Binding up sourcecode under 100+ years of copyright protection is an abuse of the whole idea of copyright law. Sourcecode holds no value to the public 100+ years from now. Companies who release code once they've decided to abandon the project is a fair coypright compromise in the internet age. But I would go further...I would have Apple or ID spell out in legalese that once they sold Y number of copies then the source code gets released...even if the codebase is not obsolete and unsupported.
Having Apple and OSS developers working together on the same codebase for a window of time could only benifit both parties. And I'm not a GPL purest...Apple release things under BSDlike license would be fine...or even a slightly more restrictive license that would require all change to come back to apple while apple is still supporting the codebase...but once Apple drops support the codebase should be released as BSD. Something like this spelled out at inception of the licensing and selling of the commecial codebase would be great. I want to support companies that build good products...but i hate seeing software and associated hardware get abandoned for lack of support...its wasteful.
"I see *no* problem with a $30 DVD or a $6 book. If they were $20 DVDs and $3 books, I would buy *more* DVDs and books".
I think I said digital distribution as an analogy to source code...let me be clear. I have no problem paying something of the order what I currently pay for CD's or books...but I have a massive problem paying the same price for the digital delivery of music or literature when I have to provide the storage medium and the bandwidth to store the downloads on. The costs of well managed digital distribution would be far less than the current retail package system. A very competitive online market place would be potential more profitable for the artists as well as being cheaper for consumers. A very competitive online marketplace could give artists much more freedom to renegotiate contracts and move from one digital label to another if they don't like the contracts. Right now the record industry "controls" artists...
remember prince and that stupid name change he did. He did it becuase is record company owned the name prince...and he had an X number of years contract with them. He got sick of it and had to publish music under a nother name to prevent breach of contract. He released a cd box set online where he made MORE money than what he made from all his record contract albums combined. He took Y number of pre-orders from people...then releases it to the public...to the public as in free to copy and redistribute. And just from the pre-orders he saw more profit than from all the records he cut while under contract....There is a better way....artists can get paid fairly and the music can be free....
Free Market economic arguments don't stand up well for music and literature...becuase music and literature or MONOPOLIES granted by congress via the copyright act. A monopoly sets prices vastly differently than someone who has to compete similar products. The creative works by artists are more unique than say different brands of refrigerators....you dont buy music or books in the same way you buy a car..normally.
but thats off-topic.....
"Apple also tries to feed and clothes all of it's employees, which is also a good thing; send all of those employee's children to school, donate to charitable causes, etc, but in order to do that they must earn profits. Business is a transaction; I pay them money, they offer me a good."
And what I'm saying is that the closed source binaries that they offer are a raw deal. I would much rather see Apple make a "promise" to open up their source code extentions have they recoup their development costs.
I want to see Apple make a social contract with the community that says... we want to develop for you a kick ass operating system...and if you like it and pay us for our time and expense...we will give you back the source code...
What's so unfair with that arrangement? The next computer I buy would be an apple, no question about it, if I had any belief that Apple would play nice and return the source code that I help pay for with my purchace once they got paidback for that codework. I never said I need to source code upfront when I pay...I understand that software development can be expensive...but I'd feel much more comfortable purchasing binaries if there was a legal undestanding that what i was paying towards was release of the source code. After so many units sold the code would be released...its a work for hire arrangement.
"You plunk down $7000, and in a year you've earned a $70k salary. Or higher"
Yep...my employer is more than willing to pay that kind of cash. I don't think i was arguing that it isnt better...my original question was is the appl e OS from a user standpoint the key?...or is it the 3rd party applications support that really made the parent poster happy. I don't have the income to buy something like photoshop for personal use. But if I needed it for work...I'd have it no doubt...becuase in the long run it would save my employer money becuase it would save me time at work. At home...my spare time has little value.
"So create your better, ideal, system, and change the world for the better, the OSS way."
That's silly...I don't have to do it...looks like china and india will do it for me.
I'm willing to PAY to hire developers to write code tp be be given back to the community...on a contract basis. This near infinite profit margin for the n+1 copy of software sold is not something I support. I will PAY to fund source code development....I donate to OSS directly or to companies who have supported OSS development in the past.
I don't believe binary only source code is a fair return on my monetary investment...considering how little expense there is in making X number of copies of the code. I would rather pay my money to pay developer time and give the source code back in return....
My employer on the other hand will shell out money hand over fist if they have to, to be productive...but my personal standards are a bit more socialistic.
You can't compare software to things like bread..becuase there isn't the same sort of production costs for software..making copies of software is cheaper than making copies of bread.
Music and books are a much better analogy...and here again I think record and publishing companies try to take an unfair profit...profit that doesnt end up benifiting the developers the people I really want to pay. there are several workable direct digital distribution business modles by performers and authors that would remove the large publishing and record industries and make books and music significantly cheaper while provide a fair return on an artists for the development time invovled...but thats another thread entirely.
God bless Apple's soul for co-opting a freely available BSD operating system to sell to the Macintosh faithful. I wonder why Apple didn't start from some closed source Unix system that they had to pay for. Does Apple also get their bread for free? If free software is good enough for apple...then its good enough for me.
I really would like to see a non-profit source code co-op farm spring up into existance...where you can donate money to pay directly for developer time to produce OSS code.
I am wishing for application support...right on target...especially for Adobe products. Adobe's big marketing campaign for PDF is viewable anywhere...I'd like them to expand that anywhere definition to include their graphics products.
Taken the fact that I know very little about programing any gui toolkit on any OS for granted... I can't imagine that coding up an interface in straight X or kde or GNOME is any harder than coding up soming in Cocoa/Carbon for Mac X... If it where a lack of a targeted api issue i would imagine Adobe and other companies would be screaming up and down to the KDE developers to give them certain API features in the QT libraries....
Shrug...ive had things take 10 seconds to install and I have had things take 3 hours (both windows and Linux)..its really a matter of how well the installer was written...and how munched yer system was before you started the install. I'm not going to debate the generalization that linux is harder to setup initially...but I've had a much easier time troubleshooting linux that I have ever had troubleshooting windows...thanks those bloated ugly.config and.rc files. Build something assuming it will "just work" and you have a dickens of a time figuring out why it isnt.
But i think you are using a different definition for "usability" than I am. I refer to usability as day in and day out usage...after the initial learning curve. I don't count learning how to use the very different process of flat file configs that linux uses as part of usability. Just like i dont count the 4 day "learning the differences between win2k and win9x" course offered where I work as part of win2k usability. If you took all the money that gets spent on basic "how to use windows" coursework out there and spent it on linux training...you'd get people just as competent in linux.
