Ok I have a question for you though. How many centimeters of seawater must be processed to remove that 1 cm of heavy water? I would think a decent ball park figure might be based on how many parts per million there are of deuterium to normal seawater. Also, energy would not get used or grow at current rates. If energy is 1000x cheaper it will soon be used at 1000x the rate.
I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium. It might take a while, but the oil fields of Texas were once thought to be an endless resource. Maybe before that happens we can build a Dyson Sphere
and blend in with the rest of the universe's dark matter.
hopefully it will come out soon and the insane (23%) tariffs will be gone.
So then you are aware that trade is not free even between the US and its closest ally, even under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Thank you for reiterating my point.
Though your question regarding BSD has nothing to do with my post, I will try to answer as best I can. Tariffs are used to balance trade and taxing some ancient BSD code would do nothing to discourage engineering expertise from disappearing overseas today. But asking software houses to compensate our government for the lost revenue due to moving jobs 'offshore' would.
I am astounded that you actually believe that exporting our technical professional jobs will raise the income in South Korea and India so much that they would find it cheaper to buy our goods than to build their own or buy from their poorer neighbors. Much of our exports to Mexico since NAFTA has been heavy machinery. Guess why. So they can build more factories. You also miss the fact that when demand for engineers and scientists in America decline so will the universities, hobbling our ability to train a new generation. Yes its true that with trade everyone benefits but only with fair trade. Trading our future for some very short term profits is not a fair trade.
And what should the displaced engineers do, go back to school and become even more highly educated? Maybe they could learn to be HVAC repairmen or how about go into Hotel Management? That way they will be prepared for the hordes of Pakastani businessmen who will no doubt flood America as tourists. Oops I forgot, those jobs are already filled by the master craftsmen who used to work in our heavy industries. Ok I'm being a bit sarcastic now but the point is that there isn't anything left to fall back on this time. Hollywood and Wall Street won't keep the nation afloat. And consider carefully because you are in the same boat. Our economies are inextricably tied.
I'm a proud comrade of the Republic of Soviet Canuckistan!!
I was only yanking your chain with the Al-Hussein remark but then you actually go and admit that you're Canadian. You really would like to see the States become a third world backwater wouldn't you? You canucks with your maple leaves and your bacon that isn't really bacon. Oooh! you make me so mad. There's a Tim Horton's down the street from me right now spreading your insidious culture by bundling doughnuts in a combo meal. True Americans know that the correct side item with a sandwich is freedom fries!!!
First off, to the Non-Americans who modded my original post as off-topic I would ask them to RTFA. Take an English lesson first if quotes like, 'simply because the United States is increasingly losing dominance in information technology' are too difficult for you to decipher.
In regards to your post, quantaman, I think you must be very gullible if you believe that the buzzword 'Free Trade' is or ever has been a significant factor in world trade policies. Ask the Canadians about hard wood lumber or the Europeans about bananas or Detroit about selling cars in Japan; Free Trade is a term bandied about by one side only when the other side has an industry they want to protect.
If you haven't figured it out yet, Free software is free. And any tax rate times $0 is still zero. You already pay duty, sales or value added taxes when you buy a distro now but that is not on the free software. What happens if other countries put a tariff on proprietary U.S. software? They raise the price for their own citizens whose per capita income may already be below the current price of many applications. If they want to strangle their own economy then so be it. It will make their raw materials and goods cheaper for us to import.
The percentage of U.S. citizens who make a living in Agriculture is at an all time low, Manufacturing has declined steadily for decades until now we are left with a "Rust Belt" of closed plants. Service industries now provide the lion's share of skilled jobs. So if we now allow our Engineering and Intellectual Capitol to be "offshored" then there will be few jobs left that don't involve competing to sell foreign made goods at the lowest margin. But we can't all cut hair or sell stereos or wait on tables. Someone, somewhere must actually produce wealth or like a fraudulent perpetual motion machine our economy will slowly grind to a halt. Do you expect the next generation of Americans make their living playing first person shooters?
I am an American and tariffs on offshored code would benefit me and all my countrymen. Perhaps you have your own reasons for wanting to see a weak America, quantiman Al-Husseini. Yes I will excuse you for being naive, but only if your highest level of education was a taliban religious school.
Companies which have code written outside of the U.S. should pay duty or tariffs on each license they sell just like vendors of manufactured items do. That would slow down the
Great Tech Job Exodus.
