> This is such an elitist position and really hurts both opensource in general and Firefox > specifically.
No, what hurts free software is people who think whining (as opposed to proper bug reports and feature requests) is a form for contribution. It drives the volunteer developers off the projects, leaving only the paid developers. Nobody think it is fun to give your work away for free, only to have people complain about it
No I don't forbid you to whine. It is covered by your freedom of expression. Just don't pretend that you are contributing to the solution rather than the problem when you do so.
> You better believe we need to hold these people to the highest level of accountability.
Nobody should be hold to a higher standard than what we are paying them for. How much higher is the salary of a high-school teacher than the salary of a software engineer?
> Don't have an open mailing list for OpenSUSE if you don't want to deal with sometimes unwanted comments.
That attitude sickens me. Just because a forum is not censored, does mean everybody has a moral right to post off-topic messages. You can do it, but it doesn't make you any less of an asshole if you do it. Quite the opposite, you were shown trust, and abused it.
Chinese women get in average 1.73 children, which is significantly less than what is needed to sustain the population over a long term. The population is still increasing though, due to expanded life expectancy. But India will soon replace China as the worlds most populous nation.
BTW: The second world countries (the old "Eastern Bloc") has in general even lower birth rates that the first world countries, so imitating Western lifestyle is not the only option.
> If people don't like MS, just don't buy its software.
We can't, our external partners send us and expect to receive data in proprietary MS formats.
I understand that you live in your moms basement, and thus have no need to exchange data with other people, but some of us live in the real world and our only choices are 1) to use MS software, or 2) to use 100% compatible software.
Requiring MS to publish specifications is a way to ensure that #2 remain at least theoretically possible.
What EU is doing is what any government should do, to keep the market alive is the finest reason for governments.
And no, because you are unable to imagine any other reason than petty protectionism for an action does not mean it is irrational. There is another option. At least you choosed the proper subject for your message.
The most noble purpose of the government is to ensure the free market, something that cannot exist without government intervention. It is always more profitable to make a fixed pricing deal with your "competitors" rather than actually trying to compete with them.
Libertarians tend to be very confused about this fact, as their central dogmas of their religion is that government is bad and free market is good.
What a company has a monopoly on one area, they can use that to give them an unfair advantage on other areas. This has been strategy used for every single successful MS product launch since MS DOS.
Demanding that a company with a monopoly publish the interfaces so competitors gets equal access means that competition again becomes possible.
A double-linked list is a special case of the technique described in the patent, and should as such be enough to invalidate the. The summary also mention other special cases of the patent claim.
An eyewitness account by a police officer is considered sufficient proof in court in most cases.
If the policeman had one of these camera helmets, the eyewitness account is unlikely to be sufficient anymore. Thus protecting civilians against made up charges of "resisting arrest.
Thus, there helmets will only serve to protect the right of civilians, and never decrease them.
I can get into all relevant government sites and many large private sites in Denmark with my government backed digital signature. Digital signatures are supported by the major browsers.
The main problem is that there is a fee for the web site for using it, which means it is not useful for small or amateur sites, they still rely on passwords.
The difference is whether there is a prior approval before publishing.
If sites like/. were liable for what the users posted, they would have to employ editors for screening all submissions before they appeared. They would need some legal training, and thus not be entirely cheap.
Most advertisement funded or hobbyist sites would not be able to afford this. Which mean that the net would fall back into the hands of a few large media corporations, and most of the democratic potential of the Internet would get lost.
With regard to the victims of libel: If the person doing the libel is anonymous, they should consider if their trustworthiness is smaller than that of an anonymous cowards. If that is the case, they have already greater problems than the libel. If the person doing the libel is not anonymous, sue that person rather than the messenger.
Some of our external partners will get the new MS Office as part of their service contracts, and our administrative office will buy it because it makes the PHB's feel at the technological frontier. Both of these will start sending us documents that cannot be read with our old MS Office, and we will be forced to upgrade.
