I'm still trying to get to the article itself - so maybe this is spoken of - but seeing the headline "Open Source Africa" made me think of the philosphical model of open source applied to Africa's societal problems (little things like ongoing genocidal wars).
In natural resources such as uranium, gold, diamonds, etc. it is actually a tremendously rich continent. So how can the people use the wealth to quit killing each other?
The point is to make the process transparent so that the best ideas and logic will succeed - not to just do the same old adversarial gamesmanship that makes the US legal system subject to the contempt of most of us.
You're not looking at law in the right way - if there is a precedent on point, then it DOES either work or not. In areas that are still up for grabs - most often when the Circuits hold contrary positions, then the opinion of the appellate judge counts for more.
But what is really important, and what this forum can help with , is finding the right path for the law. There are decisions made every day, usually by clueless, technologically illiterate ludites, that will resonate for generations. Isn't it important that the broadest possible set of minds apply their reasoning faculties to the project?
Believe me - most briefs, and most judges' opinions are written by law students or recent graduate clerks. Most of them are lazy, and no few are stupid. A lot less thought than you think goes into the decisions that will govern our lives.
The old joke when I was in law school was that law is like sausages - if you want to stomache either one, don't find out how it is made.
No - he did mean copyright. If it is patented, then the reverse engineering technique is irrelevant. Actually the explanation was a quite good one. The point is that copying is different than independant parallel development. So the thousand monkeys on typewriters couldn't get sued when they start coming up with the Bard's sonnets.
I'm not practicing - but I guess three years of intellectual property specialty in law school shouldn't go to waste - I'm very interested in helping out with this open law project. I'm often surprised by the good ideas in this forum, so I hope I'm not the only one.
And let's hope the children stay here. Crushed under Slashdot's very own DoS attack of grits and Natalie Portman, this very good idea could easily be abandoned when they realize just how "open" it gets around here.
zantispam wrote: I, for one, would not participate if I did not have that choice avaliable to me. I would also resent it if ever Rob did such a thing.
Why? There are plenty of ways for you to control you expression under the copyright laws - which certainly never anticipated forums such as this. Indead, the relevant constitutional grant of power to Congress to create a copyright system refers to promotion "of science and the useful arts." Promotion of these values in a discussion forum comes very close to the ancient concept of the Marketplace of Ideas.
Do you really think your contribution is so valuable that you want to control its dissemination? To me that is a contradiction. If your ideas are valuable you should want to spread them around! If you don't want your ideas in the public domain, then patent them or arrange exclusive license with a publisher - a public discussion forum is just that - PUBLIC.
The whole point of posting to a forum is to release your memes on the collective consciousness. Anyone who would stop posting because of a public release isn't really interested in the discussion anyway.
So the answer is simple - a public release and redistribution license accepted by hitting the "submit" button. Part of it could be the user id attached in any redistribution.
On another point - anyone know of a political discussion board using the/. moderation structure?
I have a friend who hates the idea of ever having a child - but she really perked up when Dolly got cloned a few years ago. The idea of having "a mini-me" appealed to her narcissism.
The real appeal is everyone's hidden suspicion that "I could have really been somebody if..." - many people want to try the nature/nurture experiment, showing that if just they had all the advantages they wish they'd had, they'd be the ultimate genius that their inflated self-image reflects instead of their diminished reality.
Here's the kicker - they could be right in some respects. The intellectual and emotional environment matters. A child raised with great attention to fulfilling potential may fair better than one raised, well, by self-absorbed yuppies or by 50's era conservative patriarchs who are secretly jealous of their child's opportunities.
More likely, however, would be a child constantly condemned by the overexpectations of its parent/twin who's attempts to live vicariously through the clone would stunt its ability to mature.
Re:NASA won't do it, but people can.
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
Gosh, too bad we didn't have anonymous cowards in 1492.
Closed systems / Open systems - Skymining
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 2
Often the ignorant argue that space exploration takes resources away from Earth-bound priorities, or even less logical, that "we'd just pollute other planets."
One - while it makes sense to protect space resources of surpassing beauty, such as the rings of Saturn, mining asteroids for minerals isn't perturbing a biosystem, nor destroying anything of beauty. There is no defensible argument against it.
