The actual official line was that communism was the goal. Communism was to be reached through socialism, and the system of the time was socialism. Communism is sort of an utopian state and the harsh reality of the workd forced a temporary system that was implemented and named socialism. That's what they said, so it might be a question of definitions. If you mean social democracy when you say socialism, then you are right. However, from the other side of the curtain social democracy was still capitalism, for the means of production was still privately, rather than collectively, owned. (Note that we're talking about ownership of means of production and *not* personal property, the abolishemnt of personal belongings were never part of the official line).
> Though the Soviet Union was founded in the spirit of Marx's work, it was by no means the kind of state that Marx thought would > necessarily appear. Marx's worker's state required an industrialized economy to arise (since this foster development of class > consciousness among the proletariat), and there's no way you can fairly say that Russia was an industrial economy in 1917.
That's where Lenin came into the picture. The whole ideology inside the Block was called "Marxism-Leninism", not just Marxism. Lenin argued that the highly industrialised background is handy, but not necessary, to sweep capitalism out and through the socialist route you can still get to the ultimate goal, communism. The need of a class consciousness was replaced by simple misery and hunger. He understood Marx's arguments and he also insited on industrialisation (he had the famous equation, Rule_of_the_Soviets + Electrification = Communism, which, interestingly, is mathematically equivalent to Rule_of_the_Soviets = Communism - Electrification...) as well as education (an other of his favourites, "To learn, to learn, to learn") but he argued that while it was necessary for communism down the track, it was not necessary for the revolution here and now.
So what to the Western world is social democracy that to the Eastern Block was capitalism, Western communism mapped to Eastern socialism and what the Block called communism, the West didn't even had a word for:-)
> While a fascist state could itself be oligarchical in nature, it would still seek direct control of > power and not divest it to the political systems that exist in and serve corporate interests.
Unless, of course, you assume that the oligarchs and the would-be fascist rulers are one and the same. In that case distorting the existing political system so that it channels the power from its existing owners into your direction is exactly what you want to do.
Actually, what you calculated is not boiling water. It is just bringing it to boiling point. The specific heat of boiling water, i.e. changing it from 100C liquid water to 100C gaseous water is many many times more. If I remember correctly (it was a long time ago...), the heat needed to melt ice is about 80cal/g and to boil water was 540cal/g (where cal is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1g liquid water by 1K or 1C, as you like it, under normal conditions as per pressure etc. so basically it is the specific heat of water used as an energy unit).
> There would be commercial software, it'd all be wrapped up in NDAs and Trade Secret clauses, encrypted and only > available as binaries. It'd make use of all the best efforts of GPL and BSD software and contribute very little back.
If there was no copyright, you could not stop me or anyone else to distribute your binaries for free. So what would be your incentive to create that binary software in the first place? You can try to protect it (as game companies tried to do it in the C64 era) but I don't remember a single game back then that wasn't cracked in no time at all.
In a copyright-free environment the whole commercial SW development industry would not work in its current form. You would need a different busines model.
It is not exactly the right example, but indicates the possibilities: look at the FPGA manufacturers. They want to sell chips. So they spend a lot of money on developing synthesis software that they give away free. yes, it is copyright and all but it is pretty much free. They don't give you source because a) old reflexes b) support issues c) source would tell you about the internals of *chips*. Nevertheless, it is a move towards the direction where the copyright-based SW business model is replaced by a service oriented model (in this case, the SW itself is the service and the return on investment is realised in increased chip sales).
I think RMS was on the map a long time before Linux. The fact that most of the Linux crowd doesn't know of him is a different issue. RMS made Linux possible and created the subculture of free software.
If indeed noone takes him seriously that's very sad and frightening, IMHO. He might look creepy but if you listen to what he says, you will find content there. If having the Right to Read is Marxist philosphy, then I'll have to go and buy a hammer and a sickle...
Well, sort of. Maybe. Copyright allows you to distribute the code, in binary or source, while limiting the rights of others to re-distribute your work or work derived from yours. RMS very cleverly used the very copyright law to defeat it and guarantee that you can *not* limit the rights of the others to re-distribute. He also made a twist so that you must release the source and you must limit the recipient's right to change the licensing terms.
