I've pointed out elsewhere: In the US, at least, there are already barriers to entry into the voting process - you need to register, and then show up at a polling place. These minor inconveniences alone are enough to keep the majority of the voting population from bothering to turn out (the recent presidential election turnout being a welcome abberation.)
In my mind, it's a good thing, too... people speak of the right to vote, but never of the responsibility to vote. The ability to choose your government or representatives is not a right, it is a responsibility; and only those who demostrate the ability to take responsibility seriously should be give the responsibility to vote. We expect more - far more - of our elected officials than we do of the electors themselves, these days. Presidential candidate X has to be informed, capable, articulate and knowledgeable; Joe and Jane Sixpack aren't expected to have to know anything other than "X is Good, Y is Bad. Vote X!" ("Expected"? - hell, most candidates don't want Joe and Jane to do anything at all like think about their campaigns; they just want to be able to manipulate them on an emotional level to get the statistical results they desire.)
One of Heinlein's points was that you can't expect an irresponsible or ill-informed electorate to make anything other than an irresponsible or ill-informed decision; and the only way to insure that you would have a responsible, well-informed electorate was to make sure that the people who were allowed to vote had demonstrated that there were capable of acting responsibly.
Indeed. The idea is that, by granting a time-limited monopoly for a patent, companies and individuals will be encouraged to invent and innovate, since there is a strong possibility of a real return (the limited monopoly) if their invention or innovation is patentable. It is (or, at least, was intended as) a legal encouragement from the government to invest in research in a way that eventually ensures that the results become available to the public at large.
The real problem isn't the idea or concept of patents; it's that the US patent office, at least, seems to have decided that they'll approve virtually anything and let the lawyers sort it out in the end. There are several ways that the patent approval process could be improved to help eliminate the "one-click" type patents. An open time period for independent review by interested third parties, requiring patent applicants to actively search for prior art or conflicting patents, allowing only business method or software patents in conjunction with relevant traditional patents, etc.
In other words, there are any number of ways the patent office can shift part of their burden onto those parties that are actively interested in approval or denial of a patent application. With enough pressure, there's a decent chance that the patent offices for various governments could be encouraged to adopt one or more of these methods.
See a previous post of mine on the subject - the world is a heck of a lot larger than Western Europe, Australia and the US. We may be the most comfortable, developed, and influential nations; but the majority of the world population (perhaps not 90%, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't at least 75%) live in countries where "political unrest" and "ethnic cleansing" are more than a convenient euphamisms for TV news anchors to bandy about.
IIRC, the current turnout was over 60% of eligible voters; the highest percentage in a long time. You could force people to vote by penalizing them if they didn't or rewarding them if they did, but to what purpose? By not voting, they're essentially saying "Yeah, either or - makes no difference to me." That in and of itself is a vote (though, obviously, not the best vote.)
Folks in western Europe, Great Britain, Austrialia and the USA tend to forget that the vast majority of the world is not a safe place if you have the wrong polticial beliefs, the wrong religious beliefs, or happen to have been born the wrong nationality.
Just look at your scumbag politians scrabbling about like rats trying anything they can to scrape up a few more votes - including partial recounts in places they think will cause a skew the way they want, court injunctions, priming people to complain to the media about injustices even before the results are in. The list goes on.
You obviously didn't get my point. In a large portion of the world, it would be scumbag politicians leading soldiers and revolutionaries who were scrambling about like rats doing anything they could to kill off the opposition.
Scumbag politicians? Yeah. We've got more than a few. No more than the rest of the world, I think, and a lot fewer than some other countries. Compared to random acts of political violence, ethnic cleansing, and the like, I think they're pretty much a nuisance, particularly when compared to the alternative - waking up every morning and wondering if the local political situation will let you live another 24 hours.
And BTW - I never claimed that the US was the birthplace of democracy - nor even that we were a democracy. We're not; the United States is a representative republic.
A friend in Sweden tells me that the U.S.A. is now being referred to as the B.R.A., the Banana Republic of America.
Oh, be serious.