Same procedure as last upgrade. Same procedure as every upgrade.
We end up paying Microsoft not for new features we don't need, but for being allowed to cooperate with our partners.
This is why I believe the government needs to standardize on an open format for exchanging documents internally between branches and externally with private citizens and organizations. This is not a problem that can be solved by local decision makers. The locally optimal solution is always to go for a format that can read what the external partners, and this vicious cycle can only be broken by finding a different global optimal point.
(My math/cs background tells me that a local optimum is not necessary a global optimum, which is the provable wrong leap-of-faith that the dogmatic anti-regulation people have made).
If you want a job in a coffee shop, by all means, learn java.
> ruby jobs --> 297
There aren't that many open positions as jewelers out there.
But if you want to be a programmer, learn programming fundamentals. Don't just learn a language. It will soon be replaced by the next buzz word language sold to the pointy heads anyway.
1: That there are open fora where people can post their own ideas and expressions without being it pre-aproved before publishing by some kind of censor.
2: That there are no place where people can post expressions copyrighted by other people without prior permission.
We obviously can't have both be true at the same time. If YouTube must go, so must/.. Both makes it possible for people to publish copyrigted material, and both remove it per request. If you can successfully sue YouTube, you can also upload some copyrighted material of your own to/. as an AC, and then sue CmdrTaco for distributing it. Percentages don't matter to the law, it is based on principles.
I believe #1 is very important to democracy, and that democracy is more important than the potential loss of profit implied by #2. Of course, I won't guarentee that your law makers feel the same way about the relative value of democracy and profit.
The DMCA is supposed to mean that YouTube and Google are not responsible for what their users upload, but are obliged to remove all copyrighted material when requested to do so by the copyright holders.
This is one thing the DMCA got right, without such a protection of service providers, it would be impossible to run a site like/. where anyone can upload copyrighted material.
Free software is not a zero-sum game, everybody are supposed to get more from free software than what they put into it. But anyway:
Sun: Java and OpenOffice.org are their most visible contributions, but they contribute to lots of other stuff too. Firefox, Gnome, XEmacs, low level network protocols springs to mind.
IBM: They do most of their work on the "behind-the-door" projects, but they are big contributors too infrastructure project in for example GCC and the Linux kernel. Not to mention that they actually did marketing for the Linux brand.
Google: Apart front releasing plenty of their own software, they also sponsor "Summer of Code", which is a great way for students to become involved in free software and get paid at the same time.
You other big mistake is to assume the free software developers are unpaid. This is true for the majority of projects on sourceforge, which are merely a way for hobbyist to share with each other. It is not true for the major commercially significant free software projects, which are use by many people and by big companies. If you log at the changelogs for the big projects such as GCC or the Linux kernel, you will see that most of the commits are from people who are paid full time developers. There is a small number of commits from people who are paid part time to work on the software (because they use it as a part of their primary job), and a small number of commits from students, but very few from pure hobbyists.
If effect, the great economic impact of free software is not as a medium for hobbyist to distribute their products, but as a medium for different companies to share the development burden with each other without giving away control to a single proprietary vendor. And the great impact of the GPL is to discourage some companies from going proprietary with their extensions, instead of sharing them.
If they measure the non-delayed particle *before* the 50 ms have passed, the quantum state of the delayed particle will already be fixed at the time they get around to measure it.
On the other hand, if they wait 50 ms before measuring the non-delayed particle, they aren't really sending much of a signal back in time.
It isn't much use to send message back in time, if you aren't allowed to read them before the present time.
> Of course there is no way to disprove the idea of a god or gods. Neither is there a way to > prove their existence, either. Hence, believing either that none exist or that there is > definitively one or more is demonstrably stupid.