Are there any lawyers here that can say whether packet sniffing is indeed a form of Reverse Engineering and could then be prohibited by an EULA? Common sense would tell me that it can not because it would be analogous to having a reasonable expectation of privacy when talking with someone inside your home but not when shouting to your neighbor through an open window.
Well then maybe some members of the secret police who think they are protecting this country will question their own convictions after being told to investigate individuals who turn out to be upstanding law-abiding freedom-loving people who tenaciously defend the Constitiution.
Let me give you an example of what I would consider a paradigm failure that happens all the time in the open source community. The critic of open source says, "Open source is just not very good at building easy-to-use software." And the open source defender says, "Oh, you haven't seen the latest version of Gnome (GNU Object Model Environment). It's really getting pretty good."
Tim touches on something here that I have noticed too. Open source does not have a reputation for being easy to use. But why is that so? Some projects are very user friendly but in general the profit motive works against Open Source here. Consulting, Support, and Customization is the main business model in the Open Source world, but if a software is extremely easy for the end users to set up then there is less of a reason for consultants to be brought in.
I agree with RMS that it would be a good idea to use a term for IP that correctly describes what it is. "Intellectual Property" doesn't express the fact that it is meant to be a time limited monopoly on the use of a novel idea. Joe Public thinks of property as something which is tangible and owned indefinitely. By allowing the meaning of the concept to change through verbal misdirection and common misusage we let a few individuals squeeze a few more drops of profit from an old cash cows teat, but the overall effect is that society as a whole is worse off.
The default nature of information and ideas is free - look at the past 4000 years or so of science. The idea of saying "so and so is mine" or "only I'm allowed to do this" with respect to ideas is pretty new, to the best of my knowledge.
If you look at History you will find many examples of information that was lost precisely because it was kept proprietary. That was the main purpose of the medieval guilds, as well as clerics and numerous secret societies. It is why secrets like how to make Damascus Steel were lost. It is a better argument for intellectual freedom to point out how the free flow of information has bettered our world, for example the Gutenberg Bible and medical knowledge, than to say, incorrectly, that it was always like that before and now we are being oppressed.
Second, by what spade do you call the conglomeration of concepts known individually as copyright, patent, trademark, servicemark, and tradename? I think this was the original question.
If patents can be issued for software then software should only be sold with the source code provided so that the publisher's competitors can verify that their intellectual "property" has not been pirated. There would no longer be a need for source code secrecy or non-compete agreements since ownership could be easily determined, after years of litigation of course. Even with this "protection", I'd bet that the same large companies who are pushing for software patents would be afraid to allow other patent holders to examine their code.
I'm not convinced that 'previous business relationship' and 'surveys' are good exemptions. On the surface they would seem to make sense but I think places you have to do business with like grocery stores and department stores and banks will start selling memberships to become their "associate". Then, purveyors of non-Scottish crap will call you on the pretense that you did business with the "association" rather than the one exclusive vendor.
And I probably don't even have to point out how easy it is to make a cold call purporting to be a survey. Instead of a recorded message saying "Hi! I'm Sandra. I'm calling to tell you that you are pre-approved for the smAcme Debt Consolidation Program with low, low rates...", instead it will be "Hi! I'm Sandra. Please express your views in our survey. Press One or wait on the line for yes, or two for no. Question one: Have you heard about the smAcme Debt Consolidation Program with its low, low rates? Two, did you know that you have already been approved?..."
They should have bought 494,000 $900 hammers. At least they would have something useful to show for it. And what do you want to bet some of the $471,000,000 ends up in the Bush Re-Election Campaign's coffers?
You might be right. If the microsofties who got rich back when msft was growing in value were to inflate scox by continually bidding above the market price then it would be much more expensive for ibm to settle this by buying sco.
It is not certain that they would be out of work. You alluded to that in your second 'certainty' which is probably a true one. The third is always true anyway and if your boss and coworkers are also walking out they would give good references for you, no?
Now Sterling is telling us that deep databases of personal info will destabalize our government causing shifts in power so fast that it essentially doom our country.
I have to disagree with him on that point. They who control the TIA would have heavy political clout. They would stay hidden and mostly unknown to average Americans, and a change in political leadership would have no effect on their ownership of the big brother machine. So as long as the smart politician kowtowed to them, his skeletons would stay safely in the closet. If you want historical precedence for this just read up on J. Edgar Hoover.
