors.
The force needed to use a buckling spring keyboard is no different than most rubber dome keyboards
Possibly. But the last time I used an IBM keyboard (it was very old, dunno what model, but it seemed to be make of metal; think it was what came with the original PC-AT) I remember having major problems. I think it was because the key travel was rather longer than on your standard membrane keyboard. Much more like the keyboards on the old IBM electric typewriters.
the primary cause of carpal tunnel is incorrect wrist position anyway
Again, possibly. But Carpal tunnel - and other forms of RSI affecting the wrist and hand - can be exacerbated by minor injury even to the point where even a soft touch keyboard will cripple you.
There was one time I spent a weekend moving furniture, and then fell over on an ice skating rink and broke my fall by putting out my hand. I was fine, there was only the slightest bruising on the fleshy pad at the base of my thumb. But after one day back at work, pounding away on the keyboard all day, I was in agony. I couldn't tolerate the sightest deflection of my wrist and had to bind it up inside a weekly computer trade journal with a rubber belt just to avoid going into paroxysms of agony every few minutes. I was like that for several days.
*sigh*...I just KNEW before I hit the "Read More" link that it wouldnt be long before somone started harping on about how wonderful the Model M is and then the whole sheep-like lot of would you chime in...
Whatever happened to diversity?
Look, believe it or not, spring loaded keys aren't everybody's cup of tea - especially if you have to so a lot of typing, where a soft-touch keyboard is a much safer bet for your wrists.
The article poster preferred vintage Logitech, but I prefer the action on vintage Keytronic (from before they started overdesigning everything, that is). They have a tough, springy membrane that gives enough positive feedback to allow you to type very rapidly, while cushioning the impact gently enough to avoid both sore fingers *and* sore wrists.
That light sabre duel (note correct spelling of SABRE) was really something. I really enjoyed watching it. Kudos to Cary Ho and Calvin Ho for their efforts.
But then again, I guess you're always guaranteed a good time... with a couple of Hos...
Do *you* think this bill, or any other similar bill in the near future has any chance of substantial cross-party support?
Do you think Washington is beginning to believe that an expanded and more adventurous space program would improve the national self image and bring people closer together? Are they truly getting ready to compete with China and India in space and on the Moon?
Or is it all just wishful thinking, not likely to be shared by senir establishment figures any time soon?
If you really are a senior exec in the space program I would expect you to have *some* insight into these questions, even if it's only based on internal rumours.
Nothing personal, but I don't tend to bother seeking rational argument with someone when they are shouting in all caps and employing sarcastic rhetorical questions beginning with "did your mommy...?". When you're faced with that level of open hostility you just know there is no point in arguing.
It seems to me that roughly half of URLS containing a mistyped or otherwise invalid domain/host already result in a redirection to a name registrar's advertisement.
This isn't news, it's bullshit. The examples given are just ordinary degraded media, there's nothing surprising in the result. So what's this meant to be about? We have to worship entropy now, do we?
Slashdot editors should not feel obliged to post this kind of intellectual jerk-off just because it got high score on the keyword-o-meter. Try reading the stuff first dammit, see if there's any value in it.
The Swiss used a similar ploy to stay out of two world wars: nobody dared attack them because all their (the rich and powerful's) money was sitting in Swiss banks.
Now it's the Americans who have got everybody's money - locked up in unpaid debt - so the world literally can't afford for the US to fail economically.
The only people who don't care about that are the people who don't have any cash invested in the US: i.e. the world's poor and disaffected. So you shouldn't have to look too far to see exactly where the greatest threat to national security is coming from.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh we communicated effectively all right. The problem is that many of our representatives just won't listen, period. Apparently they they think they're not obliged to. And if they don't listen they can't hear, no matter how effective our communication is.
Until very recently I was an enthusiastic Euro-Federalist. But having participated in this public lobbying process for a while I now understand what was meant by the antis when they said that the EU is insufficiently democratic. Actually the whole edifice seems to be rotten to the core.
The parliament is largely composed of MEPs who don't listen to the majority of their constituents, and who bitch and whine about "aggressive", "irrational" and even "improper" lobbying when we are only attempting to exercise our democratic rights and get their attention.
Since they complained that we were wrong to fight the directive because we didn't understand the facts, then let it be noted that they never made the slightest attempt to engage with us and explain their position properly. Not once. Despite the strength of protest, they just didn't care.
And then it turns out that even if we do manage to get our MEPs to vote responsibly, the Council of Ministers - whom nobody voted for - can overturn any decision on a whim. And that Council is dominated by men who represent big business.