There is no way disprove that a small apple pie is in orbit around Jupiter. Neither is there a way to prove it exists. Nonetheless, I believe that there isn't one. Disbelieving in entities based on lack of evidence is called Occam's razor, and is a part of the scientific method. You may call it stupid if it makes you feel better (I don't care), but the scientific method and Occam's Razor has served us well, so I believe in them. They key, of course, is to be willing to readjust your beliefs when new evidence turn up.
In my world view, neither theism or atheism are stupid. There are plenty of evidence (in the form of miracles) for the existence of gods. The quality of the evidence is debatable though. Some are impressed with the atheism, and thus believe in gods. Some think little of it, and take the default position in lack of evidence, which is disbelief.
And finally some are not bright enough to understand why others can reach different conclusions based on the same evidence than they themselves do, and resort to calling everybody else stupid. It is the Homer Simpson position: "Everybody does everything because they are stupid". Very popular on the net.
Corporations have a free option... so does the rest of us. Including people in less developed countries, who is now less dependent of those corporations.
Linux is a single but important brick in a a world-wide free computer infrastructure, which has the potential of bringing more freedom and prosperity than any revolution in a single country.
But the way Debian "shield" the developer from the user, so we (as developers) don't actually see the original problems experienced by the users, but instead have to deal with the consequences of the broken "fixes" introduced by Debian. They even distribute other developers alpha test code so they "shield" the developers from direct response to code that was only released in order to generate such a response.
I still write free software, but I'm happy that it is for a sufficiently vertical market that I don't have to deal with the pain of Debian packaging it up anymore. It is one of the many small annoyanced that takes the fun out of it.
And yes, I know there are advantages to the use of having a "homogenised" distribution with a single access point, but as a developer I only see the dark side of it. And somehow none of the other distributions caused as much grief.
Slashdot Mirror
> This is such an elitist position and really hurts both opensource in general and Firefox
> specifically.
No, what hurts free software is people who think whining (as opposed to proper bug reports and feature requests) is a form for contribution. It drives the volunteer developers off the projects, leaving only the paid developers. Nobody think it is fun to give your work away for free, only to have people complain about it
No I don't forbid you to whine. It is covered by your freedom of expression. Just don't pretend that you are contributing to the solution rather than the problem when you do so.
> You better believe we need to hold these people to the highest level of accountability.
Nobody should be hold to a higher standard than what we are paying them for. How much higher is the salary of a high-school teacher than the salary of a software engineer?
> Don't have an open mailing list for OpenSUSE if you don't want to deal with sometimes unwanted comments.
That attitude sickens me. Just because a forum is not censored, does mean everybody has a moral right to post off-topic messages. You can do it, but it doesn't make you any less of an asshole if you do it. Quite the opposite, you were shown trust, and abused it.
> I'd rather spend Saturday playing real golf than I would hanging out with friends.
Uh, for most players, "real golf" is a place to hang out with their friends...
Chinese women get in average 1.73 children, which is significantly less than what is needed to sustain the population over a long term. The population is still increasing though, due to expanded life expectancy. But India will soon replace China as the worlds most populous nation.
BTW: The second world countries (the old "Eastern Bloc") has in general even lower birth rates that the first world countries, so imitating Western lifestyle is not the only option.
> If people don't like MS, just don't buy its software.
We can't, our external partners send us and expect to receive data in proprietary MS formats.
I understand that you live in your moms basement, and thus have no need to exchange data with other people, but some of us live in the real world and our only choices are 1) to use MS software, or 2) to use 100% compatible software.
Requiring MS to publish specifications is a way to ensure that #2 remain at least theoretically possible.
What EU is doing is what any government should do, to keep the market alive is the finest reason for governments.
And no, because you are unable to imagine any other reason than petty protectionism for an action does not mean it is irrational. There is another option. At least you choosed the proper subject for your message.
The most noble purpose of the government is to ensure the free market, something that cannot exist without government intervention. It is always more profitable to make a fixed pricing deal with your "competitors" rather than actually trying to compete with them.
Libertarians tend to be very confused about this fact, as their central dogmas of their religion is that government is bad and free market is good.
What a company has a monopoly on one area, they can use that to give them an unfair advantage on other areas. This has been strategy used for every single successful MS product launch since MS DOS.
Demanding that a company with a monopoly publish the interfaces so competitors gets equal access means that competition again becomes possible.
The patent is either some sort of joke (like the guy who patented the wheel), or the computer science skill level at LSI must be incredible low.
A double-linked list is a special case of the technique described in the patent, and should as such be enough to invalidate the. The summary also mention other special cases of the patent claim.
An eyewitness account by a police officer is considered sufficient proof in court in most cases.
If the policeman had one of these camera helmets, the eyewitness account is unlikely to be sufficient anymore. Thus protecting civilians against made up charges of "resisting arrest.
Thus, there helmets will only serve to protect the right of civilians, and never decrease them.
I can get into all relevant government sites and many large private sites in Denmark with my government backed digital signature. Digital signatures are supported by the major browsers.
The main problem is that there is a fee for the web site for using it, which means it is not useful for small or amateur sites, they still rely on passwords.
The difference is whether there is a prior approval before publishing.
/. were liable for what the users posted, they would have to employ editors for screening all submissions before they appeared. They would need some legal training, and thus not be entirely cheap.
If sites like
Most advertisement funded or hobbyist sites would not be able to afford this. Which mean that the net would fall back into the hands of a few large media corporations, and most of the democratic potential of the Internet would get lost.
With regard to the victims of libel: If the person doing the libel is anonymous, they should consider if their trustworthiness is smaller than that of an anonymous cowards. If that is the case, they have already greater problems than the libel. If the person doing the libel is not anonymous, sue that person rather than the messenger.
Some of our external partners will get the new MS Office as part of their service contracts, and our administrative office will buy it because it makes the PHB's feel at the technological frontier. Both of these will start sending us documents that cannot be read with our old MS Office, and we will be forced to upgrade.
Same procedure as last upgrade. Same procedure as every upgrade.
We end up paying Microsoft not for new features we don't need, but for being allowed to cooperate with our partners.
This is why I believe the government needs to standardize on an open format for exchanging documents internally between branches and externally with private citizens and organizations. This is not a problem that can be solved by local decision makers. The locally optimal solution is always to go for a format that can read what the external partners, and this vicious cycle can only be broken by finding a different global optimal point.
(My math/cs background tells me that a local optimum is not necessary a global optimum, which is the provable wrong leap-of-faith that the dogmatic anti-regulation people have made).
The Hobbit *movie* will be filmed after LotR, so it will be kind of a prequel even if the book isn't.
> java jobs --> 15969
If you want a job in a coffee shop, by all means, learn java.
> ruby jobs --> 297
There aren't that many open positions as jewelers out there.
But if you want to be a programmer, learn programming fundamentals. Don't just learn a language. It will soon be replaced by the next buzz word language sold to the pointy heads anyway.
> These people are selling your product for you. In other words, you're suing your own salesmen!
Your salesman is selling two copies of your product, and only paying you for one copy.
#1 should come after #6, or IBM would be on the bad list.
What is most important:
/.. Both makes it possible for people to publish copyrigted material, and both remove it per request. If you can successfully sue YouTube, you can also upload some copyrighted material of your own to /. as an AC, and then sue CmdrTaco for distributing it. Percentages don't matter to the law, it is based on principles.
1: That there are open fora where people can post their own ideas and expressions without being it pre-aproved before publishing by some kind of censor.
2: That there are no place where people can post expressions copyrighted by other people without prior permission.
We obviously can't have both be true at the same time. If YouTube must go, so must
I believe #1 is very important to democracy, and that democracy is more important than the potential loss of profit implied by #2. Of course, I won't guarentee that your law makers feel the same way about the relative value of democracy and profit.
The DMCA is supposed to mean that YouTube and Google are not responsible for what their users upload, but are obliged to remove all copyrighted material when requested to do so by the copyright holders.