Am I willing to pay for commercial software in linux? No less than I am willing to pay for commercial software ontop of other OSes. Am i willing to pay for commercial software in general? No, not really. But my employer is...and there is no doubt in my mind that if MS office and adobe illistrator was available for linux all the pc's where I would would become some sort of linux solution.
Now how much of your happy experince was directly related to Apples OS...or other companies support of Apple's OS?
If the virtualPC people would support linux, if Asobe would support linux with apps and MS would write some apps for linux I dont think an Apple computer would be all that compeling over a linux pc. Does Apples OSX usability tweaks alone make it all that better? If office didnt exist on the macs...having an apple would be a major problem...no matter how snazzy Apples interface was.
And once you get application support parity in Linux/Apple is it worth the cost of apple hardware?
And the fact that apple laptops still refuse to have a servicable 3 button mouse like any good Unix system should leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This one button stuff irks me something fierce.
If I didnt have to buy my own hardware and I could ask for any laptop/desktop system I wanted..I'd probably by apple with OSX at this point...but I can't bring myself to pay apple's hardware prices....for the luxury of having the chance to buy MS office for a unix based system If MS had Office out for linux I don't think i would even consider an Apple. That's the big Apple selling point for me, Office on a Unix styled OS. A nice tear-jerking anittrust breakup of MS into an OS and applications company would quickly solve that one little problem for me.
I've looked at the keychain usb devices before...but i thought th at market was moving towards portable data storage with ~100MB type storage...and not something meant primarily for small file storage like password storage.
And are those usb devices supported on Solaris?
I think smartcard/usb-keychain decisions come down to price-feature ratio. If you want real portable storage for files and what not the usb devices are the way to go...if you just want to keep passwords or cyptokeys/sigs then smartcards might be cheaper to implement.
I'd also be concerned about support for the usb devices on the Unixes... But i havent seriously looked into it...since I dont have a real need for this stuff personally. My citibank smartcard reader was FREE. so getting it working under linux was a nice bonus.
the project name is about as relevant as the misnamed linuxprinting.org website
read muscle frontpage http://www.linuxnet.com/
Linux is the targeted development platform....but the goal is have a framework portable across the unix based OSes: Linux, MacOS X and Solaris are all mentioned right up front....they even offer binaries for Solaris 8 on sparc for the base pscs software.
The license for the pcsc-lite package that they offer is a BSD variant i believe....perfect for a reference implementation across ALL the unix based OSes out there.
I think the windows world already has a large collection of cardreader software supplied by vendors...so taking care of the windows boxen would probably not need any software like this at all..since you probably get the cardreeader software for windows with the device.
Have you looked into using smartcard technology. I realise it isn't very pratical adding smart card readers to every machine..but im just starting to look into smartcards on *nix and the msucle project seems to suggest that you can roll smartcard verification into your login procedure. http://www.linuxnet.com/apps.html
I'm just psyched that i got my citbank serial port smartcard reader up and running under the pscsd smart card daemon. Now i can play around with this very idea.
I thought MS was offering a version of XP for the embedded markets...where you paid for a modular OS that came it nice little pieces to fit in yer embedded hardware?
I think I saw a comparison of embedded solutions from MS against linux embedded offerings recently...
If MS can offer a modular embedded product to compete in that space...then they sure as hell can design the desktop OS around the same modular ideas.
I've seen a version of this algorithm before. At a SIAM conference held at WPI while I was an undergraduate. You can get around the "partner" effect by creating a feedback look between two types of ranked sites: group A) Authorative sites...sites other sites link to but don't necassarily link to a lot of other sites
groub b) Link sites...sites that cobble together links to useful authorative sites based on subject matter.
In your algorithm you keep a track of a particular ranking in both groups A and B interatively. Yer ranking in group A gets weighted by the quality of the sites in group B that point to you. Yer ranking in group B gets weighted by how many quality sites you link to in group A.
Iterate the process...and you know what you have...you have an eigenvector problem....and what you get in the end is an eigenvector of highly ranked group B sites which span subsets of group A based on subject matter.
The cononocal example is the word jaguar. Run this agorithm on a search engine and you will get atleast 3 very distinct collections.... the animal, the car, and the game system..primarily.
The problem is you have to ITERATE for it to be particularly useful...and that costs cpu time....I don't know if a search engine is gonna want to really invest that time.
Frankly I'm suprised any of this is patentable since I saw this at an academic talk like 6 years ago.
I built a single flask apparatus as a senior year thesis as an undergrad...we actually got it to work too. Is it fusion? Now that I'm actually in a plasma physics graduate program I find it very doubtful that what is going on inside those very very small bubbles is actually fusion. I'd love to be able to get back to sono and make a better study of it using some of the plasma knowledge. If it is fusion it has to work along the same lines as ICF..but instead of lasers you have acoustic energy. My feeling when I was working to build the eperiment was that the effect was extremely dependant of the spacial symmetry of the system and the gas content of the liquid...in my case simply water and air. Maybe nanotube technology might provide a way to accurately probe the region near the bubble without perturbing it.
The big pain of it is the bubbles are so small its extremely hard to make measurenents. Back in 98 when I did my experiment it wasnt even clear in the literature if the light was black body nor what temperature the radiation source was. The water surrounding the bubble has a cut off in the ultra violet and the peak frequency in the emitted light was not observable. I think we found some rather crude theories of shock wave development to would explain some ionization..but i dont think the theories made any estimates of temperatures rivaling that needed for a useful fusion cross section...but of course I didn't know much plasma physics then...it would be interesting to model this in the way ICF target implosion is modeled.
If its fusion...I can't imagine this be an extremely useful power source...the bubbles are so small and short lived...if extractable power were produceable I'd imagine the power would heat the sorrounding liquid to the point that the gas dynamics driving the bubble formation would break down well before you could extract any useful heat load from the bulk volume.
Even it its not fusion temperatures in the bubble...its still a very interesting effect....pico sized oven for chemical reactions. Nanotube technology is big now...a pico sized high temp reaction chamber might be very useful for nanotech. My parter and I had a whole shopping list of crude measurements we wanted to try making . Looking for some assymetries in the radiation pattern was the one we really wanted to do.
and there is another solution...find a piece of closed source code and pay to license it...oh you want your lunch for free?