If the USA was anything like 90% of the rest of the world, the country would be in flames from the rioting, looting, civil unrest, and outright rebellion that would have inevitably followed an election this close.
Instead, we're doing what probably no other country in the world would have the balls to do. We're following our own rules. Yeah, they're rules we set up centuries ago in some cases, but damnit! - we said we were going to follow 'em, and we will, come hell or high water. We may decide to change them later; but for now, they're what we've got.
We, the people of the United States of America, are showing the rest of the world how a mature, stable and prosperous representative republic really works when under pressure to bend the rules and just make something happen. With a very few exceptions, we've been doing this a hell of a lot longer than any other country in the world; so look, listen and learn... and ask yourself if the people of your country, faced with similar circumstances, would show the same restraint and decorum that American citizens have.
Wow. You run into the oddest things - never been to Camp Susque, but my wife has some really fond memories of going there for summer camp while she was growing up. She'll be psyched to see that you're up on the web now, and I know that she'll be planning to send our daughter there when she's old enough to go:-)
Feel free to download the SDK and see for yourself. There are over a hundred messages a day on the Developmentor.NET mailing list, both from people actually using.NET, and from the MS developers working on it.
Microsoft may choose not to release the final product for some reason; if so, though, that's a business decision they'll make, and even if they do make that decision, the alpha SDK and framework will still exist. It's certainly not vaporware.
Someone who can't get xDSL, or even ISDN? I understand that one of the targets of this service will be rural areas where you can't get a broadband connection for love or money.
If you give me a copy of the information developed with that supercollider, you still have that copy -- it's a positive-sum game, not a zero-sum game like physical goods.
But the cost to acquire that information (1 million dollars in this example) has not changed, and had to come from somewhere. You are assuming that someone, somewhere, valued that information at one million dollars, and that once they have that information, they don't care if anyone else has access to it.
This is a flawed assumption, if only because by controlling that information - via copyright - and selling it to other interested parties, the original investor in the information can recoup some of their expenses. This chance to recoup expenses allows for more expensive projects (movies, software, CDs, books) to be produced with the expectation that there will be enough general appeal to allow the project to break even or (heaven forbid) actually make a profit for the original investors. In return for asuming the risk of the project up front, the original investors are allowed to reap the rewards if the project is successful; likewise, they pay the price and loose their investment if the project is not successful.
In order to produce any copyrighted work, someone invested something (time, effort, materials, money) up front. The honest truth of the matter is that many times, this investment isn't made because of some unconditional love for the work they are producing; it's made with the expectation that there will be some potential for gaining more than what was invested. [1] Remove that potential for gain, and you remove much of the motivation to create the types of works that fall under copyright.
[1] Even open source works this way. You invest a little of your time improving or creating something, with the expectation that others will do the same... if that doesn't happen, your investment (time, effort) has effectively been risked, and lost. If it does happen, your investment is returned, and you profit (via improved software.)
As an adoptive father... keep in mind that not all parents are, as you put it, "breeders". There are adoptive parents, foster parents, legal guardianships... any number of ways in which a child (of any age) might come into a family.
Having experienced it, I can comment that adoption is often a much more severe financial burden on a single parent or couple than is having a child (which is generally covered as part of an employee's health benefits). In addition, while many companies offer paid maternity leave, in many instances, this is covered (financially) as if it were a partial disability... again, leaving adoptive parents out in the cold.
As you pointed out, a good company should understand that it's employees make different lifestyle choices, and that they shouldn't favor parents over non-parents or vice-versa. Likewise, they should realize that there are many types of parents out there, and that there's many more ways to create a family than bearing a child... and that offering benefits to childbearing and childless couples may leave families like mine wondering who decided we weren't siginificant enough to bother with.
Speaking of child-realted benefits - how prevalent are adoption benefits in technology companies? My wife managed to convince her company to offer an adoption benefit to help employees defray the cost of the adoption; my company seems receptive to the general idea as well (and will probably institute it once I get off my butt and put the proposal together:-)
So - is this an unusal benefit for a company to offer, or is it something that others have encountered (or taken advantage of) elsewhere? In particular, what size company (under 50, 51-200, 201-500, etc.) is more likely to offer these types of benefits?
