What he is doing is practically a zero consequence action. It is not like he's refusing to eat for a couple of months. It is not as if he is spending some time in prison for his beliefs. This guy is not Mahatma Ghandi. He's monopolizing on something that already benefits him.
And, protest the U.S. military? Better to protest the sunshine. You have a better chance of getting rid of it.
Enjoy your fifteen minutes, there, buddy.
Hey, like it or hate it, Esperanto can be taught in just a month or two, to a level allowing excellent communications. I think its great to have such software, but that doesn't help face to face, whereas everyone learning a neutral language will help in every situation. So if we are going to pour money down a funnel, lets pour it down the funnel that has long-term benifits for mankind.
Having worked in the RF Communications field for the past 10 years, I'm not coming out of left field. I'm coming strait off the pitcher's mound. Having also worked aboard a nuclear powered submarine for two years, I have a bit more experience than you probably have in that area, too. In fact, I even operated an X-ray machine for nearly a year. I make a point to know the effects related to my occupation. Listen to me when I tell you, each of them are much more dangerous than you have been led to believe. In relation to power lines most particularly. The corona effect occurs when there is a large difference in the power level of two lines run close to each other. In some conditions you can actually see a glow, but that is rare, from what I understand. But this corona usually extends about 500 feet from the lines. Not the small lines like the ones to your house, mind, but the big ones they clear paths through the countryside for. The relative risk IMHO, is that one of my or your relatives could be the the statistic which clearly shows a DIRECT correlation to the number of leukemia victims to the proximity of these powerlines.
Except if you consider that powerlines are known to cause cancer within the powerline's corona field. Now lets get really clever and modulate the electricity causing that corona field. This will cause the corona to grow and shrink, increasing the area where cancer is caused. Of course its more dangerous. As to whether or not RF exposure is hazardous, try this experiment: Grab yourself a florescent bulb and walk up next to a decent powered RF antenna, say 1000 watts or so. When the bulb LIGHTS UP IN YOUR HAND, you know you are too close, and you are now recieving radiation into your body powerful enough to cook a meal under the right conditions. See you in Chemotherapy, buddy.
My point is that ALL vaccinations are bad, ditto antibiotics. In a macro sense. At best they cause the viruses and bacteria to get stronger by adapting. At worse, a whole new strain is created by the vaccination producers, or more likely the researchers, which might wipe out the population of Earth. Saying, "Look at all the people its helping!" is short-sighted. It's like dumping your garbage in a landfill. The short-sighted approach says, look, I got rid of the garbage from my house, its clean again. In the long term, we are polluting the earth, poisoning our children's children's children. Vaccination research is Russian Roulette, except the gun is held to the heads of the entire population of earth.
oh you mean like the flu shot, which has only served to strengthen the viral strains? Same thing applies to vaccine (take your pick). tampering with DNA is equally bad, which is the direction of most AIDS research. All you are telling me is that when the world gets wiped out by a super-virus, Gates is likely the one whose money paid for our deaths. Now space exploration, colonization of space, that will give mankind a chance of not being wiped out of existence. I'm all for making sick people better. But not if it means putting the rest of the world at risk. That's like smoking crack to make your finger stop hurting. It just makes more sense to cut the finger off.
I don't even know whether to respond. Exellent troll. But so as not to leave you ignorant, 10billion could pretty much build a spaceship factory. China's entire space program costs less than putting the space shuttle in orbit and bringing it back down a couple times. That's NOT including how much the shuttle costs. Yet they are poised to take over the space race. What you seem to be confusing is that the price of getting into space is not equal to the price of getting a shuttle into space. Those damn things were designed by committee ala U.S. Senators and built by whoever could do it cheapest. The design technology is, what, 30-40 years old now. Think in computer terms alone. 20 years ago Atari was state of the art in computer gaming. 20 years before that, the shuttles were designed. Those are estimates, but the point is valid.
I've been thinking for years that Billy and Co. should use some of that money to advance mankind. Even if Paul is doing it for some sort of profit, it's the right thing to do. (Albeit for the wrong reason) Ok, Bill, your turn.
If you buy DRM products, then you have no right to complain. Sure, DRM is here to stay, because the sheep are hungry. But those of us who are informed, simply don't buy. Tell your neighbors and family not to buy. Tell your dog, don't buy. If you are able, promote those 'after market modifications'. Then you can complain if it's still around.