Once you go looking for proprietary code to pay for and starting reading the license agreements...the simplicy and openness of the GPL gains some context. If you need to write a closed source program and you dont want to write all your own code...BUY a license for another piece of closed source work...pay someone to write it for you...find a BSD licensed code...find public domain code...but don't use the GPL code. You can cry all you want but there is nothing wrong with demanding that GPL works can not be incorporated into nonGPL works as part of the license. If it comes down to an unspecificness of the wording...the GPL will be updated so the legalese fits the intent...but the intent behind what is written in the GPL is perfectly valid as a license agreement as a limit to how one can redistribute it. If you don't like it...don't use GPL code.
You have choices...unlike the music business..the code authoring business there is a viable competitive market. You actually have choices when figuring out how to get code written to do a specific task (unless its a patented process).
Hey kuro5hin isn't my pool...i don't lurk around there. And I'm not the one suggesting that slashdot is horrid...that was the guy one level up...I have no problem peeing in his pool.
And your wrong...its only a logic loop if you keep telling people about Kuro4hin...following the previous guy's logic...slashdot people are so stupid that they needed him to tell them to look at kuro4hin. According to him, if they are smart enough to find kuro4hin on their own they wouldn't bother with slashdot. So its only a self feeding logic loop if you inform the unwashed and patentedly web illiterate slashdot crowd.
Also, since the overall traffic is lower, the quality of postings/discussions is much higher than at/.
Logic fault.... if you tell people to ditch slashdot to go to kuro5hin...then you increase the overall traffic to kuro5hin...thus lowering the quality of postings on kuro5hin.
By telling us to check out kuro5hin you just peed in yer own pool.
You'd think you want to encourage people to stay on slashdot.....
Where did I read this.....was it/....or maybe cnet?
Anyways...DVD's are at a turning point and there is a split in the ranks of the movie studies about how to handle DVD's inthe future. Extra bonus material is starting to cost way too much becuase actors and directors are starting to have pay for that bonus material getting written into contracts. So that extra 3 hours of behind th scense footage is now going to start costing studios real money to produce becuase the talent knows thats a revenue stream for the studies and they want a fair cut.
Also the licensing deal with BlockBuster is coming up for renewal....and it looks like BlockBuster isnt going to renew. The deal let blockbuster get advanced distribution of movies for rental before they were available for commercial sale...and the studies got a percentage of the rental take. Now it seems both sides of that deal are backing off. The studies think getting titles out quicker for sale is a good idea...and blockbuster is looking at the lower cost of stocking DVD making up for any lost revenue garnished by having a rental only window before full release. Both the studies and BlockBuster think they can make more money by selling cheaper...
More interesting still Warner Bros. is looking very hard at dropping the price of their DVD catalog through the floor...the idea being to get people to buy a DVD like they buy magazines in places like Walmart. Part of the reason is a lessoned learned trying to watching the record studies fight to keep control. If the price is low and reasonable...do people have less incentive still and more incentive to pony up the money....it seem like someone in the movie buz has woken up to the reality of file swapping...its always going to be there, the question is can you encourage people to buy instead of steal. If the DMCA is the stick....are $3 DVD's sitting in the checkout racks of your local Walmart the carrot?
You are wrong...the landmark betamax case for VCR's set a precident. When the Betamax case went to court VCR's where used almost exclusively for pirating material....and the courts reasoned that even though VCR's were used 93% of the time for illegal activity they had the potential for significant legitmate use in the future if the technology was allowed to exist.
If you had read the article....the judge in the Napster case didn't take an issue with Napster's file sharing technology and the use of the Betamax defense....the judge did not conclude that Napster had to be shutdown because its technology was used primarily for illegal activity....the judge in the Napster case saw that Napster controlled a centralized server that held a master list of servers and that napster could concievable use that centralized server to filter content on the network it controlled... and this filtering could be added as a layer over the existing technology....so anyone who used napster technology as is would be able to create the same filtering measures over the existing technology....and even then that can become very murky...if I started using slashdot or any site that used slash to post information about warez sites into comments I posted...would slashdot have to police the comments?
The point is...almost exclusive use of a technology for illegal activity is contrary to he ruling made in the Sony-Betamax case...a technology must only have the "potential" for significant non-infringing use....and any "content neutral" network can be used in legit ways...file shares in MSwindows being a very primative network minus some useful search capabilies...
Napster ran into a problem because the technology they used/created put them in a position of content control...napsters servers knew about the information on each users share. If napster had sold the exact same technology to a company to
be used in say an internal company network to facilite datafiles from user to user napster technology would again be perfectly legal. In that case the company running the internal server would be liable for copy right infringment..not napster for the technology that napster sold.
For decentralized file sharing systems where a master server holds no data...all you can do is hold the person offering the data liable....you can't go after the person creating the technology for not putting in safeguards on copyright infringement....it comes down to if you have control over who is using the technology you created...so napster was really a lawsuit over napsters network policy and not over the technlogy created by napster....
So for P2P which doesn't utilize a central server at all...then who do you sue....the real problems comes when you use a central server just a little bit of handshaking....then in a sense you become an ISP like a broadband ISP...and as an ISP you have some responsibily to police the people connecting to your services...and if they are found to be offering up warez on ftp or http or whatever protocal...through your service then sometimes you have a legal responsiblity to remove that user from your service or be held liable as an ISP for that users infringement.
These cases are really unclear becuase these p2p technology providers aren't just building the tech..they are also acting as ISPs who employ the technology...and it seems like they employ it almost exclusively...or atleast napster did. Napster didn't sell its client/server software to anybody to use i don't think. Which makes all this very murky. It's not the technology thats at issue its really an issue of who as control over the information on the networks..and if someone has control do they have to police the network.
neat...but no where near as practical as the yellow dog linux solution...with drive bay sized nodes that just slap right in...if you want to string a few mac towers together I'm sure appleseed is great...but if you are going to invest the money required to to buy decent g4 towers why not take the same money and invest is a node based PPC system where the hardware and software was actually designed for high performance computing.
Apple hardware isn't cheap...and it makes no sense to make an investment in stylish apple towers when what you need is raw cpu cycles...you get much more computing for the money if you buy into ydl's little briq nodes....
about that mac solution.... Yellow dog linux sells a cute little piece of hardware designed for clustering around PPC. very cute...maybe the best balance of cost effective and easy in terms of clustering that ive seen.
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/briQ/ hp c.shtml
Fine selling the carts themselves would be a copyright violation if the carts were unlinensed...but how does that make selling the linker a copyright violation....