I suspect that most companies don't even consider offering child care (of any sort) because of potential legal problems. Quite aside from having to arrange for liability insurance and the like, in most states, you need to be licensed in order to operate a daycare facility. I suspect that the end result of offering daycare would be much like running two companies, one of which is essentially not-for-profit... and what kind of small (or even mid-sized company) wants that kind of responsibility, or can justify it to investors?
Overall, if you're trying to convince your company to offer daycare, I think you'd probably be better of making a case for the company to offer childcare assistance, rather than childcare services.
Writing the kernel with what? Using a non-free editor, a non-free compiler, a non-free libc and other non-free tools? Would that be regarded as "free" by anyone?
Pardon me... how did they write that editor? The compiler? The tools? They wrote them using "non-free" (for Stallman's definition of "free") versions of the same tools.
Bootstrapping's always been a problem, even if (particularly if) you're willing to start from scratch. <sarcasm>And, hey - even if Stallman and crew had started from scratch... how in the world could you expect them to write a "free" OS and tools on top of a "non-free" BIOS?!?</sarcasm>
"Non-free&a mp;quot; software pretty much had to be, and was, used to develop the first versions of Stallman's "free" software. The fact that HURD came later than the tools wasn't because of any need for "pure" tools to build the OS. I'd bet it was because working on the tools was more fun and more immediately rewarding than working on an OS. Now, saying "Linux was OK, it got us to the point where we could work on the real OS" - that's nothing more than a huge steaming heap of "not invented here" attitude using free software as an excuse to shield a bunch of fragile egos.
You may not run the same program twice in a row. (I do. Often. But let's ignore that for now.) But... Within a single program of any complexity, there will be code that gets executed repeatedly. It might be the menu-redraw routines, or the file load/file save routines, or the search routine, or the "EMACS has consumed all available memory" error dialog... whatever; there is code that will be executed repeatedly.
Crusoe will most likely perform better than the benchmark shows in these real-life instances. Benchmarks are an artifical environment... how many benchmarks incorprated floating point calculations before FPUs became common? Given that Crusoe is the first chip of it's kind, I'm not surprised that it does poorly on current benchmarks, which were written assuming that performance on the benchmark would not change significantly from one run to another. If Crusoe (or other code-morphing chips) gain in importance, we'll probably see new benchmarks designed to test the new capabilities of these processors.
Does the original author of the GPL code have other, special rights?
Um, yeah - the original author can literally do whatever they want with their code. When they place it under the GPL, their rights are unaffected; however, they are granting you permission to use the code as long as you do so in accordance with the GPL.
So the original author can place the code under multiple licenses, if they wish - as an example, consider the perl code, released under the GPL and the Artistic license; you get to choose which license you would like to comply with when you use the code. If you write some software, you can do the same thing - release a version under the GPL, and license the same version to someone else under different (either more or less restrictive to them) terms.
Seems to be the correct conclusion, doesn't it? Regan gets the nod, though, because Democrats would much rather complain about how horrible the 80's were... and if they tried to take credit for some of the good, people would realize they should probably be held responsible for some of the bad, as well.
Hate to point out the obvious - but during the Reagan/Bush years, both the House and the Senate were controlled by Democrats. You know - those two funky legislative bodies that make the laws of the land and decide what the national budget will be?
Either the Democratic-controlled Congress decided to cut that spending, or they considered it a minor bargaining point that they were willing to throw to the dogs in order to get some other aspect of the budget past the president's veto. In either case, why do you presist in supporting the people responsible for cutting funding that you consider important?
Having used Continuus, I'd describe it as a good configuration management tool with acceptable source-control and problem tracking capabilities. They have made some siginificant improvements in the last version; the GUI is somewhat customizable; and the command line is the primary way of accessing the CCM database (the GUI's more or less a wrapper for the CLI.)