Yes, it helps open source software, within the current framework. However, if there was no copyright the current commercial SW model would not exist either, so you can not say that lack of copyright would life harder in the SW arena for non-commercial entities.
In addition, SW is only a fragment of the copyright market. There is no equivalent to 'source code' and 'binary code' in most other intellectual products, such as books, music, films, dance, maps, data compilations and whatnot. Without copyright these intellectual products would be available freely to everyone to obtain and disseminate without restriction. That would make the whole copyright business model dead and allow a very different business model, the value-added service model prevalent. The information is then available without restriction, but the service of organising, selecting, searching, refreshing, maintaining and so on the information *you* need presented the way *you want* can be purchased. There's nothing new in it, actually, that's what the Linux distros are doing.
So, while it is true that in the current, copyright-based environment the whole free-software stuff is based on the copyright law itself, you can not say that in a copyright-free environment the lack of the protection provided by the copyright law against *the very same copyright law* would hinder SW development, IMHO.
They may not know what they legislate on, but they know very well what the objective is. No, it's not saving the children from evil hackers & terrorists, it's to create legislation that makes a whole bunch of people guilty by default. Those people can be charged and convicted at any time the powers to be feel like it.
It's not knee-jerk stuff, it's power-grub stuff.
Have you realised that each of these seemingly meaningless knee-jerk reactions took a bit of civil liberty away and gave more power to the government (and its masters)?
I thought that it was a well established general opinion in geek circles that MS has never been innovative? A decade ago I think the concensus was that MS stole, copied or bought anything remotely new (to them, that is) in their stuff and usually screwed up the implementation. I seem to remember that the only thing really credited to MS was ODBC, everything else had been traced back to some already existing thing. There was some credit for TrueType, but I think there was some contraversy about that too (I don't remember what, so I'm not sure about that).
Their business tactics were not new either. However, unlike their software, those were implemented very, very well. That was the key to their growth. The innovative company is just an image, sheer PR, nothing to do with actual innovation. A patent portfolio is a business weapon, not an indication of being technically creative.
So, I wonder, what happened in the past 10 years that shifted the opinion so much that 'Is MS the *most* innovative company?' as a question can even emerge and appear on/. ?
> H.264 and AAC were developed in standards organizations where members need to declare what > patents they have that a new standard might infringe. So there should be no submarine patents > from the main industry players.
> Do you want to withhold the sick population from cheaper drugs just > because the current patent holder is too dumb to produce it cheaper?
The current patent holder *does* produce it very cheap. But due to the patent protection, with high license fees (or refusing to license it) they can make everybody else's production cost very high (or inifinite).
The current patent holders are not dumb at all. They are *greedy*. They don't really care about the sick population (other than a market segment, i.e. 'consumer'), they care about profit. They do not develop medicines to cure the sick, they develop them to make money. It's just a product like any other and the future of humanity and the wellbeing of mankind and other stuff like that has nothing to do with it.
Well, I thought that was globalisation? I am Mr. Gamer and I want to buy product GAME that is $$$ here and $ there. Due to the regulation you praise, I must pay $$$ for the product. Fine. Now I am Mr. Company and I want to buy product PROGRAMMER that is $$$ here but only $ there. Should not the same regulation apply? I mean, Mr. Company off-shores their administration, the pressing of the DVD, the making of the booklet, the customer service center and chances are, part of the programming as well - because it's cheaper to buy it there.
They want it both ways: they can buy stuff on the global market at the lowest achievable price. Then they come around and mandate that humans can not do that. Why? What makes a company more important than you or me? Companies scream around that regulation is bad, everything must be totally deregulated - except their customers, who must be heavily regulated to guarantee profit to the company and preferably executed if they do not comply.
Once I read in old book, that a long, lo9ng time ago there was this crazy idea that we elect governments and give them certain powers in order to make *our* lives better. We also allow the government to give certain rights to non-living entities, such as corporations, *as long as* it helps the government's primary goal: to make our lives better. What a silly, pinko-commie sentiment! Fortunately, we know it better: it must be the other way around. Corporations are the ruling class and they give power to the government to control us so that our behaviour furthers the corporations' wellbeing. We call it democracy, which is some ancient word for the power over the people!