Also the owners of TIA would have little need to actually destroy someone with the information they would have. They could just coerce candidates drop out of a race (like they did to Perot) or vote a certain way or use the information to further their own agenda (like they used the Office of Fatherland Security recently to track down the Democrat representatives who fled Texas to Oklahoma.) Sunshine laws and the Freedom of Information Act were meant to counteract these type of abuses but the faction in power now flagrantly violates these laws (e.g. Cheney's meetings with Enron and other Energy execs.)
TIA could be viewed as one more check and balance in the system though one not defined by our Constitution. However just because I don't think it will be destablizing doesn't mean it will be good for America. If Uncle Sam dances to the tune of secret puppetmasters then our system will come to resemble that of the Soviet Union and I think Bruce Sterling's reference to the KGB was an apt one.
No kidding. Giving a patent for something that has been done for thousands of years just because people do it through a particular communication media is ridiculous. I wish someone would patent unsolicited advertising using electronic mail as the media. Then they could make the spammers pay them or stop.
They had professionally made CD's minted with a nice silk screen on them. In quantities of 400+ they get them done for about a buck a CD. Then they sell them for a dollar at their gigs. They also give some of them away through audience participation like who can answer trivia about the band. Many half drunk people will shell out a buck for a CD especially when they just paid $2.50 for a beer.
Now you say, well how do they make money on that deal? They don't expect to make money from CD sales. But by getting their music out there and getting the audience familiar with their songs they have been picking up a following which makes them more desirable to the club owners. I'm sure you know that original bands typically don't get paid much but they are now getting more than most local cover bands.
As an indie I'm sure you are aware that even bands signed to huge labels usually lose money on CD sales and only come out ahead by touring. Well this is the same system but on a much smaller sale. And having lots of people familiar with your group also helps win those battle of the bands competitions which gives you free publicity.
So basically I think your assumption that you want to make money by selling CD's is flawed. The established system doesn't work that way and the new model won't either. Sell the band not the CD. Make your money on door receipts and if the band is good then eventually you can make a little on CDs and Tshirts later.
120 songs would be about 12 CD's. I don't buy 12 CD's a year now and when I do buy a CD it is usually for one or two songs. So $120 a year would be the highest priced of the two legal online alternatives for me. And to be quite frank, I usually just tune in one of the local college stations anyway. No commercials and a great variety of music and news.
Good points. With a tethered subscription service you will have to somehow authenticate from each device you want to play a song from. That means you must have internet access from the device and knowing ms they will make it a pita or completely impossible to play from any machine other than a ms windows pc with ie, wmp, and spylladium installed. And if they do succeed in sucking in a lot of customers, the terms of service will be modified accordingly to feed the beast.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok I have a question for you though. How many centimeters of seawater must be processed to remove that 1 cm of heavy water? I would think a decent ball park figure might be based on how many parts per million there are of deuterium to normal seawater. Also, energy would not get used or grow at current rates. If energy is 1000x cheaper it will soon be used at 1000x the rate.
I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium. It might take a while, but the oil fields of Texas were once thought to be an endless resource. Maybe before that happens we can build a Dyson Sphere and blend in with the rest of the universe's dark matter.
So then you are aware that trade is not free even between the US and its closest ally, even under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Thank you for reiterating my point.
Though your question regarding BSD has nothing to do with my post, I will try to answer as best I can. Tariffs are used to balance trade and taxing some ancient BSD code would do nothing to discourage engineering expertise from disappearing overseas today. But asking software houses to compensate our government for the lost revenue due to moving jobs 'offshore' would.
I am astounded that you actually believe that exporting our technical professional jobs will raise the income in South Korea and India so much that they would find it cheaper to buy our goods than to build their own or buy from their poorer neighbors. Much of our exports to Mexico since NAFTA has been heavy machinery. Guess why. So they can build more factories. You also miss the fact that when demand for engineers and scientists in America decline so will the universities, hobbling our ability to train a new generation. Yes its true that with trade everyone benefits but only with fair trade. Trading our future for some very short term profits is not a fair trade.
And what should the displaced engineers do, go back to school and become even more highly educated? Maybe they could learn to be HVAC repairmen or how about go into Hotel Management? That way they will be prepared for the hordes of Pakastani businessmen who will no doubt flood America as tourists. Oops I forgot, those jobs are already filled by the master craftsmen who used to work in our heavy industries. Ok I'm being a bit sarcastic now but the point is that there isn't anything left to fall back on this time. Hollywood and Wall Street won't keep the nation afloat. And consider carefully because you are in the same boat. Our economies are inextricably tied.
I'm a proud comrade of the Republic of Soviet Canuckistan!!