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I've pointed out elsewhere: In the US, at least, there are already barriers to entry into the voting process - you need to register, and then show up at a polling place. These minor inconveniences alone are enough to keep the majority of the voting population from bothering to turn out (the recent presidential election turnout being a welcome abberation.)
In my mind, it's a good thing, too... people speak of the right to vote, but never of the responsibility to vote. The ability to choose your government or representatives is not a right, it is a responsibility; and only those who demostrate the ability to take responsibility seriously should be give the responsibility to vote. We expect more - far more - of our elected officials than we do of the electors themselves, these days. Presidential candidate X has to be informed, capable, articulate and knowledgeable; Joe and Jane Sixpack aren't expected to have to know anything other than "X is Good, Y is Bad. Vote X!" ("Expected"? - hell, most candidates don't want Joe and Jane to do anything at all like think about their campaigns; they just want to be able to manipulate them on an emotional level to get the statistical results they desire.)
One of Heinlein's points was that you can't expect an irresponsible or ill-informed electorate to make anything other than an irresponsible or ill-informed decision; and the only way to insure that you would have a responsible, well-informed electorate was to make sure that the people who were allowed to vote had demonstrated that there were capable of acting responsibly.
Indeed. The idea is that, by granting a time-limited monopoly for a patent, companies and individuals will be encouraged to invent and innovate, since there is a strong possibility of a real return (the limited monopoly) if their invention or innovation is patentable. It is (or, at least, was intended as) a legal encouragement from the government to invest in research in a way that eventually ensures that the results become available to the public at large.
The real problem isn't the idea or concept of patents; it's that the US patent office, at least, seems to have decided that they'll approve virtually anything and let the lawyers sort it out in the end. There are several ways that the patent approval process could be improved to help eliminate the "one-click" type patents. An open time period for independent review by interested third parties, requiring patent applicants to actively search for prior art or conflicting patents, allowing only business method or software patents in conjunction with relevant traditional patents, etc.
In other words, there are any number of ways the patent office can shift part of their burden onto those parties that are actively interested in approval or denial of a patent application. With enough pressure, there's a decent chance that the patent offices for various governments could be encouraged to adopt one or more of these methods.
Moderation Totals:Flamebait=4, Insightful=3, Interesting=3, Overrated=2, Total=12.
Flame me, agree with me - but anything that generates this amount of comment and criticism is, at least, entertainingAnd, in a strange bit of irony, the moderation totals are neck in neck... maybe I'll ask Taco for a hand-recount.
See a previous post of mine on the subject - the world is a heck of a lot larger than Western Europe, Australia and the US. We may be the most comfortable, developed, and influential nations; but the majority of the world population (perhaps not 90%, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't at least 75%) live in countries where "political unrest" and "ethnic cleansing" are more than a convenient euphamisms for TV news anchors to bandy about.
IIRC, the current turnout was over 60% of eligible voters; the highest percentage in a long time. You could force people to vote by penalizing them if they didn't or rewarding them if they did, but to what purpose? By not voting, they're essentially saying "Yeah, either or - makes no difference to me." That in and of itself is a vote (though, obviously, not the best vote.)
Asia, China in particular. The majority of Africa. A good portion of Central and South America. and the Middle East.
Folks in western Europe, Great Britain, Austrialia and the USA tend to forget that the vast majority of the world is not a safe place if you have the wrong polticial beliefs, the wrong religious beliefs, or happen to have been born the wrong nationality.
You obviously didn't get my point. In a large portion of the world, it would be scumbag politicians leading soldiers and revolutionaries who were scrambling about like rats doing anything they could to kill off the opposition.
Scumbag politicians? Yeah. We've got more than a few. No more than the rest of the world, I think, and a lot fewer than some other countries. Compared to random acts of political violence, ethnic cleansing, and the like, I think they're pretty much a nuisance, particularly when compared to the alternative - waking up every morning and wondering if the local political situation will let you live another 24 hours.
And BTW - I never claimed that the US was the birthplace of democracy - nor even that we were a democracy. We're not; the United States is a representative republic.
Oh, be serious.
If the USA was anything like 90% of the rest of the world, the country would be in flames from the rioting, looting, civil unrest, and outright rebellion that would have inevitably followed an election this close.
