As has been pointed out repeatedly, the ICANN At-Large positions are largely for show -- they have little direct influence. Don't think of the ICANN At-Large member as a Senator, but rather as a Offical Spokesperson. Therefore, it matters much more that the At-Large rep be persuasive than that they be the most competent. Sending someone who has a complete grasp of the engineering issues, but can't persuade the people who hold real power, is a complete waste of time.
Lessig has by far the highest public profile of any of the seven, and a higher profile than all but of few ICANNers. The makes him the most likely *effective* candidate, even if others have greater technical expertise or a more passionate commitment to civil liberties.
Stop being selfish -- think about giving as well.
What better gift for grandma than the internet? I have found the Cieva to be a fabulous, cheap($300) and easy way to bring the Internet to people still initimidated by remote controls. Here is one of my success stories.
we literally cannot conceive of something which is entirely self-sustaining
hmmm... What about those blown glass spheres that contain a complete balanced biosphere?
Bzzztt. While these glass things have closed mass, they are not Thermodymanically closed -- energy (eg. sunlight) freely moves back and forth. Your example is not self-sustaining.
Ideas like this have been kicking around for years. The real problem isn't getting the carbon/diamond on the blade edge, it's keeping it there. Diamond is inert, so it doesn't like sticking to things, so it usually "rubs off" the substrate (metal, in your case) quickly.
I have lot of experience with this one. On a less than 10 year horizon, skip college. But doing so is a gamble you may eventually regret. Please read on.
I was around for the last great tech gold rush (late 70's-early 80's). At the time there were six of us who were crack progammers. (in BASIC -- this was a long time ago 8). Three of us jumped into the new economy, even ditching high school in two cases, while three of us did college and graduate school.
At 10 years (age 25), it was obvious. The college attenders were idiots. The three of us who were slogging through lectures were dramatically poorer than the jumpers. David was on Borland's C compiler team. Brian was number 2 at a software startup.
At 20 years, (now), it's no contest. All that "stupid college stuff" has paid off in spades. The three collegians have left the jumpers behind. What stock options can give so quickly, they can take away just as fast. More importantly, college is not supposed be about job training, it's supposed to be about gaining perspective and practicing learning. Indeed, none of us three collegians use our original job skills for our current wealth, and two of us barely use our college gained "job skills."
In summary, if you skip college you are making the "hollywood bet." A lucky few will be stars (eg. Bill Gates). Some will have good jobs as supporting characters or the key grip. And a shocking number will be walking Sunset Avenue sucking off people with college degrees.
I have often wandered the same thing. Perhaps this is generational?
I too have a shelf full of books I constantly reference, but my brother-in-law, who is both younger and a better programmer, gets by with almost no books --- but a lot of Altavista queries
Re:Original ideas there are many
on
Free For All
·
· Score: 3
Here goes the quibbling....
TCP/IP... was created by the US government...rather than hackers. Agreed. I have posted elsewhere, that for the purposes of the original post, I choose "open" to mean "non-proprietary." The difference betwen "open" and "public domain" are signficant, but I believe too fine for the bluntness of the original question.
the concept of WWW was derived directly from HyperCard.
er,um, kinda. At the time, a lot of "hypertext" ideas were in the air. Remember Xanadu? hypercard was certainly closed, and definitely predated html -- but WWW also owed something to gopher and WAIS, which I believe were non-proprietary.
Few of the technologies you mention are revolutionary Well, perhaps. By this high standard, almost no software ideas have been revolutionary since, oh, Babbage. Could you please suggest what you do consider revolutionary, and decide whether or not it was proprietary?
Re:Original ideas there are many
on
Free For All
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, but all of your examples started as government/university funded projects.
Agreed.
To me, and probably to the original poster, "free software" in this context means more than just what is endorsed by Ricahrd Stallman. Most people who pose questions like the orignal poster do not distinguish be "Free", "Open", "Public Domain", and "Academic." Yes, the differences are significant. But an even more important distinction is between closed/proprietary, (you can't see the source, it all owned by a for-profit entity) and these "open" categories (you can generally get at the source, non-commerical use is typically no big deal).