I was only yanking your chain with the Al-Hussein remark but then you actually go and admit that you're Canadian. You really would like to see the States become a third world backwater wouldn't you? You canucks with your maple leaves and your bacon that isn't really bacon. Oooh! you make me so mad. There's a Tim Horton's down the street from me right now spreading your insidious culture by bundling doughnuts in a combo meal. True Americans know that the correct side item with a sandwich is freedom fries!!!
First off, to the Non-Americans who modded my original post as off-topic I would ask them to RTFA. Take an English lesson first if quotes like, 'simply because the United States is increasingly losing dominance in information technology' are too difficult for you to decipher.
In regards to your post, quantaman, I think you must be very gullible if you believe that the buzzword 'Free Trade' is or ever has been a significant factor in world trade policies. Ask the Canadians about hard wood lumber or the Europeans about bananas or Detroit about selling cars in Japan; Free Trade is a term bandied about by one side only when the other side has an industry they want to protect.
If you haven't figured it out yet, Free software is free. And any tax rate times $0 is still zero. You already pay duty, sales or value added taxes when you buy a distro now but that is not on the free software. What happens if other countries put a tariff on proprietary U.S. software? They raise the price for their own citizens whose per capita income may already be below the current price of many applications. If they want to strangle their own economy then so be it. It will make their raw materials and goods cheaper for us to import.
The percentage of U.S. citizens who make a living in Agriculture is at an all time low, Manufacturing has declined steadily for decades until now we are left with a "Rust Belt" of closed plants. Service industries now provide the lion's share of skilled jobs. So if we now allow our Engineering and Intellectual Capitol to be "offshored" then there will be few jobs left that don't involve competing to sell foreign made goods at the lowest margin. But we can't all cut hair or sell stereos or wait on tables. Someone, somewhere must actually produce wealth or like a fraudulent perpetual motion machine our economy will slowly grind to a halt. Do you expect the next generation of Americans make their living playing first person shooters?
I am an American and tariffs on offshored code would benefit me and all my countrymen. Perhaps you have your own reasons for wanting to see a weak America, quantiman Al-Husseini. Yes I will excuse you for being naive, but only if your highest level of education was a taliban religious school.
Companies which have code written outside of the U.S. should pay duty or tariffs on each license they sell just like vendors of manufactured items do. That would slow down the Great Tech Job Exodus.
Are there any lawyers here that can say whether packet sniffing is indeed a form of Reverse Engineering and could then be prohibited by an EULA? Common sense would tell me that it can not because it would be analogous to having a reasonable expectation of privacy when talking with someone inside your home but not when shouting to your neighbor through an open window.
Well then maybe some members of the secret police who think they are protecting this country will question their own convictions after being told to investigate individuals who turn out to be upstanding law-abiding freedom-loving people who tenaciously defend the Constitiution.
Tim touches on something here that I have noticed too. Open source does not have a reputation for being easy to use. But why is that so? Some projects are very user friendly but in general the profit motive works against Open Source here. Consulting, Support, and Customization is the main business model in the Open Source world, but if a software is extremely easy for the end users to set up then there is less of a reason for consultants to be brought in.
I agree with RMS that it would be a good idea to use a term for IP that correctly describes what it is. "Intellectual Property" doesn't express the fact that it is meant to be a time limited monopoly on the use of a novel idea. Joe Public thinks of property as something which is tangible and owned indefinitely. By allowing the meaning of the concept to change through verbal misdirection and common misusage we let a few individuals squeeze a few more drops of profit from an old cash cows teat, but the overall effect is that society as a whole is worse off.
Who picked their acronym for them, Microsoft's PR firm?
If you look at History you will find many examples of information that was lost precisely because it was kept proprietary. That was the main purpose of the medieval guilds, as well as clerics and numerous secret societies. It is why secrets like how to make Damascus Steel were lost. It is a better argument for intellectual freedom to point out how the free flow of information has bettered our world, for example the Gutenberg Bible and medical knowledge, than to say, incorrectly, that it was always like that before and now we are being oppressed.
Second, by what spade do you call the conglomeration of concepts known individually as copyright, patent, trademark, servicemark, and tradename? I think this was the original question.
If patents can be issued for software then software should only be sold with the source code provided so that the publisher's competitors can verify that their intellectual "property" has not been pirated. There would no longer be a need for source code secrecy or non-compete agreements since ownership could be easily determined, after years of litigation of course. Even with this "protection", I'd bet that the same large companies who are pushing for software patents would be afraid to allow other patent holders to examine their code.
