Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars a year on research, development, and testing. Forcing them to lower their sources of income would mean they spend less on this, and thus would harm the people more than benefit them because of the unavailability of drugs.
Bullshit.
1) Pharmaceutical companies exaggerate the amount they spend on research, often vastly so, as a club to use whenever patent reform is proposed (or discussed in government circles). Much of that expense isn't R&D related at all, it consists of normal, non-research-related costs which through the magic of accounting have been transformed into R&D Costs.
2) Much, in some cases most, of the money funding research comes from public funds (grants, generally paid for by taxpayers) and private donations (been to any AIDS benefits lately?), as well as the time, resources, and materials of publicly funded educational institutions (Universities, Government research labs, etc). It is an appalling outrage that the products of such contributions are then privately patented and sold back to the very contributors at inflated monopoly prices.
3) It is a myth that an inventor requires a monopoly in order to make money on their invention. Ironicly, it is an anti-freemarket myth that flies in the face of virtually all free market economic data and theory... yet those who benefit from government granted monopoly regimes, like Patents, manage to convince people it is okay anyway. Inventors (incluiding pharamceutical companies) can make a perfectly fine living competing against others selling an identical product (who cares if the competitor didn't invent it first and just copied the invention, invented it independently, or did invent it first but lost the footrace to the pantent office? None of that stops the inventor from marketing and selling their product, indeed the only thing the competition will insure is that the market price is a fair one).
4) There are a number of other methods for financing R&D that are more effecient than the blanket granting of 20-year monopolies to private interests. Indeed, we use several of these and still give them their monopolies... achieving all the downside and little of the upside.
5) Selling AIDS medication for $20,000/year that costs $200/year to make does not benefit the patient (and in that example most of the money financing the research came from public funds to begin with), it only benefits the pharamceutical monopolist.
6) Monopolies are virtually by definition "price fixing," as only one entity can sell the item and are thus free to "fix" the price wherever they would like. When they fix it too low it is called "dumping" (though that isn't the only example of dumping, it certainly is one, e.g. Microsoft and Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player), when they fix it too high it is called "fixing" or "gouging", but the reality is a monopoly, whether achieved by government fiat (Pharmaceutical Patents), through predatory anti-competative business practices (Microsoft), simply because one is the only one to offer a particular product or serve a particular niche (Power and Gas companies in some locales), or for whatever reason, a monopoly is always 'fixing' a price, as there is no competition to otherwise affect and determine pricing. Maybe, if one is lucky (or has good government oversight) the price will be fixed "fairly," but fair or not, the price is definitely fixed.
No free market, no non-fixed prices.
It is just that we as a society have, foolishly, choses to hone rather large blindspots with respect to much of the price fixing that goes on, because we either charish, or do not question, many of the monopolies that surround us (particularly those which exist through government fiat via Patent and Copyright law).
if you hit a mirror with a powerful enough beam of laser light, the small fraction of light that's absorbed (no such thing as an ideal reflector) will rapidly ablate the mirror coat, and then you're screwed. [...] a 100KW IR laser will vaporize pretty much anything that's not *perfectly* reflective, i.e. anything we can build with current technology.
So you make your mirror subsystem disposable, and eject the spent mirrors like shells. Assuming you can get the desired result before or during the ablative process, you've got one shot, one mirror. We're used to such constraints with bullets and shell casings, and some disposable, portable ground-to-air missile systems, why not with mirrors?
Re:Multiple universes?
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One of Many
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· Score: 2
it talks about how inflation predicts multiple universes
This is one of my pet hates. By the very definition of the word [m-w.com], there can only be one universe. Or are the definitions now being changed?
I would suggest getting over it. Merriem-Webster does not have the final word in what the term 'Universe' means, not in colloquial speech ("we the people" decide that through our use of language, and most people I know have become very comfortable with the notion of multiple universes a long time ago, even if said universes are merely relegated to the 'universe of what is real' vs. 'the universe(s) of what is fictional'), nor in scientific terminology, in which cosmologists like will have the final say.
The term Universe, with the capital "U", is usually used for everything that we can ever have knowledge of, the entire span of space and time accessible to our instruments, now and in the future. This may seem like a fairly comprehensive definition, and in the past it has traditionally been regarded as synonymous with the entirety of everything that exists. But the development of ideas such as inflation suggests that there may be something else beyond the boundaries of the observable Universe -- regions of space and time that are unobservable in principle [...]
This has led to some ambiguity in the use of the term "Universe". Some people restrict it to the observable Universe, while others argue that it should be used to refer to all of space and time. If we use "Universe" as the name for our own expanding bubble of spacetime, everything that is in principle visible to our telescopes, then maybe the term "Cosmos" can be used to refer to the entirety of space and time, within which (if the inflationary scenario is correct) there may be an indefinitely large number of other expanding bubbles of spacetime, other universes with which we can never communicate.
Our knowledge of what is, and what may be, has far outstripped dated definitions of 'universe'... either the meaning of the term will evolve accordingly, or new terminology will result.
I'd give you less than 50% odds that your preferred definition is the one that ultimately prevails, but you never know.:-)
I would say that the license that gives the most freedom is the license that publically funded development should have. Guess what: that license is not the GPL
This is a tired argument, but to recap:
Long story short, GPL is analogous to a constitution protecting the freedoms of its citizens (users) by constraining in a few minor ways what freedoms the developers can deny their users.
The BSD license is more akin to a democracy with no constitution, or no strong constitution, which constrains the developers little or not at all, at the expense of leaving the users with no protection of their freedoms.
Both licenses are appropriate in some circumstances. BSDL is good for getting protocols, algorithms, and other standards widely accepted by allowing proprietary as well as free products to use the code (good example: ogg vorbis), while the GPL is excellent at insuring that a project remains free in perpetuity.
Software funded by tax dollars is funded by the users. It is therefor more appropriate to have a license which protects the rights and freedoms of the users who are paying for the developmnt over those of the developers who are being paid (though of course developers benefit immensly, in having their freedoms protected with respect to contributions by other developers. Not every user is a developer, but every developer is a user somewhere along the line).
"For Security, use of GPL within groups with well-defined security boundaries should be encouraged to promote faster, more locally autonomous responses to cyber threats."
Perhaps one aspect of the security to which they refer is the secure knowledge that inhouse software developed under the GPL will remain free, i.e. they will in turn receive any and all improvements made by others.;-) Somehow I doubt that is what they meant, though.
While the GPL is arguably more appropriate for public funded software development than licenses that lend themselves to proprietarization, I must agree wholeheartedly with you that it is clear that the advantage in security goes to free software over proprietary software, and not GPLed software over other free software to any degree. Indeed, as you point out, OpenBSD is the most secure operating system around, and it is certainly not GPLed.
What they clearly meant to say was the free software should be encouraged to promote faster, more locally autonomous responses to cyber threats... they are mistakenly equating GPLed software with free software (when in fact it is only a subset).
Are they sure that this isn't covered by a patent? I remember almost two years ago that VirtualDub had to remove support for ASF files because Microsoft had a patent on some part of it. The VirtualDub guys just removed support rather than fight MS. I hope this doesn't turn out to be the same situation.
Let's hope the developer who did the WMA portion of the code lives outside of the United States and is not an American citizen. Then MS could basically take their patent and shove it, and the ffmpeg stuff can simply have a compile time option to leave out patented code, a la PGP.
Of course, no one in the United States *cough* would ever compile the patented code. That would be illegal.
The supreme court disagrees. In a recent ruling they ruled that child pornography, in the form of cartoons or fiction, were perfectly legal. It is only illegal in the United States when it involves photography or filming of minors. You can sketch or write about whatever vile behavior you like... it is only illegal if it involves an actual, real world, physical child.
It is something disgusting... If pedophils says this is free speech, then murder is free speech too...
Um, no. Child Porn is something disgusting. However, pedophiles (or, much more commonly, non-pedophile people who speak out because they are concerned about losing their rights in society's zeal to go after the despicable habits of pedophiles) who say this is free speech are akin to Hollywood movie moghuls who claim that films depicting, or witnessing, murder is "free speech."
Films like, say, "Faces of Death."
Freedom of speech and the press is generally simpler than most people make it, because most people have their own personal agendas and concerns they want to filter freedom of speech through. Whether those agendas are laudable or banal is irrelevant to the underlying fact that they impose complexity on a pretty simple and straightforward right as enshrined in the constitution... indeed, it only becomes complex when one wishes to disregard that right, and justify doing so.
Possession of information, however vile that information is, should never be illegal. Marketing and selling it, sure, just as marketing and selling anything, like cars without seatbelts, can be regulated by states, or by the federal government if said trade crosses state lines.
But not possession, for the simple reason that someone could slip a vile picture of a child being molested into your luggage, then have you brought up on charges.
Think this doesn't happen? Anytime you ever receive SPAM containing a pornographic photograph of a child in your mailbox, or read a USENET newsgroup to which some dipshit has posted their OFFTOPIC, vile kiddyporn crap (because the feds are watching the alt.whatever.porn groups), or get hit with a kiddie-porn popup add when browsing the web, including but not limited to completely unrelated, legal adult pornography, you are guilty of breaking the law.
You remain guilty for as long as that material is cached by your web browser, news reader, or mailbox on your hard drive, or, arguably, as long as it sits in your mailbox unread. You are, in all those cases, in possession of banned information.
