> But how can you claim that it is disgusting for > people to want to help people less well off
> than themselves?
Why do *you* want to let starving children die? I never expressed disgust of *anyones* motivation for helping other people, it be either altruism or money. *You* were the one that said some motivations fopr helping others were "wrong". *That* is the kind of thinking that is disgusting.
> And where did Christianity come into all of > this?
Christian culture is the unique in putting more value in *motivations* than in *actions*.
> Sorry, but when I give to charity it is because
> it will help someone else, and the fact that I
> feel good is incidental.
Good, I'm glad that you choose to help others, and I do not care what your motivation for doing so is. I just wish you would stop telling other people which motivations are "right" or "wrong". Motivations are neither, only actions count (except for Christians, for whom motivations may save their souls).
> You don't seem to mind people getting money for
> it, but you do mind people feeling good about > it.
No, I'm happy whatever peoples motivations are.
> Free software really isn't that important.
I'm talking about interlectual property in general. Feeding a hungry man help him. This is good, but in only last a day. Fighting in the WTO for fair trade agreements will help him and his fellow countrymen to feed themselves. Fighting against the creation of an IP aristocracy will help his children to one day live in a country that redo what Japan and the SE asians tigers did, enter the high-tech world by copying and improving existing techonology.
Most commercial Unixen includes Display Postscript support in their X servers. Since DS is an Adobe product, it would make sense if Framemaker made use of it.
...when used as an intermediate format. Just like the quality of the error messages of the assembler is irrelevant when chosing it as an intermediate format for a compiler. You should never see them. If the front-end produce incorrect output, it is a bug.
Regarding the rest of your flame:
1) The use of static datastructures was a deliberate tradeoff between portability and flexibility. It made sense at the time, so it doesn't detract from Knuth's reputation.
2) Today the default sizes of the static datastructures are large enough that few users need to change them. Perhaps you used TeX many years ago.
> I have graphics dudes around me, and they
> like Apple Macs, and, in a few cases, Windows -
> they don't like Unix, and couldn't use it.
That would be a good reason[1] not to support Unix. However, they _do_ support Unix, just not Linux.
[1] Appart from the fact that Framemaker isn't really a "graphics application". It is more of a document preperation system, covering a niche somewhere between MS Word and TeX.
...notice how he skillfully avoids answering any concrete question, like whether or not Red Hat is going to include something like Mandrakes partition magic.
/. is owned by VA Linux, which is a for-profit company.
... to feed the hungry or to save your soul?
on
Geek Charities?
·
· Score: 2
> charity is something you should do because you
> want to
I find this line of reasoning disgusting. A starving child in Africa don't care about the motivation for donating the money to buy food. The only reason the motivation should matter, is the selfish Christian idea that the main purpose of charity is to save the soul of the giver, not to help the receiver.
This Christian mindset causes an unknown amount of tradegy every year, when followers of it fight the use of alternative efficient motivations for giving charity. Only charity given "for the goodness of the heart" is valuable in saving the givers soul.
BTW: A donation to EFF or FSF is likely to do a lot more good to the poor people than the more direct charities. The EFF and FSF fight the establishing of a new global aristocracy based on ownership of interlectual property, which will prevent the poor country from ever entering the new economy.
Even with continued advance, AI may be impossible
on
Son of HAL For Sale
·
· Score: 2
> That means, regardless of what point technology
> must reach before we can make truly intelligent
> machines, it will eventually happen so long as
> this trend continues.
There are a lot of hidden assumptions behind this conclusion. Appart from the explicit ("doubling every 18 month"), there is the view of technological advance as a linear process. Technology may very well continue to advance, but in other directions and areas than the one that leads to AI. Also, there may very well not *exist* a "technological point" where intelligent computers become a reality, no matter how fast we can make computers. We do not understand intelligence or conciousness well enough to tell whether it can in principle be duplicated by non-biological means.
Unfortunately, the European contries are at least as xenophobic as US, probably more so. Just about all EU contries have political parties whose main agenda is to keep foreigner out. These parties usually get about 10% of the vote, sometimes more (like in Austria). They have a huge influence as the mainstream parties try to adopt their politics in order to compete for the same narrow minded part of the poulation. In Denmark, all the popular parties compete on who can be toughest in foreigners, and the most popular stories in the media are about criminal foreigners or decendents of foreigners.
Of course, "foreigner" does not include other EU citizens, or even North Americans. It is only Moslems and Africans and poor people in general who "we" want to keep out.
Denmark did not change its constitution. The constitution already grants the parliament the right to give up some national independence after a referendum (which is why the Danes have to vote on each EU treaty).
Whether EU law or national law takes precedence in Denmark is somewhat unclear.
Votes in the European Council already use a system where large countries have more votes than small countries, but not as big a difference as population size would mandate.
I ilike the proposal for the new treaty to change this so that a new law must have a majority of both countries and population in order to pass.
The weird thing about the current situation is that a set of countries representing a minority of the population may pass a new law.
Copyright means I cannot freely use the fruits of other peoples interlectual achivements. I dislike this, but it does not limit how I can utilize my own ideas.
However, patents means I cannot use my own ideas, if somebody else happens to have had the same idea before me, even though I had never heard of the other persons work. Limiting my right to benefit from *my own* ideas is a much more fundamental violation of my personal freedom than copyright.
This violating is the primary reason for the strong anti-patent views, but even if you don't care about personal freedom, the practical arguments go against software patents as
well.
The economic arguments for patents in general don't hold for software, because most progress in software technology is incremental. Thus, the claimed benefit from encouraging large investments on revolutionary new technology, is by far overshadowed by the dampering effect license and legal costs have on evolutionary progress.
All these "home computers" were mostly used and bought as game boxes, but their build-in basic interpreters gave a generation a chance to discover that programming can be fun.
The cheat for that was client programs that opened sockets to their teammates and not only let them know about cloaked ships but if more than one of your teammates could see the ship the client would average the multiple randomized positions together to cancel out the randomization.
Yes, if the game depends on players having only limitied communication capability, cheating cannot be avoided. You cannot prevent players from communicating through other channels. The solution is to avoid the problem, and include "full instant telpatic connection" between players who agree on it as part of the game. You have to assume they have it anyway.
The randomization problem can be avoided by using the same randomization for all players.
It is simple. Just treat the client as part of the player when you design the server. I.e instead of
Game = Server + Client
Player = Human
design it like
Game = Server
Player = Client + Human
This means that the server should never send data to the client that the human should not have access to, and the server should accept any command that make sense in the current game state. Just like you wouln't display information in a single player game that the user should not have access to, or accept invalid moves made by the user.
With this design, the client is just a user interface. If someone creates a better player by improving the user interface, more power to them. Such improvements should be encouraged by making the client free software, preferable GPL'ed so people who improve the user interface (client) will have to disclose how they did it, if they want to share their improvements with other people.
It makes it clear _who_ (in this case: _WHO_) is regulating the content. I see no reason to create a top-level domain for each organization which would like to regulate part of the net, they can do that now.
Kylix is their port of C++Builder/Delphi. JBuilder is their Java deveopment environment.
The article mention Kylix briefly in the beginning, but the rest of the aricle is about JBuilder. It is unclear what part of "open source" and "Gnome intergration" refers to which product.
> It is costly and dangerous to create everything from scratch.
True. But even in the worst case[1], i.e. no free software alternatives, that would just mean *more* work to programmers who would have to replace the shrink-wrapped software with ad-hoc solutions.
Again, the argument for copyright should not be to protect the creators (programmers), but the consumers (in this case, the people hiring the programmers).
--
[1] The worst case is less likely than for end-user software, as there is more free software directed towards solution providers (programers) than towards end users. In many cases , the free software is even the current market leader (like gcc for the embedded programming market).
Slashdot Mirror
> But how can you claim that it is disgusting for > people to want to help people less well off
> than themselves?
Why do *you* want to let starving children die? I never expressed disgust of *anyones* motivation for helping other people, it be either altruism or money. *You* were the one that said some motivations fopr helping others were "wrong". *That* is the kind of thinking that is disgusting.
> And where did Christianity come into all of > this?
Christian culture is the unique in putting more value in *motivations* than in *actions*.
> Sorry, but when I give to charity it is because
> it will help someone else, and the fact that I
> feel good is incidental.
Good, I'm glad that you choose to help others, and I do not care what your motivation for doing so is. I just wish you would stop telling other people which motivations are "right" or "wrong". Motivations are neither, only actions count (except for Christians, for whom motivations may save their souls).
> You don't seem to mind people getting money for
> it, but you do mind people feeling good about > it.
No, I'm happy whatever peoples motivations are.
> Free software really isn't that important.
I'm talking about interlectual property in general. Feeding a hungry man help him. This is good, but in only last a day. Fighting in the WTO for fair trade agreements will help him and his fellow countrymen to feed themselves. Fighting against the creation of an IP aristocracy will help his children to one day live in a country that redo what Japan and the SE asians tigers did, enter the high-tech world by copying and improving existing techonology.
Most commercial Unixen includes Display Postscript support in their X servers. Since DS is an Adobe product, it would make sense if Framemaker made use of it.
...when used as an intermediate format. Just like the quality of the error messages of the assembler is irrelevant when chosing it as an intermediate format for a compiler. You should never see them. If the front-end produce incorrect output, it is a bug.
Regarding the rest of your flame:
1) The use of static datastructures was a deliberate tradeoff between portability and flexibility. It made sense at the time, so it doesn't detract from Knuth's reputation.
2) Today the default sizes of the static datastructures are large enough that few users need to change them. Perhaps you used TeX many years ago.
> I have graphics dudes around me, and they
> like Apple Macs, and, in a few cases, Windows -
> they don't like Unix, and couldn't use it.
That would be a good reason[1] not to support Unix. However, they _do_ support Unix, just not Linux.
[1] Appart from the fact that Framemaker isn't really a "graphics application". It is more of a document preperation system, covering a niche somewhere between MS Word and TeX.
...notice how he skillfully avoids answering any concrete question, like whether or not Red Hat is going to include something like Mandrakes partition magic.
/. is owned by VA Linux, which is a for-profit company.
> charity is something you should do because you
> want to
I find this line of reasoning disgusting. A starving child in Africa don't care about the motivation for donating the money to buy food. The only reason the motivation should matter, is the selfish Christian idea that the main purpose of charity is to save the soul of the giver, not to help the receiver.
This Christian mindset causes an unknown amount of tradegy every year, when followers of it fight the use of alternative efficient motivations for giving charity. Only charity given "for the goodness of the heart" is valuable in saving the givers soul.
BTW: A donation to EFF or FSF is likely to do a lot more good to the poor people than the more direct charities. The EFF and FSF fight the establishing of a new global aristocracy based on ownership of interlectual property, which will prevent the poor country from ever entering the new economy.
> That means, regardless of what point technology
> must reach before we can make truly intelligent
> machines, it will eventually happen so long as
> this trend continues.
There are a lot of hidden assumptions behind this conclusion. Appart from the explicit ("doubling every 18 month"), there is the view of technological advance as a linear process. Technology may very well continue to advance, but in other directions and areas than the one that leads to AI. Also, there may very well not *exist* a "technological point" where intelligent computers become a reality, no matter how fast we can make computers. We do not understand intelligence or conciousness well enough to tell whether it can in principle be duplicated by non-biological means.
Since the BSD license by purpose allows reuse in proprietary products.
Unfortunately, the European contries are at least as xenophobic as US, probably more so. Just about all EU contries have political parties whose main agenda is to keep foreigner out. These parties usually get about 10% of the vote, sometimes more (like in Austria). They have a huge influence as the mainstream parties try to adopt their politics in order to compete for the same narrow minded part of the poulation. In Denmark, all the popular parties compete on who can be toughest in foreigners, and the most popular stories in the media are about criminal foreigners or decendents of foreigners.
Of course, "foreigner" does not include other EU citizens, or even North Americans. It is only Moslems and Africans and poor people in general who "we" want to keep out.
Denmark did not change its constitution. The constitution already grants the parliament the right to give up some national independence after a referendum (which is why the Danes have to vote on each EU treaty).
Whether EU law or national law takes precedence in Denmark is somewhat unclear.
Sometimes EU members vote against EU regulation on matters they agree with, because they believe it should be up to the individual nations to decide.
The European Council does not pass any laws.
Votes in the European Council already use a system where large countries have more votes than small countries, but not as big a difference as population size would mandate.
I ilike the proposal for the new treaty to change this so that a new law must have a majority of both countries and population in order to pass.
The weird thing about the current situation is that a set of countries representing a minority of the population may pass a new law.
Copyright means I cannot freely use the fruits of other peoples interlectual achivements. I dislike this, but it does not limit how I can utilize my own ideas.
However, patents means I cannot use my own ideas, if somebody else happens to have had the same idea before me, even though I had never heard of the other persons work. Limiting my right to benefit from *my own* ideas is a much more fundamental violation of my personal freedom than copyright.
This violating is the primary reason for the strong anti-patent views, but even if you don't care about personal freedom, the practical arguments go against software patents as
well.
The economic arguments for patents in general don't hold for software, because most progress in software technology is incremental. Thus, the claimed benefit from encouraging large investments on revolutionary new technology, is by far overshadowed by the dampering effect license and legal costs have on evolutionary progress.
All these "home computers" were mostly used and bought as game boxes, but their build-in basic interpreters gave a generation a chance to discover that programming can be fun.
You can send much less information than X11, for a tile based game you can just send the tile numbers, and leave it to the client to draw the tiles.
You shoudl of course not send any information about what is behind a opaque wall.
The randomization problem can be avoided by using the same randomization for all players.
It is simple. Just treat the client as part of the player when you design the server. I.e instead of
Game = Server + Client
Player = Human
design it like
Game = Server
Player = Client + Human
This means that the server should never send data to the client that the human should not have access to, and the server should accept any command that make sense in the current game state. Just like you wouln't display information in a single player game that the user should not have access to, or accept invalid moves made by the user.
With this design, the client is just a user interface. If someone creates a better player by improving the user interface, more power to them. Such improvements should be encouraged by making the client free software, preferable GPL'ed so people who improve the user interface (client) will have to disclose how they did it, if they want to share their improvements with other people.
It makes it clear _who_ (in this case: _WHO_) is regulating the content. I see no reason to create a top-level domain for each organization which would like to regulate part of the net, they can do that now.
Historic reasons. Next version of Debian will most likely have KDE as an option.
Guy Gardner would be just the type of GL to join the KDE Legaue.
TurboLinux is a member, at it is strongest in Asia. Asia is located outside US last I checked.
Kylix is their port of C++Builder/Delphi. JBuilder is their Java deveopment environment.
The article mention Kylix briefly in the beginning, but the rest of the aricle is about JBuilder. It is unclear what part of "open source" and "Gnome intergration" refers to which product.
> It is costly and dangerous to create everything from scratch.
True. But even in the worst case[1], i.e. no free software alternatives, that would just mean *more* work to programmers who would have to replace the shrink-wrapped software with ad-hoc solutions.
Again, the argument for copyright should not be to protect the creators (programmers), but the consumers (in this case, the people hiring the programmers).
--
[1] The worst case is less likely than for end-user software, as there is more free software directed towards solution providers (programers) than towards end users. In many cases , the free software is even the current market leader (like gcc for the embedded programming market).