> Actually I'm English (but living in the US). Last time I checked the news the UK are still fighting terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan too.
As far as I know there was no terrorism in Iraq when the US/UK marched in and they by no means were connected to the 9/11. There is a lot there now, so the war OF terror seems to work very well indeed. In addition, if I remember correctly, the Taliban was entranched and supported by the very same US that fights them now, when it was handy to support any extremist/terrorist organisation against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Just as Saddam Hussein was a best of friends of the US when he was in war with Iran. Against the ayatollah, who got to power in a revolution against a brutal dictator shah who, in turn got to power with the help of guess who, because the democratically elected secular(!) government of Iran seemed too pinkish to some (in Particular, British Petroleum). Of course Iran is in the crosshairs of the coalition of the willing again, as a rogue terrorist state, even though 9/11 was organised by a Saudi and executed by Saudis and as a matter of fact, it was the US that shot down an Iranian passanger plane, not the other way around. Now Iran didn't get much better off with Khomeini or with Ahmadinejad, but at least the latter they chose themselves. He might be a nutcase but he (unlike some other nations with high moral stance) did not attack any sovereign country, signed (and reasonably obeyed) the NNPT (unlike some friends of the US, like India and Pakistan, who, incidently, *do* have nuclear weapons).
As an Englishman, you must also know that your local terrorists (IRA) were funded to a large extent from the US. Not by muslims, not by cave-dwelling bearded semi-prophets, but higher-middle and upper class, Bible waving, God fearing nice white people with roots in the United Kingdom.
The "war on terror" rhetoric from Faux News and Halliburton, I mean, White House, is kind of like a Hollywood action movie, bad guy does bad deed, innocent people die, good guy can't stand it, beats the living crap out of bad guy (with sufficient struggle and twists to show how backstabbing, evil monster the bad guy is), everybody cheers, world peace and freedom of humanity saved, closing credits. The reality seems to be somewhat different.
> I thought we were meant to be the good guys that don't do this kind of thing.
I think you would find that outside of the borders of the US the above sentiment is not generally accepted. Neither the good guys bit, nor the don't do bit.
> Democracy doesn't work. We've had them for thousands of years, and they always > fail as the majority learns they can just vote to steal from the minority.
Yeah, but capitalism allows a minority to exploit the majority, so it all balances out, doesn't it:-)
> It was the first "usable" version of Windows. It did things that were arguably miraculous.
You mean *on a PC*. Win3.1 was only miraculous if you came from DOS. Look at the other players around that time (Win3.1 came out in '92, Win3.0 in '90), such as Acorn, Mac, Amiga, Atari: they all had all those miraculous features *for years* (I don't mention the unix variants for they were not affordable then). Heck, they even allowed you to create a folder within a desktop folder, that 3.11 did not allow you to do, IIRC. I had both Amigas and Win3.1 boxes at home and I was using a Sun Sparc at work. It was painful to use the Win3.1 box. There was nothing new there, except for those who already were not used to anything but MS at the time. Win3.1 was a 16-bit OS, all the others I mentioned were 32 bit *and* had been for at least 5 years...
To get someone to be thrown to Gitmo you do not have to prove anything. In fact you do not even have to have a bad feeling about that person. It's enough to point your finger and say that (s)he is an enemy combatant or that (s)he had thoughts of terrorism and (s)he disappears. There's only one requirement: you are one of the Good Guys. A Good Guy, by definition, is a person who other Good Guys say is a Good Guy. All other people are Suspicious Persons, with the exception of some Bad Guys. Now Bad Guys are shipped to Gitmo and any person shipped to Gitmo is declared, retrospectively, a Bad Guy.