Two - the exploitation of space resources is the best environmental policy we could pursue. Would you rather crush an asteroid or strip-mine an old growth forest? Every activity on the planet has an impact on the biosphere - it must be treated as a closed system.
By using space resources we open the system - we bring energy and resources in from outside. The analogy I like to use is this - trying to help the environment without using space resources is like trying to lift a chair you are standing on. It would be possibly only if you have a skyhook to lift you up.
Skymining - the only practical way to maintain an industrial society!
What moved the facts of this case from the former to the latter category was the fact that Ford chose to hide the introduced defect - to produce a car that was substanitally LESS safe than the standards of the indsutry, as testified to by their own engineers.
Oh, and sh_mmer - this is one of the most studied cases in recent history, and you can find the number-crunches done by economists with a little research. My information is a seven-year-old memory of the case-law, trial transcripts, and analysis that every first-year law student goes through, since this is in every Torts class and a good bet for a bar review question.
. The point isn't the economic analysis but the intentional misrepresentation by the company of an unsafe product. Your economic analysis works for the situation where the risk is known by the consumer.
Of course we are free to find our own balance between safety and economy! In fact, I've gone skydiving, partly BECAUSE it cannot be made completely safe. To do so I gladly entered a contractual waiver, acknowledging that it is an unsafe activity, and that I was assuming the risk of death.
If the risk is known to the mfg and hidden from the consumer, a fair bargain has not been reached. This case is about a hidden defect. If you can't intellectually admit to a distinction between a DEFECT and an adequate(though not fool-proof) design, we're not going to find any middle ground. So it goes.
My original point in this forum remains the same - where a company knows of a defect in their software, they have a legal duty to repair the defect within a reasonable time, and to inform their consumers even before the patch is released.
Open source does this process faster because the people who need the fix provide the fix, rather than waiting for a corporation to balance the economic interest of providing a non-defective product.
You keep mistaking a fundamental defect for increments on a sliding scale of safety-vs-economy.
The prior year's model was not defective. A change was made. Now a bolt was sticking into the collapse-path of the rear-mounted gas tank.
The Ford engineers and crash-testers alerted the company, in writing, that the NEW defect endangered the passengers beyond standard and acknowledged risks inherrant in autos. They also informed the company that the defect could be rendered harmless by an 8 cent plastic cover.
The company not only didn't recall the cars (removing the gas tank to add the cover would be labor-intensive), it didn't add the cover in subsequent manufactures (at near-zero cost). Until enough people burned to death from what should have been a fender-bender that a court took notice. Again I repeat - crucial is that the defect was known (and concealed) by Ford, and easily remedied.
sh_mmr wrote - a prof. of mine once said that this case showed the immaturity of our society. after all, you can always add, say, an ounce more of steel to the frame (or a damn plastic bolt to the gastank) and save a few deaths per year. I don't expect slashdotters to be a bunch of libertarians like me, but i do expect more sophistication than this jury had.
In economics terms what the jury did is called internalizing the externalities - part of Ford's calculation was that they would win some of the lawsuits. Thus there is a transaction buffer acting as a filter to shield Ford from liability for injuries that, in a perfect exchange, clearly lie at their feet. Not a fair deal for the unwitting consumer, who has not been warned that the company has established a known and avoidable number of fiery deaths, and chosen not only to leave the defect in place, but to deny the issue exists.
Crucial to this analysis is that the fireballs were avoidable, the risk was known, and the remedy was reasonable.
Far be it from me to defend just any big jury verdict - there are lots of idiots out there playing Lawsuit Lottery. In the Pinto case the system worked, and it changed the level of risk to which you and your loved-ones are unknowingly put.
Back to the original point - applying this same line of reasoning to patch-releases would result in an affirmative duty on the part of the developer to inform customers of known defects and to offer fixes in a timely fashion. Already somewhat protected under the UCC and contract common-law, this tort application tightens the screws a bit more.
Problem of course is lawyers would turn it into a killing field.
I used to code at a small accounting software company - and saw the worst side of this issue. Starting with the totally irrational resistance of the luddite owners to posting patches on the web site, there was an economic disadvantage to releasing patches when another (due to city tax schedule releases) would be out a few weeks later - shipping 10,000 diskettes was a substantial cost for a small company. Add to this the understaffing of the testing department and tech support, and even the refusal of the owners to allow us to use point designations for patches (on the theory that it advertised how many time it took to get it right), and you can imagine the confusion and frustration. I don't (oh blasphemer!) think open source is the solution to every problem - but I'm sure that my prior employer wasn't the only sociopathic corporate greedhead torturing employee and customer alike. I gave them a lot of unsolicited legal advice (why I'm no longer working there;-) - such as this - if a company knows of a material defect in their product and conceals such to the consumer, resulting in losses to the consumer - said greedheads are liable under the higher standards of gross-negligence, recklessness, or even intentional tort, resulting in statutory treble damages or unlimited punitive damages in some cicumstances. Of course it is common in the industry to hide bugs as long as possible, under the mistaken idea that quietly fixing the bug in a later release saves consumer goodwill by avoiding embarassment. Sometimes the lag between discovering a problem and coming up with an assured good fix is even justified. But maybe what we need is a good Pinto case - wherein the bean counters at Ford decided that the cost of adding an 8 cent plastic cap to a bolt in front of the gas tank was more than the projected number of immolation-deaths per year. Jury-award was a record at the time, nailing Ford for hundreds of millions in punitive damages to demonstrate the moral repugnance of such calculation. Something to think about, at least.
Though more strategy than action, and not really a flight sim - more side-scroller - don't forget the old C-64 favorite - Dragonriders of Pern celebrating the McCaffery series.
Here's the real point - no one can control content on the web - only at worst filter through browsers or ISP. Time_Warner-AOL-Fox-MS-IBM-AT&T-what-the-hell-else may be able to attract clicks and attention, may speak with a megaphone and have the biggest stall in the marketplace of ideas - but the internet is still free, and will remain so. For FREE you can get your space on the web - you're right to speech is protected and available. If you've got nothing to say that attracts you the attention you crave, why should anyone else care?
Slashdot Mirror
So we've got industrial buckyfibers, and nano-tech is coming along nicely... so maybe an elevator to the gravitational well-top in 2061 ?
I'm still trying to get to the article itself - so maybe this is spoken of - but seeing the headline "Open Source Africa" made me think of the philosphical model of open source applied to Africa's societal problems (little things like ongoing genocidal wars).
In natural resources such as uranium, gold, diamonds, etc. it is actually a tremendously rich continent. So how can the people use the wealth to quit killing each other?
The point is to make the process transparent so that the best ideas and logic will succeed - not to just do the same old adversarial gamesmanship that makes the US legal system subject to the contempt of most of us.
You're not looking at law in the right way - if there is a precedent on point, then it DOES either work or not. In areas that are still up for grabs - most often when the Circuits hold contrary positions, then the opinion of the appellate judge counts for more.
But what is really important, and what this forum can help with , is finding the right path for the law. There are decisions made every day, usually by clueless, technologically illiterate ludites, that will resonate for generations. Isn't it important that the broadest possible set of minds apply their reasoning faculties to the project?
Believe me - most briefs, and most judges' opinions are written by law students or recent graduate clerks. Most of them are lazy, and no few are stupid. A lot less thought than you think goes into the decisions that will govern our lives.
The old joke when I was in law school was that law is like sausages - if you want to stomache either one, don't find out how it is made.
Here's a chance to change the recipe.
No - he did mean copyright. If it is patented, then the reverse engineering technique is irrelevant. Actually the explanation was a quite good one. The point is that copying is different than independant parallel development. So the thousand monkeys on typewriters couldn't get sued when they start coming up with the Bard's sonnets.
I'm not practicing - but I guess three years of intellectual property specialty in law school shouldn't go to waste - I'm very interested in helping out with this open law project. I'm often surprised by the good ideas in this forum, so I hope I'm not the only one.
And let's hope the children stay here. Crushed under Slashdot's very own DoS attack of grits and Natalie Portman, this very good idea could easily be abandoned when they realize just how "open" it gets around here.
In this article, the reporter claims that an anonymous source has traced the attacks to an adolescent.