Sure the linker has very little value without the carts...and vice versa....but I can't see how the linker is the object in violation..it should be the flash carts becuase the cart design are the copyrighted works.
either way...do the flash advance carts have any particularly good use as a storage device...beyond gameboy advance rom creation? I take these things are just a repackaged form of compact flash...For general storage is a compact flash card reader and compact flash carts a better way to go.
Maybe they should redesign the linker to accept different flash cards and carts...so they could market the linker and the cards has being for general storage/backup purposes....Maybe NOA is upset because the company is making money specificaly and directly off NOA's brand...without licensing the use of the gameboy advanced trademark...and this is the biggest legal stick NOA can think of.
If the linker and the carts were marketed has general purpose storage....and the instructions didn't only specifically target gameboy advanced rom creation but was more about general usage for backup/restore.....then it might be much harder for NOA to make a fuss about it...
Metric units are not the end all be all of measurement...even in the sciences. Physics is littered with non standard(ie not SI) units of measurement. Things that come up off the top of my head, the entire Gaussian system where the speed of light is 1, and in nuclear physics the "barne" unit which measures nuclear cross-section size (a barne as units of area...)..though barne isnt a good examply becuase its still a power of 10 conversion.....a better example is the entire Gaussian system of units where 1 coulomb becomes 3E9 statcolumbs...or while I'm thining about it the unit of eV (electron Volt) which is 1.609 E-19 Joules
Why would the enlightened physicists not use the standard metric units.....becuase its a real pain in the arse to keep a track of all those blasted powers of 10 and other numerical factors when doing derivations and keeping track of information. Using Gaussian units cleans up maxwell's equations when you are deriving things by hand. The eV unit is a more natural unit to use when talking about particle energies...sure people could talk about an electron have 1.9E-19 Joules of energy...its much easier and quicker to say 1eV and to talk about eV's since eV's are a very natually base unit in a wide range of particle motion problems.
So English units still might be useful to some becuase it provide a quicker or more efficient way to encode certain information. Just the the eV is used, there might be an industry out there that thinks bushels just make sense when talking about dry volume....
Why is it that everything thing in an American grocery store is measured in English units except the soda bottles? Milk is in gallon, food are in pounds and ounces...but the Pepsi is in Liters.
Win XP has a security problem which opens you up to attack the moment you connect to the net...
You need to connect to the net so you can get the patch from MS website....hmmmmmm...catch 22
So to safely get the patch from MS you have to find a non XP computer with a zip disk or a cd burner.....
good think there are 0.25 % of the desktops out there running linux, so XP users can grab the patch they need off a secure netenabled desktop....assuming MS lets no-IE browsers connect to the MS site to grab the patch.
Cox, from redhat is on the record in the Cnet article as saying this was a "big mistake"
and that redhat didn't mean to force the other vendors into a tough situation....
Has Redhat done this kinda thing before? I don't think so....mistakes happen. One mistake like this , I can forgive...especially when I company takes the blame right out from and admits it was their mistake at the first oportunity. If it happens again then I'll start to question Redhat's sense of vendor fair-play.....and I'm sure the security vendor list will evaluate RedHat's commitment to the list rules as well. If redhat does this again, more likely than not they will stop getting the private vendor security announcements..and redhat will be the one scrambling to update applications in the future.
But I really don't know if a a large scale security announcement should have been held off till a patch was tested...I'd rather know as soon as the vendors know so I can turn off the servers while they work on a patch. I don't want vulnerable servers humming along without knowing their vulnerable if I can help it. So in some way I'm actually grateful that RedHat mistakenly broke ranks....now I can turn off any wuftp servers and safely wait for a patch from the distros.
I think the NPL or what ever the source code from netscape was released under had a clause demanding all changes come back to netscape....
Dual license the project code under the LGPL and your own license, that you feel frees up the embedded system work while making sure improvement code comes back to you and can be put under the dual licensing scheme. And you might even be able to get some development funding from the embedded hardwaare people who want to use yer codec if you write the dual license to allow for licensing fees.
In any event a dual license scheme,if you can get away with it, is the way to go...but you'd have to get permission from all the developers in your project to agree to that arrangement. If its a one man project at this point...its easy to get the legalese of the matter resolved...you just have to have a long discussion with yourself and then you just have to make it clear that any code submitted to the project must be cleared for dual licensing before yuou will merge it in.
If it ends up being that there isn't much interest in the second license you create yourself you still have the option of dropping the second license from future releases and just releasing it under the LGPL again.
This way the code from your project will always be out there under the LGPL for people to use in other LGPL compatible projects...and you can negotiate special circumstances with a the second license...so that the codec can be used in situations the LGPL really wasnt designed to address, like embedded systems.
This time....but since the star trek series love using random plot devices to go back in time, there is a good chance that there will be a rematch in an alternative NBC gameshow time line where wil wheaton wins.
I have to admit I was impressed by the amount of money the star trek cast members racked up....they but every other weakest link team to shame.
-jef"I can do anything...its in a book...take a look...the reading rainbow"
In that paragraph, the clearly are following that slope -- who said that selling eggs is ethical? These women are mostly poor, and some of them go through quite a bit of pain so some rich couple can buy their egg. Is this ethical?
If you want to make the argument that selling eggs is ethical/unethical that's fine....its not illegal to sell human eggs, and congress is not getting ready to pass a law banning the selling of human eggs. I wish they would, that would take monetary necessity out of the equation. I'd much prefer any type of egg donation to be completely voluntary instead of a money making venture. Actually I'd like to see the selling of any human cells or organs become banned, that way no one has an easy excuse to give up so much as a dead skin cell for research purposes they really don't believe in, for the sake of monetary gain. If someone wants to "give" an egg cell, a sperm cell, a dead skin cell, blood cells, or a kidney or whatever to a research purpose or for some other reason like an organ transplant thats fine with me. Making an organ donation without monetary gain is a good measure in that you support the cause.
And are the egg donors poor?
From what I've seen personally, there is a market for "blue-blood" eggs. I saw a flyer on Princeton U.'s campus once...for an infertile couple seeking a very specific profile for an egg donor.
I fear were this will all lead us
I'm confused are you fearful of the selling of human cells, or are you fearful of the research done on human cells?
In what way is selling an egg cell all that much different than selling blood...ethically? You are a little late to question the selling of human cells like its a new practice, becuase it's been going on for awhile now.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes!!!!