Instead, we're doing what probably no other country in the world would have the balls to do. We're following our own rules. Yeah, they're rules we set up centuries ago in some cases, but damnit! - we said we were going to follow 'em, and we will, come hell or high water. We may decide to change them later; but for now, they're what we've got.
We, the people of the United States of America, are showing the rest of the world how a mature, stable and prosperous representative republic really works when under pressure to bend the rules and just make something happen. With a very few exceptions, we've been doing this a hell of a lot longer than any other country in the world; so look, listen and learn... and ask yourself if the people of your country, faced with similar circumstances, would show the same restraint and decorum that American citizens have.
Wow. You run into the oddest things - never been to Camp Susque, but my wife has some really fond memories of going there for summer camp while she was growing up. She'll be psyched to see that you're up on the web now, and I know that she'll be planning to send our daughter there when she's old enough to go :-)
You know... this is offtopic, vulgar, and I'm sure someone will manage to be offended by it.
On the other hand, it's also the most lucid and concise description of Lotus Notes that I think I've ever come across.
Feel free to download the SDK and see for yourself. There are over a hundred messages a day on the Developmentor .NET mailing list, both from people actually using .NET, and from the MS developers working on it.
Microsoft may choose not to release the final product for some reason; if so, though, that's a business decision they'll make, and even if they do make that decision, the alpha SDK and framework will still exist. It's certainly not vaporware.
Someone who can't get xDSL, or even ISDN? I understand that one of the targets of this service will be rural areas where you can't get a broadband connection for love or money.
But the cost to acquire that information (1 million dollars in this example) has not changed, and had to come from somewhere. You are assuming that someone, somewhere, valued that information at one million dollars, and that once they have that information, they don't care if anyone else has access to it.
This is a flawed assumption, if only because by controlling that information - via copyright - and selling it to other interested parties, the original investor in the information can recoup some of their expenses. This chance to recoup expenses allows for more expensive projects (movies, software, CDs, books) to be produced with the expectation that there will be enough general appeal to allow the project to break even or (heaven forbid) actually make a profit for the original investors. In return for asuming the risk of the project up front, the original investors are allowed to reap the rewards if the project is successful; likewise, they pay the price and loose their investment if the project is not successful.
In order to produce any copyrighted work, someone invested something (time, effort, materials, money) up front. The honest truth of the matter is that many times, this investment isn't made because of some unconditional love for the work they are producing; it's made with the expectation that there will be some potential for gaining more than what was invested. [1] Remove that potential for gain, and you remove much of the motivation to create the types of works that fall under copyright.
[1] Even open source works this way. You invest a little of your time improving or creating something, with the expectation that others will do the same... if that doesn't happen, your investment (time, effort) has effectively been risked, and lost. If it does happen, your investment is returned, and you profit (via improved software.)
As an adoptive father... keep in mind that not all parents are, as you put it, "breeders". There are adoptive parents, foster parents, legal guardianships... any number of ways in which a child (of any age) might come into a family.
Having experienced it, I can comment that adoption is often a much more severe financial burden on a single parent or couple than is having a child (which is generally covered as part of an employee's health benefits). In addition, while many companies offer paid maternity leave, in many instances, this is covered (financially) as if it were a partial disability... again, leaving adoptive parents out in the cold.
As you pointed out, a good company should understand that it's employees make different lifestyle choices, and that they shouldn't favor parents over non-parents or vice-versa. Likewise, they should realize that there are many types of parents out there, and that there's many more ways to create a family than bearing a child... and that offering benefits to childbearing and childless couples may leave families like mine wondering who decided we weren't siginificant enough to bother with.
Speaking of child-realted benefits - how prevalent are adoption benefits in technology companies? My wife managed to convince her company to offer an adoption benefit to help employees defray the cost of the adoption; my company seems receptive to the general idea as well (and will probably institute it once I get off my butt and put the proposal together :-)
So - is this an unusal benefit for a company to offer, or is it something that others have encountered (or taken advantage of) elsewhere? In particular, what size company (under 50, 51-200, 201-500, etc.) is more likely to offer these types of benefits?
