I'm surprised that anybody has to be "convinced" MS uses Open Source code. I've always thought it was common knowledge. Also, you could have just looked in Help About for IE and seen that it uses the Independant JPEG Group code. Based on this prior behavior, I always assumed they used the free PNG implementation. Since PNG uses zlib, MS uses zlib.
Now, if MS were smart they'd have a standard place for libjpeg.dll, libpng.dll, and zlib.dll but as far as I know there is no such thing. Either the functions are in some other DLLs, or the names are obfuscated. This bug, combined with MS's "security initiative" represents a golden opportunity: MS could take the occasion to give us "standard" DLLs so that developers would no longer have to package them, and could instead say something like "make sure you have this service pack and if you don't, here it is".
Indeed, when I first heard of a proposal to do this, circa 1986, it was referred to as "chameleon cloth".
With the right software, I bet you could get by with perhaps just 4 cameras. The tricky part is having the fabric be durable, and having the signals that travel to the pixels be fault tolerant. Also, it's got to be non-stick. Otherwise, any damage to the fabric, or anything stuck to it ruins the whole thing. OTOH, if the enemy delivers bright green sticky stuff that rains down on the soldiers, it will also rain down on the terrain. Another possible tactic is to fire a flare that backlights the soldiers with a strobe. Any latency in the camo system will be detectable, although cave-dwelling terrorists aren't likely to have such tech.
I wouldn't write code. I'd write novels where the characters were always discussing code. Instead of using quotes when the characters spoke, I'd use/* and */. Whenever I was narrating I'd put a// at the start of the line. If some idiot decides to OCR my novel into a computer and compile it, it's not my problem.
In all seriousness, I hope this proposal is DOA. This will crush the little guy, and enrich the lawyers. Oh, wait a second... all the laws are written by lawyers.
Look, legal liability for software is already an option. Ever heard of "mission critical"? If somebody is willing to back up their "5 nines" with dollars, I say more power to 'em; but don't go making my "3 nines, but a lot cheaper" illegal.
Boy howdy! When I was in 7th grade I recalled how my sister took gum wrappers, folded them a certain way, and made links for long chains. Naturally, I took the link design, switched to heavy Xerox paper, and used it as a rubber-band projectile. It flew much further than a rubber band, and could inflict pain from 20 feet away if you got a good shot.
I wonder why the girls didn't think of that? (that was a rhetorical question) I thought it was way over the line when the delinqents in the back of the bus loaded them with bits of metal and leftover plexiglass from shop though. I think they got suspended for that.
Of course the fun never ends. A friend, who was a freshman in college at the time, obtained 30 feet of medical tubing (essentially, a huge rubber band). They flung water balloons from so far across the quad that nobody knew from whence they came.
Then of course we have all heard of stuff like "pumpkin chunkin" and so forth. So, I ain't the least bit surprised $400 rubber-band machine guns exist.
Re:Wrong "Two Types Of Invention"
on
Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 2
My initial reaction to this was to dismiss it as more AIP rhetoric, but I think you have a point.
I now think the 3 classes should be:
1. Those that are more likely to occur when protection exists (a new type of motor that requires a $500,000,000 investment to perfect).
2. Those that are less likely to occur due to the presence of protection (a software project that can't afford to defend itself from frivolous lawsuits because, oh say... XOR mouse cursors are patented).
3. Those that will occur no matter what (some guy mixes cough syrup into a drink, sets it on fire, and discovers that it tastes good).
A simple "how strong should IP protection be" is really too simple a question when we view things in this light. Perhaps the questions should be 1. Which classes of inventions fall into which category. 2. How much protection should that class enjoy to omptimize output.
Notice I said *optimize* output. It is entirely possible for a society to determine that some types of IP should be minimized as opposed to maximized (e.g., child porn, or for a less extreme example... they might want to encourage TV networks to produce more serious programming and less mental pablum). But then when you start to talk about discouraging some forms of IP, you get into free speech issues...
Difficult questions indeed...
Two Types Of Invention?
on
Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Perhaps there are two types of invention: Those that will occur without protection, and those that won't occur without it.
Obviously, not having protection won't hinder all invention, as the "inventive spirit" is something that most of us believe exists.
Also, while there may have been invention during that time, there was probably also more trade secrecy, something the article doesn't explore at all.
If the patent process slows business, it may actually be because it requires disclosure. Companies go for the "sure thing" by patenting, but give up the possibility of perpetuating their monopoly through secrecy which can be *very* effective. Thinking Coca-Cola? Chump change. Consider Ziljan (the cymbal people) IIRC, they kept the process a family secret for something like 400 years or more. If all the Ziljans get hit by a bus, nobody will ever be able to make those exact cymbals again. So, what was that about patents being bad for society?
