Re:Why is a civilian spouting off about war?
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 2
There are lots of targets of military value.
To paraphrase a retired general who was speaking on this subject over the weekend: "Bombs and cruise missiles in Afghanistan just knock around rubble. You can't bomb them into the stone age because they're already in the stone age." And later: "What can you do to them militarily that hasn't been done already?"
Massive ground operations will probably not be conducted because the terrain is unfavorable to invaders. Just look at history. Both the soviets and the Brittish were brought to their knees by Afghanistan. I have not heard a single military analyst who thinks traditional warfare is either feasible or a good idea. Besides that, virtually every member of the Bush administration speaking on the subject has said "This will not be a traditional war." I'm more inclined to believe them than the declarations of/. posters.
Thus, the "license breaker" could not be
forced to release their own source code.
This is true, but I'm guessing that many companies who have infringed the GPL (especially if it was deliberate) would rather settle with the copyright holder and release the derivative code as part of the settlement rather than be dragged to court to face the consequences of their actions. It is also much more attractive than the bad publicity they would receive by openly stealing code from a free software developer. A lawyer friend of mine once told me that the goal of any good lawyer is to avoid court and craft a favorable settlement instead. In this respect, Moglen is doing a superb job.
Re:Why is a civilian spouting off about war?
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 2
In defense of Jon, I don't think you've been paying very close attention to what the leaders
of the country have been saying for the past week. His piece is largely a summarization of
the discussions that took place on "Meet the Press" and the other weekend news-interview shows.
There certainly is some speculation on Jon's part, but anyone who seriously listened to what
Dick Cheney and Colin Powell said over the weekend should be wondering what the hell they're
talking about (whether you have military experience or not).
Much of what they said made no
sense and seemed to be self-contradictory. They are either just blathering to sound impressive
or they have some trick up their sleeves that will astonish the rest of us when (or if) we find
out what it is.
Traditional warfare in Afghanistan has essentially been ruled out. Airstrikes
will be extremely limited because their are so few targets other than the civilian population.
Ground troops may not be used at all. And if they are, they will be extremely limited in number.
Economic sanctions will do no good against a country with no economy.
Yet despite all these restrictions, the taliban is marked for
removal. Doesn't this seem just a little bit strange to anyone else? Jon noticed it and is just making an attempt to understand. In this case, if the Bush adiministration is telling the truth, you have no better idea of what is being planned than anyone else.
If he does not plead "not guilty," he cannot excercise his right to a trial and, probably more importantly in this case, appeals. If the DMCA is found to be unconstitutional on free speech grounds, then he is indeed not guilty because the law was invalid in the first place. And even if it is an enforcable law, it is still not clear that he is guilty because of jurisdictional issues (and the additional problem of holding an individual liable if the corporation owns the copyright on his software).
He probably knows a lot more Shakespeare than you think he does. I majored in physics and minored in philosophy with about a third of the other physics majors. One guy was double-majoring in philosophy, and another one in english. Very few of my professors seemed to have a one-track mind on physics.
Now on to your other point, there is no reason for everyone to know everything about physics, but they should know the basics of how the universe works and what science is about. The people making public policy decisions about science do not typically come from a scientific background. Shouldn't they at least know how progress is made in science, what the purpose of science is, and be able to distinguish between popular "scientific" fads and real science? I remember when the SSC was killed, one senator was pleased that no more money would be spent on "an esoteric toy for a small group of scientific ellites." Had she actually taken a modern physics class, she would have known how much our current economy (and entire society) depends on the discoveries made from earlier "esoteric toys." That's why people who claim to be educated should be educated in science.
Axons can't effectively transmit signals without myelin. The relevance to learning is that when neurons are added to neural networks gradually while learning, the network is able to learn much more complex patterns and rules than it would be able to do with a static network.
Rumelhart and McClelland published "On learning the past tense of English verbs" in 1986 in Parallel Distributed Processing. The relevance of gradual myelinization was revealed by Jeffery Elman in "Incremental learning" in 1991, published in Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. A followup article, L"anguage Processing," can be found in the Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks.
I, on the other hand, have enough knowledge and experience to see
that the entire field doesn't have the slightest clue how full-blown
adult-level cognitive and language abilities work. You don't have to be an
expert in architecture to see that a mud hut is not going to scale to the
Empire State Building.
Knowledge and experience in what? So far this looks more like Joe-Bob sitting on his front
porch critiquing the work of Richard Feynman while scarfing down a bucket of pork rinds than
a well reasoned response to their claims. If you have objections to a specific theory of language
or can point out problems with experimental methods, then please point them out. The scientists
(yes, they are real scientists) doing research in this area are not just pulling things out of
thin air. They proceed just as other scientists do, developing theories and then developing
experiments to test those theories. Some experiments involve interactions with real children
and adults, and others involve computer simulations of brain functions. They are far from
developing a complete explanation of language and cognition in general, but much more progress
has been made than you give them credit for.
