That's interesting. I was thinking the other day about making a movie set in a future where there were no intellectual property rights.
There is a gang of criminals who sell binaries to people that need things done NOW. The legal alternative is to wait for your request to be handled by a government-run Sourceforge style collective, which costs nothing but takes forever. In one scene, a man is programming and there is a knock on the door: "Open up! We're here to set you free". Police burst in and take his computer while singing The Free Software Song. He spends a year in jail. When he gets out, his daughter asks him to tell her about when "free" used to mean you could do what you want. It would be just like in Fahrenheit 451 where the role of the fireman had changed.
Lousy trolls. I got all excited when I saw "A Real Case" thinking there might be beer involved. Then I saw "Against The Jews" and thought, I can't drink that. Mmmm... race hate. See? It just doesn't work.
Even without satellites intentionally blowing up, debris is already a problem. One good space battle, and the Earth will have a junk layer too thick to navigate. Then you can kiss all space travel good-bye until they figure out a way to clean it up. Maybe somebody will figure out a way to deorbit massive ammounts of junk all at once. The first idea that comes to mind is releasing enough gas in orbit to slow down the junk, but maybe that isn't practical. At any rate, if they factor debris into this I bet they will determine that it isn't worth destroying this particular battlefield.
Re:My Generation's "Kennedy was Shot" moment
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 2
I was in high school when it happened. I was home that day, but I can't remember why. It might have been an administrative "teacher's holiday" or something like that in our county.
I was sleaping in, and I was having a dream. In the dream, I was playing with this crystal perfume decanter that my mother keeps on the dresser. The symbolism of this object was plain for me--it was one of those things that as a child I was not supposed to touch because it might break. Yet of course, it is a very nice looking object so you want to touch it. As I was playing with it, the top fell off the base, and I was struggling to balance it back on top without making noise or being noticed. Then the phone rang (in real life, not in the dream).
That woke me up. It was my mother calling to tell me to turn on the TV so I could see what happened.
It is just really strange that I had that dream at that particular moment, and I will never forget it. In the dream I never got the thing balanced back on the base, so I was thinking that maybe this meant NASA would launch no more shuttles. Of course they eventually did, but it certainly took them a long time to get the program "balanced" again.
...except for all the others. If we try to value IP based on the scarcity model, we arrive at zero. We know that "zero" is an irrational answer to the problem. We have no rational basis for evaluating products with such wierd elasticity of demand and supply. Therefore, the only sane thing to do is treat IP as if it were physical property, and that is exactly what copyright does. Until you come up with a better answer, you are just tilting at windmills. We have yet to come up with a better answer. The Stephen King experiment mentioned in the article was a flop.
And only later did a good answer occur to me--a high tech twist on an old proverb. "There is one beautiful program, and every programmer has written it."
The original of course is, "There is one perfect child, and every mother has it."
This just in. In an important new development in labor relations, managers at leading firms have determined that unions are not needed. Despite widespead speculation by management that this was the case, positive proof was lacking until recently. An executive at a leading technology firm, Cobalt, was quoated as saying:
"Because clarity on issues like this is important, we have updated the Employee Handbook expressly stating Cobalt's position that a union is not needed here,"
When asked about safety regulations, taxes, reports to stockholders, and equal rights; management had no specific comment other than that they were "cautiously optimistic".
Not so much the code itself, but the APIs are easy to use, they're highly portable, and very free. I wish I could say libpng, but it took a little bit too long to figure out how to make it do what I wanted. Maybe that was just me though. There was some trial and error involved. Let's hear it not only for "beautiful code" but the entire package being well designed and easy to use.
1. They monopolize the computer industry and stifle competition.
They enforce standards and create opportunities. Making a PCI card? Write a Windows driver for it, and the job is done. BeOS? Would never have been started if it weren't for nasty closed source OS's like Windows and MacOS. Now crappy Open Source desktops are starting to steal just enough market to make BeOS a poor business, so they do the only thing they can do, which is to appease the OSS community, but it was the prospect of selling the OS for $70/per that caused them to enter the market with something new and innovative--not the opportunity to "serve the community".
2. They do not open their source so that other developers can create software on an even playing field with them.
And I bet the Giant's offense won't just hand the ball over to Baltimore. What a bunch of bad guys they are.
3. They are not responsive to fixing flaws in their systems that are discovered by the community at large.
When the problem is fixable, they usually respond in a decent ammount of time. Think Linux is better? Consider the recent Linux worm.
4. They overcharge for their software and force their clients into a nasty, anti-competetive business relationship.
Don't like the high price? Try to offer a similar product at a better price. That's what a free market is all about. There is nothing immoral about them charging as much as they like for an OS. You might counter that this takes money from the pockets of organizations like hospitals that offer lifesaving services. The counterpoint is that if they charged less it would reduce the quality of life of employees and stockholders, which can kill just as many people as bad health care (poverty is no better for your health than an x-ray machine that crashes, it just kills in a less dramatic fashion).