Of course this is all just speculation and stuff. Nobody has the time to do an unbiansed, rigorous, statisticly valid study and present it in such a way so that laymen could understand it. That would be... a lot of work!
False statement. In the majority of cases where "socialism" was implemented, the country had just come out of a major war. What exactly was the fat Lenin's, or the Communist East Europeans lived off of? Or China, which had been ravaged by the Japanese and a two civil wars in a row?
Yes, there was war on those countries, but agricultural traditions--the fat of the land--survived intact. Then they were destroyed by the Socialists/Communists whatever you want to call them. Very idealistic people can go tragicly wrong.
Also, I said GPL software was inferior, not free software (*BSD vs. Linux).
Re-read my statement.
When GPL software dominates a market, we are left with low-quality free packages on one end and expensive "industry standard" or "specialized" software on the other.
There is nothing there that says proprietary is always better or that free software is inferior. I said that when a particular class of free software license dominates, the proprietary packages in that market become fewer and more expensive.
I have to give you some credit though--many of my statements are not backed up, and I can't cite references. Unfortunately, I don't get payed to research these things. I'm an amateur pundit, but if someone wanted to pay me to work at a think tank, I think I'd enjoy it.
I also have to give you credit for not forming your argument based on your desire to noun a verb. Why do so many Free Software advocates center their arguments around trying to change the language? Perhaps it's just a bad habit they picked up from RMS and the PC speech movement.
If strong IP rights didn't exist, ASPs would dominate the market. In fact, the erosion of IP rights through piracy is one of the primary motives for the ASP model. ASPs suck. I just want to buy stuff and use it without having to worry about the network. Time for my favorite quote regarding ASPs: "I can't use my word processor. The network's down."
With closed source software each competitor is forced to reinvent the wheel.
With closed-source software, each competitor is encouraged to bring their own individual perspective to the problems at hand.
The middle ground may get squeezed but the services area expands. Take the market for PHP programmers as an example. I've even seen jobs to write PHPNuke add-ons.
You're actually making my point. As a potential retail consumer for such a web front end (but too small a consumer to consider hiring a programmer) my choices are limited.
[regarding the price polarization effect]Like Apache in the web server market? Or MySQL/Postgres in the DB market
I don't know much about DBs, but IIRC, the Open Source community whined a long time about the lack of something called "transactions" in MySQL. Oracle had it first. Apache isn't GPL'd. Open Source that isn't GPL'd attracts, dare I say, a better class of developers--people who are open to the idea that they might need to commercialize at some later point in time, and have the foresight to seek out solutions that allow them to keep their options open.
Why did Apple choose BSD? I personally love the free PNG and JPEG source, and would happily contribute bug-fixes to them. Just one problem: I've never found a bug in either one. Instead, I've released a few simple things like USFlag as my way of "giving back". And there was no need for a coercive license to make me do that when it made sense for me to do it.
For a good example of price polarization, Look at GIMP vs. Photoshop, and then try finding good shareware for $20-$100 that does similar things using an open standard file format. I'm willing to be proved wrong on this. A rigorous study would be difficult, and I'm not aware of any unbiased research. I would even settle for good inexpensive, currently maintained shareware that handles PSDs. Maybe I just haven't found the right package.
Those that would like to steal code repackage it and sell it without giving either credit or code back to whence it came.
It never ceases to amaze me how strongly people will defend IP when the GPL is attacked. So, are you now on the record as stating that strong IP rights are important?
I can't believe Mundie's complaint about the GPL is that it will pull money out of the public sector. He should be arguing the other way around: In the long run, the GPL puts money into the public sector, and that's why it's bad.
Peren's argument distracts us from the real problem by pointing out how much money business saves in the short-run.
What is the real problem? There are at least two: First, by discouraging entry into the software market, the GPL reduces the number of competitors. This means less consumer choice, not more. That's because most consumers have the ability and the resources to evaluate and choose programs, but most don't have the ability and resources to evaluate and choose programmers. Free Software is devestating to the diverse "middle ground" of software that sells in the $20-$100 range. When GPL software dominates a market, we are left with low-quality free packages on one end and expensive "industry standard" or "specialized" software on the other.
The other problem is that when GPL projects fail to keep pace with technology, there is the danger that people will make arguments that the government needs to step in and take over the project. This is the secret hearts desire of the Free Software movement, which is just socialism with a hi-tech veneer. Already, there are too many government workers writing software who should instead be using a diverse array of packages from different vendors, linked together by open standards (open standards are law, but executables are *not*. That's a critical distinction that Lessig fails to make, but we aren't here to talk about Lessig).