I'm finding it hard to see anything worth saving in these institutions. It begins to look like they offer nothing to the private citizen at all. But sadly, the same malaise is also deeply embedded in the UK's own political institutions, so no relief there either.
Just what the fuck do we have to *do* to get effective representation in government around here?
I'm with the earlier poster who said one day there will be an epiphany. Thing is, they can only get away with this shit as long as most people are comfortable enough to be able to ignore it. And we here all know - perhaps better than most - that there are major economic shifts under way right now which are due to wipe the smiles right off the faces of most of the middle class some time pretty soon.
It's quite a big middle class so you can expect there to be a major and noticeable interruption to law and order when it gets to that point. Especially if the notion has by then seeped into the public consciousness that those vacuous, smirking and self-serving fools in government only let us down because they forgot who the hell they were supposed to be working for.
In the meantime: if a corrupt stoolpigeon of vested interests like Bolkenstein can't, as a government appointee, be removed by electoral means then I suppose we can only hope his health isn't too good.
Now that's just being dense. Of course this is big news, especially for systems builders too small to be able to swing a good deal with MS. Moreover, it's the first time anything like this has happened with Linux, and if it results in even the tiniest bit more exposure of open source OS to hoi polloi, then so much the better.
This is for small "white box builders". Those brave souls and small businesses who are still trying to make a living building cheap computers for resale.
The article to which you refer said "More than 17 per cent of Australians", not "More than 47 per cent". You sad git.
Actually the council of ministers can choose to ignore them and enact it regardless. And there's no nead to be vulgar.
Yeah - one possible outcome is that China won't be able to participate in global markets - another more likely possibility is that China will export it's homegrown technologies, at unprecedented price levels, undercutting *both* Intel and Microsoft. No wonder Intel are scared.
China already have the manufacturing infrastructure to do all this. They just need to develop their own IP. It's a no-brainer for them.
There's nobody here disputing any of that. I agree in principle with what you are trying to achieve and I have written several letters to my MEP stating broadly the same things.
Where I do disagree is that I don't think a community-held patent portfolio can be made into a practical defence strategy.
Try to remember that patent law has evolved (like most law) to serve the wealthy and powerful, at everyone else's expense. Under current "intellectual property" law (and I do mean patents, trademarks *and* copyright), in most cases - no matter who is actually right - the winner is the one with the most money. This rule of thumb is only broken when both parties have sufficient legal resources to go all the way.
As I pointed out, it is unlikely that the EFF could accumulate sufficient resources out of subscription fees to fight even one patent lawsuit against a major player. I'd go further: I don't think the OSS community will ever be able to match those industry giants' investment in IP protection. They can afford to spend all that, and they even like it that way because in the end they make even more money out of it. Whereas we don't make any money out of it even if we win.
For these reason the *only* way we can hope to retain control of the fruits of our labours is to seek a change in the law, and specifically one which drastically reduces the role of courts and lawyers for arbitration purposes. This would level the playing field so that all participants could seek protection under the law without incurring huge legal bills. A patent office that was more open and didn't grant stupid patents would be a start; a law that clearly forbade patents on abstract processes such as software and business methods would more or less eliminate the problem altogether.
So if there are any limited resources available to be spent on fighting this issue I think the EFF are absolutely right to be concentrating on seeking changes in the law and the way it is applied.
BTW I know what you mean about IBM, one does almost get the warm fuzzy feeling about them these days. But that's only because it suits them to snuggle up to the OSS community as things stand right now, with IBM in its current form. That could all change pretty quickly if they decide to de-emphasize their software support and consultancy business. So do beware of any cross-licensing deals containing a revocation clause - because then IBM could do to us exactly what SCO is trying to do to IBM right now.
I don't know if it's still the case, but certainly up until recently at least, many help pages would just state the program name and version and along with a list of empty headings there was a single brief comment along the lines of "Sorry, we don't have time to write documentation".
In my humble opinion (as someone who develops software for a living) if you can't document then you shouldn't be pushing software in the first place. Who else is going to do it? Is some telepathic volunteer supposed to read their minds?
If as you suggest this problem has receded somewhat in recent versions, that's a good thing.
In the latest version of OpenBSD for instance there were at least 5 excellent patentable innovations
With respect to building a portfolio of patents to engage in cross-licensing deals with major patent holders, just how many software patents do such companies like IBM, Oracle, Adobe hold? IBM alone holds more than 37,000 patents and this number is currently increasing by thousands per year.
Faced with patent portfolios like that, which represent annual R&D and legal expenditure in the billions industry-wide, I don't see how parity can ever be achieved. So how can we ever achieve parity in order to bring the buggers to the negotiating table? Rather than let us have access to their huge number of patents in exchange for a paltry few, they might consider it cheaper to just invent their own alternative. Or to fight it in court and bleed us dry that way, as noted above.