Binding up sourcecode under 100+ years of copyright protection is an abuse of the whole idea of copyright law. Sourcecode holds no value to the public 100+ years from now. Companies who release code once they've decided to abandon the project is a fair coypright compromise in the internet age. But I would go further...I would have Apple or ID spell out in legalese that once they sold Y number of copies then the source code gets released...even if the codebase is not obsolete and unsupported.
Having Apple and OSS developers working together on the same codebase for a window of time could only benifit both parties. And I'm not a GPL purest...Apple release things under BSDlike license would be fine...or even a slightly more restrictive license that would require all change to come back to apple while apple is still supporting the codebase...but once Apple drops support the codebase should be released as BSD.
Something like this spelled out at inception of the licensing and selling of the commecial codebase would be great. I want to support companies that build good products...but i hate seeing software and associated hardware get abandoned for lack of support...its wasteful.
-jef
"I see *no* problem with a $30 DVD or a $6 book. If they were $20 DVDs and $3 books, I would buy *more* DVDs and books".
I think I said digital distribution as an analogy to source code...let me be clear. I have no problem paying something of the order what I currently pay for CD's or books...but I have a massive problem paying the same price for the digital delivery of music or literature when I have to provide the storage medium and the bandwidth to store the downloads on. The costs of well managed digital distribution would be far less than the current retail package system. A very competitive online market place would be potential more profitable for the artists as well as being cheaper for consumers. A very competitive online marketplace could give artists much more freedom to renegotiate contracts and move from one digital label to another if they don't like the contracts. Right now the record industry "controls" artists...
remember prince and that stupid name change he did. He did it becuase is record company owned the name prince...and he had an X number of years contract with them. He got sick of it and had to publish music under a nother name to prevent breach of contract. He released a cd box set online where he made MORE money than what he made from all his record contract albums combined. He took Y number of pre-orders from people...then releases it to the public...to the public as in free to copy and redistribute. And just from the pre-orders he saw more profit than from all the records he cut while under contract....There is a better way....artists can get paid fairly and the music can be free....
Free Market economic arguments don't stand up well for music and literature...becuase music and literature or MONOPOLIES granted by congress via the copyright act. A monopoly sets prices vastly differently than someone who has to compete similar products. The creative works by artists are more unique than say different brands of refrigerators....you dont buy music or books in the same way you buy a car..normally.
but thats off-topic.....
"Apple also tries to feed and clothes all of it's employees, which is also a good thing; send all of those employee's children to school, donate to charitable causes, etc, but in order to do that they must earn profits. Business is a transaction; I pay them money, they offer me a good."
And what I'm saying is that the closed source binaries that they offer are a raw deal. I would much rather see Apple make a "promise" to open up their source code extentions have they recoup their development costs.
I want to see Apple make a social contract with the community that says...
we want to develop for you a kick ass operating system...and if you like it and pay us for our time and expense...we will give you back the source code...
What's so unfair with that arrangement? The next computer I buy would be an apple, no question about it, if I had any belief that Apple would play nice and return the source code that I help pay for with my purchace once they got paidback for that codework. I never said I need to source code upfront when I pay...I understand that software development can be expensive...but I'd feel much more comfortable purchasing binaries if there was a legal undestanding that what i was paying towards was release of the source code. After so many units sold the code would be released...its a work for hire arrangement.
"You plunk down $7000, and in a year you've earned a $70k salary. Or higher"
Yep...my employer is more than willing to pay that kind of cash. I don't think i was arguing that it isnt better...my original question was is the appl e OS from a user standpoint the key?...or is it the 3rd party applications support that really made the parent poster happy. I don't have the income to buy something like photoshop for personal use. But if I needed it for work...I'd have it no doubt...becuase in the long run it would save my employer money becuase it would save me time at work. At home...my spare time has little value.
"So create your better, ideal, system, and change the world for the better, the OSS way."
That's silly...I don't have to do it...looks like china and india will do it for me.
-jef
I'm willing to PAY to hire developers to write code tp be be given back to the community...on a contract basis. This near infinite profit margin for the n+1 copy of software sold is not something I support.
I will PAY to fund source code development....I donate to OSS directly or to companies who have supported OSS development in the past.
I don't believe binary only source code is a fair return on my monetary investment...considering how little expense there is in making X number of copies of the code. I would rather pay my money to pay developer time and give the source code back in return....
My employer on the other hand will shell out money hand over fist if they have to, to be productive...but my personal standards are a bit more socialistic.
You can't compare software to things like bread..becuase there isn't the same sort of production costs for software..making copies of software is cheaper than making copies of bread.
Music and books are a much better analogy...and here again I think record and publishing companies try to take an unfair profit...profit that doesnt end up benifiting the developers the people I really want to pay. there are several workable direct digital distribution business modles by performers and authors that would remove the large publishing and record industries and make books and music significantly cheaper while provide a fair return on an artists for the development time invovled...but thats another thread entirely.
God bless Apple's soul for co-opting a freely available BSD operating system to sell to the Macintosh faithful. I wonder why Apple didn't start from some closed source Unix system that they had to pay for. Does Apple also get their bread for free? If free software is good enough for apple...then its good enough for me.
I really would like to see a non-profit source code co-op farm spring up into existance...where you can donate money to pay directly for developer time to produce OSS code.
-jef
I am wishing for application support...right on target...especially for Adobe products.
.config and .rc files.
Adobe's big marketing campaign for PDF is viewable anywhere...I'd like them to expand that anywhere definition to include their graphics products.
Taken the fact that I know very little about programing any gui toolkit on any OS for granted...
I can't imagine that coding up an interface in straight X or kde or GNOME is any harder than coding up soming in Cocoa/Carbon for Mac X...
If it where a lack of a targeted api issue i would imagine Adobe and other companies would be screaming up and down to the KDE developers to give them certain API features in the QT libraries....
Shrug...ive had things take 10 seconds to install and I have had things take 3 hours (both windows and Linux)..its really a matter of how well the installer was written...and how munched yer system was before you started the install. I'm not going to debate the generalization that linux is harder to setup initially...but I've had a much easier time troubleshooting linux that I have ever had troubleshooting windows...thanks those bloated ugly
Build something assuming it will "just work" and you have a dickens of a time figuring out why it isnt.
But i think you are using a different definition for "usability" than I am. I refer to usability as day in and day out usage...after the initial learning curve. I don't count learning how to use the very different process of flat file configs that linux uses as part of usability. Just like i dont count the 4 day "learning the differences between win2k and win9x" course offered where I work as part of win2k usability. If you took all the money that gets spent on basic "how to use windows" coursework out there and spent it on linux training...you'd get people just as competent in linux.