Perens is right in the short-run: Socialism always does well in the beginning because it lives off the fat of the land that has been stored up. In the long-run though, it drags the economy down.
...everybody in government should have to put a little disclaimer on their policy statements, something like this:
The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent those of my employer
In this case, the "employer" is We The People of the United States.
I wager that most of us have no desire to nuke Russia, which is making remarkable progress towards becoming a free society. Come to think of it, most of us have no desire to nuke anybody unless they nuke us first.
This thing was made before terrorist nukes were taken seriously by the general public, so the smallest weapon they have is 1 megaton. Most experts have been saying that the terrorists will have a hard time just getting A-bombs. H-bombs are another matter. Anyhow, even if the bad guys got a 1 megaton bomb on the Capitol, everything inside the beltway would be safe except for fallout. The prevailing winds here are from the east--Marylanders take note, you will get most of the fallout. No more trips to Ocean City after that, and the bad guys would get a bonus of poisoning the Naval Academy if the winds were blowing in that direction.
Of course the terrorist nuke, if it exists, is about 15 *kilotons*. That would ruin a good portion of downtown DC, and send a lot of survivors into the 'burbs.
So, I too have been thinking about this a lot lately since I live near DC. I'd be lying in my bed at night, and all of the sudden it would get like daylight. Less than a minute later there would be a tremendous noise like a wierd thunder I assume, but the damaging blast wouldn't hit us. Then the next day we would either get killed by the survivors, or we would all come together to help them. I'm an optimist, I think the latter is more likely.
What do you think, they use contact fuses on those things?
I don't think so. The bomb probably has some kind of majority voting computer system like the Space Shuttle. It has inertial guidance as well as GPS, and it checks both just in case some nimrod blows up the GPS satellites. If a majority of the computers decide that the rocket malfunctioned, they destroy the bomb by detonating the conventional starter charges out of sync.
Of course this is just a pure guess on my part, but I know if I were designing such a thing to overfly friendly countries, I would make sure there was some way to prevent it from nuking the friendlies.
I know for a fact that there have been cases where nukes were dropped by accident and did not explode, but presumably that was because they were not armed to begin with.
Does anybody out there have any real information about what kind of safeguards are built into warheads? Come to think of it, it is a simple matter to estimate time to target and not arm the bomb until X seconds after launch.
Its only purpose is to subvert the US constitution by mooting the clause that grants limited rights to authors. In essence, they have found a loophole in the Constitution and are exploiting it. This hardly qualifies them as champions of liberty.
Bah! BSD it like the other guy said. If it's BSD you GPL bigots can still link with it, and so can everybody else. BSD is part of a continuous line between openness and control, with only Public Domain exhibiting more opennness. GPL is designed to restrict movement along the continuum. For those who view the other parts of the continuum as important, complaints regarding the GPL and freedom make perfect sense. For those who regard the other parts of the continuum as immoral, the complaints are incomprehensible.
The "non commercial only" license exherts more control than GPL, but does not exhibit the same controls as a EULA. For this reason, NCO licenses live in a world of suckiness. Whenever I have seen NCO licenses, I have seen code that is either used by a handful of vendors, or code that just dies from lack of interest. Where the GPL achieves nearly optimal incentive to copy, the NCO achieves nearly optimal incentive to ignore.
So, I would be happier if MS closed the source totally. That would give them the incentive to throw their marketing muscle behind it and create something that flies like their JVM. As it stands, they will probably end up developing 2 CLI's anyway because of this license: One that is standards compliant (Rotor), and another that peforms and that they really care about.
OTOH, if they BSD'd it, it could become the industry standard and MS would actually get some of the best free help in the business to debug their code. The security and performance would be comparable to *BSD.
If the license stays as it is, Rotor will become just another exhibit in the Consortium Curiousity Museum. They might as well just spend their time double-checking the standards documentation. It would be a more productive use of man-hours.
Re:Seen as a bumper sticker...
on
How to Save PGP
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· Score: 1
As a general rule, I think we are going to see Israel vs. Palestine and USA vs. terrorists shaking out pretty much the same way: Low casualty figures in the "allied" countries consisting mostly of civilians. High casualty figures in the "axis" countries consisting mostly of military.
Of course, the Axis countries always like to count starving civilians as casualties, but when their leaders divert most resources to soldiers and weapons and ignore the needs of the civilians, whose fault is it?