What is interesting is that the FBI has used this exact kind of thing against people they've gone after for unrelated crimes, even though it is pretty clear (e.g. a guy has 10,000 porn pics on his hard drive, including 3 in his browser cache of underage people) that they were not looking for or collecting child pornography. Because mere possession is illegal, and ignorance (i.e. not knowing) is no excuse, these people are criminalized despite the fact that they have no pedophiliac tendencies or desires whatsoever.
Worse, many people who have no interest in pornography at all, of any kind, end up with this crap on their hard drives simply for having been foolish enough to type whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov, or to have posted something in public with the real email address attached, thus ending up on someone's SPAM list.
Now, if said information were treated as the evidence of a heinous crime that it is, rather than a contriband, it could still be taken away as evidence of a crime, and held until the crime (trafficking in a regulated item: child porn, and/or the physical act of harming a child itself) is solved, prosecuted, and all appeals are exhausted.
Wala... you get the material off the street, and you do not even need to diminish anyone's liberty to do so. Plus, you get the added benefit of encouraging real pedophiles who want their material back to cooperate in bringing the seller and original, vile perpetrators to justice.
Solaris does not particularly target the desktop user any longer, and hasn't seriously for a long time. So bitching about Solaris being "clunky" in that kind of usage (which is what it appears you're talking about, ditching Solaris on the desktop), is ludicrous.
Tell that to Sun Marketing.
Solaris desktop isn't the only area where solaris is clunky. It is also clunky in a number of server configurations (e.g. database server, etc.) where Linux, FreeBSD, and others shine.
You may not like the fact that your favorite operating system isn't terribly well suited for a number of applications, applications for which it is often marketed by its seller, but that does little to change the fact that it remains less well suited than others, or that the areas where it does shine are areas that only a few specialized applications have any real use for.
You may also not like the fact that businesses and companies, including the one I work for, have found it in their strategic interest to deploy open and free(dom) operating systems and products wherever feasable, or that the turnaround on fixing problems is typically faster than Sun (who is BTW a great deal better than Microsoft in that respect), so much so that it, more than anything else, became a deciding factor when my bosses chose which direction to go, and which operating system to deploy.
Indeed, you may not much care for anything I've said on the subject (your rather trite post certainly seems to indicate that), and certainly Sun probably doesn't like to hear it (and when it has been brought up to their sales representatives, you could almost see their hands go over the ears and their lips begin to move in the "I can't hear you, I can't hear you" refrain), but that does absolutely nothing to negate the fact that, for the vast majority of common tasks to which computers are used in many, many corporate and small business settings, Solaris ins't nearly as well suited as other alternatives such as FreeBSD and Linux, nor does it negate the fact that Sun's unwillingness to listen to its customers on this subject has played no small role in their shrinking marketshare.
Of course, your contention that 2-cpu unix configurations isn't relevant to the discussion shows an immense ignornace of the hardware offerings Sun itself markets, many of which are precisely the clunky, slow, and ineffecient architecture you yourself dismiss in lauding their 64 and 128 cpu solutions, which the vast majority of us have no use for.
Finally, I recommend you look up the word 'attack', then look up the word 'criticize.' There is a difference that your idealogical adherance to Sun appears to have blinded you to, much as Sun's sales representatives have been blinded as they've watched their accounts dwindle toward zero. Hint: I was criticizing Solaris, and rightly so based on my not inconsiderable experience with the product (indeed, I work with it every day). Your interpretation of that as an attack says a great deal more about your bias than it does about mine.
You are right to object to FUD, and some of the broader generalizations certainly are overly-broad (and therefor not so accurate). However, you are seeing a great deal of FUD where IMHO there really isn't any. Most people's exposure to solaris isn't in the problem domain you are working on, and from most people's perspective (my own included) Solaris is big, slow, and clunky, not because it is big, slow, and clunky at everything, but because it is big, slow, and clunky at those tasks most people perform most of the time.
These are the same kind of people who complain about Microsoft spreading lies (FUD) about Linux, but these hypocrites have no problems doing the same regarding Solaris, because it doesn't fit into their open source ideology.
I think you'd better back that accusation up with some hard evidence, particularly the 'hypocracy' bit.
I have worked with SunOS since before GNU/Linux ever existed, and have been using Solaris for years. I too have been a Linux user for years.
But I make my living doing parallel/numerical computing research and I know from runnings lots and lots of performance studies that Solaris beats Linux handily in several situations.
That is absolutely true, but there is a corrallary which is just as true: in many, many situations Solaris is clunky and shows its staid age all too well. I would go further and say, based on my own experience, that those situations, in which Solaris shows its clunkiness, and GNU/Linux really shines, are the ones that face most people far more commonly than those where Solaris shines and GNU/Linux lags.
Why is Solaris so much slower to improve in so many ways, despite shining in some? Probably because it isn't free software, and as such has many less people working on it, and is able to leverage far less communal contributions.
It may be ignorant to bash the performance of Solaris solely based upon its proprietary status, but it is certainly not ignorant to be critical of its greater overhead and clunky performance in most real-world cases, nor to point to its proprietary status as a contributor to that situation. Indeed, it is equally ignorant to assume people who have worked with both dislike Solaris solely out of philisophical grounds, when the Operating System (and Sun) provide ample reasons to dislike it on technical merit, behavior, cost, and lack of openness (which is often critical to fixing serious problems which occasionally arise). Indeed, with the exception of those who are working on in the kind of parallel computing problem domains you are, Solaris is in general quite slow and clunky, especially when running on intel hardware.
That fact that it is proprietary, and one must purchase (and wait on) expensive Sun support to get issues, even critical issues, fixed, isn't a factor in Solaris' favor either, and the latter (the need to be able to fix problems quickly, and not be handcuffed from doing so) was the reason we ended up dumping Solaris in favor of Linux on the desktop years ago, a decision which has been very good for our business BTW. And no, it isn't hypocracy, it is practicality.
I think corporate fines should be based on a percentage of their annual REVENUE. If MS was fined 5% of their revenue for this, fuck yeah they'd sit up and take notice! Keep the dollar amount for the humans.
Good luck.
Clearly NYC politicians were paid off generously (an examination of their portfolios would no doubt be very revealing), in that the city only charged Microsoft a $50.00 fine (much less than IBM was charged before) and graciously "accepted" Microsoft's "Apology".
That was a $50.00 fine in total, not per count, making a laughingstock of the entire anti-graffitti law, and sending a clear message: we in the NYC government like corporate graffitti if our portfolio members or campaign contributors do it, but if individuals (or non-bribing companies) do it, watch out!
How long before......MS decide this is illegal and start suing?
How about sometime after Microsoft actually uses a lawsuit as a weapon? Microsoft has zero history of suing people who write lookalikes of their software (Samba, WINE, That NT-workalike project, etc).
Well, that is true only to a point. In fairness to Microsoft, they haven't filed any such lawsuits, but they have used the threat of lawsuits on more than one occasion, and while they haven't dealt with look-and-feel per se, they have dealt with other equally inane things, like file format compatability. Certainly Microsoft has reserved the option to (mis)use lawsuits strategicly against Free Software in the internal Halloween documents leaked a few years ago.
Apparently, you're thinking of Apple who really is truly evil when it comes to suing people.
Both are evil, in different ways. However, I believe you are correct in pointing out that Apple is the one which went beyond mere intimidation, to actually filing (and losing) lawsuits based upon mimicknig look-and-feel.
Which is why, much as I like some of Apple's products (and will almost certainly make Apple my next laptop), I am also at pains to point out that anyone switching from Windows to Apple is simply trading one Master for another, and who is to say that the kinder Master today will be the kinder Master next year?
Of course, with Palladium on the horizon, we may well find ourselves in the extraordinarilly ironic situation where we need to buy a non-Intel, non-AMD (e.g. Apple PowerPC) system just to be able to dual-boot into Linux. I suspect instead most of the Asian hardware companies will ship with two BIOSes, so that a simple jumper or firmware setting can completely eliminate Palladium, but who can ever be certain in these unusual times?
Freedom to only do Right Is Not Freedom!
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Freenet 0.5 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The FreeNet principles are a good things, but I'm concerned about the possible wrong uses of freedom.
"Wrong" as defined by whom?
The Bush family thinks it is wrong to leak information emberrassing to the family out to the press, and they punish people severely (within their power) when they do so, yet what they do is clearly constitutional.
Supporters of Clinton felt it was severely wrong to have private, political groups fund and possibly incite lawsuits by private citizens for poltical ends, but clearly that was within the bounds of the constitution.
I'm not worried about nazi propaganda, I think is a good thing that the normal citizen have access to this information in order to study it.
Ah. So are you the person who gets to tell us what is "right" and what is "wrong?"
But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it. My only hope in this case is that these crimes can be pursued by police through other normal way.
Pedophilia is an illness, and people who act on those feelings are criminals. It was never necessary, nor smart, to subvert the first amendment by making information (child pornography) illegal to possess. Illegal to sell, yes (that falls under the commerce clause), but making the possession of child pornography illegal was a serious mistake.
Why? Two reasons I can think of off hand
1) Possession doesn't imply any intent or even desire. Ever get child porno SPAM in your mailbox? How about child porno popups when surfing completely unrelated adult pornography, or perusing newsgroups some looser has spammed with their vile crap? Most people have, and have immediately become guilty under the law for possessing child pornography (it is copied to your machine's memory). Worse still, that crap is cached on people's hard drives, often without their knowledge, for extended periods of time.