Am I willing to pay for commercial software in linux? No less than I am willing to pay for commercial software ontop of other OSes. Am i willing to pay for commercial software in general? No, not really. But my employer is...and there is no doubt in my mind that if MS office and adobe illistrator was available for linux all the pc's where I would would become some sort of linux solution.
-jef
Now how much of your happy experince was directly related to Apples OS...or other companies support of Apple's OS?
If the virtualPC people would support linux, if Asobe would support linux with apps and MS would write some apps for linux I dont think an Apple computer would be all that compeling over a linux pc. Does Apples OSX usability tweaks alone make it all that better? If office didnt exist on the macs...having an apple would be a major problem...no matter how snazzy Apples interface was.
And once you get application support parity in Linux/Apple is it worth the cost of apple hardware?
And the fact that apple laptops still refuse to have a servicable 3 button mouse like any good Unix system should leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This one button stuff irks me something fierce.
If I didnt have to buy my own hardware and I could ask for any laptop/desktop system I wanted..I'd probably by apple with OSX at this point...but I can't bring myself to pay apple's hardware prices....for the luxury of having the chance to buy MS office for a unix based system If MS had Office out for linux I don't think i would even consider an Apple. That's the big Apple selling point for me, Office on a Unix styled OS. A nice tear-jerking anittrust breakup of MS into an OS and applications company would quickly solve that one little problem for me.
-jef
I've looked at the keychain usb devices before...but i thought th at market was moving towards portable data storage with ~100MB type storage...and not something meant primarily for small file storage like password storage.
And are those usb devices supported on Solaris?
I think smartcard/usb-keychain decisions come down to price-feature ratio. If you want real portable storage for files and what not the usb devices are the way to go...if you just want to keep passwords or cyptokeys/sigs then smartcards might be cheaper to implement.
I'd also be concerned about support for the usb devices on the Unixes...
But i havent seriously looked into it...since I dont have a real need for this stuff personally.
My citibank smartcard reader was FREE. so getting it working under linux was a nice bonus.
-jef
the project name is about as relevant as the misnamed linuxprinting.org website
read muscle frontpage
http://www.linuxnet.com/
Linux is the targeted development platform....but the goal is have a framework portable across the unix based OSes: Linux, MacOS X and Solaris are all mentioned right up front....they even offer binaries for Solaris 8 on sparc for the base pscs software.
The license for the pcsc-lite package that they offer is a BSD variant i believe....perfect for a reference implementation across ALL the unix based OSes out there.
I think the windows world already has a large collection of cardreader software supplied by vendors...so taking care of the windows boxen would probably not need any software like this at all..since you probably get the cardreeader software for windows with the device.
-jef
Have you looked into using smartcard technology.
I realise it isn't very pratical adding smart card readers to every machine..but im just starting to look into smartcards on *nix and the msucle project seems to suggest that you can roll smartcard verification into your login procedure.
http://www.linuxnet.com/apps.html
I'm just psyched that i got my citbank serial port smartcard reader up and running under the pscsd smart card daemon. Now i can play around with this very idea.
-jef
I thought MS was offering a version of XP for the embedded markets...where you paid for a modular OS that came it nice little pieces to fit in yer embedded hardware?
I think I saw a comparison of embedded solutions from MS against linux embedded offerings recently...
If MS can offer a modular embedded product to compete in that space...then they sure as hell can design the desktop OS around the same modular ideas.
-jef
I've seen a version of this algorithm before. At a SIAM conference held at WPI while I was an undergraduate. You can get around the "partner" effect by creating a feedback look between two types of ranked sites:
group A) Authorative sites...sites other sites link to but don't necassarily link to a lot of other sites
groub b) Link sites...sites that cobble together links to useful authorative sites based on subject matter.
In your algorithm you keep a track of a particular ranking in both groups A and B interatively.
Yer ranking in group A gets weighted by the quality of the sites in group B that point to you.
Yer ranking in group B gets weighted by how many quality sites you link to in group A.
Iterate the process...and you know what you have...you have an eigenvector problem....and what you get in the end is an eigenvector of highly ranked group B sites which span subsets of group A based on subject matter.
The cononocal example is the word jaguar.
Run this agorithm on a search engine and you will get atleast 3 very distinct collections....
the animal, the car, and the game system..primarily.
The problem is you have to ITERATE for it to be particularly useful...and that costs cpu time....I don't know if a search engine is gonna want to really invest that time.
Frankly I'm suprised any of this is patentable since I saw this at an academic talk like 6 years ago.
-jef
I built a single flask apparatus as a senior year thesis as an undergrad...we actually got it to work too. Is it fusion? Now that I'm actually in a plasma physics graduate program I find it very doubtful that what is going on inside those very very small bubbles is actually fusion. I'd love to be able to get back to sono and make a better study of it using some of the plasma knowledge. If it is fusion it has to work along the same lines as ICF..but instead of lasers you have acoustic energy. My feeling when I was working to build the eperiment was that the effect was extremely dependant of the spacial symmetry of the system and the gas content of the liquid...in my case simply water and air. Maybe nanotube technology might provide a way to accurately probe the region near the bubble without perturbing it.
.
The big pain of it is the bubbles are so small its extremely hard to make measurenents. Back in 98 when I did my experiment it wasnt even clear in the literature if the light was black body nor what temperature the radiation source was. The water surrounding the bubble has a cut off in the ultra violet and the peak frequency in the emitted light was not observable. I think we found some rather crude theories of shock wave development to would explain some ionization..but i dont think the theories made any estimates of temperatures rivaling that needed for a useful fusion cross section...but of course I didn't know much plasma physics then...it would be interesting to model this in the way ICF target implosion is modeled
If its fusion...I can't imagine this be an extremely useful power source...the bubbles are so small and short lived...if extractable power were produceable I'd imagine the power would heat the sorrounding liquid to the point that the gas dynamics driving the bubble formation would break down well before you could extract any useful heat load from the bulk volume.
Even it its not fusion temperatures in the bubble...its still a very interesting effect....pico sized oven for chemical reactions. Nanotube technology is big now...a pico sized high temp reaction chamber might be very useful for nanotech. My parter and I had a whole shopping list of crude measurements we wanted to try making . Looking for some assymetries in the radiation pattern was the one we really wanted to do.
-jef
and there is another solution...find a piece of closed source code and pay to license it...oh you want your lunch for free?