You know what they say... I went to a statisticians conference, and a hockey game broke out... or something like that. Or was that, "lies, damn lies, and casualty figures"?
...I now present you with the lyrics to Heat of the Moment, combined with some extraneous text to sqeeze by the evil awful "not enough characters per line" filter. Many characters of useless stuff required to bypass this filer. Mary hada little spam. Tweedle deedle dee. Dubm-dilly-um. And all that other good stuff that *they* don't want you to have.
I never meant to be so bad to you
One thing I said that I would never do -
A look from you and I would fall from grace
And that would wipe the smile right from my face.
Do you remember when we used to dance
An incident arose from circumstance.
One thing let to another
we were young
And we would scream together songs unsung.
It was the heat of the moment
Tellin' me what our hearts meant
The heat of the moment shone in your eyes.
And now you find yourself in '82
The disco hot foots hold the jump for you.
you can't concent yourself with bigger things
You catch and pull a ride on the dragon's wings.
'cause it's the heat of the moment
The heat of the moment
the heat of the moment
Shone in your eyes.
And when your looks are gone and your alone
How many nights you sit beside the phone?
What were the things you wanted for yourself -
Teenage ambitions
you remember well.
It was the heat of the moment
Tellin' you what your heart meants
The heat of the moment shone in your eyes.
It was the heat of the moment
the heat of the moment
The heat of the moment shone in your eyes.
Heat of the moment
heat of the moment
heat of the mom
In the 'common vernacular' people run around claiming to write good (when of course when can only write well, or not so well, etc...) It was common 'knowledge' that the sun revolved around the earth in Copernicus' day... you could just ask anyone on the ancient Slashot site. So my question is this... do you have any actual valid point to make?
Yes. There is a time and a place for technical jargon. You are confusing the "common vernacular" with "common mistakes". "Write good" may become acceptable over time as language evolves, whereas the position of the Sun is an objective scientific fact.
Efforts to use precise technical jargon all the time will actually result in ineffective communication. Judging when and where to use what kind of language is an important skill. It might be more convenient for you to use multiple words that convey fine shades of meaning, but you stand a good chance of losing your audience when you do that.
This reminds me of the whole "cracker" vs. "hacker" debate. You know who won that, and you should know why.
Perhaps you were unaware that Slashdot is a technical forum.
Libertarians fail to garner more than 3% in most elections for one simple reason: They have no common sense.
Examples:
Most Americans agree that non-violent drug offenders should not be removed from society and locked up with violent criminals while rapists and murderers go on parole. Most Americans do not want pot for sale at the local 7-11. This is common sense.
Most Americans don't want to throw the borders wide open. If we don't protect our borders, what's the point of having a sovereign nation in the first place? In this regard, Libertarians are just a useless proxy for one-world government. Most Americans see right through that. It just doesn't make sense.
The Libertarians have some excellent ideas, but until they are willing to act like real politicians and engage in the art of compromise, until they temper their idealism with common sense, they are useless.
That's why the Reform Party and the Libertarian Party need to unite. The Reformed-Libertarian Party could actually pull people from the Dems and the Republicans. Look at how well Ross Perot did despite being a paranoid with a hopeless running-mate. There is plainly a yearning in America for a party that isn't hog-tied by special interests, a party that holds true to the American ideals, but does so in a well thought-out practical manner. The Reformed-Libertarian Party could be the answer.
Just do me one favor: Leave Jesse Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot out of it. We need someone that mainstream Americans can accept.
Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted
If I ran a service like that, I'd be tempted to skim off some of the papers, say... 10%, and market them to students who need a "gauranteed A".
As for turnitin.com owning the paper, are you sure it's not a non-exclusive license? If it's a non-exclusive license to use, they are just protecting themselves. If it's an actual copyright transfer than I wouldn't stand for it. It would be interesting to see a bunch of warez-swapping, MP3 trading students standing up for IP protection. It doesn't feel so good when the shoe is on the other foot, does it? I mean, after all, it's not like you lose any money by letting turnitin.com have the paper. How many students sell their papers anyway? Yada, yada, yada, all the same old AIP arguments turned on their head...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised that anybody has to be "convinced" MS uses Open Source code. I've always thought it was common knowledge. Also, you could have just looked in Help About for IE and seen that it uses the Independant JPEG Group code. Based on this prior behavior, I always assumed they used the free PNG implementation. Since PNG uses zlib, MS uses zlib.