2 10031.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ao/20000210/cr/20000
Smells like BS to me, but I'll pass it on anyway. On a related point - remember the caning in Singapore a few years back? Hmmmm.
zantispam wrote: I, for one, would not participate if I did not have that choice avaliable to me. I would also resent it if ever Rob did such a thing.
Why? There are plenty of ways for you to control you expression under the copyright laws - which certainly never anticipated forums such as this. Indead, the relevant constitutional grant of power to Congress to create a copyright system refers to promotion "of science and the useful arts." Promotion of these values in a discussion forum comes very close to the ancient concept of the Marketplace of Ideas.
Do you really think your contribution is so valuable that you want to control its dissemination? To me that is a contradiction. If your ideas are valuable you should want to spread them around! If you don't want your ideas in the public domain, then patent them or arrange exclusive license with a publisher - a public discussion forum is just that - PUBLIC.
The whole point of posting to a forum is to release your memes on the collective consciousness. Anyone who would stop posting because of a public release isn't really interested in the discussion anyway.
/. moderation structure?
So the answer is simple - a public release and redistribution license accepted by hitting the "submit" button. Part of it could be the user id attached in any redistribution.
On another point - anyone know of a political discussion board using the
I have a friend who hates the idea of ever having a child - but she really perked up when Dolly got cloned a few years ago. The idea of having "a mini-me" appealed to her narcissism.
..." - many people want to try the nature/nurture experiment, showing that if just they had all the advantages they wish they'd had, they'd be the ultimate genius that their inflated self-image reflects instead of their diminished reality.
The real appeal is everyone's hidden suspicion that "I could have really been somebody if
Here's the kicker - they could be right in some respects. The intellectual and emotional environment matters. A child raised with great attention to fulfilling potential may fair better than one raised, well, by self-absorbed yuppies or by 50's era conservative patriarchs who are secretly jealous of their child's opportunities.
More likely, however, would be a child constantly condemned by the overexpectations of its parent/twin who's attempts to live vicariously through the clone would stunt its ability to mature.
Gosh, too bad we didn't have anonymous cowards in 1492.
Often the ignorant argue that space exploration takes resources away from Earth-bound priorities, or even less logical, that "we'd just pollute other planets."
One - while it makes sense to protect space resources of surpassing beauty, such as the rings of Saturn, mining asteroids for minerals isn't perturbing a biosystem, nor destroying anything of beauty. There is no defensible argument against it.
Two - the exploitation of space resources is the best environmental policy we could pursue. Would you rather crush an asteroid or strip-mine an old growth forest? Every activity on the planet has an impact on the biosphere - it must be treated as a closed system.
By using space resources we open the system - we bring energy and resources in from outside. The analogy I like to use is this - trying to help the environment without using space resources is like trying to lift a chair you are standing on. It would be possibly only if you have a skyhook to lift you up.
Skymining - the only practical way to maintain an industrial society!
What moved the facts of this case from the former to the latter category was the fact that Ford chose to hide the introduced defect - to produce a car that was substanitally LESS safe than the standards of the indsutry, as testified to by their own engineers.
Oh, and sh_mmer - this is one of the most studied cases in recent history, and you can find the number-crunches done by economists with a little research. My information is a seven-year-old memory of the case-law, trial transcripts, and analysis that every first-year law student goes through, since this is in every Torts class and a good bet for a bar review question.
. The point isn't the economic analysis but the intentional misrepresentation by the company of an unsafe product. Your economic analysis works for the situation where the risk is known by the consumer.
Of course we are free to find our own balance between safety and economy! In fact, I've gone skydiving, partly BECAUSE it cannot be made completely safe. To do so I gladly entered a contractual waiver, acknowledging that it is an unsafe activity, and that I was assuming the risk of death.
If the risk is known to the mfg and hidden from the consumer, a fair bargain has not been reached. This case is about a hidden defect. If you can't intellectually admit to a distinction between a DEFECT and an adequate(though not fool-proof) design, we're not going to find any middle ground. So it goes.
My original point in this forum remains the same - where a company knows of a defect in their software, they have a legal duty to repair the defect within a reasonable time, and to inform their consumers even before the patch is released.
Open source does this process faster because the people who need the fix provide the fix, rather than waiting for a corporation to balance the economic interest of providing a non-defective product.
You keep mistaking a fundamental defect for increments on a sliding scale of safety-vs-economy.
The prior year's model was not defective. A change was made. Now a bolt was sticking into the collapse-path of the rear-mounted gas tank.
The Ford engineers and crash-testers alerted the company, in writing, that the NEW defect endangered the passengers beyond standard and acknowledged risks inherrant in autos. They also informed the company that the defect could be rendered harmless by an 8 cent plastic cover.
The company not only didn't recall the cars (removing the gas tank to add the cover would be labor-intensive), it didn't add the cover in subsequent manufactures (at near-zero cost). Until enough people burned to death from what should have been a fender-bender that a court took notice. Again I repeat - crucial is that the defect was known (and concealed) by Ford, and easily remedied.
sh_mmr wrote - a prof. of mine once said that this case showed the immaturity of our society. after all, you can always add, say, an ounce more of steel to the frame (or a damn plastic bolt to the gastank) and save a few deaths per year. I don't expect slashdotters to be a bunch of libertarians like me, but i do expect more sophistication than this jury had.
In economics terms what the jury did is called internalizing the externalities - part of Ford's calculation was that they would win some of the lawsuits. Thus there is a transaction buffer acting as a filter to shield Ford from liability for injuries that, in a perfect exchange, clearly lie at their feet. Not a fair deal for the unwitting consumer, who has not been warned that the company has established a known and avoidable number of fiery deaths, and chosen not only to leave the defect in place, but to deny the issue exists.
Crucial to this analysis is that the fireballs were avoidable, the risk was known, and the remedy was reasonable.
Far be it from me to defend just any big jury verdict - there are lots of idiots out there playing Lawsuit Lottery. In the Pinto case the system worked, and it changed the level of risk to which you and your loved-ones are unknowingly put.
Back to the original point - applying this same line of reasoning to patch-releases would result in an affirmative duty on the part of the developer to inform customers of known defects and to offer fixes in a timely fashion. Already somewhat protected under the UCC and contract common-law, this tort application tightens the screws a bit more.
Problem of course is lawyers would turn it into a killing field.
I used to code at a small accounting software company - and saw the worst side of this issue. Starting with the totally irrational resistance of the luddite owners to posting patches on the web site, there was an economic disadvantage to releasing patches when another (due to city tax schedule releases) would be out a few weeks later - shipping 10,000 diskettes was a substantial cost for a small company. Add to this the understaffing of the testing department and tech support, and even the refusal of the owners to allow us to use point designations for patches (on the theory that it advertised how many time it took to get it right), and you can imagine the confusion and frustration. I don't (oh blasphemer!) think open source is the solution to every problem - but I'm sure that my prior employer wasn't the only sociopathic corporate greedhead torturing employee and customer alike. I gave them a lot of unsolicited legal advice (why I'm no longer working there ;-) - such as this - if a company knows of a material defect in their product and conceals such to the consumer, resulting in losses to the consumer - said greedheads are liable under the higher standards of gross-negligence, recklessness, or even intentional tort, resulting in statutory treble damages or unlimited punitive damages in some cicumstances. Of course it is common in the industry to hide bugs as long as possible, under the mistaken idea that quietly fixing the bug in a later release saves consumer goodwill by avoiding embarassment. Sometimes the lag between discovering a problem and coming up with an assured good fix is even justified. But maybe what we need is a good Pinto case - wherein the bean counters at Ford decided that the cost of adding an 8 cent plastic cap to a bolt in front of the gas tank was more than the projected number of immolation-deaths per year. Jury-award was a record at the time, nailing Ford for hundreds of millions in punitive damages to demonstrate the moral repugnance of such calculation. Something to think about, at least.
Though more strategy than action, and not really a flight sim - more side-scroller - don't forget the old C-64 favorite - Dragonriders of Pern celebrating the McCaffery series.
Here's the real point - no one can control content on the web - only at worst filter through browsers or ISP. Time_Warner-AOL-Fox-MS-IBM-AT&T-what-the-hell-else may be able to attract clicks and attention, may speak with a megaphone and have the biggest stall in the marketplace of ideas - but the internet is still free, and will remain so. For FREE you can get your space on the web - you're right to speech is protected and available. If you've got nothing to say that attracts you the attention you crave, why should anyone else care?