Does anyone else remember when the US linux magazines were more than 4 pages? Both Linux Magazine and Linux Journal are really just monthly pamphlets now. Originally I could justify paying those high prices because there was a lot of content, but now its mostly adverts, with maybe two good articles buried within them. No thanks. For the same price, I'll take the paperback on the next shelf. Or skip a couple of issues and use the money for a reference book.
If these magazines are in trouble, its because they are asking WAY more than they are worth. For the content level currently in each issue, $3.50 max. The idea is, you make enough money to keep afloat long enough to get the advertizing. Then you maximize readership by lowering prices and make your money off advertizing. Thats not a difficult concept. Look at Woman's Day, and Family Circle: $1.50. They are the most popular magazines in America. Learn something from them.
In fact, PGP stands out as a good example of prior art. it has databases, ala keyservers. Email verification of relationships is arguable, but only from the standpoint of was your keysigning accomplished via email. Obviously, this is so for some since people attach PGP signatures to their emails, and therefore prior art. The web of trust itself is the relationship part. So it's either prior art, or its not covered by the patent. So my idea works either way.
I've known about (and used, once or twice) Huminity for well over a year. The basic idea rocks. However:
0. No chatroom.
1. Useless info on most people
2. Doesn't have the critical mass of users to truly be useful. Finding paths to groups of users can be a pain.
3. Windoze only, last I looked.
That said, I'd love to see a OSS version of this. Perhaps built around GnuPG so that messages could be encrypted and your web of trust shows up as your "network." This kind of graphical display of webs of trust would go far in promoting better webs of trust. It would likely avoid patent issues, too, since if they do have a patent, it would cover using databases, not encryption keys. Also, Having users show up as interconnected stars in an 3D OpenGL starfield would be very cool, with very connected users being galaxy centers.
All in all, though, Huminity could be very useful, if the userbase ever got big enough, and they managed to squash a few glaring flaws.
Do you think the average developer/manager at MS is dumber than your average OS participant?
One only need point to Visual Basic. The answer, clearly, is YES.
Okay, I realize VB has little to do with OS participation, but it really makes me cringe. So many college students have this as their intro to programming. And every one of them has to unlearn most of it before being able to competently program in another language, because it's hosed. That's the kind of "quality" you may expect from M$.
What will happen with MSH is that it will add yet more clunk to an already clunky OS. Supergluing a shell onto the OS instead of designing with a shell in mind. Mainly so they can say, "Look, we have a command line, too!"
I don't know about binaries, but in source code, couldn't you just tuck in a few unprintable characters in a particular sequence? If it became rampant, then people could find it if they were looking for it. But who would? Those who are lazy enough to use such code are lazy enough not to think of it. Not that lazy is a bad trait for programmers, quite the contrary. Some characters are zero length if I recall correctly, so they don't even show as a space. I could be mistaken on that, though. At any rate, a few of these sequences buried randomly through your code should suffice, because if you had to take it to court, the code in question could be brought in as evidence.
You can't really expect any other response from M$. One reason they don't want govornment support of open source is that the more states invest time and energy into open source, the more difficult it will become for them to successfully lobby against open source initiatives. In other words, once the majority of states mandate Open Source, M$ and almost all proprietary software companies will be living on borrowed time. The paradigm will have changed, and they will simply be waiting to die.
No. This leads to toolkit confusion. Darwinism implies a weeding out process, which has not occurred. Instead, we have overpopulation, which leads to flame wars, which leads to the Dark Si^H^H^H confusion. Best to scrap the whole mess, in my opinion. I'd love to see Y succeed.
Unfortunately, the problem with IT is that the guys calling the shots have zero clue what they are doing. At the base level, I'd say roughly 20% of the enlisted IT specialists are in fact clueful but without any authority to make decisions on the level needed for the job. In the Navy, NMCI is only making things worse. Because it takes even more power away from those who know what to do to get the job done, and gives it to the utterly clueless. The most glaring example is the hose job they did with the new message system. They took the most broken pile of email kludge available (you know, the one that VB viruses love so much), broke it further to the point it could make an IT cry, and slapped it onto a broke down PC, which was made by the lowest bidder and shows it. Then they shipped it Navy-wide. Bravo. Who needs enemies? Especially depressing is the budget sucked into this beast. A handful of good programmers writing from scratch could have turned out a masterpiece for 1/1000th of the budget they used, and in half the time, if they had only started from scratch.