Now, if MS were smart they'd have a standard place for libjpeg.dll, libpng.dll, and zlib.dll but as far as I know there is no such thing. Either the functions are in some other DLLs, or the names are obfuscated. This bug, combined with MS's "security initiative" represents a golden opportunity: MS could take the occasion to give us "standard" DLLs so that developers would no longer have to package them, and could instead say something like "make sure you have this service pack and if you don't, here it is".
Indeed, when I first heard of a proposal to do this, circa 1986, it was referred to as "chameleon cloth".
With the right software, I bet you could get by with perhaps just 4 cameras. The tricky part is having the fabric be durable, and having the signals that travel to the pixels be fault tolerant. Also, it's got to be non-stick. Otherwise, any damage to the fabric, or anything stuck to it ruins the whole thing. OTOH, if the enemy delivers bright green sticky stuff that rains down on the soldiers, it will also rain down on the terrain. Another possible tactic is to fire a flare that backlights the soldiers with a strobe. Any latency in the camo system will be detectable, although cave-dwelling terrorists aren't likely to have such tech.
Did anybody mirror it?
I wouldn't write code. I'd write novels where the characters were always discussing code. Instead of using quotes when the characters spoke, I'd use /* and */. Whenever I was narrating I'd put a // at the start of the line. If some idiot decides to OCR my novel into a computer and compile it, it's not my problem.
In all seriousness, I hope this proposal is DOA. This will crush the little guy, and enrich the lawyers. Oh, wait a second... all the laws are written by lawyers.
Look, legal liability for software is already an option. Ever heard of "mission critical"? If somebody is willing to back up their "5 nines" with dollars, I say more power to 'em; but don't go making my "3 nines, but a lot cheaper" illegal.
Boy howdy! When I was in 7th grade I recalled how my sister took gum wrappers, folded them a certain way, and made links for long chains. Naturally, I took the link design, switched to heavy Xerox paper, and used it as a rubber-band projectile. It flew much further than a rubber band, and could inflict pain from 20 feet away if you got a good shot.
I wonder why the girls didn't think of that? (that was a rhetorical question) I thought it was way over the line when the delinqents in the back of the bus loaded them with bits of metal and leftover plexiglass from shop though. I think they got suspended for that.
Of course the fun never ends. A friend, who was a freshman in college at the time, obtained 30 feet of medical tubing (essentially, a huge rubber band). They flung water balloons from so far across the quad that nobody knew from whence they came.
Then of course we have all heard of stuff like "pumpkin chunkin" and so forth. So, I ain't the least bit surprised $400 rubber-band machine guns exist.
My initial reaction to this was to dismiss it as more AIP rhetoric, but I think you have a point.
I now think the 3 classes should be:
1. Those that are more likely to occur when protection exists (a new type of motor that requires a $500,000,000 investment to perfect).
2. Those that are less likely to occur due to the presence of protection (a software project that can't afford to defend itself from frivolous lawsuits because, oh say... XOR mouse cursors are patented).
3. Those that will occur no matter what (some guy mixes cough syrup into a drink, sets it on fire, and discovers that it tastes good).
A simple "how strong should IP protection be" is really too simple a question when we view things in this light. Perhaps the questions should be 1. Which classes of inventions fall into which category. 2. How much protection should that class enjoy to omptimize output.
Notice I said *optimize* output. It is entirely possible for a society to determine that some types of IP should be minimized as opposed to maximized (e.g., child porn, or for a less extreme example... they might want to encourage TV networks to produce more serious programming and less mental pablum). But then when you start to talk about discouraging some forms of IP, you get into free speech issues...
Difficult questions indeed...
Perhaps there are two types of invention: Those that will occur without protection, and those that won't occur without it.
Obviously, not having protection won't hinder all invention, as the "inventive spirit" is something that most of us believe exists.
Also, while there may have been invention during that time, there was probably also more trade secrecy, something the article doesn't explore at all.
If the patent process slows business, it may actually be because it requires disclosure. Companies go for the "sure thing" by patenting, but give up the possibility of perpetuating their monopoly through secrecy which can be *very* effective. Thinking Coca-Cola? Chump change. Consider Ziljan (the cymbal people) IIRC, they kept the process a family secret for something like 400 years or more. If all the Ziljans get hit by a bus, nobody will ever be able to make those exact cymbals again. So, what was that about patents being bad for society?
Of course this is all just speculation and stuff. Nobody has the time to do an unbiansed, rigorous, statisticly valid study and present it in such a way so that laymen could understand it. That would be... a lot of work!
Go ahead, Washington State, tax those jobs right outta there!
Why, I think I here something... sounds like a phone ringing. Hello, Chicago?