Two of the biggest mysteries of language acquisition in children have been solved in the past
decade. The first is the problem of why children (in all languages) make distinctive grammatical
errors at certain stages of development (error-milestones). These kinds of errors are frequently
used to delineate the stages of language acquisition. It turns out that the errors are a side
effect of the way semantic maps (a type of neural network) evolve over time. They tend to ignore
exceptions to a rule, then generalize the exceptions (replacing the original rule), and then
put the real rule back in place with the exceptions handled nicely as exceptions. The second important
discovery is how children are able to pick up language so quickly. That is a result of only a fraction
of the axons in the brain being myelenated at birth. Neurons are brought "on-line" over a period
of years, and this is extremely important to learning. Again, neural network simulations were
vital for this discovery.
You could probably output random sentences with that 200 word
vocabulary and fool "experts". 18 month old children don't exactly have the
greatest conversational skills.
Maybe you should actually study the subject before posting. The experts evaluating the
conversations are most likely linguists or psychologists who specialize in early language
development, not a collection of morons who got degrees from Sally Struthers. When children
learn languages, they don't just spit out random collections of words (although it may
appear that way to someone who doesn't really pay attention to what's going on). There
are very distinctive patterns to the way words are combined, the way verbs are conjugated, etc.
There is a huge difference between the way an 18 month old speaks and the way a 22 month
old speaks. People who have devoted their lives to the study of language development
know this. Armchair scientists on slashdot do not.
Call me when you have any actual *theory* on adult-level language skills,
much less an implementation.
Ever hear of Chomsky? How about Pinker? What about the entire field of linguistics? There
is no shortage of theories on how language works. Cognitive scientists are also starting to
develop an understanding of how children pick it up. This company is obviously exagerating
the capabilities of their program, but I'm guessing that they know a lot more about the subject
than you do.
One of the big problems with ESR's response to Stallman (and yours by extension), is that it is ultimately a strawman. Raymond has ignored an implicit premise to Stallman's argument, which is completely unacceptable on his part since Stallman has written extensively on his opinions of copyright and shouldn't need to restate them again.
Raymond stated that "Stallman and Kuhn want to be able to make decisions that affect other developers more than
themselves. By the definition they themselves have proposed, they want power." But this ignores the fact that Stallman does not believe that copyright should be applicable to software at all (I'm not clear on his opinions of copyright in general). It is true that they wish to remove a right that software developers currently possess, but that is not the same as desiring control over the excercise of that right. In some cases there is no functional distinction between the removal of a right and control over it's excercise, but in this case there is. Here's why: When people talk about rights, they are usually speaking of inalienable rights, or those rights that a person possesses by virtue of being a sentient being. Inalienable rights cannot be removed, they can only be restricted or controlled. Freedom of speech and religion fall into this category. But copyright is not an inalienable right, it is a utilitarian right. It is granted as a means of accomplishing some other societal goal. In the case of the US, this goal is laid out in the constitution as "promoting the arts and sciences."
Utilitarian rights do not generally have an ethical basis. They can be removed with no ethical impact on those who once held them. This is why copyright is limited (or is supposed to be limited) to a period of time after a work has been published. No one gets the right forever (as would be the case if it were an inalienable right), but only until the copyright expires.
Now, this is important to Stallman's argument because, in his opinion (I don't necessarily agree with him here), proprietary licenses (a side-effect of copyright) violate users' rights that he considers to be inalienable rights (the right to help yourself and fair-use rights in general). In his view, developers have improperly been granted a utilitarian right that allows them to exert power over others and violate their rights. He wants to remove that utilitarian right, just as plantation owners lost the utilitarian right to own other human beings, because it was recognized that such a right is improper. This is not to say that proprietary licenses damage people on the scale that slavery does.
So, Stallman is not trying to exert power over developers and make decisions for them. He is simply trying to remove a right (and the power that goes with it) that they should never have been granted in the first place. It's fine for ESR to disagree, but his responses should at least respond to the argument that
Stallman actually makes, not the argument ESR wishes Stallman had made. The response could be as simple as stating that the utility of copyrights on software outweigh any damage they do to individual's rights, but at least it would be an honest response that addresses the real issue.
Your analogy has no relevance whatsoever to SDMI's threatened lawsuit against Felton
and the unreasonable protection Congress likes to extend to corporations (especially in the
form of the DMCA). For one thing, the DMCA does not protect corporations from lawsuits, as
you implied with your analogy. It gives them the right to file frivolous lawsuits
and receive unreasonable damages from normal people. It doesn't cut down on lawsuits, it increases them. Secondly, corporations are not asking
for these kinds of protections because people are suing them. They might also be asking for
additional protections from liability lawsuits, but that's a completely different matter, not
the one we are discussing. Corporations
are getting favorable laws passed because they bribe the politicians. It has nothing to do with Congress
attempting to solve a problem with excessive judgements against corporations. After all,
no one has ever won a suit against a record company based on the
claim that they were physically injured while downloading or copying music.