I suspect that most companies don't even consider offering child care (of any sort) because of potential legal problems. Quite aside from having to arrange for liability insurance and the like, in most states, you need to be licensed in order to operate a daycare facility. I suspect that the end result of offering daycare would be much like running two companies, one of which is essentially not-for-profit... and what kind of small (or even mid-sized company) wants that kind of responsibility, or can justify it to investors?
Overall, if you're trying to convince your company to offer daycare, I think you'd probably be better of making a case for the company to offer childcare assistance, rather than childcare services.
Pardon me... how did they write that editor? The compiler? The tools? They wrote them using "non-free" (for Stallman's definition of "free") versions of the same tools.
Bootstrapping's always been a problem, even if (particularly if) you're willing to start from scratch. <sarcasm>And, hey - even if Stallman and crew had started from scratch... how in the world could you expect them to write a "free" OS and tools on top of a "non-free" BIOS?!? </sarcasm>
"Non-free&a mp;quot; software pretty much had to be, and was, used to develop the first versions of Stallman's "free" software. The fact that HURD came later than the tools wasn't because of any need for "pure" tools to build the OS. I'd bet it was because working on the tools was more fun and more immediately rewarding than working on an OS. Now, saying "Linux was OK, it got us to the point where we could work on the real OS" - that's nothing more than a huge steaming heap of "not invented here" attitude using free software as an excuse to shield a bunch of fragile egos.
No - note the wording: I'm talking about the same (presumably the initial) version of the code, which you as an author would hold all rights to.
Sigh. It's a troll, but I'll bite...
You may not run the same program twice in a row. (I do. Often. But let's ignore that for now.) But... Within a single program of any complexity, there will be code that gets executed repeatedly. It might be the menu-redraw routines, or the file load/file save routines, or the search routine, or the "EMACS has consumed all available memory" error dialog... whatever; there is code that will be executed repeatedly.
Crusoe will most likely perform better than the benchmark shows in these real-life instances. Benchmarks are an artifical environment... how many benchmarks incorprated floating point calculations before FPUs became common? Given that Crusoe is the first chip of it's kind, I'm not surprised that it does poorly on current benchmarks, which were written assuming that performance on the benchmark would not change significantly from one run to another. If Crusoe (or other code-morphing chips) gain in importance, we'll probably see new benchmarks designed to test the new capabilities of these processors.
Um, yeah - the original author can literally do whatever they want with their code. When they place it under the GPL, their rights are unaffected; however, they are granting you permission to use the code as long as you do so in accordance with the GPL.
So the original author can place the code under multiple licenses, if they wish - as an example, consider the perl code, released under the GPL and the Artistic license; you get to choose which license you would like to comply with when you use the code. If you write some software, you can do the same thing - release a version under the GPL, and license the same version to someone else under different (either more or less restrictive to them) terms.
Does anyone have contact information for these folks available (friggin' web site is /.'ed...)
I'd really like to get in touch with them about this...
Seems to be the correct conclusion, doesn't it? Regan gets the nod, though, because Democrats would much rather complain about how horrible the 80's were... and if they tried to take credit for some of the good, people would realize they should probably be held responsible for some of the bad, as well.
Hate to point out the obvious - but during the Reagan/Bush years, both the House and the Senate were controlled by Democrats. You know - those two funky legislative bodies that make the laws of the land and decide what the national budget will be?
Either the Democratic-controlled Congress decided to cut that spending, or they considered it a minor bargaining point that they were willing to throw to the dogs in order to get some other aspect of the budget past the president's veto. In either case, why do you presist in supporting the people responsible for cutting funding that you consider important?
Having used Continuus, I'd describe it as a good configuration management tool with acceptable source-control and problem tracking capabilities. They have made some siginificant improvements in the last version; the GUI is somewhat customizable; and the command line is the primary way of accessing the CCM database (the GUI's more or less a wrapper for the CLI.)
As usual, someone else (jms) managed to make my point much more clearly in another post: