Ahem. <rant> Common Lisp, interestingly enough can do all these things too. It's really amazing how all the C programmers get so excited over stuff that's been done before, and better too, just because it (looks) { like->this; } </rant>
You missed the point where Lessig said that intellectual property is both an inout and output, and that if the input costs go up it strangles develpment of more... There is a very valid argument to be made that weaker IP might boost jobs in the software/media industries.
While I don't know about france, I suspect that this comes from the Canadian case involving Ernst Zundel. He was sued under Canada's "false news" laws, for publishing, amont other things, a pamphlet entitled "did six million really die".
The extent to which the court defined history was to say that Zundel's defense that the government had not proved in court that the holocaust had occured was not a defense, that the existance of the holocaust is sufficiently well known and generally documented, that the burden of proof rested on Zundel to prove it didn't happen if he wished to defend himself by claiming that the news he published was, in fact true.
All very oversimplified, but no, it's not a crime to believe it didn't happen (although apparantly is in canada to print false news, such as that the holocaust didn't happen), but rather that the assumption in court is, it did. There's some summaries of the case over on nizkor on their page about Zundel
There does have to come a point in law where you just take something as a given and don't have to prove that there's a large country to the south of canada called the united states, or equal silliness.
And that's why the FAA needs to dump those "RF on an airplane" rules, and mandate a technological solution.
On the other hand this requires upgrading (or possibly more likely replacing, as EM resistance is a hard thing to tack on after the fact) every single airplane in every airline.
What stops companies from releasing a product with the same feature as an open sourced application, that copied the code from that open sourced application, tweaked a few things, and then released their own closed-source product, saying that they did not copy that code?
well, you have to tweak enough that there aren't large sections of the binary that are bitwise identical. If I compile my open-source program A, and compare the binary to closed-source program B, and oh, 80% of them are bitwise identical, some programmers and executives at the company B are going to be making some depositions under penalty of perjury.
Which leads us to problem 2. The need to pay your programmers enough that they never, ever, leave. Especially never leave angry, or for a competitor. Paying every employee who's "in" on this copyright violation enough that they'll never get a better deal elsewhere has to take some of the fun out of it.
Oh, you can steal the code, and possibly get away with it. But there are ways you can get caught, and that could get seriously ugly.
errr... not exactly. A license is a contract, that is, something entered into by 2 parties.. In the absence of a license, you have certain rights, which are established by existing laws, such as the right to resell the copy of the work, but not the right to copy it, or prepare derivative works.
Agreeing to the MS license you give away rights you would otherwise have. Agreeing to the GPL, you gain some additional rights you wouldn't normally have.
Similarly, by default, you have no right to go on private property....
Well, general relativity is also a lot older than QCD, having been formulated in 1915,a full 57 years before QCD. It does take time for theoretical advances to be useful in ordinary every day devices. General relativity didn't have many practical applications in ordinary every day devices in 1943 either.
Put bluntly, using quantum computers you can manage to cut the keyspace by an exponential factor of.5--that is to say, a keyspace of 1,000,000 elements gets pulled down to 1,000 elements.
Well, that is the worst that quantum computing can do, as there is already an algorithm that can do that. Factoring large numbers can be done in polynomial time, which is a far far bigger improvement than just the.5 exponential you quote. So RSA, and pretty much all assymetric cyper systems are toast when QC's become common.
Nobody has tried yet to come up with a quantum algorithm to crack DES, or other symmetric cyphers, but there is no theoretical reason one couldn't be made... (nor any that one could, it's just not known what all QC can do yet).
Hey! wow! I have another one.... propagation of the species, yeah, having children.
Of course there were the wubbawubba people that abstained from all sex... 'course they were extinct in one generation.
And hey, wolf packs don't randomly kill their own, they must be ethical! Termite colonies too!
And I'm not exactly sure how you define "culture" and "its own", there are many tribes that share a common culture, but feel no compunction about killing each other, if you're defining "its own" as the people it's considered unacceptable (or undesirable) to kill, your argument is circular. For almost any other definition of members of a culture, I'm sure examples can be found. (presumably you're excluding euthenasia of deformed infants, female infants or even the elderly all of which have occured in some societies)
But yes, there are no existing cultures that have belief structures conducive to the extinction of the culture. If you can come up with a set of behaviors that are common across all human cultures, that cannot be found in ant colonies, I'll consider discussing them as "ethical absolutes". Ones shared by ants I'm just going to write off as "necessary to the survival of any species with a social group larger than the individual".