Now, as an OT side-note (since you mentioned it): Yes, the people who sued the tobacco companies
should have known (and probably did know) that they would get cancer from the practice. But that
wasn't the tobacco companies' defense. Their defense was that tobacco is completely safe, has
no known ill-effects, and the plaintiffs must have come down with lung cancer in some other way.
This was despite the mountains of evidence (some of it provided by their own documents) to the
contrary. They have never argued that people should know better and should take responsiblity
for their own actions. What do you expect a jury to do when they are presented with such an idiotic
defense? They can only consider the defense presented, they can't provide a defense for the
tobacco companies, so they had to find for the plaintiffs. The most disturbing thing about the
whole tobacco fiasco is that the executives blatantly commited perjury in front of Congress and
got away with it. If anyone else pulled that kind of stunt they would end up in prison.
It is my honest belief that current research in AI is not so much
about how to make computers think, but rather about how to reproduce the behaviour
tranditionally associated with thinking. The distinction is important.
While a human will think about a new situation possibly inventing and using new
rules, current AI programs rely on (possibly partial) knowledge of what is going on.
This is only true for some areas of AI research. Researchers coming from congnitive
science and neuroscience are very interested in discovering how thought works in
humans and frequently use AI (often neural networks) as a research tool. In this
context, the research is about how humans think, and by extension, how to make a
computer think in the same way humans do.
Why should we care? Maybe because we (or at least some of us) have a sense of ethics and respect for human life in general. This kind of oppresion is wrong. All the time. Everywhere. There is no possible way to justify it. The fact that humans have been treating each other badly and enslaving one another for much of the past 10,000 years does not mean it is an ethical activity that we should be supporting, whether it contributes to the illusion of progress or not.
If
anything, the establishment of mining and factories will add stability to the region, since the companies want to protect their money and
investment.
In short, the next time you feel like whining about the plight of people in the third world, ask yourself "Do I want to live like that?" I suspect the
answer is no, and if it is no, please don't stop the wheels of progress from helping them escape.
Why don't you explain to everyone how giving money to a group of people conducting an extremely violent and oppressive civil war contributes to the stability of the region? Companies don't need to bother protecting their money and investment, because they have no investment in the region. The rebels run the mines and then sell the raw materials to western corporations. They then use the money to buy weapons which are used to enslave, kill, and torture their advisaries. How is this improving anyone's life (other than those who are getting rich off of the war)?
And as long as we're talking about helping people escape from poverty, let's talk about what "the wheels of progress" are up to in neighboring areas of Africa. In Sierra-Leone we have (you guessed it!) another civil war being funded by western corporations. In this case it's the diamond industry that we can blame. People (even children) who are not active rebels or aren't eager enough to mine diamonds for them are helped by having their hands lopped off. Children are sometimes helped by being forced to participate in the torture and murder of their parents. That's progress if I've ever seen it! In nearby Nigeria, Chevron officials helped labor leaders trying to organize their employees by participating in their assasinations. More progress inspired by a corporation protecting it's valuable assets! Unfortunately for the people who were helped by Chevron, human beings are not considered to be valuable and worthy of protection.
So, no, I don't want to live like that and I don't want to help turn the wheels of progress. Trade can help people, but only if they actually get paid fairly for their labor and their countries are not turned into toxic wastelands in the process.
But because this was done using some new technology that hasn't been perfected yet, and
because in some Orwellian universe this technology may be able to infringe upon privacy, well,
it's important.
If this is the same Orwellian universe in which law enforcement has routinely used illegal wiretaps,
the FBI has illegally infiltrated and monitored left-wing activist groups, the NSA may monitor global
electronic communications, the FBI maintained massive files on citizens based on the whims of a
perverse director, and people during the 1950s were harrassed by Congress and denied employment
based on their constitutionally protected political beliefs (which they may or may not have actually
held), the government tested the effects of radioactive material on humans without their
knowledge or consent (and conducted other horrendous experiments as well)...
If that's the Orwellian universe you're talking about, then, yes, this is important and I am
concerned.
Governments in the US, all the way from the federal level to the local level, have
a terrible history of abuses. The potential for abuse here is huge, and the temptation to abuse it
will be even larger. I cannot think of a single technology available to law enforcement that has
not been used to violate the rights of citizens in some way or another, and I see no reason why
this technology will be any different. We have a lot to lose here and very little to gain. Why
take the risk?