Of course, I could be speaking about any medium to large business in the US, with the gist of all that. But it is depressing to know that the fate of the free world is in such hands.
I remember seeing an article somewhere (maybe here) about a guy who used a webcam and a colored stick, and had the computer watching where he moved the stick to play a lightsaber duel game. As far as I can see, the input issue is a non-issue.
3 or more webcams could track a light-emitting pen/glove/whatever and plot its position within a specific space quite easily, and with cameras placed correctly, one could "sculpt" thin air, or a holographically projected image. Differences in light frequency could indicate mouse clicks, for the no-wires approach.
I could get into driving a phantom car, or actually playing an air guitar. for fine control, if you couldn't get it with the cameras, (I bet you can, though.) you could use a tablet. Or, hey, a keyboard.
I can see a room-sized version of this, with cameras to track your movement, and holographic projections. The Holodeck. Mmmm. Imagine learning a language by walking through holographic worlds and touching objects performing an action to hear the word in that language.
Quake3D. Unreal Tournament could then truly claim that title. People would pay a couple hundred bucks to play that for an hour or two. And whoever pulls it off will be famous, at least for a week.
Writing software is hard work and there's nothing that magically gives you rights over something I built.
OK, I'd just like to point out that you used the correct verb the first time in this sentence. You wrote it. You didn't build it. At best, You had it built, by a compiler. See? When I buy a copy of something written, I have the right to quote it, read it as many times as I wish, decorate with it, or write my own book that has the same basic plot as your book as long as I don't copy from your book to do so. I can prop up my broken coffee table with it. Its mine, I can do whatever I want with it, except violate your copyrights.
But that's moot, because my real point is, ya cant have your cake and eat it too. Either you wrote software, or you produced software, its either a published work, in which case copyright applies, or its a product, which I then have the right to do whatever the heck I please with it, including copy the snap-digity-dog out of it, like I could copy a Corvette EXACTLY, except I can't use the trademark. I tend to take this view when its proprietary, because it is a product, like a toaster is a product. I bought my toaster, and it's mine to take apart and use to build another toaster just like it, if I so choose, which I may then give to my friend. There is nothing in that toaster I can't use however I wish. If the source is available to the public (hence, the word PUBLIsh) Then, and only then will I consider it to fall under copyright. In which case, since I can read a fudge recipe and then turn around and write a fudge recipe I think will taste the same, I can therefore read your code and write code that does the same thing. As long as I don't copy it right out of your code, I can use it like that under copyright law. And that is why I have no problem with what is called software piracy (same as clone cars) or reverse engineering, or using excerpts from a published source code regardless of license (licensing a book? Absurd.). All have been legal since our country was founded. I see no need to suddenly change things now. Try not to squint and see things though Bill Gate's rose colored glasses. They were proscribed by Dr. Corporate Greed, who needs his liscense revoked.
To add to that:
As a professional radio operator, I can tell you that operating a transceiver is a perishable skill. If these guys can't use their equipment on a fairly regular basis, they become much less useful in a crisis. It's not like riding a bicycle, where you learn it once and you know it forever. It's more like playing a musical instrument, where if you set it down, it only takes a few short years and you can't play anymore. At least, not well enough to be a useful musician. HAMM radio operators should be considered a national treasure, because if we ever did suffer a economic/governmental collapse, or lose the power grid (which we see is not as unlikely as we thought) or whatever other catastrophy might happen, those guys will be the heroes who tell you Mom and Pop are still breathing.
Seems like forever ago when I first saw a water cooled system. But I never thought I would see the day it went mainstream.
OTOH, the media gave it a push lately, so what you are witnessing is probably a shortlived fad. Not that it isn't cool. (No pun intended.)
Does this indicate that our current system of laws concerning copyrights (and patents, for that matter) does not reflect the will of the people? You bet.
On the other hand, does it indicate an erosion of our system of values? Probably in most cases, yes.
I can see the need for some copyright laws, and for some patent laws. They are necessary. But the problem is, legislators forgot while they sat in their offices to keep in mind the most fundamental principle of our government- that it is FOR the people. That means exclusively, not inclusively. That means implicitly NOT for the businesses, of any size, since a business is not a person.