Once you go looking for proprietary code to pay for and starting reading the license agreements...the simplicy and openness of the GPL gains some context. If you need to write a closed source program and you dont want to write all your own code...BUY a license for another piece of closed source work...pay someone to write it for you...find a BSD licensed code...find public domain code...but don't use the GPL code. You can cry all you want but there is nothing wrong with demanding that GPL works can not be incorporated into nonGPL works as part of the license. If it comes down to an unspecificness of the wording...the GPL will be updated so the legalese fits the intent...but the intent behind what is written in the GPL is perfectly valid as a license agreement as a limit to how one can redistribute it. If you don't like it...don't use GPL code.
You have choices...unlike the music business..the code authoring business there is a viable competitive market. You actually have choices when figuring out how to get code written to do a specific task (unless its a patented process).
-jef
Hey kuro5hin isn't my pool...i don't lurk around there. And I'm not the one suggesting that slashdot is horrid...that was the guy one level up...I have no problem peeing in his pool.
And your wrong...its only a logic loop if you keep telling people about Kuro4hin...following the previous guy's logic...slashdot people are so stupid that they needed him to tell them to look at kuro4hin. According to him, if they are smart enough to find kuro4hin on their own they wouldn't bother with slashdot. So its only a self feeding logic loop if you inform the unwashed and patentedly web illiterate slashdot crowd.
Also, since the overall traffic is lower, the quality of postings/discussions is much higher than at /.
Logic fault....
if you tell people to ditch slashdot to go to kuro5hin...then you increase the overall traffic to kuro5hin...thus lowering the quality of postings on kuro5hin.
By telling us to check out kuro5hin you just peed in yer own pool.
You'd think you want to encourage people to stay on slashdot.....
-jef
Where did I read this.....was it /....or maybe cnet?
Anyways...DVD's are at a turning point and there is a split in the ranks of the movie studies about how to handle DVD's inthe future. Extra bonus material is starting to cost way too much becuase actors and directors are starting to have pay for that bonus material getting written into contracts. So that extra 3 hours of behind th scense footage is now going to start costing studios real money to produce becuase the talent knows thats a revenue stream for the studies and they want a fair cut.
Also the licensing deal with BlockBuster is coming up for renewal....and it looks like BlockBuster isnt going to renew. The deal let blockbuster get advanced distribution of movies for rental before they were available for commercial sale...and the studies got a percentage of the rental take. Now it seems both sides of that deal are backing off. The studies think getting titles out quicker for sale is a good idea...and blockbuster is looking at the lower cost of stocking DVD making up for any lost revenue garnished by having a rental only window before full release. Both the studies and BlockBuster think they can make more money by selling cheaper...
More interesting still Warner Bros. is looking very hard at dropping the price of their DVD catalog through the floor...the idea being to get people to buy a DVD like they buy magazines in places like Walmart. Part of the reason is a lessoned learned trying to watching the record studies fight to keep control. If the price is low and reasonable...do people have less incentive still and more incentive to pony up the money....it seem like someone in the movie buz has woken up to the reality of file swapping...its always going to be there, the question is can you encourage people to buy instead of steal. If the DMCA is the stick....are $3 DVD's sitting in the checkout racks of your local Walmart the carrot?
-jef
You are wrong...the landmark betamax case for VCR's set a precident. When the Betamax case went to court VCR's where used almost exclusively for pirating material....and the courts reasoned that even though VCR's were used 93% of the time for illegal activity they had the potential for significant legitmate use in the future if the technology was allowed to exist.
If you had read the article....the judge in the Napster case didn't take an issue with Napster's file sharing technology and the use of the Betamax defense....the judge did not conclude that Napster had to be shutdown because its technology was used primarily for illegal activity....the judge in the Napster case saw that Napster controlled a centralized server that held a master list of servers and that napster could concievable use that centralized server to filter content on the network it controlled... and this filtering could be added as a layer over the existing technology....so anyone who used napster technology as is would be able to create the same filtering measures over the existing technology....and even then that can become very murky...if I started using slashdot or any site that used slash to post information about warez sites into comments I posted...would slashdot have to police the comments?
The point is...almost exclusive use of a technology for illegal activity is contrary to he ruling made in the Sony-Betamax case...a technology must only have the "potential" for significant non-infringing use....and any "content neutral" network can be used in legit ways...file shares in MSwindows being a very primative network minus some useful search capabilies...
Napster ran into a problem because the technology they used/created put them in a position of content control...napsters servers knew about the information on each users share. If napster had sold the exact same technology to a company to
be used in say an internal company network to facilite datafiles from user to user napster technology would again be perfectly legal. In that case the company running the internal server would be liable for copy right infringment..not napster for the technology that napster sold.
For decentralized file sharing systems where a master server holds no data...all you can do is hold the person offering the data liable....you can't go after the person creating the technology for not putting in safeguards on copyright infringement....it comes down to if you have control over who is using the technology you created...so napster was really a lawsuit over napsters network policy and not over the technlogy created by napster....
So for P2P which doesn't utilize a central server at all...then who do you sue....the real problems comes when you use a central server just a little bit of handshaking....then in a sense you become an ISP like a broadband ISP...and as an ISP you have some responsibily to police the people connecting to your services...and if they are found to be offering up warez on ftp or http or whatever protocal...through your service then sometimes you have a legal responsiblity to remove that user from your service or be held liable as an ISP for that users infringement.
These cases are really unclear becuase these p2p technology providers aren't just building the tech..they are also acting as ISPs who employ the technology...and it seems like they employ it almost exclusively...or atleast napster did. Napster didn't sell its client/server software to anybody to use i don't think. Which makes all this very murky. It's not the technology thats at issue its really an issue of who as control over the information on the networks..and if someone has control do they have to police the network.
-jef
neat...but no where near as practical as the yellow dog linux solution...with drive bay sized nodes that just slap right in...if you want to string a few mac towers together I'm sure appleseed is great...but if you are going to invest the money required to to buy decent g4 towers why not take the same money and invest is a node based PPC system where the hardware and software was actually designed for high performance computing.
Apple hardware isn't cheap...and it makes no sense to make an investment in stylish apple towers when what you need is raw cpu cycles...you get much more computing for the money if you buy into ydl's little briq nodes....
-jef
about that mac solution....
/ hp c.shtml
Yellow dog linux sells a cute little piece of hardware designed for clustering around PPC. very cute...maybe the best balance of cost effective and easy in terms of clustering that ive seen.