Yet another greedy SOB hoping to win the legal lottery. Waaaah! They made me feel bad.
This may be offtopic, but people seem to forget that when someone "wins the legal lottery," it almost
always means that some other party (in this context, a government) has broken the law. This isn't
just a system that arbitrarily awards money to people, it's an extremely important method for
enforcing the law. We have three branches of government in this country for a reason, and I am
glad for it. It may be unfortunate, but lawsuits are often the only way to enforce the law
against misbehaving executive and legislative branches. Blame the people breaking the laws, not
the ones excercising their rights to have them enforced.
I have to agree with this. I really get tired of the endless hand-wringing that is spewed
forth by various pundits who are upset that Open Source/Free Software doesn't follow enough
of the time-tested corporate rules. The absence of clear leadership is one of the defining
characteristics of both the OS and FS movements. Their are no real leaders -- there are
only advisers, and that advice need not be followed. This is what true freedom is about, and
freedom is an integral part of both movements. I have the freedom to waste my own time starting
my own failing project that needlessly reproduces the functionality of a dozen other projects.
This bothers a lot of people. Too bad for them. I also have the freedom to contribute to
successful and original projects in a meaningful way. This also bothers a lot of people.
Too bad for them, too.
What the weak-spined hand-wringers need to realize is that OS/FS is as much a cultural
movement as it is a technological movement. It's about doing things differently
as well as doing them better. Of course, this leads to waste, as many critics are fond of
pointing out. We have dozens of window managers, hundreds (maybe thousands) of text editors,
dead projects galore. But does this really matter? How many projects have been abandoned because
the authors discovered more established projects to contribute to instead? How many were the
result of inexperienced developers getting in over their heads? This may all look like wasted
effort, but it is really nothing more than the process of learning and creation. Every novice
programmer needs toy projects to sharpen his skills. Is there any harm done by allowing others
to see and comment on what he has done (and maybe take some ideas from it)? Sometimes it's better
to add small improvements to an existing project, but there are also great benefits to going it
alone. Some failed projects were also started by experienced developers. Again, this is not
something to worry about. Most creative people have a lot more bad ideas than good ideas. They
will sometimes convince themselves that bad ideas are good and proceed with a new project. Leaders
don't stop this kind of thing, they just hide it from view.
So, why should we take one of the most important features of the success of OS/FS and
throw it away? Why should we adopt the old, corporate way of doing things? Sure, it's risky
to start doing things in a new way, but cultural movements always carry risks. I am glad that
I can develop Free software and only have to risk my time and maybe a little money. No one
will hang me or put me in a concentration camp for my efforts. No one will turn fire hoses
against me or burn a cross in my front yard. It disturbs me that even the relatively minor
risks imposed by abandoning corporate culture are too much for those who claim to be fans of
Open Source and then go on to enumerate the features of a corporation that are needed to
"make it successful." Develop some passion and do something to contribute, but please don't
claim to be a fan of OS/FS and then disparage it for being too Free.
No one can be forced to license their code under the GPL, even if they have violated the license. If a company violates the GPL, either deliberately or by misunderstanding the requirements, it is a copyright violation and should be handled as any other copyright violation. They really have two choices when it comes to resolving this: open up the violating code, or stop distributing it. They chose to take the second option and stop distributing the program in a manner that violates the GPL. Compliance has been enforced.
Some people feel that the best way to counter all this carbon going into the air (mostly in the form of CO2) is to use some kind of machine to
extract atmospheric carbon. Fortunately, such machines already exist. They are called trees. It appears that John Denver had the solution to
global warming figured out before anybody ever heard of it.
Read the news! Planting trees won't do much to help the situation.
That's a lot of obfuscation you've thrown in there, but most of it is not relevant (nor is it scientifically sound). There are two things that we know about global warming (facts -- not disputed by any reputable scientist).
1. CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs energy from the sun (i.e. heat). This is why Venus is the hottest planet. It is also why the temperature of Venus only drops by 3 degrees during the very long Venutian night.
2. We (humans) are putting a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in a very short amount of time.
It is true that climate models are generally crappy, but that doesn't mean that we are unable to predict general trends, and that has been done. The temperature is rising, and we have an explanation for why. All of the other crap that is thrown around is just speculation that maybe there is something else in the environment that counteracts the effects of CO2 or that maybe something else is responsible for the increase in temperature. But it's just speculation. The simplest explanation that is supported by real evidence (invoking Occam's Razor) is that CO2 is causing the temperature of the atmosphere to rise.
Simplicity is the rule of scientific reasoning, unless the simple explanations fail to explain the evidence.
It remains to be seen what kind of impact this will have on the environment, and that's where the real disagreement between scientists comes in. But I say leave well enough alone. It's not likely to help things, and if it hurts, it may be bad enough that we can't dig our selves out of it. Why take huge risks like that when we don't have to?