False statement. In the majority of cases where "socialism" was implemented, the country had just come out of a major war. What exactly was the fat Lenin's, or the Communist East Europeans lived off of? Or China, which had been ravaged by the Japanese and a two civil wars in a row?
Time for some history:
Soviet Famine and Chinese Famine
Yes, there was war on those countries, but agricultural traditions--the fat of the land--survived intact. Then they were destroyed by the Socialists/Communists whatever you want to call them. Very idealistic people can go tragicly wrong.
Also, I said GPL software was inferior, not free software (*BSD vs. Linux).
Re-read my statement.
When GPL software dominates a market, we are left with low-quality free packages on one end and expensive "industry standard" or "specialized" software on the other.
There is nothing there that says proprietary is always better or that free software is inferior. I said that when a particular class of free software license dominates, the proprietary packages in that market become fewer and more expensive.
I have to give you some credit though--many of my statements are not backed up, and I can't cite references. Unfortunately, I don't get payed to research these things. I'm an amateur pundit, but if someone wanted to pay me to work at a think tank, I think I'd enjoy it.
I also have to give you credit for not forming your argument based on your desire to noun a verb. Why do so many Free Software advocates center their arguments around trying to change the language? Perhaps it's just a bad habit they picked up from RMS and the PC speech movement.
As for my statements about the government stepping in to fund a GPL project, it's not fortune telling: it's history. Of course that's just one example. The "sneaky funding" through grants and diverted effort on the part of government workers (which is illegal since works created by US gov. workers in the course of their daily business are supposed to be Public Domain) is a much bigger problem right now. I have little doubt we will hear even more of this in the future.
Exploring the rest of my statements with an open mind is left as an exercise for the reader.
That's enough for me tonight folks. Peace.
Problem: What if you have a structure that *optionally* allocates memory, and your cleanup code for that structure just frees all the pointers?
I have never bothered to check free because my rule is: for every init of a structure, make sure you call the cleanup.
This has worked for hundreds of kLOC of C I've written. Also, debugging heaps are nice. :)
If strong IP rights didn't exist, ASPs would dominate the market. In fact, the erosion of IP rights through piracy is one of the primary motives for the ASP model. ASPs suck. I just want to buy stuff and use it without having to worry about the network. Time for my favorite quote regarding ASPs: "I can't use my word processor. The network's down."
With closed source software each competitor is forced to reinvent the wheel.
With closed-source software, each competitor is encouraged to bring their own individual perspective to the problems at hand.
The middle ground may get squeezed but the services area expands. Take the market for PHP programmers as an example. I've even seen jobs to write PHPNuke add-ons.
You're actually making my point. As a potential retail consumer for such a web front end (but too small a consumer to consider hiring a programmer) my choices are limited.
[regarding the price polarization effect]Like Apache in the web server market? Or MySQL/Postgres in the DB market
I don't know much about DBs, but IIRC, the Open Source community whined a long time about the lack of something called "transactions" in MySQL. Oracle had it first. Apache isn't GPL'd. Open Source that isn't GPL'd attracts, dare I say, a better class of developers--people who are open to the idea that they might need to commercialize at some later point in time, and have the foresight to seek out solutions that allow them to keep their options open.
Why did Apple choose BSD? I personally love the free PNG and JPEG source, and would happily contribute bug-fixes to them. Just one problem: I've never found a bug in either one. Instead, I've released a few simple things like USFlag as my way of "giving back". And there was no need for a coercive license to make me do that when it made sense for me to do it.
For a good example of price polarization, Look at GIMP vs. Photoshop, and then try finding good shareware for $20-$100 that does similar things using an open standard file format. I'm willing to be proved wrong on this. A rigorous study would be difficult, and I'm not aware of any unbiased research. I would even settle for good inexpensive, currently maintained shareware that handles PSDs. Maybe I just haven't found the right package.
Those that would like to steal code repackage it and sell it without giving either credit or code back to whence it came.
It never ceases to amaze me how strongly people will defend IP when the GPL is attacked. So, are you now on the record as stating that strong IP rights are important?
I can't believe Mundie's complaint about the GPL is that it will pull money out of the public sector. He should be arguing the other way around: In the long run, the GPL puts money into the public sector, and that's why it's bad.
Peren's argument distracts us from the real problem by pointing out how much money business saves in the short-run.
What is the real problem? There are at least two: First, by discouraging entry into the software market, the GPL reduces the number of competitors. This means less consumer choice, not more. That's because most consumers have the ability and the resources to evaluate and choose programs, but most don't have the ability and resources to evaluate and choose programmers. Free Software is devestating to the diverse "middle ground" of software that sells in the $20-$100 range. When GPL software dominates a market, we are left with low-quality free packages on one end and expensive "industry standard" or "specialized" software on the other.
The other problem is that when GPL projects fail to keep pace with technology, there is the danger that people will make arguments that the government needs to step in and take over the project. This is the secret hearts desire of the Free Software movement, which is just socialism with a hi-tech veneer. Already, there are too many government workers writing software who should instead be using a diverse array of packages from different vendors, linked together by open standards (open standards are law, but executables are *not*. That's a critical distinction that Lessig fails to make, but we aren't here to talk about Lessig).
Perens is right in the short-run: Socialism always does well in the beginning because it lives off the fat of the land that has been stored up. In the long-run though, it drags the economy down.
...everybody in government should have to put a little disclaimer on their policy statements, something like this:
The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent those of my employer
In this case, the "employer" is We The People of the United States.
I wager that most of us have no desire to nuke Russia, which is making remarkable progress towards becoming a free society. Come to think of it, most of us have no desire to nuke anybody unless they nuke us first.
Well, if you are curious you might want to try the Nuclear Blast Mapper
This thing was made before terrorist nukes were taken seriously by the general public, so the smallest weapon they have is 1 megaton. Most experts have been saying that the terrorists will have a hard time just getting A-bombs. H-bombs are another matter. Anyhow, even if the bad guys got a 1 megaton bomb on the Capitol, everything inside the beltway would be safe except for fallout. The prevailing winds here are from the east--Marylanders take note, you will get most of the fallout. No more trips to Ocean City after that, and the bad guys would get a bonus of poisoning the Naval Academy if the winds were blowing in that direction.
Of course the terrorist nuke, if it exists, is about 15 *kilotons*. That would ruin a good portion of downtown DC, and send a lot of survivors into the 'burbs.
So, I too have been thinking about this a lot lately since I live near DC. I'd be lying in my bed at night, and all of the sudden it would get like daylight. Less than a minute later there would be a tremendous noise like a wierd thunder I assume, but the damaging blast wouldn't hit us. Then the next day we would either get killed by the survivors, or we would all come together to help them. I'm an optimist, I think the latter is more likely.
What do you think, they use contact fuses on those things?
I don't think so. The bomb probably has some kind of majority voting computer system like the Space Shuttle. It has inertial guidance as well as GPS, and it checks both just in case some nimrod blows up the GPS satellites. If a majority of the computers decide that the rocket malfunctioned, they destroy the bomb by detonating the conventional starter charges out of sync.
Of course this is just a pure guess on my part, but I know if I were designing such a thing to overfly friendly countries, I would make sure there was some way to prevent it from nuking the friendlies.
I know for a fact that there have been cases where nukes were dropped by accident and did not explode, but presumably that was because they were not armed to begin with.
Does anybody out there have any real information about what kind of safeguards are built into warheads? Come to think of it, it is a simple matter to estimate time to target and not arm the bomb until X seconds after launch.
Its only purpose is to subvert the US constitution by mooting the clause that grants limited rights to authors. In essence, they have found a loophole in the Constitution and are exploiting it. This hardly qualifies them as champions of liberty.
Bah! BSD it like the other guy said. If it's BSD you GPL bigots can still link with it, and so can everybody else. BSD is part of a continuous line between openness and control, with only Public Domain exhibiting more opennness. GPL is designed to restrict movement along the continuum. For those who view the other parts of the continuum as important, complaints regarding the GPL and freedom make perfect sense. For those who regard the other parts of the continuum as immoral, the complaints are incomprehensible.
The "non commercial only" license exherts more control than GPL, but does not exhibit the same controls as a EULA. For this reason, NCO licenses live in a world of suckiness. Whenever I have seen NCO licenses, I have seen code that is either used by a handful of vendors, or code that just dies from lack of interest. Where the GPL achieves nearly optimal incentive to copy, the NCO achieves nearly optimal incentive to ignore.
So, I would be happier if MS closed the source totally. That would give them the incentive to throw their marketing muscle behind it and create something that flies like their JVM. As it stands, they will probably end up developing 2 CLI's anyway because of this license: One that is standards compliant (Rotor), and another that peforms and that they really care about.
OTOH, if they BSD'd it, it could become the industry standard and MS would actually get some of the best free help in the business to debug their code. The security and performance would be comparable to *BSD.
If the license stays as it is, Rotor will become just another exhibit in the Consortium Curiousity Museum. They might as well just spend their time double-checking the standards documentation. It would be a more productive use of man-hours.
As a general rule, I think we are going to see Israel vs. Palestine and USA vs. terrorists shaking out pretty much the same way: Low casualty figures in the "allied" countries consisting mostly of civilians. High casualty figures in the "axis" countries consisting mostly of military.
Of course, the Axis countries always like to count starving civilians as casualties, but when their leaders divert most resources to soldiers and weapons and ignore the needs of the civilians, whose fault is it?
You know what they say... I went to a statisticians conference, and a hockey game broke out... or something like that. Or was that, "lies, damn lies, and casualty figures"?
...I now present you with the lyrics to Heat of the Moment, combined with some extraneous text to sqeeze by the evil awful "not enough characters per line" filter. Many characters of useless stuff required to bypass this filer. Mary hada little spam. Tweedle deedle dee. Dubm-dilly-um. And all that other good stuff that *they* don't want you to have.
I never meant to be so bad to you
One thing I said that I would never do -
A look from you and I would fall from grace
And that would wipe the smile right from my face.
Do you remember when we used to dance
An incident arose from circumstance.
One thing let to another
we were young
And we would scream together songs unsung.
It was the heat of the moment
Tellin' me what our hearts meant
The heat of the moment shone in your eyes.
And now you find yourself in '82
The disco hot foots hold the jump for you.
you can't concent yourself with bigger things
You catch and pull a ride on the dragon's wings.
'cause it's the heat of the moment
The heat of the moment
the heat of the moment
Shone in your eyes.
And when your looks are gone and your alone
How many nights you sit beside the phone?
What were the things you wanted for yourself -
Teenage ambitions
you remember well.
It was the heat of the moment
Tellin' you what your heart meants
The heat of the moment shone in your eyes.
It was the heat of the moment
the heat of the moment
The heat of the moment shone in your eyes.
Heat of the moment
heat of the moment
heat of the mom
Your contentiousness is exceeded only by the irony of your .sig.
In the 'common vernacular' people run around claiming to write good (when of course when can only write well, or not so well, etc...) It was common 'knowledge' that the sun revolved around the earth in Copernicus' day ... you could just ask anyone on the ancient Slashot site. So my question is this ... do you have any actual valid point to make?
Yes. There is a time and a place for technical jargon. You are confusing the "common vernacular" with "common mistakes". "Write good" may become acceptable over time as language evolves, whereas the position of the Sun is an objective scientific fact.
Efforts to use precise technical jargon all the time will actually result in ineffective communication. Judging when and where to use what kind of language is an important skill. It might be more convenient for you to use multiple words that convey fine shades of meaning, but you stand a good chance of losing your audience when you do that.
This reminds me of the whole "cracker" vs. "hacker" debate. You know who won that, and you should know why.
Perhaps you were unaware that Slashdot is a technical forum.
Chuckle. LOL.
Libertarians fail to garner more than 3% in most elections for one simple reason: They have no common sense.
Examples:
Most Americans agree that non-violent drug offenders should not be removed from society and locked up with violent criminals while rapists and murderers go on parole. Most Americans do not want pot for sale at the local 7-11. This is common sense.
Most Americans don't want to throw the borders wide open. If we don't protect our borders, what's the point of having a sovereign nation in the first place? In this regard, Libertarians are just a useless proxy for one-world government. Most Americans see right through that. It just doesn't make sense.
The Libertarians have some excellent ideas, but until they are willing to act like real politicians and engage in the art of compromise, until they temper their idealism with common sense, they are useless.
That's why the Reform Party and the Libertarian Party need to unite. The Reformed-Libertarian Party could actually pull people from the Dems and the Republicans. Look at how well Ross Perot did despite being a paranoid with a hopeless running-mate. There is plainly a yearning in America for a party that isn't hog-tied by special interests, a party that holds true to the American ideals, but does so in a well thought-out practical manner. The Reformed-Libertarian Party could be the answer.
Just do me one favor: Leave Jesse Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot out of it. We need someone that mainstream Americans can accept.
Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted
If I ran a service like that, I'd be tempted to skim off some of the papers, say... 10%, and market them to students who need a "gauranteed A".
As for turnitin.com owning the paper, are you sure it's not a non-exclusive license? If it's a non-exclusive license to use, they are just protecting themselves. If it's an actual copyright transfer than I wouldn't stand for it. It would be interesting to see a bunch of warez-swapping, MP3 trading students standing up for IP protection. It doesn't feel so good when the shoe is on the other foot, does it? I mean, after all, it's not like you lose any money by letting turnitin.com have the paper. How many students sell their papers anyway? Yada, yada, yada, all the same old AIP arguments turned on their head...