Unless you want to advance ants and termites as ethical creatures;)
For all that, it is easy to miss the incredible contributions of Microsoft--and its de facto partner, Intel--to the just as incredible progress of the computer industry. By establishing a mass market that enabled staggering price reductions, "Wintel" has made the computer revolution possible. The most fanatical advocates of Linux do not seem to realize that, without Microsoft, Intel and the resulting 200 million compatible PCs, without the $500 400-MHz systems with a complete operating system, there would be no Linux to speak of. The entire computer world, Microsoft groupies and Microsoft haters, is riding on the coattails of Microsoft.
Not this tired old thing again. This just does not hold water. In later paragraphs he goes on to talk about the dismal failure of MS's competitors to realize the opportunities till it was too late. Of course for the whole "Wintel has made the computer revolution possible", it has to be the case that without MS Sun, Apple, Motorola, etc must have *never* realized the opportunites. Of course, at the time windows came out, apple was fighting hard to gain desktop share, on motorola processors. If MS had blown it, maybe we'd have had a revolution based on the Macarola platform. So did MS maybe accelerate the computer revolutio, say, by a year? sure. Are we all just riding on their coattails? pbbbbbbbbbbbtttttttttt!
excellent point... Actually... strikes me even he agrees that there is a tradition that there is a relationship between the cost and the price:
You, my publisher, may offer me $100 for my latest novel, adding that it's really boring and you are doing me a favor, whereas I, having spent five years on it and being convinced that the result is--frankly--brilliant, scream that anything less than a million would be a moral outrage. Ethics won't bring a resolution here, only economics and the strength of our respective negotiating positions. But if I accept your proposal and the next day you sell the rights to Steven Spielberg for $10 million, many people will consider that you have done me wrong ethically.
The article does make many good points, (although not too many new ones), but overall, I was not too impressed. Seems to me he's got as much of an axe to grind as the people he's arguing against.
He says of the FSF:
These are extremely strong indictments, based on moral terms. They are morally unjustifiable.
yet then goes on to espouse the "copyright as a natural right" doctrine:
The gradual imposition of a copyright (due largely in France to Beaumarchais, author of the Barber of Seville and the Marriage of Figaro as well as smuggler of arms to the American revolution) was a major moral correction, re-establishing the rights of the creators.
However he merely posits this as an assertion, despite the fact that American common law, English common law, and the American Constitution, all hold that copyrights are granted by the governemnt to promote the common good. In this interpretation of copyright Stallman's arguments take on a different cast. You still may not agree with them, but asserting that someone else's claim as to what constitutes a moral right is groundless by claiming something else as a moral right (without justification) is IMNSHO, not a very good rhetorical technique. It's just more complicated than Meyer (or Stallman) claim.
He also attacks the FSF by saying:
Extreme analogies are another dubious rhetorical device.
(regarding the comparison of the SPA to stalinist russia), but then goes on to attack the free software movement by decrying ESR's views on gun control:
a society where all software would be proprietary, and civilized measures would be in place preventing (for example) a disturbed white supremacist from buying a police gun without any background check at a gunshow, then going to a Jewish day camp in Los Angeles to shoot at everyone in sight (a tragedy that happened just a few weeks ago);
Now, I think all of us know that even ESR would condemn the shooting of children at a day camp. Is this not a bit of an extreme analogy? Especially since in ESR's fantasy world (as opposed to Meyer's in which nobody ever would be able to commit acts of random violence), the white supremacist would have died in the hail of fire returned by the camp counsillors.
I actually find the whole attack on ESR's gon control views, and his demand that RMS and Linus distance themselves from his views very bizzare coming from someone who said:
The observation works the other way too: bad people can defend good causes. A corrupt and dishonest politician may sincerely support principles of democracy and freedom. His personal failings do not disqualify the ideas of democracy and freedom any more than the Nazi regime's impressive building of autobahnen disqualifies the merits of freeways
It just strikes me that this is not an unbiased, calm critique of the free software movement, it is written with a particular agenda in mind (well, two, to defend commercial software developers, and to attack the gun lobby), and as it decries the use of rhetorical techniques by the free software movement, while using them itself, and can't even avoid contradicting itself, strikes me as little more than demagoguery.