In the context of license violations and license enforcability, it is a distribution license. While the right to run the program is implicitly granted through the license to copy, that is only an incidental feature of the GPL. Giving anyone the right to run a program could be accomplished with a single sentance. No legal action would ever arise from a person simply running a GPLed program because it is not possible to violate the license in that way. GPL violations can only arise when a transfer of GPLed code (including object code) has taken place between two parties. So, while you may technically be in violation of the law by running a GPLed program without first agreeing to the license, it is legally irrelevant because no one will sue you for it.
The big concern with nuclear rockets is that they still must use chemical boosters until they reach about 30000 feet. Chemical rockets blow up. The line from NASA will be that all nuclear material is in a container that is impervious to explosions, but that's still a big risk. I don't know about you, but I think that fallout is way worse than hydrocarbons in terms of pollution.
Besides that, a lot of rockets are hydrogen powered, and those only produce water vapor.
Remember that the GPL is a distribution license, not a usage license. The assumption in copyright law (as I understand it) is that you never have the right to redistribute a copyrighted work without permission. If a person redistributed without bothering to read the license and a court case resulted, the judge would probably treat it as a copyright violation, not a license violation. As the GPL states, nothing else gives you the right to redistribute or modify the code, so a failure to agree to the license terms via a failure to read the license means no permission to distribute was ever granted.
Konqueror allows you to not only turn Java and Javascript on and off (individually), but you can set it up the behavior on a site-by-site basis, if that's what you want to do. You can also explicately turn off just the popup boxes and leave the rest of Java alone.
I used to cheat with a hose and a nozzle. Always against the rules, and the hose length could be limiting, but I had unlimited water and killer range. No one could argue with that (at least not without getting soaked).
The
lawyers required that the University sign the cease and desist letter, destroy the kIllustrator-package, name every
KIllustrator user, and disclose the profit they made from it.
Remember that most of the photos they are looking for are
probably known criminals with prior records. If they arrested you, an
identity check would probably clear your name. I think the worst you'd
have to endure would be a couple hours behind bars while they verified
your identity. Plus, you'd have the grounds for a really
cool lawsuit (false arrest).
Why should anyone have to put up with this kind of nonsense? Getting arrested
is frightening and stressful, whether you are guilty of anything or not. And
lawsuits aren't much fun, either. I have never talked to anyone who has been
through a deposition that wanted to repeat the experience. Lawsuits are expensive,
long, and extremely stressful. And I don't know about you, but a couple of hours
behind bars for walking down the street is a pretty big deal to me. Imagine the
embarrasment of being out in public, minding your own business, and having police come
up and handcuff you and cart you off to jail. A lot of people would be humiliated.
Slashdot Mirror
To paraphrase a retired general who was speaking on this subject over the weekend: "Bombs and cruise missiles in Afghanistan just knock around rubble. You can't bomb them into the stone age because they're already in the stone age." And later: "What can you do to them militarily that hasn't been done already?"
Massive ground operations will probably not be conducted because the terrain is unfavorable to invaders. Just look at history. Both the soviets and the Brittish were brought to their knees by Afghanistan. I have not heard a single military analyst who thinks traditional warfare is either feasible or a good idea. Besides that, virtually every member of the Bush administration speaking on the subject has said "This will not be a traditional war." I'm more inclined to believe them than the declarations of /. posters.
This is true, but I'm guessing that many companies who have infringed the GPL (especially if it was deliberate) would rather settle with the copyright holder and release the derivative code as part of the settlement rather than be dragged to court to face the consequences of their actions. It is also much more attractive than the bad publicity they would receive by openly stealing code from a free software developer. A lawyer friend of mine once told me that the goal of any good lawyer is to avoid court and craft a favorable settlement instead. In this respect, Moglen is doing a superb job.
Traditional warfare in Afghanistan has essentially been ruled out. Airstrikes will be extremely limited because their are so few targets other than the civilian population. Ground troops may not be used at all. And if they are, they will be extremely limited in number. Economic sanctions will do no good against a country with no economy. Yet despite all these restrictions, the taliban is marked for removal. Doesn't this seem just a little bit strange to anyone else? Jon noticed it and is just making an attempt to understand. In this case, if the Bush adiministration is telling the truth, you have no better idea of what is being planned than anyone else.
If he does not plead "not guilty," he cannot excercise his right to a trial and, probably more importantly in this case, appeals. If the DMCA is found to be unconstitutional on free speech grounds, then he is indeed not guilty because the law was invalid in the first place. And even if it is an enforcable law, it is still not clear that he is guilty because of jurisdictional issues (and the additional problem of holding an individual liable if the corporation owns the copyright on his software).