Agreed. Government by dictat is a just a huge confidence trick, relying on the people's fear of what will happen to them if they dare to withdraw its authority, pending political reform (actually nothing would happen, except more controlled government).
They also try to promote the idea that they are so powerful that you can't force them to acquiesce to to the public's expectations on any given issue. A major riot exposes that lie quickly enough (in teh UK anyway...remember Thatcher's aborted Poll Tax? Labour's attempted petrol tax hikes?), but they know that as long as the middle classes are comfortable enough, there will never be a sufficient number of people willing to risk exposing themselves to a face full of tear gas and a night in the cells.
Whenever government meddling results in the middle classes hurting badly enough to take to the streets, therefore, you can bet it wasn't done on purpose. But that doesn't excuse it. If we are ever to achieve peace, justice and representative government then the habitual arrogance of incumbent government must be broken and they must be placed on a leash. Of course those in power always like it just the way it is so I don't believe any kind of meaningful political reform will ever be possible without direct action from a massive popular movement.
Unfortunately a handful of disgruntled geeks isn't it.
Weren't you listening? The only EU representatives we elect are sent to the EU parliament, which has no power.
Decisions are taken by the Council of Ministers, who are appointed by the national governments of the day. Who as we all know, turned out in practice not to be who we thought we were electing.
In any event I've been recently finding out just how hard of hearing those MEPs are. If the EU parliament did obtain executive power, it would hardly make any difference. Most of them don't claim to represent you or me, once elected: they just do whatever they like. Usually this means following the party whip in order to boost their career prospects. They're so very far away from their consituents you see.
Actually that can make things worse. It leads to pendulum politics, where the political and legislative environment changes so abruptly every 5-10 years that it becomes perpetually impossible for the citizen to adapt.
In the UK, people brought up during a socialist era struggled to cope with the capitalist revolution imposed by Thatcher throughout the 1980's. Those who managed to adapt were then thrown to the wolves when the Tories were deposed by New Labour in the early 1990's.
Nobody wants to live like that. Most people will find it difficult to prosper without stability and a degree of certainty. You learn the rules and you figure out how you can make a living within that. If the rug keeps getting pulled out from under your feet, it gets hard to stay on your feet.
I think a better solution is to reform the electoral and political systems so that it becomes impossible (or at least very difficult) for one party to obtain a large majority. That way, the only legislation that can get passed is legislation with broad cross-party support, eliminating laws based upon party ideology and also leading to fewer laws crafted to serve the interests of a small and influential minority.
Critics of proportional representation say that you must allow large majorities or else you don't get "strong government". I say, to hell with "strong government". No more serial dictatorship! Let the people run their own lives.
Your idea of a OSS-community-held patent portfolio has been advanced before, but it is never going to work either.
The OSS "community", such as it is, is composed mainly of a great horde of geeks who like to get neat stuff for free, and relatively few actual contributing developers.
It is as much as "we" can do just to keep churning out code for bugfixes and upgrades. They simply don't, as a general rule, command the resources to get patents written up, registered, and defended in the courts - all expensive and time consuming processes.
As to your suggestion that we form an association and each contribute $100 annually - we already have, in the EFF, an organization capable of looking after this, and they need that money already if you're offering. They are already short of funds. Why? It's not that we don't care really, but $100 is a fair sized chunk of money for a geek to find, expecially in these straitened times. Those of us lucky enough to still be in work are no longer paid as well as we used to be. And the rest of us are out of work.
For the sake of argument let's posit the existence of a group of people turned on by patent law. We'll call this hypothetical bunch "patent geeks" (we already know there are *some* people like us working on the legal side; people like Eben Moglen, Lawrence Lessig, and the contributors to Greplaw and the OpenLaw project, both hosted at Harvard).
Now if the efforts of OSS developers were only matched by legal i-dotting and t-crossing by those hypothetical patent geeks, then each software project could be backed up by proper legal protection.
But guess what - the people mentioned above may be interested, and can sometimes help out when critical cases get to court, but they are not patent draftsmen. I see no sign of *any* hobbyist patent draftmen willing to lend out their services pro bono, actually.
In reality, dotting i's and crossing t's have always been the OSS community's weak spot. Many applications (i.e. the entire gamut of KDE applications EVEN AT VERSION 3.2) *still* don't come with adequate (or even *any*) documentation, for example. Even worse, some projects' output is distributed in such a raw form that it can only be coaxed into life by an expert after weeks of experimentation.
But this is tolerated because it is the very absence of the usual rigorous standards required by paying customers, which allows these projects to exist in the first place, and which allows their fruits to be distributed at such low cost. It is those "flexible" standards which allows open source to exist and compete with commercial softwre in the first place.
You can surely see by now where I'm going with this. If every OSS software development project needed to be shadowed by a team of volunteer patent lawyers then most software projects would simply wither and die. The cost of operating would be too great for small players and the only projects able to survive would be those capable of going commercial like Linux, BIND, Apache, Sendmail, Samba, the GNU compiler suite.
So to sum up: many users won't pay for patent registration and defence; the larger projects may end up being forced to do it themselves, but if it were to become a universal necessity owing to increasing frequency of aggressive patent lawsuits then the only possible result is a much smaller open source universe. We need therefore to focus our efforts on changing the law to provide a more benign legal environment for pro bono software contributors.
Possibly. But the last time I used an IBM keyboard (it was very old, dunno what model, but it seemed to be make of metal; think it was what came with the original PC-AT) I remember having major problems. I think it was because the key travel was rather longer than on your standard membrane keyboard. Much more like the keyboards on the old IBM electric typewriters.
the primary cause of carpal tunnel is incorrect wrist position anyway
Again, possibly. But Carpal tunnel - and other forms of RSI affecting the wrist and hand - can be exacerbated by minor injury even to the point where even a soft touch keyboard will cripple you.
There was one time I spent a weekend moving furniture, and then fell over on an ice skating rink and broke my fall by putting out my hand. I was fine, there was only the slightest bruising on the fleshy pad at the base of my thumb. But after one day back at work, pounding away on the keyboard all day, I was in agony. I couldn't tolerate the sightest deflection of my wrist and had to bind it up inside a weekly computer trade journal with a rubber belt just to avoid going into paroxysms of agony every few minutes. I was like that for several days.
*sigh*...I just KNEW before I hit the "Read More" link that it wouldnt be long before somone started harping on about how wonderful the Model M is and then the whole sheep-like lot of would you chime in...
Whatever happened to diversity?
Look, believe it or not, spring loaded keys aren't everybody's cup of tea - especially if you have to so a lot of typing, where a soft-touch keyboard is a much safer bet for your wrists.
The article poster preferred vintage Logitech, but I prefer the action on vintage Keytronic (from before they started overdesigning everything, that is). They have a tough, springy membrane that gives enough positive feedback to allow you to type very rapidly, while cushioning the impact gently enough to avoid both sore fingers *and* sore wrists.
Perfect for running Linux on your hacked X-box!
That light sabre duel (note correct spelling of SABRE) was really something. I really enjoyed watching it. Kudos to Cary Ho and Calvin Ho for their efforts.
... with a couple of Hos ...
But then again, I guess you're always guaranteed a good time
Do *you* think this bill, or any other similar bill in the near future has any chance of substantial cross-party support?
Do you think Washington is beginning to believe that an expanded and more adventurous space program would improve the national self image and bring people closer together? Are they truly getting ready to compete with China and India in space and on the Moon?
Or is it all just wishful thinking, not likely to be shared by senir establishment figures any time soon?
If you really are a senior exec in the space program I would expect you to have *some* insight into these questions, even if it's only based on internal rumours.
I'd like to hear what you have to say.
Nothing personal, but I don't tend to bother seeking rational argument with someone when they are shouting in all caps and employing sarcastic rhetorical questions beginning with "did your mommy...?". When you're faced with that level of open hostility you just know there is no point in arguing.
Never underestimate how shitty things can get.
Never underestimate the ignorance, incompetence and bloodyminded selfishness of our leaders.
It seems to me that roughly half of URLS containing a mistyped or otherwise invalid domain/host already result in a redirection to a name registrar's advertisement.
This isn't news, it's bullshit. The examples given are just ordinary degraded media, there's nothing surprising in the result. So what's this meant to be about? We have to worship entropy now, do we?
Slashdot editors should not feel obliged to post this kind of intellectual jerk-off just because it got high score on the keyword-o-meter. Try reading the stuff first dammit, see if there's any value in it.
Yes, I think we noticed. In fact I described this strategy at the end of my comment. What, did you fall asleep before getting to the end?
The Swiss used a similar ploy to stay out of two world wars: nobody dared attack them because all their (the rich and powerful's) money was sitting in Swiss banks.
Now it's the Americans who have got everybody's money - locked up in unpaid debt - so the world literally can't afford for the US to fail economically.
The only people who don't care about that are the people who don't have any cash invested in the US: i.e. the world's poor and disaffected. So you shouldn't have to look too far to see exactly where the greatest threat to national security is coming from.