Calm down. Poor quality software is the *worst* reason to bash a closed-source, inflexable, monopolizing corporation. Fundamental matters of principle carry a lot more weight.
The attacks levied against companies selling proprietary software are in many cases just the same old attacks that have always come from socialists. When it comes to morality, it doesn't matter how you think things should be. It matters how things will be as the result of the outcome from your actions. History is on the side of a balance between socialism and capitalism, with the preservation of individual liberties being important. In the case of software, capitalism works better on the desktop so far, and socialism is better on the server so far. Individual liberty has been preserved in that people are allowed to create free and proprietary software, and customers are allowed to choose. Let's hope it stays this way.
Completely bogus. I can't "force" you to do anything.
OK then. Microsoft can't force us to do anything either. You must accept that to be consistant.
Yes. You *can* force us to do things. There are already a few things I can think of where the best tool for the job is GPL, and there are no close seconds. Under that circumstance, the choice that we must make is a direct result of programmers choosing the GPL.
Back when only a few people were GPL'ing; your statement about not being able to force people might have been true. Now there is huge and growing market penetration. Now you are no longer the rebels. You are the authorities. You must deal with your power now. Like all rebel movements that come to power, the Free Software movement is likely to be very authoritarian. We'll see.
Right on. And for those of you who are going to jump on this guy and try to refute it, consider this:
In grade school you were taught the multiplication table and several procedures for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing very large numbers.
Together that data and the procedures constitute a kind of program. Now, what if your teacher had told you that basic arithmetic was under the GPL, and that all products using basic arithmetic had to be performed as a public service?
RMS would have us believe all knowledge work should be collectivised. A radical right winger might go so far as to state the opposite (imagine a class full of first graders trying to figure out long division with no help from the teacher). Both sides are obviously wrong. As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Slashdot's corporate parent--are they going to do this? If there is a Transmeta CPU that will fit in a Pentium socket and work like a Pentium then VA has time, but if this requires a special MoBo it looks like VA is behind. I guess if this requires any real effort they will just partner with one of these companies as a VAR. They are certainly not in a position to acquire anything these days.
Harvard University, said: "Using only Earth 2001 technology, we could now generate a beamed laser pulse that appears 5,000 times brighter than our sun, as seen by a distant civilisation in the direction of its slender beam.
What will it say? Make Money Fast? Send back a green flash if you want to be removed from our beam-list?
On behalf of desideria's family, I would like to announce some sad news. It appears that several minutes ago he had a stroke; the result of something the doctors called an "oxymoronic inquiry stack overflow failure". We aren't entirely sure what that means, but they said shock therapy might help. We'll keep you posted.
Argghh!!! It's not the mailers that cause the problem. It's people like you.
You remind me of this room mate I had who actually responded to a telemarketer. If it weren't for people like you, the whole thing would just go away on its own.
So, forget about mailing bricks to the companies. Find the people that like this stuff and mail bricks to *them*.
Re:Learn some history, dammit!
on
Antitrust
·
· Score: 2
Lousy Standard Oil. Way worse then Microsoft. Somebody needs to break them up so that we won't have these outrageously high gas prices.
No, that's not it. They had no trouble supplying power with the current number of plants until very recently.
It's the way they deregulated. They deregulated the wholesale market, but not the retail market. You don't have to be a Harvard MBA to realize that in that situation, the retailers get caught in a squeeze play. In this case, the power company is the retailer, and they are being pushed towards bankruptcy.
It sticks in my craw when I hear people say "deregulation caused it". That's a half truth, because they only half deregulated.
They should either re-regulate the wholesale market or deregulate the consumer market. The latter is not likely because just the *threat* of higher consumer costs is enough to bring out protestors.
This whole thing reminds me of a joke that was told during California's last recession: "will the last one leaving please turn out the lights".
Perhaps someone could write an American English to Brittish English translator.
Maybe they will add one to Babelfish, so that you can type in "I was smoking a cigarrette while pushing the pram" and get back "I was burning a fag at the prom"
Anyone who knows anything about Linux immediately associates "LinuxOne" with "Sleazy fly-by-night scam from Hong Kong".
You'd have to be nuts to merge with them and acquire the stench of scandal. The people that started this to begin with are stupid to think that anyone would fall for it after the Linux tulip bulb mania.
I never thought we would hear from them again. Does the LinuxOne distro even exist? If it does, it is anything more than RedHat with no changes other than the name? Does anybody run it?
Slashdot Mirror
That's interesting. I was thinking the other day about making a movie set in a future where there were no intellectual property rights.