Now on to your other point, there is no reason for everyone to know everything about physics, but they should know the basics of how the universe works and what science is about. The people making public policy decisions about science do not typically come from a scientific background. Shouldn't they at least know how progress is made in science, what the purpose of science is, and be able to distinguish between popular "scientific" fads and real science? I remember when the SSC was killed, one senator was pleased that no more money would be spent on "an esoteric toy for a small group of scientific ellites." Had she actually taken a modern physics class, she would have known how much our current economy (and entire society) depends on the discoveries made from earlier "esoteric toys." That's why people who claim to be educated should be educated in science.
Axons can't effectively transmit signals without myelin. The relevance to learning is that when neurons are added to neural networks gradually while learning, the network is able to learn much more complex patterns and rules than it would be able to do with a static network.
Rumelhart and McClelland published "On learning the past tense of English verbs" in 1986 in Parallel Distributed Processing. The relevance of gradual myelinization was revealed by Jeffery Elman in "Incremental learning" in 1991, published in Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. A followup article, L"anguage Processing," can be found in the Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks.
Knowledge and experience in what? So far this looks more like Joe-Bob sitting on his front porch critiquing the work of Richard Feynman while scarfing down a bucket of pork rinds than a well reasoned response to their claims. If you have objections to a specific theory of language or can point out problems with experimental methods, then please point them out. The scientists (yes, they are real scientists) doing research in this area are not just pulling things out of thin air. They proceed just as other scientists do, developing theories and then developing experiments to test those theories. Some experiments involve interactions with real children and adults, and others involve computer simulations of brain functions. They are far from developing a complete explanation of language and cognition in general, but much more progress has been made than you give them credit for.
Two of the biggest mysteries of language acquisition in children have been solved in the past decade. The first is the problem of why children (in all languages) make distinctive grammatical errors at certain stages of development (error-milestones). These kinds of errors are frequently used to delineate the stages of language acquisition. It turns out that the errors are a side effect of the way semantic maps (a type of neural network) evolve over time. They tend to ignore exceptions to a rule, then generalize the exceptions (replacing the original rule), and then put the real rule back in place with the exceptions handled nicely as exceptions. The second important discovery is how children are able to pick up language so quickly. That is a result of only a fraction of the axons in the brain being myelenated at birth. Neurons are brought "on-line" over a period of years, and this is extremely important to learning. Again, neural network simulations were vital for this discovery.
Maybe you should actually study the subject before posting. The experts evaluating the conversations are most likely linguists or psychologists who specialize in early language development, not a collection of morons who got degrees from Sally Struthers. When children learn languages, they don't just spit out random collections of words (although it may appear that way to someone who doesn't really pay attention to what's going on). There are very distinctive patterns to the way words are combined, the way verbs are conjugated, etc. There is a huge difference between the way an 18 month old speaks and the way a 22 month old speaks. People who have devoted their lives to the study of language development know this. Armchair scientists on slashdot do not.
Ever hear of Chomsky? How about Pinker? What about the entire field of linguistics? There is no shortage of theories on how language works. Cognitive scientists are also starting to develop an understanding of how children pick it up. This company is obviously exagerating the capabilities of their program, but I'm guessing that they know a lot more about the subject than you do.
Raymond stated that "Stallman and Kuhn want to be able to make decisions that affect other developers more than themselves. By the definition they themselves have proposed, they want power." But this ignores the fact that Stallman does not believe that copyright should be applicable to software at all (I'm not clear on his opinions of copyright in general). It is true that they wish to remove a right that software developers currently possess, but that is not the same as desiring control over the excercise of that right. In some cases there is no functional distinction between the removal of a right and control over it's excercise, but in this case there is. Here's why: When people talk about rights, they are usually speaking of inalienable rights, or those rights that a person possesses by virtue of being a sentient being. Inalienable rights cannot be removed, they can only be restricted or controlled. Freedom of speech and religion fall into this category. But copyright is not an inalienable right, it is a utilitarian right. It is granted as a means of accomplishing some other societal goal. In the case of the US, this goal is laid out in the constitution as "promoting the arts and sciences."
Utilitarian rights do not generally have an ethical basis. They can be removed with no ethical impact on those who once held them. This is why copyright is limited (or is supposed to be limited) to a period of time after a work has been published. No one gets the right forever (as would be the case if it were an inalienable right), but only until the copyright expires.
Now, this is important to Stallman's argument because, in his opinion (I don't necessarily agree with him here), proprietary licenses (a side-effect of copyright) violate users' rights that he considers to be inalienable rights (the right to help yourself and fair-use rights in general). In his view, developers have improperly been granted a utilitarian right that allows them to exert power over others and violate their rights. He wants to remove that utilitarian right, just as plantation owners lost the utilitarian right to own other human beings, because it was recognized that such a right is improper. This is not to say that proprietary licenses damage people on the scale that slavery does.