Not to say that the free software movement can't be critically examined and criticized. Just this isn't it...
any imagineable? uhh, no, for highly parallel tasks, that don't ned to communicate much with each other (many science apps), the speed of the cluster scales pretty much linearly with the number of machines, and there really isn't much limit on the size of the cluster.
I can imagine some really big clusters.
However, I will grant that there's a great many computational problems that don't parralellize that way, and some of those it may very well be impossible to build a cluster that's faster than a top-end mainframe (or supercomputer).
Yes, it was a trojan horse, however this does address on issue, it creates a distinction beteween opening files that will execute arbitrary actions on your machine, and files that are more likely to be "just data"
Coal powered plants also release 100 times the radiation into the environment that a nuclear plant does. We can decrease the radiation released into the environment by switching from coal plants to nuclear ones.
Ironic, aint it?
Or we could just regulate coal ash like we would nuclear waste containing 200ppm uranium. Of course, we can't have that, it might make nuclear power economically viable.
Coal has uranium impurities that average around 1ppm, when burned, the ash remaining is about 1% of the mass, and almost all of the uranium remains in the ash (the fly ash, which is (mostly) caught in the filters in the smokestacks). For more information, read ths article on Coal Combustion
Actually the main thing France does, that we don't in the US, is just take the spent fuel rods and process them to separate out the still-fissionable U-235 that is left behind, rather than just labelling the entire spent fuel rod as radioactive waste, and arguing about what hole to bury it in.
I was unaware that stoning wasn't considered cruel and unusal punishment. I'm glad to see it's just the open sourcing windows that is not an option, if we can just stone the officers to death, that's enough.
When you think you've found something, you can build your own identical OS fort for pennies and try it out in a mock attack.
Ah! So the more expensive an operating system is, the more secure it is, because the bad guys won't be able to afford a copy.
Get my point yet? Its not a such a simple proportional model.
It is though.
Your model assumes you can have a completely secure system. This is fundamentally false.
Certainly is true that it's false, however, I assume no such thing.
The question is (a) how many ways in are there (b) how easy is it to find each way in (c) how soon are known ways in closed. OS excels in (a) and (c) but is very bad at (b). CS is very good at (b) and ok at (c), but probably much worse at (a).
But (a) and (b) are inversely related. The easier it is to find bugs, the faster they will be fixed. However, the really important metric is the number of bugs "they" have found, and you haven't. Why in gods name would you want to make it harder for you to find them, or to use the fortress analogy... If you were the engineer charged with defending the fort, how would you go about doing it, if you didn't have the plans?
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem.
<rant>
Common Lisp, interestingly enough can do all these things too. It's really amazing how all the C programmers get so excited over stuff that's been done before, and better too, just because
it (looks)
{
like->this;
}
</rant>
You missed the point where Lessig said that intellectual property is both an inout and output, and that if the input costs go up it strangles develpment of more... There is a very valid argument to be made that weaker IP might boost jobs in the software/media industries.
The extent to which the court defined history was to say that Zundel's defense that the government had not proved in court that the holocaust had occured was not a defense, that the existance of the holocaust is sufficiently well known and generally documented, that the burden of proof rested on Zundel to prove it didn't happen if he wished to defend himself by claiming that the news he published was, in fact true.
All very oversimplified, but no, it's not a crime to believe it didn't happen (although apparantly is in canada to print false news, such as that the holocaust didn't happen), but rather that the assumption in court is, it did. There's some summaries of the case over on nizkor on their page about Zundel
There does have to come a point in law where you just take something as a given and don't have to prove that there's a large country to the south of canada called the united states, or equal silliness.
Which leads us to problem 2. The need to pay your programmers enough that they never, ever, leave. Especially never leave angry, or for a competitor. Paying every employee who's "in" on this copyright violation enough that they'll never get a better deal elsewhere has to take some of the fun out of it.
Oh, you can steal the code, and possibly get away with it. But there are ways you can get caught, and that could get seriously ugly.
modelling, pro sports to some extent, where it peaks not too long after entry (depending on the sport, you can golf till you drop ;)
Agreeing to the MS license you give away rights you would otherwise have. Agreeing to the GPL, you gain some additional rights you wouldn't normally have.
Similarly, by default, you have no right to go on private property....
Well, general relativity is also a lot older than QCD, having been formulated in 1915,a full 57 years before QCD. It does take time for theoretical advances to be useful in ordinary every day devices. General relativity didn't have many practical applications in ordinary every day devices in 1943 either.
x = 0.9999.....
10x = 9.9999....
10x - x = 9
9x = 9
x = 1
Nobody has tried yet to come up with a quantum algorithm to crack DES, or other symmetric cyphers, but there is no theoretical reason one couldn't be made... (nor any that one could, it's just not known what all QC can do yet).
Of course there were the wubbawubba people that abstained from all sex... 'course they were extinct in one generation.
And hey, wolf packs don't randomly kill their own, they must be ethical!
Termite colonies too!
And I'm not exactly sure how you define "culture" and "its own", there are many tribes that share a common culture, but feel no compunction about killing each other, if you're defining "its own" as the people it's considered unacceptable (or undesirable) to kill, your argument is circular. For almost any other definition of members of a culture, I'm sure examples can be found. (presumably you're excluding euthenasia of deformed infants, female infants or even the elderly all of which have occured in some societies)
But yes, there are no existing cultures that have belief structures conducive to the extinction of the culture. If you can come up with a set of behaviors that are common across all human cultures, that cannot be found in ant colonies, I'll consider discussing them as "ethical absolutes". Ones shared by ants I'm just going to write off as "necessary to the survival of any species with a social group larger than the individual".
Unless you want to advance ants and termites as ethical creatures ;)
He says of the FSF:
yet then goes on to espouse the "copyright as a natural right" doctrine: However he merely posits this as an assertion, despite the fact that American common law, English common law, and the American Constitution, all hold that copyrights are granted by the governemnt to promote the common good. In this interpretation of copyright Stallman's arguments take on a different cast. You still may not agree with them, but asserting that someone else's claim as to what constitutes a moral right is groundless by claiming something else as a moral right (without justification) is IMNSHO, not a very good rhetorical technique. It's just more complicated than Meyer (or Stallman) claim.He also attacks the FSF by saying:
(regarding the comparison of the SPA to stalinist russia), but then goes on to attack the free software movement by decrying ESR's views on gun control: Now, I think all of us know that even ESR would condemn the shooting of children at a day camp. Is this not a bit of an extreme analogy? Especially since in ESR's fantasy world (as opposed to Meyer's in which nobody ever would be able to commit acts of random violence), the white supremacist would have died in the hail of fire returned by the camp counsillors.I actually find the whole attack on ESR's gon control views, and his demand that RMS and Linus distance themselves from his views very bizzare coming from someone who said:
It just strikes me that this is not an unbiased, calm critique of the free software movement, it is written with a particular agenda in mind (well, two, to defend commercial software developers, and to attack the gun lobby), and as it decries the use of rhetorical techniques by the free software movement, while using them itself, and can't even avoid contradicting itself, strikes me as little more than demagoguery.Not to say that the free software movement can't be critically examined and criticized. Just this isn't it...
I can imagine some really big clusters.
However, I will grant that there's a great many computational problems that don't parralellize that way, and some of those it may very well be impossible to build a cluster that's faster than a top-end mainframe (or supercomputer).
All depends on your workload...
how about something to detect probably malicious javascript?
Yes, it was a trojan horse, however this does address on issue, it creates a distinction beteween opening files that will execute arbitrary actions on your machine, and files that are more likely to be "just data"
If you're going to post material copied from Brunching Shuttlecocks you should at least credit them...
Ironic, aint it?
Or we could just regulate coal ash like we would nuclear waste containing 200ppm uranium. Of course, we can't have that, it might make nuclear power economically viable.
Coal has uranium impurities that average around 1ppm, when burned, the ash remaining is about 1% of the mass, and almost all of the uranium remains in the ash (the fly ash, which is (mostly) caught in the filters in the smokestacks). For more information, read ths article on Coal Combustion
you screwed up your isotopes. U-235 is used in conventional reactors, and atom bombs, U-238 is transformed into Pu-239 in breeder reactors.
Actually the main thing France does, that we don't in the US, is just take the spent fuel rods and process them to separate out the still-fissionable U-235 that is left behind, rather than just labelling the entire spent fuel rod as radioactive waste, and arguing about what hole to bury it in.
Oh! you mean the original poster was joking?