/. where anyone can upload copyrighted material.
This is one thing the DMCA got right, without such a protection of service providers, it would be impossible to run a site like
Free software is not a zero-sum game, everybody are supposed to get more from free software than what they put into it. But anyway:
Sun: Java and OpenOffice.org are their most visible contributions, but they contribute to lots of other stuff too. Firefox, Gnome, XEmacs, low level network protocols springs to mind.
IBM: They do most of their work on the "behind-the-door" projects, but they are big contributors too infrastructure project in for example GCC and the Linux kernel. Not to mention that they actually did marketing for the Linux brand.
Google: Apart front releasing plenty of their own software, they also sponsor "Summer of Code", which is a great way for students to become involved in free software and get paid at the same time.
You other big mistake is to assume the free software developers are unpaid. This is true for the majority of projects on sourceforge, which are merely a way for hobbyist to share with each other. It is not true for the major commercially significant free software projects, which are use by many people and by big companies. If you log at the changelogs for the big projects such as GCC or the Linux kernel, you will see that most of the commits are from people who are paid full time developers. There is a small number of commits from people who are paid part time to work on the software (because they use it as a part of their primary job), and a small number of commits from students, but very few from pure hobbyists.
If effect, the great economic impact of free software is not as a medium for hobbyist to distribute their products, but as a medium for different companies to share the development burden with each other without giving away control to a single proprietary vendor. And the great impact of the GPL is to discourage some companies from going proprietary with their extensions, instead of sharing them.
If they measure the non-delayed particle *before* the 50 ms have passed, the quantum state of the delayed particle will already be fixed at the time they get around to measure it.
On the other hand, if they wait 50 ms before measuring the non-delayed particle, they aren't really sending much of a signal back in time.
It isn't much use to send message back in time, if you aren't allowed to read them before the present time.
> Of course there is no way to disprove the idea of a god or gods. Neither is there a way to
> prove their existence, either. Hence, believing either that none exist or that there is
> definitively one or more is demonstrably stupid.
There is no way disprove that a small apple pie is in orbit around Jupiter. Neither is there a way to prove it exists. Nonetheless, I believe that there isn't one. Disbelieving in entities based on lack of evidence is called Occam's razor, and is a part of the scientific method. You may call it stupid if it makes you feel better (I don't care), but the scientific method and Occam's Razor has served us well, so I believe in them. They key, of course, is to be willing to readjust your beliefs when new evidence turn up.
In my world view, neither theism or atheism are stupid. There are plenty of evidence (in the form of miracles) for the existence of gods. The quality of the evidence is debatable though. Some are impressed with the atheism, and thus believe in gods. Some think little of it, and take the default position in lack of evidence, which is disbelief.
And finally some are not bright enough to understand why others can reach different conclusions based on the same evidence than they themselves do, and resort to calling everybody else stupid. It is the Homer Simpson position: "Everybody does everything because they are stupid". Very popular on the net.
(and I'm falling for it)
... so does the rest of us. Including people in less developed countries, who is now less dependent of those corporations.
Corporations have a free option
Linux is a single but important brick in a a world-wide free computer infrastructure, which has the potential of bringing more freedom and prosperity than any revolution in a single country.
All my code has been GPL'ed, so not that problem.
But the way Debian "shield" the developer from the user, so we (as developers) don't actually see the original problems experienced by the users, but instead have to deal with the consequences of the broken "fixes" introduced by Debian. They even distribute other developers alpha test code so they "shield" the developers from direct response to code that was only released in order to generate such a response.
I still write free software, but I'm happy that it is for a sufficiently vertical market that I don't have to deal with the pain of Debian packaging it up anymore. It is one of the many small annoyanced that takes the fun out of it.
And yes, I know there are advantages to the use of having a "homogenised" distribution with a single access point, but as a developer I only see the dark side of it. And somehow none of the other distributions caused as much grief.