There is a gang of criminals who sell binaries to people that need things done NOW. The legal alternative is to wait for your request to be handled by a government-run Sourceforge style collective, which costs nothing but takes forever. In one scene, a man is programming and there is a knock on the door: "Open up! We're here to set you free". Police burst in and take his computer while singing The Free Software Song. He spends a year in jail. When he gets out, his daughter asks him to tell her about when "free" used to mean you could do what you want. It would be just like in Fahrenheit 451 where the role of the fireman had changed.
Lousy trolls. I got all excited when I saw "A Real Case" thinking there might be beer involved. Then I saw "Against The Jews" and thought, I can't drink that. Mmmm... race hate. See? It just doesn't work.
Yet again.
Another product for the "I'll care about it when I can input my credit card and order it" file.
Even without satellites intentionally blowing up, debris is already a problem. One good space battle, and the Earth will have a junk layer too thick to navigate. Then you can kiss all space travel good-bye until they figure out a way to clean it up. Maybe somebody will figure out a way to deorbit massive ammounts of junk all at once. The first idea that comes to mind is releasing enough gas in orbit to slow down the junk, but maybe that isn't practical. At any rate, if they factor debris into this I bet they will determine that it isn't worth destroying this particular battlefield.
I was in high school when it happened. I was home that day, but I can't remember why. It might have been an administrative "teacher's holiday" or something like that in our county.
I was sleaping in, and I was having a dream. In the dream, I was playing with this crystal perfume decanter that my mother keeps on the dresser. The symbolism of this object was plain for me--it was one of those things that as a child I was not supposed to touch because it might break. Yet of course, it is a very nice looking object so you want to touch it. As I was playing with it, the top fell off the base, and I was struggling to balance it back on top without making noise or being noticed. Then the phone rang (in real life, not in the dream).
That woke me up. It was my mother calling to tell me to turn on the TV so I could see what happened.
It is just really strange that I had that dream at that particular moment, and I will never forget it. In the dream I never got the thing balanced back on the base, so I was thinking that maybe this meant NASA would launch no more shuttles. Of course they eventually did, but it certainly took them a long time to get the program "balanced" again.
...except for all the others. If we try to value IP based on the scarcity model, we arrive at zero. We know that "zero" is an irrational answer to the problem. We have no rational basis for evaluating products with such wierd elasticity of demand and supply. Therefore, the only sane thing to do is treat IP as if it were physical property, and that is exactly what copyright does. Until you come up with a better answer, you are just tilting at windmills. We have yet to come up with a better answer. The Stephen King experiment mentioned in the article was a flop.
And only later did a good answer occur to me--a high tech twist on an old proverb. "There is one beautiful program, and every programmer has written it."
The original of course is, "There is one perfect child, and every mother has it."
Manager Says Union Not Needed
This just in. In an important new development in labor relations, managers at leading firms have determined that unions are not needed. Despite widespead speculation by management that this was the case, positive proof was lacking until recently. An executive at a leading technology firm, Cobalt, was quoated as saying:
"Because clarity on issues like this is important, we have updated the Employee Handbook expressly stating Cobalt's position that a union is not needed here,"
When asked about safety regulations, taxes, reports to stockholders, and equal rights; management had no specific comment other than that they were "cautiously optimistic".
Not so much the code itself, but the APIs are easy to use, they're highly portable, and very free. I wish I could say libpng, but it took a little bit too long to figure out how to make it do what I wanted. Maybe that was just me though. There was some trial and error involved. Let's hear it not only for "beautiful code" but the entire package being well designed and easy to use.
1. They monopolize the computer industry and stifle competition.
They enforce standards and create opportunities. Making a PCI card? Write a Windows driver for it, and the job is done. BeOS? Would never have been started if it weren't for nasty closed source OS's like Windows and MacOS. Now crappy Open Source desktops are starting to steal just enough market to make BeOS a poor business, so they do the only thing they can do, which is to appease the OSS community, but it was the prospect of selling the OS for $70/per that caused them to enter the market with something new and innovative--not the opportunity to "serve the community".
2. They do not open their source so that other developers can create software on an even playing field with them.
And I bet the Giant's offense won't just hand the ball over to Baltimore. What a bunch of bad guys they are.
3. They are not responsive to fixing flaws in their systems that are discovered by the community at large.
When the problem is fixable, they usually respond in a decent ammount of time. Think Linux is better? Consider the recent Linux worm.
4. They overcharge for their software and force their clients into a nasty, anti-competetive business relationship.
Don't like the high price? Try to offer a similar product at a better price. That's what a free market is all about. There is nothing immoral about them charging as much as they like for an OS. You might counter that this takes money from the pockets of organizations like hospitals that offer lifesaving services. The counterpoint is that if they charged less it would reduce the quality of life of employees and stockholders, which can kill just as many people as bad health care (poverty is no better for your health than an x-ray machine that crashes, it just kills in a less dramatic fashion).