2) Any photographs are by definition evidence of a crime. Instead of banning information, such evidence could be routinely siezed, to be returned to its owner only after the crime (child molestation) has been solved. That would have had the twin benefit of not eroding the 1st amendment and building a strong incentive to squeel on the seller into the entire process.
The "dark side" of freedom is a red herring. If we are free, we are free to do things others disagree with. The only limits should be when those freedoms reduce the freedoms of others (that was what the founding fathers intended, after all). IN other words, in the case of pedophelia, the crime is the molestation and harm to the child (and the selling of a regulated, in this case banned, product), not the mere possession of the photographs. However, the police can and should seize any such photographic or video evidence, and keep it on hand in a file, until the case is solved and the child raping perpetrators convicted and put in prison. Of course, such evidence couldn't be returned until said perps had exhausted all appeal opportunities.
A little clear thinking would go a long way toward solving many of the 'problems' that come out of people's misuse of their liberties, without eliminating those liberties altogether. And those downsides which can't be eliminated through intelligent application of the law, within the bounds of the constitution, should be viewed as the price we are obligated to pay for liberty.
A price, by the way, which is laughably small compared to that which our forfathers paid in establishing and protecting those freedoms in times past.
"It's illegal," she said, "and they're going to get a lot of publicity for it."
I think that was the whole point of all of this.
And, as another observed, "do the math." It is a very cheap way to gain notoriety (exposure), which serves their purposes exactly.
Now, if the city of New York really wants to stop this sort of thing (IBM was somewhat innovative and original when they did it a couple of years ago, Nike and Microsoft are merely a tired, repeated cliche at this point), they will probably need to start suspending or revoking the business licenses of the advertising firms that do this sort of thing, and/or throwing the employees doing this in jail for a night or two.
Fines, even fines that a single human being would find enormous, are nothing to the almost bottomless coffers of corporate america, and Microsoft in particular, and will certainly do little to deter this sort of thing in the future.
Am I the only one secretly wishing all of those butterfly-clad idiots were magically transported to some impoverished shanty-town (like in Bangladesh or Brazil) so they could convince all of the people who are drinking raw sewage in their water how wonderful the benefits of MSN 8 will be?
Quite possibly you were the only one dreaming of that particular scenerio, but now there are a bunch of us enjoying the image as well.:-)
Several colleagues of mine and I are not-so-secretly wishing all of those butterfly-clad candy-asses would be magically teleported into "Taliban Country" (Northern Pakistan or Chechnya), where they could live to fullfillment the roles of "Harem Bitch" they've so obviously aspired to. OK, it isn't Billy Boy's Harem, but still, its a leg up in the business...and they have to start somewhere.
The GPL community response to criticism has always been, "don't use GPL code if you don't like the license." Seems perfectly reasonable. If you don't like the BitKeeper license, then don't use BitKeeper.
Which is precisely what RMS is saying, and what other kernel developers in the past have said (and been flamed into oblivion on the LKML for saying).
Unfortunately, Linus isn't personally affected by the constraints (he isn't contributing code to CVS or subversion), and he finds it convinient. Whether his stance is simply one of valuing his own convinience over the freedom of others, or he is taking a political stand about being apolitical I do not know. I do know that I disagree with his decision, and I think RMS is right on this particular issue.
However, if I felt really strongly about it I could fork a version of the kernel and maintain it with subversion I suppose (I think others have actually done that sort of thing already). Ultimately Linus will do what he likes, right or wrong (he is frequently right, and he is frequently wrong, like most human beings), and whether you like RMS or like to denigrate RMS, the GPL he wrote has certainly done much to insure that we are free to follow Linus, RMS, or whomever else we like, or to not follow them and fork the code as we see fit.
However, that freedom does not mean people should feel obligated to remain silent when they see something they find ethically reprehensible, such as the licensing terms Bitkeeper snuck in after the fact, in short, after the Linux community had already snorted a few sucker lines and formed a habit. Indeed, part of preserving said freedoms requires we step forward and speak out on these sorts of issues when they arrive, whether or not it is a polular or trendy thing to do, or these freedoms we so enjoy and take for granted will be reduced to little more than a passing fad and a distant memory.
Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer!
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ECCp-109 Solved
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· Score: 2
How generous of you. Personally, if I can help find a cure for cancer, no matter if its PWNED by someone or not, I don't care. The end result would be a cure.
The end result will be a cure locked down by patents, sold at monopoly prices which only the wealthy or well insuread (two terms rapidly becoming synonymmous) can afford.
I have no intention of donating anything to fund research designed to benefit the wealthy and not the rest of us. Better to have no cure, than to have a cure whose price has been so inflated that only the well off can afford it, and which by arbitrary government fiat has been artificially made unavailable to everyone else.
Stop allowing patents on research funded by donations and public tax money and I'll reconsider, until then these sorts of charities are nothing more than just another corporate deception to take our money and use it to bolster their own profits.
Dvorak is an ass. An ignorant ass, when it comes to understanding RF emissions and the interference they can cause with avionics.
I have, on two seperate occasions that I specifically remember, had RF emissions interfere with radio reception. The kind of radio reception an aircraft taxiing to a runway wants to hear when the tower says "hold short of 31L for crossing traffic" or "Give way to the Boeing 737, then taxi to alpha nine".
Once was from a cell phone, and once from my laptop. In both cases I was on the ground, unable to receive transmissions from the tower of the very airport I was at.
It is rare, and it requires a number of factors to come into confluence for it to happen, but it does happen, and the results could be quite catastrophic.
Dvorak is, in short, an ignorant ass who should stop talking on his cell phone long enough to consider the potential consiquences of what he advocates. The reduction of a small but verifiably real risk (which I have personally experienced in my own aircraft) with potentially deadly consiquences to zero risk is only insulting if one is a completely self-centered idiot. To those of us who are pilots, or otherwise involved in aviation, and who do value safety, the only insulting nonsense is that eminating from Dvorak's uninformed pen.
Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer!
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ECCp-109 Solved
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Here [ud.com] you can donate your CPU cycles to help discover a cure for cancer. If that's not a noble cause, no telling what is.
Fine. I'll consider it, so long as any research benefitting from my donation signs a legally binding agreement not to patent the resulting cure (if any), or any other useful knowledged gleaned from our 'donations.'
What, you say no way? Then this isn't a charity, it is just another profiteering company looking for a free handout, and playing people's heartstrings to get it.
Most of the patented pharmaceuticals have significant contributions of public funds (taxes) as well as private donations (charities), which they then patent and sell back to the very people who helped underwrite their research at often unaffordable monopoly prices. AIDS is the perfect example of this, where treatments developed in no small part from publicly provided funds are patented and cost upwards of $20,000 year for each patient in the United States, while Brazil, which has chosen to ignore these very same patents, can offer the same treatment to AIDS patients down there for $200 / year (the government often picking up that tab and providing the medicine at no cost to the patient).
Until the researchers involved stop patenting and locking down the knowledge they are gaining in no small part from our donations and our tax dollars, I'll keep my money, and my CPU cycles, thank you very much.
As learned in the AOL CD story a few days ago (so don't blame me if it's inaccurate,/me points at everyone else), anything that comes bulk mail doesn't have any return to sender fees associated with it, so the post office throws it out if you send it return to sender. Meaning that all you do then is increase the load on the postal service, with out inconveniencing the sender at all, and subsequently increasing postal rates.
Maybe if SPAM, I mean, junkmail, becomes a big enough hassle for the post office they'll stop marketing bulk mail these clowns and make them pay for a full-priced stamp like the rest of us. Even if that stamp cost me 50 cents, I'd be happier with than than the mailbox full of other people's (the advertisers) trash I have to throw away each night.
I see the ranting comes from both sides...I agree I have my dislikes for irrogant cusses like RMS, but that's not to say I don't appreciate his work...and what's with the spamming of BSD?
This must be a troll, and I probably shouldn't answer.
First, please look up waht the word SPAM means (not the meat, the verb and its related noun form). I certainly have never 'spammed' BSD (how can you possibly spam an operating system?), nor have I ever denigrated it in any way. Quite the contrary, the OS is one I quite like.
The fact that the BSD file and system utilities, of which 'ls' is but one, are generally less feature rich than their GNU equivelents is a matter of public record, trivially verifiable by either running both commands and comparing them yourself, reading the man pages for both commands and comparing them, or googling the plethora of archival messages detailing the specifics for you.
This is not necessarilly a bad thing: some people prefer the stripped down ('less bloated') versions of tar, ls, and the like.
As for defining what GNU is, the FSF has already done precisely that. It is rather trivial for you to browse their web page and satisfy your curiosity in that regard yourself, rather than resorting to intellectual laziness and spouting demands on slashdot that have already been met.
As for Linus torvalds defining what 'Linux' means, you'll have to take that up with Linus.
As for 'my' standard, it isn't. It is a matter of public record as to what generally comprises the core of a UNIX-like operating system, and trivial to examine what portion of said tools that have historically comprised a Linux (or GNU/Linux) distribution are products of the GNU project and what percentage were not, as well as to make the exact same comparison today.