So, Stallman is not trying to exert power over developers and make decisions for them. He is simply trying to remove a right (and the power that goes with it) that they should never have been granted in the first place. It's fine for ESR to disagree, but his responses should at least respond to the argument that Stallman actually makes, not the argument ESR wishes Stallman had made. The response could be as simple as stating that the utility of copyrights on software outweigh any damage they do to individual's rights, but at least it would be an honest response that addresses the real issue.
Now, as an OT side-note (since you mentioned it): Yes, the people who sued the tobacco companies should have known (and probably did know) that they would get cancer from the practice. But that wasn't the tobacco companies' defense. Their defense was that tobacco is completely safe, has no known ill-effects, and the plaintiffs must have come down with lung cancer in some other way. This was despite the mountains of evidence (some of it provided by their own documents) to the contrary. They have never argued that people should know better and should take responsiblity for their own actions. What do you expect a jury to do when they are presented with such an idiotic defense? They can only consider the defense presented, they can't provide a defense for the tobacco companies, so they had to find for the plaintiffs. The most disturbing thing about the whole tobacco fiasco is that the executives blatantly commited perjury in front of Congress and got away with it. If anyone else pulled that kind of stunt they would end up in prison.
This is only true for some areas of AI research. Researchers coming from congnitive science and neuroscience are very interested in discovering how thought works in humans and frequently use AI (often neural networks) as a research tool. In this context, the research is about how humans think, and by extension, how to make a computer think in the same way humans do.
Why don't you explain to everyone how giving money to a group of people conducting an extremely violent and oppressive civil war contributes to the stability of the region? Companies don't need to bother protecting their money and investment, because they have no investment in the region. The rebels run the mines and then sell the raw materials to western corporations. They then use the money to buy weapons which are used to enslave, kill, and torture their advisaries. How is this improving anyone's life (other than those who are getting rich off of the war)?
And as long as we're talking about helping people escape from poverty, let's talk about what "the wheels of progress" are up to in neighboring areas of Africa. In Sierra-Leone we have (you guessed it!) another civil war being funded by western corporations. In this case it's the diamond industry that we can blame. People (even children) who are not active rebels or aren't eager enough to mine diamonds for them are helped by having their hands lopped off. Children are sometimes helped by being forced to participate in the torture and murder of their parents. That's progress if I've ever seen it! In nearby Nigeria, Chevron officials helped labor leaders trying to organize their employees by participating in their assasinations. More progress inspired by a corporation protecting it's valuable assets! Unfortunately for the people who were helped by Chevron, human beings are not considered to be valuable and worthy of protection.
So, no, I don't want to live like that and I don't want to help turn the wheels of progress. Trade can help people, but only if they actually get paid fairly for their labor and their countries are not turned into toxic wastelands in the process.
If this is the same Orwellian universe in which law enforcement has routinely used illegal wiretaps, the FBI has illegally infiltrated and monitored left-wing activist groups, the NSA may monitor global electronic communications, the FBI maintained massive files on citizens based on the whims of a perverse director, and people during the 1950s were harrassed by Congress and denied employment based on their constitutionally protected political beliefs (which they may or may not have actually held), the government tested the effects of radioactive material on humans without their knowledge or consent (and conducted other horrendous experiments as well)... If that's the Orwellian universe you're talking about, then, yes, this is important and I am concerned.
Governments in the US, all the way from the federal level to the local level, have a terrible history of abuses. The potential for abuse here is huge, and the temptation to abuse it will be even larger. I cannot think of a single technology available to law enforcement that has not been used to violate the rights of citizens in some way or another, and I see no reason why this technology will be any different. We have a lot to lose here and very little to gain. Why take the risk?
This may be offtopic, but people seem to forget that when someone "wins the legal lottery," it almost always means that some other party (in this context, a government) has broken the law. This isn't just a system that arbitrarily awards money to people, it's an extremely important method for enforcing the law. We have three branches of government in this country for a reason, and I am glad for it. It may be unfortunate, but lawsuits are often the only way to enforce the law against misbehaving executive and legislative branches. Blame the people breaking the laws, not the ones excercising their rights to have them enforced.
What the weak-spined hand-wringers need to realize is that OS/FS is as much a cultural movement as it is a technological movement. It's about doing things differently as well as doing them better. Of course, this leads to waste, as many critics are fond of pointing out. We have dozens of window managers, hundreds (maybe thousands) of text editors, dead projects galore. But does this really matter? How many projects have been abandoned because the authors discovered more established projects to contribute to instead? How many were the result of inexperienced developers getting in over their heads? This may all look like wasted effort, but it is really nothing more than the process of learning and creation. Every novice programmer needs toy projects to sharpen his skills. Is there any harm done by allowing others to see and comment on what he has done (and maybe take some ideas from it)? Sometimes it's better to add small improvements to an existing project, but there are also great benefits to going it alone. Some failed projects were also started by experienced developers. Again, this is not something to worry about. Most creative people have a lot more bad ideas than good ideas. They will sometimes convince themselves that bad ideas are good and proceed with a new project. Leaders don't stop this kind of thing, they just hide it from view.
So, why should we take one of the most important features of the success of OS/FS and throw it away? Why should we adopt the old, corporate way of doing things? Sure, it's risky to start doing things in a new way, but cultural movements always carry risks. I am glad that I can develop Free software and only have to risk my time and maybe a little money. No one will hang me or put me in a concentration camp for my efforts. No one will turn fire hoses against me or burn a cross in my front yard. It disturbs me that even the relatively minor risks imposed by abandoning corporate culture are too much for those who claim to be fans of Open Source and then go on to enumerate the features of a corporation that are needed to "make it successful." Develop some passion and do something to contribute, but please don't claim to be a fan of OS/FS and then disparage it for being too Free.
No one can be forced to license their code under the GPL, even if they have violated the license. If a company violates the GPL, either deliberately or by misunderstanding the requirements, it is a copyright violation and should be handled as any other copyright violation. They really have two choices when it comes to resolving this: open up the violating code, or stop distributing it. They chose to take the second option and stop distributing the program in a manner that violates the GPL. Compliance has been enforced.
Read the news! Planting trees won't do much to help the situation.
That's a lot of obfuscation you've thrown in there, but most of it is not relevant (nor is it scientifically sound). There are two things that we know about global warming (facts -- not disputed by any reputable scientist).
1. CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs energy from the sun (i.e. heat). This is why Venus is the hottest planet. It is also why the temperature of Venus only drops by 3 degrees during the very long Venutian night.
2. We (humans) are putting a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in a very short amount of time.
It is true that climate models are generally crappy, but that doesn't mean that we are unable to predict general trends, and that has been done. The temperature is rising, and we have an explanation for why. All of the other crap that is thrown around is just speculation that maybe there is something else in the environment that counteracts the effects of CO2 or that maybe something else is responsible for the increase in temperature. But it's just speculation. The simplest explanation that is supported by real evidence (invoking Occam's Razor) is that CO2 is causing the temperature of the atmosphere to rise. Simplicity is the rule of scientific reasoning, unless the simple explanations fail to explain the evidence.
It remains to be seen what kind of impact this will have on the environment, and that's where the real disagreement between scientists comes in. But I say leave well enough alone. It's not likely to help things, and if it hurts, it may be bad enough that we can't dig our selves out of it. Why take huge risks like that when we don't have to?
In the context of license violations and license enforcability, it is a distribution license. While the right to run the program is implicitly granted through the license to copy, that is only an incidental feature of the GPL. Giving anyone the right to run a program could be accomplished with a single sentance. No legal action would ever arise from a person simply running a GPLed program because it is not possible to violate the license in that way. GPL violations can only arise when a transfer of GPLed code (including object code) has taken place between two parties. So, while you may technically be in violation of the law by running a GPLed program without first agreeing to the license, it is legally irrelevant because no one will sue you for it.
Besides that, a lot of rockets are hydrogen powered, and those only produce water vapor.
Remember that the GPL is a distribution license, not a usage license. The assumption in copyright law (as I understand it) is that you never have the right to redistribute a copyrighted work without permission. If a person redistributed without bothering to read the license and a court case resulted, the judge would probably treat it as a copyright violation, not a license violation. As the GPL states, nothing else gives you the right to redistribute or modify the code, so a failure to agree to the license terms via a failure to read the license means no permission to distribute was ever granted.
Konqueror allows you to not only turn Java and Javascript on and off (individually), but you can set it up the behavior on a site-by-site basis, if that's what you want to do. You can also explicately turn off just the popup boxes and leave the rest of Java alone.
I used to cheat with a hose and a nozzle. Always against the rules, and the hose length could be limiting, but I had unlimited water and killer range. No one could argue with that (at least not without getting soaked).
These guys didn't do their homework, did they?
Why should anyone have to put up with this kind of nonsense? Getting arrested is frightening and stressful, whether you are guilty of anything or not. And lawsuits aren't much fun, either. I have never talked to anyone who has been through a deposition that wanted to repeat the experience. Lawsuits are expensive, long, and extremely stressful. And I don't know about you, but a couple of hours behind bars for walking down the street is a pretty big deal to me. Imagine the embarrasment of being out in public, minding your own business, and having police come up and handcuff you and cart you off to jail. A lot of people would be humiliated.