Calm down. Poor quality software is the *worst* reason to bash a closed-source, inflexable, monopolizing corporation. Fundamental matters of principle carry a lot more weight.
The attacks levied against companies selling proprietary software are in many cases just the same old attacks that have always come from socialists. When it comes to morality, it doesn't matter how you think things should be. It matters how things will be as the result of the outcome from your actions. History is on the side of a balance between socialism and capitalism, with the preservation of individual liberties being important. In the case of software, capitalism works better on the desktop so far, and socialism is better on the server so far. Individual liberty has been preserved in that people are allowed to create free and proprietary software, and customers are allowed to choose. Let's hope it stays this way.
Completely bogus. I can't "force" you to do anything.
OK then. Microsoft can't force us to do anything either. You must accept that to be consistant.
Yes. You *can* force us to do things. There are already a few things I can think of where the best tool for the job is GPL, and there are no close seconds. Under that circumstance, the choice that we must make is a direct result of programmers choosing the GPL.
Back when only a few people were GPL'ing; your statement about not being able to force people might have been true. Now there is huge and growing market penetration. Now you are no longer the rebels. You are the authorities. You must deal with your power now. Like all rebel movements that come to power, the Free Software movement is likely to be very authoritarian. We'll see.
Right on. And for those of you who are going to jump on this guy and try to refute it, consider this:
In grade school you were taught the multiplication table and several procedures for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing very large numbers.
Together that data and the procedures constitute a kind of program. Now, what if your teacher had told you that basic arithmetic was under the GPL, and that all products using basic arithmetic had to be performed as a public service?
RMS would have us believe all knowledge work should be collectivised. A radical right winger might go so far as to state the opposite (imagine a class full of first graders trying to figure out long division with no help from the teacher). Both sides are obviously wrong. As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Slashdot's corporate parent--are they going to do this? If there is a Transmeta CPU that will fit in a Pentium socket and work like a Pentium then VA has time, but if this requires a special MoBo it looks like VA is behind. I guess if this requires any real effort they will just partner with one of these companies as a VAR. They are certainly not in a position to acquire anything these days.
Harvard University, said: "Using only Earth 2001 technology, we could now generate a beamed laser pulse that appears 5,000 times brighter than our sun, as seen by a distant civilisation in the direction of its slender beam.
What will it say? Make Money Fast? Send back a green flash if you want to be removed from our beam-list?
On behalf of desideria's family, I would like to announce some sad news. It appears that several minutes ago he had a stroke; the result of something the doctors called an "oxymoronic inquiry stack overflow failure". We aren't entirely sure what that means, but they said shock therapy might help. We'll keep you posted.
That's funny. When I tried to learn the guitar, I found myself wishing it was shaped like a keyboard.
cant this also be easily ported to Linux since Quake was GPL'd?
This has to be one of the silliest things I've ever seen on /., which is saying alot. What, praytell does the license have to do with portability?
Argghh!!! It's not the mailers that cause the problem. It's people like you.
You remind me of this room mate I had who actually responded to a telemarketer. If it weren't for people like you, the whole thing would just go away on its own.
So, forget about mailing bricks to the companies. Find the people that like this stuff and mail bricks to *them*.
Lousy Standard Oil. Way worse then Microsoft. Somebody needs to break them up so that we won't have these outrageously high gas prices.
No, that's not it. They had no trouble supplying power with the current number of plants until very recently.
It's the way they deregulated. They deregulated the wholesale market, but not the retail market. You don't have to be a Harvard MBA to realize that in that situation, the retailers get caught in a squeeze play. In this case, the power company is the retailer, and they are being pushed towards bankruptcy.
It sticks in my craw when I hear people say "deregulation caused it". That's a half truth, because they only half deregulated.
They should either re-regulate the wholesale market or deregulate the consumer market. The latter is not likely because just the *threat* of higher consumer costs is enough to bring out protestors.
This whole thing reminds me of a joke that was told during California's last recession: "will the last one leaving please turn out the lights".
That just raises more issues. I can't legally gain from the content?
So, I shouldn't read it unless I expect to gain nothing from it.
Perhaps someone could write an American English to Brittish English translator.
Maybe they will add one to Babelfish, so that you can type in "I was smoking a cigarrette while pushing the pram" and get back "I was burning a fag at the prom"
Anyone who knows anything about Linux immediately associates "LinuxOne" with "Sleazy fly-by-night scam from Hong Kong".
You'd have to be nuts to merge with them and acquire the stench of scandal. The people that started this to begin with are stupid to think that anyone would fall for it after the Linux tulip bulb mania.
I never thought we would hear from them again. Does the LinuxOne distro even exist? If it does, it is anything more than RedHat with no changes other than the name? Does anybody run it?
Why not use computers to create actors, George Lucas would?
Whassa isa Matrix? Meesuh can't decide take blue pill or red pill. Whassa with se gun? Oh... BANG! BANG!