For this broader, sloppier view of "open", my claim holds.
Original ideas there are many
on
Free For All
·
· Score: 5
What have this gang of people done that isn't a "workalike"
The Internet
Internet Explorer. IE started life as Mosaic, one of the original browsers. Like all of the origninal browsers, Mosaic was open source. Microsoft bought the browser idea from its Open Source inventors.
Apache. This is the direct descendant of the original web server (it too was open source), and it dominates the web. Microsoft has tried to copy Apache's functions, but has had a tough time keeping up with Apache's pace of innnovation.
sendmail. Essentially all of the email that goes across the internet does so thanks to sendmail. The orginal (open source) developers now also run a company, but the orignal accomplishments all happened open-source.
BIND The Internet works on IP addresses (eg. 135.23.43.121). Any time you type a URL (letters) into your browswer, you are using BIND. This was invented open source (the B is for Berkely).
TCP/IP These are the two protocols (among others) that make the internet possible. In a sense, they define what is "internet." Developed and implemented open source
Eric Raymond addresses "creativity" issues in his essays.
Thus far, the transparency extends only a couple of millimeters deep...transparent human skin would allow optical devices to penetrate further and illuminate tissue properties... "It's really a simple idea," said Welch. "To make it useful will be the more difficult task."
So, if want you want to see is in first 3 millimeters of skin, this might help. But it seems a really invasive procedure (saturating with Glycerol) for such a small benefit.
I too enterred graduate school a fortran programmer, and I too did my thesis relying on Matlab. But the Matlab/C integratgion was really tight - so I learned C and didn't get stranded in a dying language. Since I learned C, I have never seen *any* non-legacy situation where Fortran was to be preferred over C.
No wonder I was confused. You changed points on me. The headline/article was about a "tragedy of the commons" dooming Gnutella. I was pointing out that the "tragedy" argument looked pretty weak to me.
You are making a seperate point: Gnutella has poor scaling and therefore won't succeed. Seems reasonable to me. I have not studied Gnutella in detail, but what I have seen seems like a scaling nightmare. So you and I agree on this point, at this time. Since Gnutella is GPLed, I always assumed the scaling problems would be "fixed" in the future, perhaps at the cost of a code fork.
Of course, you never passed the beer around recursively
Pleasae expand - I'm not sure I grasp your point. For certain issues, recusrions would seem to help....What I wouldn't have given for an autonomous recursive bathroom cleaning algorithm.
Programmers know this as the "90/10" rule: 90% of the useful work will be done by 10% of the code
This applies to people as well. I helped organize keggers in college. A small number of us did the organizing/financing/clean up -- everyone else just showed up and partied. That was kind of the whole point. So this "ecology" result is NOT a tragedy of the commons, it' just a another keg party - and you know how hard those are to stop 8)
Yes, Americans can be ignorant/arrogant, but so can the rest of the world. It's just that Americans, for whatever reason, are currently the world's Political/Economical/Military (and perhaps cultural...scary thought;) hegemonic power, so American flaws are expsosed to more people and easier to to see.
The Romans faced the same problem when they took over "Graeco-Roman" culture.
In fact, I am quite familiar with six sigma, and have even discussed CMM with a six-sigma blackbelt. She new some effots had been made to apply 6 sig to coding, but didn't know any details.
Hence my ongoing quest to figure out if there is anything behind the CMM hype.
A rough calculation says that an hour of driving will require 180 kg of liquid N2 -- not including the storage container. Why?
Nitrogen's energy density sucks
Herewith:
Most of the available energy is from the phase change (using the cold N2 as the "bottom" of an energy gradient running from ambient) For N2, this is a measley 400 J/g (compared to carbon, at 60,000 J/g). So, in going the 200K to ambient, a gram of N can gives at most 600 J of energy. (Specific heat ~1 J/g/k). One horsepower is a 740 Joule/ second. Assuming an efficient car only needing 20 HP, and riduculously high Carnot efficiency of 50%, you need 20* 740 / 0.50 / 600 = 50 gram/s, or almost 180 kg/hr.