Based on that, it has been documented by numerous people, both within and unrelated to the Free Software Foundation, that around 95% of the code for said core system came from the GNU project. As it so happens, nearly 100% of the code is GPLed.
As for GNU/Linux being useless without X... you've clearly never done any serious server work with FreeBSD, Solaris, or Linux. Or if you have, and you leave X running on those servers, you should be severely bitchslapped for incompetence.
There, that should be enough morsels to sate the troll.
Man, you do have your priorities screwed up, you know that? Instead of paying attention to your lady friend who so graciously supplied you with a fine red, you are writing an answer to a Slashdot comment
heh.:-) We were taking a break. She was napping, I was sitting a few feet away in a darkened loft surfing the web. No negligence was involved: play resumed a couple of hours later (not that it's anyone's business).
You see, you assume that if the private sector doesn't do it, somebody else will and will provide the code/information/etc. for free. That's not true
You assert that, perhaps as an axiomatic belief. Can you provide evidence to back that belief up?
If something is required or desired by someone (a person, a company, a group), and they cannot purchase it at any price (because, as you assert, no proprietary interest has marketed said product), they can and will most likely scratch that itch themself. That is, provided they have legal access to the source materials (code, data) needed, which is of course exactly what licenses such as the GPL insure.
Indeed, it is quite arguable that people are more likely to scratch an itch and create a product that no commerical venture would bother with (transcode anyone), than it is that the failure of a commercial interest to produce something will mean no one, anywhere, ever bothers to create a similar thing.
I don't know much about navigational charts, but I've dealt with topo maps. You *can* download the digital data for the topo maps from the government websites. It is free.
The same is true of aviation data.
It is, however, not true of NOAA navigational data and maps used by boats, because the government has granted a private concern exclusive rights to distribute the data.
I've flown on MANY small craft with phones and various electronic gadgets and have NEVER had a single problem. My father and uncle are both pilots. Both own their own planes. Needless to say, I get to fly a lot.
It makes absolutely no difference whether it happens a lot or extremely rarely. The fact remains that it does happen, that it can happen to any aircraft, and that is is a managable risk that can be reduced to zero by simply requiring people to forgo use of their electronic toys for a brief time during taxi, takeoff, and landing.
Get over it people, if you can't be bothered to turn off your gameboy for a few minutes to insure the safety of the flight you need more psychological help than your going to get on an airplane, or on slashdot for that matter.
Who cares if it only happens once in 1000, 1 million, or 1 quintillion incidents? The fact remains that, on occasion, it does happen, and under the wrong circumstances the consiquences can be catastrophic. The risk is therefor unacceptable, and trivial to reduce to absolute zero. Indeed, not requiring people to shut off their electronic toys for a short time and thereby eliminating that risk would be negligence of thie highest order.
Why the use of ANY electronic device is prohibited below a certain altitude, except when sitting still at the gate?
Because in some geometries, under some conditions, a cell phone or laptop can disrupt radio reception and navigational equipment. I have forgotten to turn my cell phone off more than once, and I routinely use my laptop to listen to ogg files while flying my Beech Sundowner on long cross country flight. The vast majority of the time there is no noticable effect, by on two different occasions I have had my laptop completely block my radio reception.
Now, before some smartass, thinking they know what they do not, blurts something stupid like "how did you know you missed radio reception if you couldn't hear it?" I'll go ahead and point out what should be obvious:
1) You get weather data prior to requesting permission to taxi. This whether data is broadcast on a looped tape, updated once per hour if it is ATIS, updated constantly by automated equipment if it is ASOS, etc. In one case the ASOS was silent with the laptop on, perfectly audible with it off (this was confirmed by power cycling the laptop severa times).
2) When you call clearance delivery or ground for taxi instructions, you expect a reply. If you don't get one, you call again. If this persists, you probably have a problem (usually you've dialed up the wrong frequency, have your volume turned down, or aren't transmitting). Turning off my cell phone immediate resulted in my hearing "N6708R, how do you read?" to which my reply was, "Loud and clear, now." Meigs ground had tried to respond to my request several times, the transmission was blocked whenever I had the phone turned on.
So, while such interference is rare, it can and does occur from time to time. Do you really want to risk having a Boeing 747 miss a call from the tower to hold short for crossing traffic while taxiing to or from the runway just so you can call your wife and let her know the plane is about to take off/just landed, or just so you can edit that Word document one more time prior to takeoff?
I assume you would want things like "ls" to be part of the core. The "ls" on my Linux box is (c) FSF. Are you saying someone should re-write "ls" just so we don't have FSF stuff in this "core" Linux? There's a saying about cutting off your nose to spite your face that seems appropriate here.
No, he's just one of a plethora of ungrateful wretches that wishes to obfuscate and denigrate Richard Stallman's rather impressive contribution to the core Linux system (something like 95% of the code that comprises what is traditionally considered the core of a UNIX-like operating system is FSF code), probably because he has a personal dislike for the man, a dislike likely inherited not from personal contact, but from word of mouth and reading the tirades of RMS's detractors.
In other words, he wants to be able to say "see, I shouldn't call it GNU/Linux, since I've stripped out the 95% of the system that was FSF software and cobbled in less-feature-rich BSD versions instead, or did without!" Ignoring, of course, that doing so is, aside from being completely asinine for no real good reason, doesn't reflect the reality for the other 99.9% of the Linux, or if you prefer, GNU/Linux systems that have been deployed.
You are absolutely correct, "silly" is about the kindest way to characterize such nonsense.
Hardly. And while I don't have any expectation of swaying your opinion, be it an honest one (my assumption), one stemming from political or religious dogma (a possibility given the number of Ayn Randian zealots that expound hereabouts), or a paid bit of astroturfing (you've made enough intelligent comments on other subjects that I'm inclined to seriously doubt this, nevertheless the possibility is real, and it certainly does happen here rather often. Furthermore, what better way to cloak an astroturf than by presenting intelligent discussion in every subject save the one a person is paid to astroturf in. Such as strategy would, while despicable, be quite intelligent...nevertheless, you certainly the benefit of any doubt, small though that doubt may be. Indeed were it not for this evening's rather liberal libation -- a fine Bordeaux a lady friend keeps insisting I have 'just one more glass off' -- I probably wouldn't have mentioned the possibility at all...and will doubtless regret doing so tommorow I imagine), I will the try to illuminate why I believe your argument, and the assumptions it entails, to be flawed.
Now, let's say I picked up this code and reworked it into a Photoshop plug-in, taking the public code as a base (embrace), but also adding extra functionality (extend) so that it's useful for general-purpose photography. I am now selling this plug-in as a closed-source commercial product.
A contrived example designed to avoid the issue at hand, which is the vulnerability of unprotected code to being embraced, extended, and destroyed in classic Microsoftian fashion, as has happened to numerous other products in the past (both proprietary and open).
A more telling example would be your picking up code to a free and open security package, like, say, Kerberos, implimenting it in your already widely adopted operating system (the leveraging of which to destroy competition in other markets for which you are already a convicted monopolist), deliberately extending the code and protocol in incompatible, and undocumented, ways, and thereby making 90% of the deployed computer systems incompatible with the original code virtually overnight.
For the unaware, Microsoft has already tried precisely that, something they were able to do because the code, while not public domain, was inadequately protected by a *BSD style license. (Microsoft did not succeed in this effort, though they certainly have in other, similar efforts).
Please explain how this
(1) took away your access to the original PD code
I did not claim that it did.
(2) took away the usability of the original code
If the code becomes useless for its original purpose because virtually none of the other machines with which it must communicate are now running incompatibly extended, proprietery derivates of that code, the usability of the code by any reasonable metric has been reduced, quite possibly eliminated altogether. This hasn't happened with Kerberos yet, thankfully, but it has happened to plenty of other inadequately protected products (and inadequate protection isn't limited to public domain and BSD-style licenses, it can and often does include proprietery licensed products, which are then sold and killed, or embraced, extended, and destroyed).
In other words, such actions clearly and demonstrably take away the usefulness of the original, public code.
(3) destroyed the original code?
Another strawman, requesting that I defend a claim I am not making.
As with my example of an enterprising corporation that bribes local government and obtains the privelege of putting a fence around your property (by misusing the public lands around it to erect said fence), then charging you a toll to enter and leave your own proprety, the property (code) has neither been taken away or destroyed, but it's usefulness has been severely denigrated, perhaps eliminated altogether.
Think I'm making up a contrived example? Study your history. A very similar event to my analogy, which should illustrate to any open mind the flaws in your argument, happened for real in the United Kingdom several hundred years ago in a thinly veiled landgrab from which stems the myth of the so-called "Tragedy of the Commons."
Keep in mind, just because not every instance wouldn't result in the diminishment of the public commons doesn't mean many, perhaps even most, cases of it wouldn't.
Also, lest we forget, freedom is something the constitution intended to afford the people, not coporations or governments. The sad fact that our government and courts ignore the intent of our founding fathers shouldn't distract us from that important fact. The point? Freedom of choice is something we want for people. There are many contexts in which such freedoms our inappropriate and even destructive in the hands of governing bodies. The constitution was written to deny the government as much freedom as it could (c.f the oft-ignored 10th amendment).
In the case of projects and knowledge financed and paid for by public moneys, it is highly inappropriate to permissively allow them to be privatized by private interests. Whether it is NOAA seaway navigational charts (paid for by public money, copyrighted and made only available from a private firm for $100.00/cd despite the fact that our tax dollars paid for it), or software, the end result should not only be a product that is free, but a product whose freedom and accessibility is guarenteed into the future. Unfortunately, time and time again we find instances of entities, like Microsoft, abusing the public domain in much the way I described (though numerous other abuses abound, e.g. patenting medicines derived from research largely financed by public moneys and charity contributions, being granted exclusive rights in back-room deals a la the NOAA chart data I alluded to earlier, and so on).
The GPL, while certainly not the only way to protect against such abuses, is certainly one very effective and time proven way.
Slashdot Mirror
Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars a year on research, development, and testing. Forcing them to lower their sources of income would mean they spend less on this, and thus would harm the people more than benefit them because of the unavailability of drugs.
... yet those who benefit from government granted monopoly regimes, like Patents, manage to convince people it is okay anyway. Inventors (incluiding pharamceutical companies) can make a perfectly fine living competing against others selling an identical product (who cares if the competitor didn't invent it first and just copied the invention, invented it independently, or did invent it first but lost the footrace to the pantent office? None of that stops the inventor from marketing and selling their product, indeed the only thing the competition will insure is that the market price is a fair one).
... achieving all the downside and little of the upside.
Bullshit.
1) Pharmaceutical companies exaggerate the amount they spend on research, often vastly so, as a club to use whenever patent reform is proposed (or discussed in government circles). Much of that expense isn't R&D related at all, it consists of normal, non-research-related costs which through the magic of accounting have been transformed into R&D Costs.
2) Much, in some cases most, of the money funding research comes from public funds (grants, generally paid for by taxpayers) and private donations (been to any AIDS benefits lately?), as well as the time, resources, and materials of publicly funded educational institutions (Universities, Government research labs, etc). It is an appalling outrage that the products of such contributions are then privately patented and sold back to the very contributors at inflated monopoly prices.
3) It is a myth that an inventor requires a monopoly in order to make money on their invention. Ironicly, it is an anti-freemarket myth that flies in the face of virtually all free market economic data and theory
4) There are a number of other methods for financing R&D that are more effecient than the blanket granting of 20-year monopolies to private interests. Indeed, we use several of these and still give them their monopolies
5) Selling AIDS medication for $20,000/year that costs $200/year to make does not benefit the patient (and in that example most of the money financing the research came from public funds to begin with), it only benefits the pharamceutical monopolist.
6) Monopolies are virtually by definition "price fixing," as only one entity can sell the item and are thus free to "fix" the price wherever they would like. When they fix it too low it is called "dumping" (though that isn't the only example of dumping, it certainly is one, e.g. Microsoft and Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player), when they fix it too high it is called "fixing" or "gouging", but the reality is a monopoly, whether achieved by government fiat (Pharmaceutical Patents), through predatory anti-competative business practices (Microsoft), simply because one is the only one to offer a particular product or serve a particular niche (Power and Gas companies in some locales), or for whatever reason, a monopoly is always 'fixing' a price, as there is no competition to otherwise affect and determine pricing. Maybe, if one is lucky (or has good government oversight) the price will be fixed "fairly," but fair or not, the price is definitely fixed.
No free market, no non-fixed prices.
It is just that we as a society have, foolishly, choses to hone rather large blindspots with respect to much of the price fixing that goes on, because we either charish, or do not question, many of the monopolies that surround us (particularly those which exist through government fiat via Patent and Copyright law).
if you hit a mirror with a powerful enough beam of laser light, the small fraction of light that's absorbed (no such thing as an ideal reflector) will rapidly ablate the mirror coat, and then you're screwed. [...] a 100KW IR laser will vaporize pretty much anything that's not *perfectly* reflective, i.e. anything we can build with current technology.
So you make your mirror subsystem disposable, and eject the spent mirrors like shells. Assuming you can get the desired result before or during the ablative process, you've got one shot, one mirror. We're used to such constraints with bullets and shell casings, and some disposable, portable ground-to-air missile systems, why not with mirrors?
This is one of my pet hates. By the very definition of the word [m-w.com], there can only be one universe. Or are the definitions now being changed?
I would suggest getting over it. Merriem-Webster does not have the final word in what the term 'Universe' means, not in colloquial speech ("we the people" decide that through our use of language, and most people I know have become very comfortable with the notion of multiple universes a long time ago, even if said universes are merely relegated to the 'universe of what is real' vs. 'the universe(s) of what is fictional'), nor in scientific terminology, in which cosmologists like will have the final say.
Our knowledge of what is, and what may be, has far outstripped dated definitions of 'universe'
I'd give you less than 50% odds that your preferred definition is the one that ultimately prevails, but you never know.
I would say that the license that gives the most freedom is the license that publically funded development should have. Guess what: that license is not the GPL
This is a tired argument, but to recap:
Long story short, GPL is analogous to a constitution protecting the freedoms of its citizens (users) by constraining in a few minor ways what freedoms the developers can deny their users.
The BSD license is more akin to a democracy with no constitution, or no strong constitution, which constrains the developers little or not at all, at the expense of leaving the users with no protection of their freedoms.
Both licenses are appropriate in some circumstances. BSDL is good for getting protocols, algorithms, and other standards widely accepted by allowing proprietary as well as free products to use the code (good example: ogg vorbis), while the GPL is excellent at insuring that a project remains free in perpetuity.
Software funded by tax dollars is funded by the users. It is therefor more appropriate to have a license which protects the rights and freedoms of the users who are paying for the developmnt over those of the developers who are being paid (though of course developers benefit immensly, in having their freedoms protected with respect to contributions by other developers. Not every user is a developer, but every developer is a user somewhere along the line).
"For Security, use of GPL within groups with well-defined security boundaries should be encouraged to promote faster, more locally autonomous responses to cyber threats."
;-) Somehow I doubt that is what they meant, though.
... they are mistakenly equating GPLed software with free software (when in fact it is only a subset).
Perhaps one aspect of the security to which they refer is the secure knowledge that inhouse software developed under the GPL will remain free, i.e. they will in turn receive any and all improvements made by others.
While the GPL is arguably more appropriate for public funded software development than licenses that lend themselves to proprietarization, I must agree wholeheartedly with you that it is clear that the advantage in security goes to free software over proprietary software, and not GPLed software over other free software to any degree. Indeed, as you point out, OpenBSD is the most secure operating system around, and it is certainly not GPLed.
What they clearly meant to say was the free software should be encouraged to promote faster, more locally autonomous responses to cyber threats
Are they sure that this isn't covered by a patent? I remember almost two years ago that VirtualDub had to remove support for ASF files because Microsoft had a patent on some part of it. The VirtualDub guys just removed support rather than fight MS. I hope this doesn't turn out to be the same situation.
Let's hope the developer who did the WMA portion of the code lives outside of the United States and is not an American citizen. Then MS could basically take their patent and shove it, and the ffmpeg stuff can simply have a compile time option to leave out patented code, a la PGP.
Of course, no one in the United States *cough* would ever compile the patented code. That would be illegal.
But For me, Child Porn is not free speech.
... it is only illegal if it involves an actual, real world, physical child.
... indeed, it only becomes complex when one wishes to disregard that right, and justify doing so.
... you get the material off the street, and you do not even need to diminish anyone's liberty to do so. Plus, you get the added benefit of encouraging real pedophiles who want their material back to cooperate in bringing the seller and original, vile perpetrators to justice.
The supreme court disagrees. In a recent ruling they ruled that child pornography, in the form of cartoons or fiction, were perfectly legal. It is only illegal in the United States when it involves photography or filming of minors. You can sketch or write about whatever vile behavior you like
It is something disgusting... If pedophils says this is free speech, then murder is free speech too...
Um, no. Child Porn is something disgusting. However, pedophiles (or, much more commonly, non-pedophile people who speak out because they are concerned about losing their rights in society's zeal to go after the despicable habits of pedophiles) who say this is free speech are akin to Hollywood movie moghuls who claim that films depicting, or witnessing, murder is "free speech."
Films like, say, "Faces of Death."
Freedom of speech and the press is generally simpler than most people make it, because most people have their own personal agendas and concerns they want to filter freedom of speech through. Whether those agendas are laudable or banal is irrelevant to the underlying fact that they impose complexity on a pretty simple and straightforward right as enshrined in the constitution
Possession of information, however vile that information is, should never be illegal. Marketing and selling it, sure, just as marketing and selling anything, like cars without seatbelts, can be regulated by states, or by the federal government if said trade crosses state lines.
But not possession, for the simple reason that someone could slip a vile picture of a child being molested into your luggage, then have you brought up on charges.
Think this doesn't happen? Anytime you ever receive SPAM containing a pornographic photograph of a child in your mailbox, or read a USENET newsgroup to which some dipshit has posted their OFFTOPIC, vile kiddyporn crap (because the feds are watching the alt.whatever.porn groups), or get hit with a kiddie-porn popup add when browsing the web, including but not limited to completely unrelated, legal adult pornography, you are guilty of breaking the law.
You remain guilty for as long as that material is cached by your web browser, news reader, or mailbox on your hard drive, or, arguably, as long as it sits in your mailbox unread. You are, in all those cases, in possession of banned information.
What is interesting is that the FBI has used this exact kind of thing against people they've gone after for unrelated crimes, even though it is pretty clear (e.g. a guy has 10,000 porn pics on his hard drive, including 3 in his browser cache of underage people) that they were not looking for or collecting child pornography. Because mere possession is illegal, and ignorance (i.e. not knowing) is no excuse, these people are criminalized despite the fact that they have no pedophiliac tendencies or desires whatsoever.
Worse, many people who have no interest in pornography at all, of any kind, end up with this crap on their hard drives simply for having been foolish enough to type whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov, or to have posted something in public with the real email address attached, thus ending up on someone's SPAM list.
Now, if said information were treated as the evidence of a heinous crime that it is, rather than a contriband, it could still be taken away as evidence of a crime, and held until the crime (trafficking in a regulated item: child porn, and/or the physical act of harming a child itself) is solved, prosecuted, and all appeals are exhausted.
Wala
Solaris does not particularly target the desktop user any longer, and hasn't seriously for a long time. So bitching about Solaris being "clunky" in that kind of usage (which is what it appears you're talking about, ditching Solaris on the desktop), is ludicrous.
Tell that to Sun Marketing.
Solaris desktop isn't the only area where solaris is clunky. It is also clunky in a number of server configurations (e.g. database server, etc.) where Linux, FreeBSD, and others shine.
You may not like the fact that your favorite operating system isn't terribly well suited for a number of applications, applications for which it is often marketed by its seller, but that does little to change the fact that it remains less well suited than others, or that the areas where it does shine are areas that only a few specialized applications have any real use for.
You may also not like the fact that businesses and companies, including the one I work for, have found it in their strategic interest to deploy open and free(dom) operating systems and products wherever feasable, or that the turnaround on fixing problems is typically faster than Sun (who is BTW a great deal better than Microsoft in that respect), so much so that it, more than anything else, became a deciding factor when my bosses chose which direction to go, and which operating system to deploy.
Indeed, you may not much care for anything I've said on the subject (your rather trite post certainly seems to indicate that), and certainly Sun probably doesn't like to hear it (and when it has been brought up to their sales representatives, you could almost see their hands go over the ears and their lips begin to move in the "I can't hear you, I can't hear you" refrain), but that does absolutely nothing to negate the fact that, for the vast majority of common tasks to which computers are used in many, many corporate and small business settings, Solaris ins't nearly as well suited as other alternatives such as FreeBSD and Linux, nor does it negate the fact that Sun's unwillingness to listen to its customers on this subject has played no small role in their shrinking marketshare.
Of course, your contention that 2-cpu unix configurations isn't relevant to the discussion shows an immense ignornace of the hardware offerings Sun itself markets, many of which are precisely the clunky, slow, and ineffecient architecture you yourself dismiss in lauding their 64 and 128 cpu solutions, which the vast majority of us have no use for.
Finally, I recommend you look up the word 'attack', then look up the word 'criticize.' There is a difference that your idealogical adherance to Sun appears to have blinded you to, much as Sun's sales representatives have been blinded as they've watched their accounts dwindle toward zero. Hint: I was criticizing Solaris, and rightly so based on my not inconsiderable experience with the product (indeed, I work with it every day). Your interpretation of that as an attack says a great deal more about your bias than it does about mine.
You are right to object to FUD, and some of the broader generalizations certainly are overly-broad (and therefor not so accurate). However, you are seeing a great deal of FUD where IMHO there really isn't any. Most people's exposure to solaris isn't in the problem domain you are working on, and from most people's perspective (my own included) Solaris is big, slow, and clunky, not because it is big, slow, and clunky at everything, but because it is big, slow, and clunky at those tasks most people perform most of the time.
These are the same kind of people who complain about Microsoft spreading lies (FUD) about Linux, but these hypocrites have no problems doing the same regarding Solaris, because it doesn't fit into their open source ideology.
I think you'd better back that accusation up with some hard evidence, particularly the 'hypocracy' bit.
I have worked with SunOS since before GNU/Linux ever existed, and have been using Solaris for years. I too have been a Linux user for years.
But I make my living doing parallel/numerical computing research and I know from runnings lots and lots of performance studies that Solaris beats Linux handily in several situations.
That is absolutely true, but there is a corrallary which is just as true: in many, many situations Solaris is clunky and shows its staid age all too well. I would go further and say, based on my own experience, that those situations, in which Solaris shows its clunkiness, and GNU/Linux really shines, are the ones that face most people far more commonly than those where Solaris shines and GNU/Linux lags.
Why is Solaris so much slower to improve in so many ways, despite shining in some? Probably because it isn't free software, and as such has many less people working on it, and is able to leverage far less communal contributions.
It may be ignorant to bash the performance of Solaris solely based upon its proprietary status, but it is certainly not ignorant to be critical of its greater overhead and clunky performance in most real-world cases, nor to point to its proprietary status as a contributor to that situation. Indeed, it is equally ignorant to assume people who have worked with both dislike Solaris solely out of philisophical grounds, when the Operating System (and Sun) provide ample reasons to dislike it on technical merit, behavior, cost, and lack of openness (which is often critical to fixing serious problems which occasionally arise). Indeed, with the exception of those who are working on in the kind of parallel computing problem domains you are, Solaris is in general quite slow and clunky, especially when running on intel hardware.
That fact that it is proprietary, and one must purchase (and wait on) expensive Sun support to get issues, even critical issues, fixed, isn't a factor in Solaris' favor either, and the latter (the need to be able to fix problems quickly, and not be handcuffed from doing so) was the reason we ended up dumping Solaris in favor of Linux on the desktop years ago, a decision which has been very good for our business BTW. And no, it isn't hypocracy, it is practicality.
I think corporate fines should be based on a percentage of their annual REVENUE. If MS was fined 5% of their revenue for this, fuck yeah they'd sit up and take notice! Keep the dollar amount for the humans.
Good luck.
Clearly NYC politicians were paid off generously (an examination of their portfolios would no doubt be very revealing), in that the city only charged Microsoft a $50.00 fine (much less than IBM was charged before) and graciously "accepted" Microsoft's "Apology".
That was a $50.00 fine in total, not per count, making a laughingstock of the entire anti-graffitti law, and sending a clear message: we in the NYC government like corporate graffitti if our portfolio members or campaign contributors do it, but if individuals (or non-bribing companies) do it, watch out!
What an utter farce.
How long before... ...MS decide this is illegal and start suing?
How about sometime after Microsoft actually uses a lawsuit as a weapon? Microsoft has zero history of suing people who write lookalikes of their software (Samba, WINE, That NT-workalike project, etc).
Well, that is true only to a point. In fairness to Microsoft, they haven't filed any such lawsuits, but they have used the threat of lawsuits on more than one occasion, and while they haven't dealt with look-and-feel per se, they have dealt with other equally inane things, like file format compatability. Certainly Microsoft has reserved the option to (mis)use lawsuits strategicly against Free Software in the internal Halloween documents leaked a few years ago.
Apparently, you're thinking of Apple who really is truly evil when it comes to suing people.
Both are evil, in different ways. However, I believe you are correct in pointing out that Apple is the one which went beyond mere intimidation, to actually filing (and losing) lawsuits based upon mimicknig look-and-feel.
Which is why, much as I like some of Apple's products (and will almost certainly make Apple my next laptop), I am also at pains to point out that anyone switching from Windows to Apple is simply trading one Master for another, and who is to say that the kinder Master today will be the kinder Master next year?
Of course, with Palladium on the horizon, we may well find ourselves in the extraordinarilly ironic situation where we need to buy a non-Intel, non-AMD (e.g. Apple PowerPC) system just to be able to dual-boot into Linux. I suspect instead most of the Asian hardware companies will ship with two BIOSes, so that a simple jumper or firmware setting can completely eliminate Palladium, but who can ever be certain in these unusual times?
The FreeNet principles are a good things, but I'm concerned about the possible wrong uses of freedom.
.
"Wrong" as defined by whom?
The Bush family thinks it is wrong to leak information emberrassing to the family out to the press, and they punish people severely (within their power) when they do so, yet what they do is clearly constitutional.
Supporters of Clinton felt it was severely wrong to have private, political groups fund and possibly incite lawsuits by private citizens for poltical ends, but clearly that was within the bounds of the constitution.
I'm not worried about nazi propaganda, I think is a good thing that the normal citizen have access to this information in order to study it.
Ah. So are you the person who gets to tell us what is "right" and what is "wrong?"
But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it. My only hope in this case is that these crimes can be pursued by police through other normal way.
Pedophilia is an illness, and people who act on those feelings are criminals. It was never necessary, nor smart, to subvert the first amendment by making information (child pornography) illegal to possess. Illegal to sell, yes (that falls under the commerce clause), but making the possession of child pornography illegal was a serious mistake.
Why? Two reasons I can think of off hand
1) Possession doesn't imply any intent or even desire. Ever get child porno SPAM in your mailbox? How about child porno popups when surfing completely unrelated adult pornography, or perusing newsgroups some looser has spammed with their vile crap? Most people have, and have immediately become guilty under the law for possessing child pornography (it is copied to your machine's memory). Worse still, that crap is cached on people's hard drives, often without their knowledge, for extended periods of time.
2) Any photographs are by definition evidence of a crime. Instead of banning information, such evidence could be routinely siezed, to be returned to its owner only after the crime (child molestation) has been solved. That would have had the twin benefit of not eroding the 1st amendment and building a strong incentive to squeel on the seller into the entire process.
The "dark side" of freedom is a red herring. If we are free, we are free to do things others disagree with. The only limits should be when those freedoms reduce the freedoms of others (that was what the founding fathers intended, after all). IN other words, in the case of pedophelia, the crime is the molestation and harm to the child (and the selling of a regulated, in this case banned, product), not the mere possession of the photographs. However, the police can and should seize any such photographic or video evidence, and keep it on hand in a file, until the case is solved and the child raping perpetrators convicted and put in prison. Of course, such evidence couldn't be returned until said perps had exhausted all appeal opportunities
A little clear thinking would go a long way toward solving many of the 'problems' that come out of people's misuse of their liberties, without eliminating those liberties altogether. And those downsides which can't be eliminated through intelligent application of the law, within the bounds of the constitution, should be viewed as the price we are obligated to pay for liberty.
A price, by the way, which is laughably small compared to that which our forfathers paid in establishing and protecting those freedoms in times past.
"It's illegal," she said, "and they're going to get a lot of publicity for it."
I think that was the whole point of all of this.
And, as another observed, "do the math." It is a very cheap way to gain notoriety (exposure), which serves their purposes exactly.
Now, if the city of New York really wants to stop this sort of thing (IBM was somewhat innovative and original when they did it a couple of years ago, Nike and Microsoft are merely a tired, repeated cliche at this point), they will probably need to start suspending or revoking the business licenses of the advertising firms that do this sort of thing, and/or throwing the employees doing this in jail for a night or two.
Fines, even fines that a single human being would find enormous, are nothing to the almost bottomless coffers of corporate america, and Microsoft in particular, and will certainly do little to deter this sort of thing in the future.
Am I the only one secretly wishing all of those butterfly-clad idiots were magically transported to some impoverished shanty-town (like in Bangladesh or Brazil) so they could convince all of the people who are drinking raw sewage in their water how wonderful the benefits of MSN 8 will be?
:-)
Quite possibly you were the only one dreaming of that particular scenerio, but now there are a bunch of us enjoying the image as well.
Several colleagues of mine and I are not-so-secretly wishing all of those butterfly-clad candy-asses would be magically teleported into "Taliban Country" (Northern Pakistan or Chechnya), where they could live to fullfillment the roles of "Harem Bitch" they've so obviously aspired to. OK, it isn't Billy Boy's Harem, but still, its a leg up in the business...and they have to start somewhere.
The GPL community response to criticism has always been, "don't use GPL code if you don't like the license." Seems perfectly reasonable. If you don't like the BitKeeper license, then don't use BitKeeper.
Which is precisely what RMS is saying, and what other kernel developers in the past have said (and been flamed into oblivion on the LKML for saying).
Unfortunately, Linus isn't personally affected by the constraints (he isn't contributing code to CVS or subversion), and he finds it convinient. Whether his stance is simply one of valuing his own convinience over the freedom of others, or he is taking a political stand about being apolitical I do not know. I do know that I disagree with his decision, and I think RMS is right on this particular issue.
However, if I felt really strongly about it I could fork a version of the kernel and maintain it with subversion I suppose (I think others have actually done that sort of thing already). Ultimately Linus will do what he likes, right or wrong (he is frequently right, and he is frequently wrong, like most human beings), and whether you like RMS or like to denigrate RMS, the GPL he wrote has certainly done much to insure that we are free to follow Linus, RMS, or whomever else we like, or to not follow them and fork the code as we see fit.
However, that freedom does not mean people should feel obligated to remain silent when they see something they find ethically reprehensible, such as the licensing terms Bitkeeper snuck in after the fact, in short, after the Linux community had already snorted a few sucker lines and formed a habit. Indeed, part of preserving said freedoms requires we step forward and speak out on these sorts of issues when they arrive, whether or not it is a polular or trendy thing to do, or these freedoms we so enjoy and take for granted will be reduced to little more than a passing fad and a distant memory.
How generous of you. Personally, if I can help find a cure for cancer, no matter if its PWNED by someone or not, I don't care. The end result would be a cure.
The end result will be a cure locked down by patents, sold at monopoly prices which only the wealthy or well insuread (two terms rapidly becoming synonymmous) can afford.
I have no intention of donating anything to fund research designed to benefit the wealthy and not the rest of us. Better to have no cure, than to have a cure whose price has been so inflated that only the well off can afford it, and which by arbitrary government fiat has been artificially made unavailable to everyone else.
Stop allowing patents on research funded by donations and public tax money and I'll reconsider, until then these sorts of charities are nothing more than just another corporate deception to take our money and use it to bolster their own profits.
Dvorak is an ass. An ignorant ass, when it comes to understanding RF emissions and the interference they can cause with avionics.
I have, on two seperate occasions that I specifically remember, had RF emissions interfere with radio reception. The kind of radio reception an aircraft taxiing to a runway wants to hear when the tower says "hold short of 31L for crossing traffic" or "Give way to the Boeing 737, then taxi to alpha nine".
Once was from a cell phone, and once from my laptop. In both cases I was on the ground, unable to receive transmissions from the tower of the very airport I was at.
It is rare, and it requires a number of factors to come into confluence for it to happen, but it does happen, and the results could be quite catastrophic.
Dvorak is, in short, an ignorant ass who should stop talking on his cell phone long enough to consider the potential consiquences of what he advocates. The reduction of a small but verifiably real risk (which I have personally experienced in my own aircraft) with potentially deadly consiquences to zero risk is only insulting if one is a completely self-centered idiot. To those of us who are pilots, or otherwise involved in aviation, and who do value safety, the only insulting nonsense is that eminating from Dvorak's uninformed pen.
Here [ud.com] you can donate your CPU cycles to help discover a cure for cancer. If that's not a noble cause, no telling what is.
Fine. I'll consider it, so long as any research benefitting from my donation signs a legally binding agreement not to patent the resulting cure (if any), or any other useful knowledged gleaned from our 'donations.'
What, you say no way? Then this isn't a charity, it is just another profiteering company looking for a free handout, and playing people's heartstrings to get it.
Most of the patented pharmaceuticals have significant contributions of public funds (taxes) as well as private donations (charities), which they then patent and sell back to the very people who helped underwrite their research at often unaffordable monopoly prices. AIDS is the perfect example of this, where treatments developed in no small part from publicly provided funds are patented and cost upwards of $20,000 year for each patient in the United States, while Brazil, which has chosen to ignore these very same patents, can offer the same treatment to AIDS patients down there for $200 / year (the government often picking up that tab and providing the medicine at no cost to the patient).
Until the researchers involved stop patenting and locking down the knowledge they are gaining in no small part from our donations and our tax dollars, I'll keep my money, and my CPU cycles, thank you very much.
As learned in the AOL CD story a few days ago (so don't blame me if it's inaccurate, /me points at everyone else), anything that comes bulk mail doesn't have any return to sender fees associated with it, so the post office throws it out if you send it return to sender. Meaning that all you do then is increase the load on the postal service, with out inconveniencing the sender at all, and subsequently increasing postal rates.
Maybe if SPAM, I mean, junkmail, becomes a big enough hassle for the post office they'll stop marketing bulk mail these clowns and make them pay for a full-priced stamp like the rest of us. Even if that stamp cost me 50 cents, I'd be happier with than than the mailbox full of other people's (the advertisers) trash I have to throw away each night.
I see the ranting comes from both sides...I agree I have my dislikes for irrogant cusses like RMS, but that's not to say I don't appreciate his work...and what's with the spamming of BSD?
... you've clearly never done any serious server work with FreeBSD, Solaris, or Linux. Or if you have, and you leave X running on those servers, you should be severely bitchslapped for incompetence.
This must be a troll, and I probably shouldn't answer.
First, please look up waht the word SPAM means (not the meat, the verb and its related noun form). I certainly have never 'spammed' BSD (how can you possibly spam an operating system?), nor have I ever denigrated it in any way. Quite the contrary, the OS is one I quite like.
The fact that the BSD file and system utilities, of which 'ls' is but one, are generally less feature rich than their GNU equivelents is a matter of public record, trivially verifiable by either running both commands and comparing them yourself, reading the man pages for both commands and comparing them, or googling the plethora of archival messages detailing the specifics for you.
This is not necessarilly a bad thing: some people prefer the stripped down ('less bloated') versions of tar, ls, and the like.
As for defining what GNU is, the FSF has already done precisely that. It is rather trivial for you to browse their web page and satisfy your curiosity in that regard yourself, rather than resorting to intellectual laziness and spouting demands on slashdot that have already been met.
As for Linus torvalds defining what 'Linux' means, you'll have to take that up with Linus.
As for 'my' standard, it isn't. It is a matter of public record as to what generally comprises the core of a UNIX-like operating system, and trivial to examine what portion of said tools that have historically comprised a Linux (or GNU/Linux) distribution are products of the GNU project and what percentage were not, as well as to make the exact same comparison today.
Based on that, it has been documented by numerous people, both within and unrelated to the Free Software Foundation, that around 95% of the code for said core system came from the GNU project. As it so happens, nearly 100% of the code is GPLed.
As for GNU/Linux being useless without X
There, that should be enough morsels to sate the troll.
Man, you do have your priorities screwed up, you know that? Instead of paying attention to your lady friend who so graciously supplied you with a fine red, you are writing an answer to a Slashdot comment
:-) We were taking a break. She was napping, I was sitting a few feet away in a darkened loft surfing the web. No negligence was involved: play resumed a couple of hours later (not that it's anyone's business).
heh.