Here, though, is the crux of the matter: it is also BY the people. Things have gotten out of hand with patents and copyrights because WE let it happen. Now, people are beginning, on a massive level, to completely ignore those patent and copyright laws. This is as it should be. The next thing that SHOULD happen is that the legislature should see that the will of the people has changed regarding those laws, and remove them. Like Prohibition, often the ligislature does not look at the will of the people until it is too late really be doing the right thing. So bootlegging, or software piracy, or copyright infringement, or digital freedom fighting- whatever you wish to call it, is quickly becoming a duty of the concerned citizen. While I don't/can't advocate criminal activity, I do recognise such activity, on this scale, as the Voice of the People. It's the voice of change. *end of slightly inflammatory rant*
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And, protest the U.S. military? Better to protest the sunshine. You have a better chance of getting rid of it.
Enjoy your fifteen minutes, there, buddy.
Hey, like it or hate it, Esperanto can be taught in just a month or two, to a level allowing excellent communications. I think its great to have such software, but that doesn't help face to face, whereas everyone learning a neutral language will help in every situation. So if we are going to pour money down a funnel, lets pour it down the funnel that has long-term benifits for mankind.
Having worked in the RF Communications field for the past 10 years, I'm not coming out of left field. I'm coming strait off the pitcher's mound. Having also worked aboard a nuclear powered submarine for two years, I have a bit more experience than you probably have in that area, too. In fact, I even operated an X-ray machine for nearly a year. I make a point to know the effects related to my occupation. Listen to me when I tell you, each of them are much more dangerous than you have been led to believe. In relation to power lines most particularly. The corona effect occurs when there is a large difference in the power level of two lines run close to each other. In some conditions you can actually see a glow, but that is rare, from what I understand. But this corona usually extends about 500 feet from the lines. Not the small lines like the ones to your house, mind, but the big ones they clear paths through the countryside for. The relative risk IMHO, is that one of my or your relatives could be the the statistic which clearly shows a DIRECT correlation to the number of leukemia victims to the proximity of these powerlines.
Except if you consider that powerlines are known to cause cancer within the powerline's corona field. Now lets get really clever and modulate the electricity causing that corona field. This will cause the corona to grow and shrink, increasing the area where cancer is caused. Of course its more dangerous. As to whether or not RF exposure is hazardous, try this experiment: Grab yourself a florescent bulb and walk up next to a decent powered RF antenna, say 1000 watts or so. When the bulb LIGHTS UP IN YOUR HAND, you know you are too close, and you are now recieving radiation into your body powerful enough to cook a meal under the right conditions. See you in Chemotherapy, buddy.
However, I will admit to being a fool.
oh you mean like the flu shot, which has only served to strengthen the viral strains? Same thing applies to vaccine (take your pick). tampering with DNA is equally bad, which is the direction of most AIDS research. All you are telling me is that when the world gets wiped out by a super-virus, Gates is likely the one whose money paid for our deaths. Now space exploration, colonization of space, that will give mankind a chance of not being wiped out of existence. I'm all for making sick people better. But not if it means putting the rest of the world at risk. That's like smoking crack to make your finger stop hurting. It just makes more sense to cut the finger off.
I don't even know whether to respond. Exellent troll. But so as not to leave you ignorant, 10billion could pretty much build a spaceship factory. China's entire space program costs less than putting the space shuttle in orbit and bringing it back down a couple times. That's NOT including how much the shuttle costs. Yet they are poised to take over the space race. What you seem to be confusing is that the price of getting into space is not equal to the price of getting a shuttle into space. Those damn things were designed by committee ala U.S. Senators and built by whoever could do it cheapest. The design technology is, what, 30-40 years old now. Think in computer terms alone. 20 years ago Atari was state of the art in computer gaming. 20 years before that, the shuttles were designed. Those are estimates, but the point is valid.
I've been thinking for years that Billy and Co. should use some of that money to advance mankind. Even if Paul is doing it for some sort of profit, it's the right thing to do. (Albeit for the wrong reason) Ok, Bill, your turn.
If you buy DRM products, then you have no right to complain. Sure, DRM is here to stay, because the sheep are hungry. But those of us who are informed, simply don't buy. Tell your neighbors and family not to buy. Tell your dog, don't buy. If you are able, promote those 'after market modifications'. Then you can complain if it's still around.
almost religiously. In America, 'education' is almost an oxymoron.
If these magazines are in trouble, its because they are asking WAY more than they are worth. For the content level currently in each issue, $3.50 max. The idea is, you make enough money to keep afloat long enough to get the advertizing. Then you maximize readership by lowering prices and make your money off advertizing. Thats not a difficult concept. Look at Woman's Day, and Family Circle: $1.50. They are the most popular magazines in America. Learn something from them.
Sorry if this was OT. It had to be said.
In fact, PGP stands out as a good example of prior art. it has databases, ala keyservers. Email verification of relationships is arguable, but only from the standpoint of was your keysigning accomplished via email. Obviously, this is so for some since people attach PGP signatures to their emails, and therefore prior art. The web of trust itself is the relationship part. So it's either prior art, or its not covered by the patent. So my idea works either way.
I've known about (and used, once or twice) Huminity for well over a year. The basic idea rocks. However: 0. No chatroom. 1. Useless info on most people 2. Doesn't have the critical mass of users to truly be useful. Finding paths to groups of users can be a pain. 3. Windoze only, last I looked. That said, I'd love to see a OSS version of this. Perhaps built around GnuPG so that messages could be encrypted and your web of trust shows up as your "network." This kind of graphical display of webs of trust would go far in promoting better webs of trust. It would likely avoid patent issues, too, since if they do have a patent, it would cover using databases, not encryption keys. Also, Having users show up as interconnected stars in an 3D OpenGL starfield would be very cool, with very connected users being galaxy centers. All in all, though, Huminity could be very useful, if the userbase ever got big enough, and they managed to squash a few glaring flaws.
One only need point to Visual Basic. The answer, clearly, is YES.
Okay, I realize VB has little to do with OS participation, but it really makes me cringe. So many college students have this as their intro to programming. And every one of them has to unlearn most of it before being able to competently program in another language, because it's hosed. That's the kind of "quality" you may expect from M$.
What will happen with MSH is that it will add yet more clunk to an already clunky OS. Supergluing a shell onto the OS instead of designing with a shell in mind. Mainly so they can say, "Look, we have a command line, too!"
Keep it, thanks anyway.
I don't know about binaries, but in source code, couldn't you just tuck in a few unprintable characters in a particular sequence? If it became rampant, then people could find it if they were looking for it. But who would? Those who are lazy enough to use such code are lazy enough not to think of it. Not that lazy is a bad trait for programmers, quite the contrary. Some characters are zero length if I recall correctly, so they don't even show as a space. I could be mistaken on that, though. At any rate, a few of these sequences buried randomly through your code should suffice, because if you had to take it to court, the code in question could be brought in as evidence.
You can't really expect any other response from M$. One reason they don't want govornment support of open source is that the more states invest time and energy into open source, the more difficult it will become for them to successfully lobby against open source initiatives. In other words, once the majority of states mandate Open Source, M$ and almost all proprietary software companies will be living on borrowed time. The paradigm will have changed, and they will simply be waiting to die.
No. This leads to toolkit confusion. Darwinism implies a weeding out process, which has not occurred. Instead, we have overpopulation, which leads to flame wars, which leads to the Dark Si^H^H^H confusion. Best to scrap the whole mess, in my opinion. I'd love to see Y succeed.
Of course, I could be speaking about any medium to large business in the US, with the gist of all that. But it is depressing to know that the fate of the free world is in such hands.
I remember seeing an article somewhere (maybe here) about a guy who used a webcam and a colored stick, and had the computer watching where he moved the stick to play a lightsaber duel game. As far as I can see, the input issue is a non-issue.
3 or more webcams could track a light-emitting pen/glove/whatever and plot its position within a specific space quite easily, and with cameras placed correctly, one could "sculpt" thin air, or a holographically projected image. Differences in light frequency could indicate mouse clicks, for the no-wires approach.
I could get into driving a phantom car, or actually playing an air guitar. for fine control, if you couldn't get it with the cameras, (I bet you can, though.) you could use a tablet. Or, hey, a keyboard.
I can see a room-sized version of this, with cameras to track your movement, and holographic projections. The Holodeck. Mmmm.