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/briQ
-jef
Fine selling the carts themselves would be a copyright violation if the carts were unlinensed...but how does that make selling the linker a copyright violation....
Sure the linker has very little value without the carts...and vice versa....but I can't see how the linker is the object in violation..it should be the flash carts becuase the cart design are the copyrighted works.
either way...do the flash advance carts have any particularly good use as a storage device...beyond gameboy advance rom creation? I take these things are just a repackaged form of compact flash...For general storage is a compact flash card reader and compact flash carts a better way to go.
Maybe they should redesign the linker to accept different flash cards and carts...so they could market the linker and the cards has being for general storage/backup purposes....Maybe NOA is upset because the company is making money specificaly and directly off NOA's brand...without licensing the use of the gameboy advanced trademark...and this is the biggest legal stick NOA can think of.
If the linker and the carts were marketed has general purpose storage....and the instructions didn't only specifically target gameboy advanced rom creation but was more about general usage for backup/restore.....then it might be much harder for NOA to make a fuss about it...
-jef
Metric units are not the end all be all of measurement...even in the sciences. Physics is littered with non standard(ie not SI) units of measurement. Things that come up off the top of my head, the entire Gaussian system where the speed of light is 1, and in nuclear physics the "barne" unit which measures nuclear cross-section size (a barne as units of area...)..though barne isnt a good examply becuase its still a power of 10 conversion.....a better example is the entire Gaussian system of units where 1 coulomb becomes 3E9 statcolumbs...or while I'm thining about it the unit of eV (electron Volt) which is 1.609 E-19 Joules
Why would the enlightened physicists not use the standard metric units.....becuase its a real pain in the arse to keep a track of all those blasted powers of 10 and other numerical factors when doing derivations and keeping track of information. Using Gaussian units cleans up maxwell's equations when you are deriving things by hand. The eV unit is a more natural unit to use when talking about particle energies...sure people could talk about an electron have 1.9E-19 Joules of energy...its much easier and quicker to say 1eV and to talk about eV's since eV's are a very natually base unit in a wide range of particle motion problems.
So English units still might be useful to some becuase it provide a quicker or more efficient way to encode certain information. Just the the eV is used, there might be an industry out there that thinks bushels just make sense when talking about dry volume....
Why is it that everything thing in an American grocery store is measured in English units except the soda bottles? Milk is in gallon, food are in pounds and ounces...but the Pepsi is in Liters.
-jef
Win XP has a security problem which opens you up to attack the moment you connect to the net...
You need to connect to the net so you can get the patch from MS website....hmmmmmm...catch 22
So to safely get the patch from MS you have to find a non XP computer with a zip disk or a cd burner.....
good think there are 0.25 % of the desktops out there running linux, so XP users can grab the patch they need off a secure netenabled desktop....assuming MS lets no-IE browsers connect to the MS site to grab the patch.
-jef
Cox, from redhat is on the record in the Cnet article as saying this was a "big mistake"
and that redhat didn't mean to force the other vendors into a tough situation....
Has Redhat done this kinda thing before? I don't think so....mistakes happen. One mistake like this , I can forgive...especially when I company takes the blame right out from and admits it was their mistake at the first oportunity. If it happens again then I'll start to question Redhat's sense of vendor fair-play.....and I'm sure the security vendor list will evaluate RedHat's commitment to the list rules as well. If redhat does this again, more likely than not they will stop getting the private vendor security announcements..and redhat will be the one scrambling to update applications in the future.
But I really don't know if a a large scale security announcement should have been held off till a patch was tested...I'd rather know as soon as the vendors know so I can turn off the servers while they work on a patch. I don't want vulnerable servers humming along without knowing their vulnerable if I can help it. So in some way I'm actually grateful that RedHat mistakenly broke ranks....now I can turn off any wuftp servers and safely wait for a patch from the distros.
-jef
Dual license the project code under the LGPL and your own license, that you feel frees up the embedded system work while making sure improvement code comes back to you and can be put under the dual licensing scheme. And you might even be able to get some development funding from the embedded hardwaare people who want to use yer codec if you write the dual license to allow for licensing fees.
In any event a dual license scheme,if you can get away with it, is the way to go...but you'd have to get permission from all the developers in your project to agree to that arrangement. If its a one man project at this point...its easy to get the legalese of the matter resolved...you just have to have a long discussion with yourself and then you just have to make it clear that any code submitted to the project must be cleared for dual licensing before yuou will merge it in.
If it ends up being that there isn't much interest in the second license you create yourself you still have the option of dropping the second license from future releases and just releasing it under the LGPL again.
This way the code from your project will always be out there under the LGPL for people to use in other LGPL compatible projects...and you can negotiate special circumstances with a the second license...so that the codec can be used in situations the LGPL really wasnt designed to address, like embedded systems.
-jef
-jef
This time....but since the star trek series love using random plot devices to go back in time, there is a good chance that there will be a rematch in an alternative NBC gameshow time line where wil wheaton wins.
I have to admit I was impressed by the amount of money the star trek cast members racked up....they but every other weakest link team to shame.
-jef"I can do anything...its in a book...take a look...the reading rainbow"
In that paragraph, the clearly are following that slope -- who said that selling eggs is ethical? These women are mostly poor, and some of them go through quite a bit of pain so some rich couple can buy their egg. Is this ethical?
If you want to make the argument that selling eggs is ethical/unethical that's fine....its not illegal to sell human eggs, and congress is not getting ready to pass a law banning the selling of human eggs. I wish they would, that would take monetary necessity out of the equation. I'd much prefer any type of egg donation to be completely voluntary instead of a money making venture. Actually I'd like to see the selling of any human cells or organs become banned, that way no one has an easy excuse to give up so much as a dead skin cell for research purposes they really don't believe in, for the sake of monetary gain. If someone wants to "give" an egg cell, a sperm cell, a dead skin cell, blood cells, or a kidney or whatever to a research purpose or for some other reason like an organ transplant thats fine with me. Making an organ donation without monetary gain is a good measure in that you support the cause.
And are the egg donors poor?
From what I've seen personally, there is a market for "blue-blood" eggs. I saw a flyer on Princeton U.'s campus once...for an infertile couple seeking a very specific profile for an egg donor.
I fear were this will all lead us
I'm confused are you fearful of the selling of human cells, or are you fearful of the research done on human cells?
In what way is selling an egg cell all that much different than selling blood...ethically? You are a little late to question the selling of human cells like its a new practice, becuase it's been going on for awhile now.