Nitrogen isn't even close to being a useful transportation fuel.
Slashdot Mirror
Lessig has by far the highest public profile of any of the seven, and a higher profile than all but of few ICANNers. The makes him the most likely *effective* candidate, even if others have greater technical expertise or a more passionate commitment to civil liberties.
Politics is the art of the possible.
That is funniest goddamn .sig I have seen in weeks. Putting it in a thread about the M$ appeals effort is just brilliant 8).
And now back to our regularly scheduled M$ bashing.....
Very Wise grasshopper.
This is why some GI problems and yeast infections are better treated with yoghurt than anti-biotics/anti-fungals.
Ideas like this have been kicking around for years. The real problem isn't getting the carbon/diamond on the blade edge, it's keeping it there. Diamond is inert, so it doesn't like sticking to things, so it usually "rubs off" the substrate (metal, in your case) quickly.
In breaking news today, Free software advocate Rischard Stallman noticed his Webster's included the clause As this conflicts with the key GPL clause, "Richard should always get his way," RMS has called for an immediate boycott of this evil corporate entity.
I have lot of experience with this one. On a less than 10 year horizon, skip college. But doing so is a gamble you may eventually regret. Please read on.
I was around for the last great tech gold rush (late 70's-early 80's). At the time there were six of us who were crack progammers. (in BASIC -- this was a long time ago 8). Three of us jumped into the new economy, even ditching high school in two cases, while three of us did college and graduate school.
At 10 years (age 25), it was obvious. The college attenders were idiots. The three of us who were slogging through lectures were dramatically poorer than the jumpers. David was on Borland's C compiler team. Brian was number 2 at a software startup.
At 20 years, (now), it's no contest. All that "stupid college stuff" has paid off in spades. The three collegians have left the jumpers behind. What stock options can give so quickly, they can take away just as fast. More importantly, college is not supposed be about job training, it's supposed to be about gaining perspective and practicing learning. Indeed, none of us three collegians use our original job skills for our current wealth, and two of us barely use our college gained "job skills."
In summary, if you skip college you are making the "hollywood bet." A lucky few will be stars (eg. Bill Gates). Some will have good jobs as supporting characters or the key grip. And a shocking number will be walking Sunset Avenue sucking off people with college degrees.
Thanks for making this old fart feel a little less obsolete 8)
I have often wandered the same thing. Perhaps this is generational?
I too have a shelf full of books I constantly reference, but my brother-in-law, who is both younger and a better programmer, gets by with almost no books --- but a lot of Altavista queries
Where to you live -- Stepford?
Here goes the quibbling....
... was created by the US government ...rather than hackers. Agreed. I have posted elsewhere, that for the purposes of the original post, I choose "open" to mean "non-proprietary." The difference betwen "open" and "public domain" are signficant, but I believe too fine for the bluntness of the original question.
TCP/IP
the concept of WWW was derived directly from HyperCard. er,um, kinda. At the time, a lot of "hypertext" ideas were in the air. Remember Xanadu? hypercard was certainly closed, and definitely predated html -- but WWW also owed something to gopher and WAIS, which I believe were non-proprietary.
Few of the technologies you mention are revolutionary Well, perhaps. By this high standard, almost no software ideas have been revolutionary since, oh, Babbage. Could you please suggest what you do consider revolutionary, and decide whether or not it was proprietary?
Yeah, but all of your examples started as government/university funded projects.
Agreed.
To me, and probably to the original poster, "free software" in this context means more than just what is endorsed by Ricahrd Stallman. Most people who pose questions like the orignal poster do not distinguish be "Free", "Open", "Public Domain", and "Academic." Yes, the differences are significant. But an even more important distinction is between closed/proprietary, (you can't see the source, it all owned by a for-profit entity) and these "open" categories (you can generally get at the source, non-commerical use is typically no big deal).
For this broader, sloppier view of "open", my claim holds.