You see, you assume that if the private sector doesn't do it, somebody else will and will provide the code/information/etc. for free. That's not true
You assert that, perhaps as an axiomatic belief. Can you provide evidence to back that belief up?
If something is required or desired by someone (a person, a company, a group), and they cannot purchase it at any price (because, as you assert, no proprietary interest has marketed said product), they can and will most likely scratch that itch themself. That is, provided they have legal access to the source materials (code, data) needed, which is of course exactly what licenses such as the GPL insure.
Indeed, it is quite arguable that people are more likely to scratch an itch and create a product that no commerical venture would bother with (transcode anyone), than it is that the failure of a commercial interest to produce something will mean no one, anywhere, ever bothers to create a similar thing.
I don't know much about navigational charts, but I've dealt with topo maps. You *can* download the digital data for the topo maps from the government websites. It is free.
The same is true of aviation data.
It is, however, not true of NOAA navigational data and maps used by boats, because the government has granted a private concern exclusive rights to distribute the data.
I've flown on MANY small craft with phones and various electronic gadgets and have NEVER had a single problem. My father and uncle are both pilots. Both own their own planes. Needless to say, I get to fly a lot.
It makes absolutely no difference whether it happens a lot or extremely rarely. The fact remains that it does happen, that it can happen to any aircraft, and that is is a managable risk that can be reduced to zero by simply requiring people to forgo use of their electronic toys for a brief time during taxi, takeoff, and landing.
Get over it people, if you can't be bothered to turn off your gameboy for a few minutes to insure the safety of the flight you need more psychological help than your going to get on an airplane, or on slashdot for that matter.
Who cares if it only happens once in 1000, 1 million, or 1 quintillion incidents? The fact remains that, on occasion, it does happen, and under the wrong circumstances the consiquences can be catastrophic. The risk is therefor unacceptable, and trivial to reduce to absolute zero. Indeed, not requiring people to shut off their electronic toys for a short time and thereby eliminating that risk would be negligence of thie highest order.
Why the use of ANY electronic device is prohibited below a certain altitude, except when sitting still at the gate?
Because in some geometries, under some conditions, a cell phone or laptop can disrupt radio reception and navigational equipment. I have forgotten to turn my cell phone off more than once, and I routinely use my laptop to listen to ogg files while flying my Beech Sundowner on long cross country flight. The vast majority of the time there is no noticable effect, by on two different occasions I have had my laptop completely block my radio reception.
Now, before some smartass, thinking they know what they do not, blurts something stupid like "how did you know you missed radio reception if you couldn't hear it?" I'll go ahead and point out what should be obvious:
1) You get weather data prior to requesting permission to taxi. This whether data is broadcast on a looped tape, updated once per hour if it is ATIS, updated constantly by automated equipment if it is ASOS, etc. In one case the ASOS was silent with the laptop on, perfectly audible with it off (this was confirmed by power cycling the laptop severa times).
2) When you call clearance delivery or ground for taxi instructions, you expect a reply. If you don't get one, you call again. If this persists, you probably have a problem (usually you've dialed up the wrong frequency, have your volume turned down, or aren't transmitting). Turning off my cell phone immediate resulted in my hearing "N6708R, how do you read?" to which my reply was, "Loud and clear, now." Meigs ground had tried to respond to my request several times, the transmission was blocked whenever I had the phone turned on.
So, while such interference is rare, it can and does occur from time to time. Do you really want to risk having a Boeing 747 miss a call from the tower to hold short for crossing traffic while taxiing to or from the runway just so you can call your wife and let her know the plane is about to take off/just landed, or just so you can edit that Word document one more time prior to takeoff?
I assume you would want things like "ls" to be part of the core. The "ls" on my Linux box is (c) FSF. Are you saying someone should re-write "ls" just so we don't have FSF stuff in this "core" Linux? There's a saying about cutting off your nose to spite your face that seems appropriate here.
No, he's just one of a plethora of ungrateful wretches that wishes to obfuscate and denigrate Richard Stallman's rather impressive contribution to the core Linux system (something like 95% of the code that comprises what is traditionally considered the core of a UNIX-like operating system is FSF code), probably because he has a personal dislike for the man, a dislike likely inherited not from personal contact, but from word of mouth and reading the tirades of RMS's detractors.
In other words, he wants to be able to say "see, I shouldn't call it GNU/Linux, since I've stripped out the 95% of the system that was FSF software and cobbled in less-feature-rich BSD versions instead, or did without!" Ignoring, of course, that doing so is, aside from being completely asinine for no real good reason, doesn't reflect the reality for the other 99.9% of the Linux, or if you prefer, GNU/Linux systems that have been deployed.
You are absolutely correct, "silly" is about the kindest way to characterize such nonsense.
Pure handwaving.
Hardly. And while I don't have any expectation of swaying your opinion, be it an honest one (my assumption), one stemming from political or religious dogma (a possibility given the number of Ayn Randian zealots that expound hereabouts), or a paid bit of astroturfing (you've made enough intelligent comments on other subjects that I'm inclined to seriously doubt this, nevertheless the possibility is real, and it certainly does happen here rather often. Furthermore, what better way to cloak an astroturf than by presenting intelligent discussion in every subject save the one a person is paid to astroturf in. Such as strategy would, while despicable, be quite intelligent...nevertheless, you certainly the benefit of any doubt, small though that doubt may be. Indeed were it not for this evening's rather liberal libation -- a fine Bordeaux a lady friend keeps insisting I have 'just one more glass off' -- I probably wouldn't have mentioned the possibility at all...and will doubtless regret doing so tommorow I imagine), I will the try to illuminate why I believe your argument, and the assumptions it entails, to be flawed.
Now, let's say I picked up this code and reworked it into a Photoshop plug-in, taking the public code as a base (embrace), but also adding extra functionality (extend) so that it's useful for general-purpose photography. I am now selling this plug-in as a closed-source commercial product.
A contrived example designed to avoid the issue at hand, which is the vulnerability of unprotected code to being embraced, extended, and destroyed in classic Microsoftian fashion, as has happened to numerous other products in the past (both proprietary and open).
A more telling example would be your picking up code to a free and open security package, like, say, Kerberos, implimenting it in your already widely adopted operating system (the leveraging of which to destroy competition in other markets for which you are already a convicted monopolist), deliberately extending the code and protocol in incompatible, and undocumented, ways, and thereby making 90% of the deployed computer systems incompatible with the original code virtually overnight.
For the unaware, Microsoft has already tried precisely that, something they were able to do because the code, while not public domain, was inadequately protected by a *BSD style license. (Microsoft did not succeed in this effort, though they certainly have in other, similar efforts).
Please explain how this
(1) took away your access to the original PD code
I did not claim that it did.
(2) took away the usability of the original code
If the code becomes useless for its original purpose because virtually none of the other machines with which it must communicate are now running incompatibly extended, proprietery derivates of that code, the usability of the code by any reasonable metric has been reduced, quite possibly eliminated altogether. This hasn't happened with Kerberos yet, thankfully, but it has happened to plenty of other inadequately protected products (and inadequate protection isn't limited to public domain and BSD-style licenses, it can and often does include proprietery licensed products, which are then sold and killed, or embraced, extended, and destroyed).
In other words, such actions clearly and demonstrably take away the usefulness of the original, public code.
(3) destroyed the original code?
Another strawman, requesting that I defend a claim I am not making.
As with my example of an enterprising corporation that bribes local government and obtains the privelege of putting a fence around your property (by misusing the public lands around it to erect said fence), then charging you a toll to enter and leave your own proprety, the property (code) has neither been taken away or destroyed, but it's usefulness has been severely denigrated, perhaps eliminated altogether.
Think I'm making up a contrived example? Study your history. A very similar event to my analogy, which should illustrate to any open mind the flaws in your argument, happened for real in the United Kingdom several hundred years ago in a thinly veiled landgrab from which stems the myth of the so-called "Tragedy of the Commons."
Keep in mind, just because not every instance wouldn't result in the diminishment of the public commons doesn't mean many, perhaps even most, cases of it wouldn't.
Also, lest we forget, freedom is something the constitution intended to afford the people, not coporations or governments. The sad fact that our government and courts ignore the intent of our founding fathers shouldn't distract us from that important fact. The point? Freedom of choice is something we want for people. There are many contexts in which such freedoms our inappropriate and even destructive in the hands of governing bodies. The constitution was written to deny the government as much freedom as it could (c.f the oft-ignored 10th amendment).
In the case of projects and knowledge financed and paid for by public moneys, it is highly inappropriate to permissively allow them to be privatized by private interests. Whether it is NOAA seaway navigational charts (paid for by public money, copyrighted and made only available from a private firm for $100.00/cd despite the fact that our tax dollars paid for it), or software, the end result should not only be a product that is free, but a product whose freedom and accessibility is guarenteed into the future. Unfortunately, time and time again we find instances of entities, like Microsoft, abusing the public domain in much the way I described (though numerous other abuses abound, e.g. patenting medicines derived from research largely financed by public moneys and charity contributions, being granted exclusive rights in back-room deals a la the NOAA chart data I alluded to earlier, and so on).
The GPL, while certainly not the only way to protect against such abuses, is certainly one very effective and time proven way.