And I probably don't even have to point out how easy it is to make a cold call purporting to be a survey. Instead of a recorded message saying "Hi! I'm Sandra. I'm calling to tell you that you are pre-approved for the smAcme Debt Consolidation Program with low, low rates...", instead it will be "Hi! I'm Sandra. Please express your views in our survey. Press One or wait on the line for yes, or two for no. Question one: Have you heard about the smAcme Debt Consolidation Program with its low, low rates? Two, did you know that you have already been approved? ..."
They should have bought 494,000 $900 hammers. At least they would have something useful to show for it. And what do you want to bet some of the $471,000,000 ends up in the Bush Re-Election Campaign's coffers?
As for why you would want to use it, being able to do OpenGL on V2, V3 and Banshee cards is a pretty good reason. It was also Open Sourceed by 3dfx before they went under.
I was wondering the same thing. The main screen should be a clock of some sort not a iconic menu.
You might be right. If the microsofties who got rich back when msft was growing in value were to inflate scox by continually bidding above the market price then it would be much more expensive for ibm to settle this by buying sco.
And now if you find wires running to mirror in your room you won't know if it is some cool new electronic device or a camera placed their for the hotel employees amusement.
It is not certain that they would be out of work. You alluded to that in your second 'certainty' which is probably a true one. The third is always true anyway and if your boss and coworkers are also walking out they would give good references for you, no?
I have to disagree with him on that point. They who control the TIA would have heavy political clout. They would stay hidden and mostly unknown to average Americans, and a change in political leadership would have no effect on their ownership of the big brother machine. So as long as the smart politician kowtowed to them, his skeletons would stay safely in the closet. If you want historical precedence for this just read up on J. Edgar Hoover.
Also the owners of TIA would have little need to actually destroy someone with the information they would have. They could just coerce candidates drop out of a race (like they did to Perot) or vote a certain way or use the information to further their own agenda (like they used the Office of Fatherland Security recently to track down the Democrat representatives who fled Texas to Oklahoma.) Sunshine laws and the Freedom of Information Act were meant to counteract these type of abuses but the faction in power now flagrantly violates these laws (e.g. Cheney's meetings with Enron and other Energy execs.)
TIA could be viewed as one more check and balance in the system though one not defined by our Constitution. However just because I don't think it will be destablizing doesn't mean it will be good for America. If Uncle Sam dances to the tune of secret puppetmasters then our system will come to resemble that of the Soviet Union and I think Bruce Sterling's reference to the KGB was an apt one.
No kidding. Giving a patent for something that has been done for thousands of years just because people do it through a particular communication media is ridiculous. I wish someone would patent unsolicited advertising using electronic mail as the media. Then they could make the spammers pay them or stop.
I bet the project was a piece of software that compares source code to try to find any similarities.
They had professionally made CD's minted with a nice silk screen on them. In quantities of 400+ they get them done for about a buck a CD. Then they sell them for a dollar at their gigs. They also give some of them away through audience participation like who can answer trivia about the band. Many half drunk people will shell out a buck for a CD especially when they just paid $2.50 for a beer.
Now you say, well how do they make money on that deal? They don't expect to make money from CD sales. But by getting their music out there and getting the audience familiar with their songs they have been picking up a following which makes them more desirable to the club owners. I'm sure you know that original bands typically don't get paid much but they are now getting more than most local cover bands.
As an indie I'm sure you are aware that even bands signed to huge labels usually lose money on CD sales and only come out ahead by touring. Well this is the same system but on a much smaller sale. And having lots of people familiar with your group also helps win those battle of the bands competitions which gives you free publicity.
So basically I think your assumption that you want to make money by selling CD's is flawed. The established system doesn't work that way and the new model won't either. Sell the band not the CD. Make your money on door receipts and if the band is good then eventually you can make a little on CDs and Tshirts later.
120 songs would be about 12 CD's. I don't buy 12 CD's a year now and when I do buy a CD it is usually for one or two songs. So $120 a year would be the highest priced of the two legal online alternatives for me. And to be quite frank, I usually just tune in one of the local college stations anyway. No commercials and a great variety of music and news.
Good points. With a tethered subscription service you will have to somehow authenticate from each device you want to play a song from. That means you must have internet access from the device and knowing ms they will make it a pita or completely impossible to play from any machine other than a ms windows pc with ie, wmp, and spylladium installed. And if they do succeed in sucking in a lot of customers, the terms of service will be modified accordingly to feed the beast.