The Internet
Internet Explorer. IE started life as Mosaic, one of the original browsers. Like all of the origninal browsers, Mosaic was open source. Microsoft bought the browser idea from its Open Source inventors.
Apache. This is the direct descendant of the original web server (it too was open source), and it dominates the web. Microsoft has tried to copy Apache's functions, but has had a tough time keeping up with Apache's pace of innnovation.
sendmail . Essentially all of the email that goes across the internet does so thanks to sendmail. The orginal (open source) developers now also run a company, but the orignal accomplishments all happened open-source.
BIND The Internet works on IP addresses (eg. 135.23.43.121). Any time you type a URL (letters) into your browswer, you are using BIND. This was invented open source (the B is for Berkely).
TCP/IP These are the two protocols (among others) that make the internet possible. In a sense, they define what is "internet." Developed and implemented open source
Eric Raymond addresses "creativity" issues in his essays.
Tatoo Removal
20 years from, all these inked Gen Y'ers are going to pay big bucks to make their tattos go away, and these guys are going to rake it in 8)
I too enterred graduate school a fortran programmer, and I too did my thesis relying on Matlab. But the Matlab/C integratgion was really tight - so I learned C and didn't get stranded in a dying language. Since I learned C, I have never seen *any* non-legacy situation where Fortran was to be preferred over C.
Why did you choose Fortran over C?
No wonder I was confused. You changed points on me. The headline/article was about a "tragedy of the commons" dooming Gnutella. I was pointing out that the "tragedy" argument looked pretty weak to me.
You are making a seperate point: Gnutella has poor scaling and therefore won't succeed. Seems reasonable to me. I have not studied Gnutella in detail, but what I have seen seems like a scaling nightmare. So you and I agree on this point, at this time. Since Gnutella is GPLed, I always assumed the scaling problems would be "fixed" in the future, perhaps at the cost of a code fork.
Have a nice day
Programmers know this as the "90/10" rule: 90% of the useful work will be done by 10% of the code
This applies to people as well. I helped organize keggers in college. A small number of us did the organizing/financing/clean up -- everyone else just showed up and partied. That was kind of the whole point. So this "ecology" result is NOT a tragedy of the commons, it' just a another keg party - and you know how hard those are to stop 8)
GO GNUTELLA
Yes, Americans can be ignorant/arrogant, but so can the rest of the world. It's just that Americans, for whatever reason, are currently the world's Political/Economical/Military (and perhaps cultural...scary thought ;) hegemonic power, so American flaws are expsosed to more people and easier to to see.
The Romans faced the same problem when they took over "Graeco-Roman" culture.
Thank you.
In fact, I am quite familiar with six sigma, and have even discussed CMM with a six-sigma blackbelt. She new some effots had been made to apply 6 sig to coding, but didn't know any details.
Hence my ongoing quest to figure out if there is anything behind the CMM hype.
A rough calculation says that an hour of driving will require 180 kg of liquid N2 -- not including the storage container. Why?
Nitrogen's energy density sucks
Herewith:
Most of the available energy is from the phase change (using the cold N2 as the "bottom" of an energy gradient running from ambient) For N2, this is a measley 400 J/g (compared to carbon, at 60,000 J/g). So, in going the 200K to ambient, a gram of N can gives at most 600 J of energy. (Specific heat ~1 J/g/k). One horsepower is a 740 Joule/ second. Assuming an efficient car only needing 20 HP, and riduculously high Carnot efficiency of 50%, you need 20* 740 / 0.50 / 600 = 50 gram/s, or almost 180 kg/hr.
Nitrogen isn't even close to being a useful transportation fuel.
The Unix (TM) brand name
A nice, tree hugging logo
Title for Tom Cruise's next movie: "MI3: The Santa Cruz Operation"
Monterey was a consortium of IBM, SCO, NUMA-Q, and Intel to deliver an enterprise-grade unix for Itanium( aka, IA-64, Mercred).
An interesting bit was the cc:NUMA architecture for high end clustering. I wonder what will become of it?