Imagine learning a language by walking through holographic worlds and touching objects performing an action to hear the word in that language.
Quake3D. Unreal Tournament could then truly claim that title. People would pay a couple hundred bucks to play that for an hour or two. And whoever pulls it off will be famous, at least for a week.
Writing software is hard work and there's nothing that magically gives you rights over something I built.
OK, I'd just like to point out that you used the correct verb the first time in this sentence. You wrote it. You didn't build it. At best, You had it built, by a compiler. See? When I buy a copy of something written, I have the right to quote it, read it as many times as I wish, decorate with it, or write my own book that has the same basic plot as your book as long as I don't copy from your book to do so. I can prop up my broken coffee table with it. Its mine, I can do whatever I want with it, except violate your copyrights.
But that's moot, because my real point is, ya cant have your cake and eat it too. Either you wrote software, or you produced software, its either a published work, in which case copyright applies, or its a product, which I then have the right to do whatever the heck I please with it, including copy the snap-digity-dog out of it, like I could copy a Corvette EXACTLY, except I can't use the trademark. I tend to take this view when its proprietary, because it is a product, like a toaster is a product. I bought my toaster, and it's mine to take apart and use to build another toaster just like it, if I so choose, which I may then give to my friend. There is nothing in that toaster I can't use however I wish. If the source is available to the public (hence, the word PUBLIsh) Then, and only then will I consider it to fall under copyright. In which case, since I can read a fudge recipe and then turn around and write a fudge recipe I think will taste the same, I can therefore read your code and write code that does the same thing. As long as I don't copy it right out of your code, I can use it like that under copyright law. And that is why I have no problem with what is called software piracy (same as clone cars) or reverse engineering, or using excerpts from a published source code regardless of license (licensing a book? Absurd.). All have been legal since our country was founded. I see no need to suddenly change things now. Try not to squint and see things though Bill Gate's rose colored glasses. They were proscribed by Dr. Corporate Greed, who needs his liscense revoked.
To add to that:
As a professional radio operator, I can tell you that operating a transceiver is a perishable skill. If these guys can't use their equipment on a fairly regular basis, they become much less useful in a crisis. It's not like riding a bicycle, where you learn it once and you know it forever. It's more like playing a musical instrument, where if you set it down, it only takes a few short years and you can't play anymore. At least, not well enough to be a useful musician. HAMM radio operators should be considered a national treasure, because if we ever did suffer a economic/governmental collapse, or lose the power grid (which we see is not as unlikely as we thought) or whatever other catastrophy might happen, those guys will be the heroes who tell you Mom and Pop are still breathing.
Seems like forever ago when I first saw a water cooled system. But I never thought I would see the day it went mainstream.
OTOH, the media gave it a push lately, so what you are witnessing is probably a shortlived fad. Not that it isn't cool. (No pun intended.)
Oh, forget it.
"Oh! Oh! I know! Lets make grade school even more like a prison for our youth!"
"Bob, thats brilliant! I'm putting you in for a raise."
As if our education system wasn't screwed up enough.
Does this indicate that our current system of laws concerning copyrights (and patents, for that matter) does not reflect the will of the people? You bet.
On the other hand, does it indicate an erosion of our system of values? Probably in most cases, yes.
I can see the need for some copyright laws, and for some patent laws. They are necessary. But the problem is, legislators forgot while they sat in their offices to keep in mind the most fundamental principle of our government- that it is FOR the people. That means exclusively, not inclusively. That means implicitly NOT for the businesses, of any size, since a business is not a person.
Here, though, is the crux of the matter: it is also BY the people. Things have gotten out of hand with patents and copyrights because WE let it happen. Now, people are beginning, on a massive level, to completely ignore those patent and copyright laws. This is as it should be. The next thing that SHOULD happen is that the legislature should see that the will of the people has changed regarding those laws, and remove them. Like Prohibition, often the ligislature does not look at the will of the people until it is too late really be doing the right thing. So bootlegging, or software piracy, or copyright infringement, or digital freedom fighting- whatever you wish to call it, is quickly becoming a duty of the concerned citizen. While I don't/can't advocate criminal activity, I do recognise such activity, on this scale, as the Voice of the People. It's the voice of change.
*end of slightly inflammatory rant*