Similarly, there are Pirates, who should be boilt in oil in public (attendance fees apply) executions after confiscating all their assets, but this practice is currently suspended due to the high price of oil (see Terrorists and the Axis of Evil). Then there are the Good Guys (a subset of the above mentioned Good Guys), who protect the Artists from the Pirates. The rest of the population is Suspected Thieves, actually including the Artists themselves. A Suspected Thief can be declared a Pirate by a Good Guy at any time, simply by pointing a finger. Sometimes these freshly minted Pirates question their promotion, but since almost nobody is spending 24/7 buying products from the Good Guys (even though it is one of the Responsibilities as a Citizen of Any Country Whatsoever), the Loss of Profit Due To Consumer Inactivity clause applies and makes the Pirate eligible for a further promotion to Bad Guy, ready to ship to Gitmo.
Actually, I would not mind that much if music as an *industry* was killed. I much more liked music as an art form, a media to express something rather than mass-produced products dropping from a conveyor belt to be consumed. I sort of like to be a listener, not a consumer when it comes to music, but hey, I'm living in the past.
Well, scheduling performance can only be quantified to a degree. When I'm editing a document while running two computationally and disk intensive tasks in the background (e.g big simulations) I don't really care if the background calculations will finish 5 minutes later, but I do care about the editor and every GUI thing I have on the screen being snappy, just as snappy as if there was nothing running in the background. I'm not running the latest&greatest, just some older version of 2.6.??? but that does not seem to be the case, as a matter of fact. So until the for example "perceived responsiveness" gets a firm definition and a method of quantifying it, scheduling performance is scientificly quantified only with the qualifier "..., neglecting all other factors that we can not quantify or care about."
> Seriously, companies like Nokia that "open" their products need to be > rewarded regardless of their motivations
They will be rewarded, at least they expect to be: if opening the product had not been predicted to generate extra revenue, they would not have done it.
Nokia did not actually open their phone, they just did not enter to an exclusive deal with a telco. If a telco paid enough to Nokia to deliver their latest&greatest uber-phone locked to their network (note I said "enough", to compensate for lost revenue on all other networks), then Nokia would happily deliver locked phones - the CEO's #1 responsibility is to maximise RoI. Since nobody asked (== offered enough) Nokia to deliver their phone exclusively for a particular network, they figured they could make a few extra sales on the Apple/AT&T contraversy.
If you scroll down, there's a relatively long piece with the title "Customer advantages from Novell's collaboration with Microsoft", written by Justin Steinman (although he has not been positively verified as the source by the site admins). That piece contains the quote.
> Apparently, you don't know what a hard link is. > > You haven't created a file owned by root. You've created an i-node pointing to the > data blocks of a file owned by root.
No, you didn't. You created a directory entry pointing to the i-node of the file which is also pointed by the 'sh' entry in the/bin directory file. In addition, the reference count in the i-node has been bumped up by 1. One file is one i-node and that inode contains the owner, permission and timestamp info as well as the disc blocks that the file uses. For all practical purposes the file and the i-node are the same thing. A dir entry contains a name for the file and a pointer to the inode. There can be as many dir entries in different directories to the same file as you wish. The i-node also contains a reference count of how many dir entries point to it. When you rm a file, it will remove the dir entry and decrement the refcount in the i-node. When the refcount reaches 0, the file is actually deleted (actually it will only be deleted if it is not open at the time, but that's a separate issue).
You can delete a hard link to a file owned by anyone if you have write permission on the directory that contains a link:
The/tmp can be written by anyone. Note the 't' at the end of the permissons of/tmp: that is the sticky bit. Normally, if you have write permission on a directory, you can add, delete and rename files in that directory, no matter who actually owns those files (since you do not want to touch the file, you only change the directory file, which you have right to). If the sticky is set, however, an entry can only be removed (or, for that matter, renamed) by the owner of the file pointed by that entry. This is actually a trick (kludge, if you like) to solve the problem that sometimes you need to be able to create files in a common place (e.g. lock files) but you must not let anyone but the owner delete them and the basic UNIX acces right model is not enough for that. One such place is/tmp, an other prominent example is/var/lock. Since creating a hard link is to insert an entry to the directory file you can do it in such a directory - anyone can add entries, as the directory is word-writable. However, if the sticky is set, you can only remove (or rename) an entry if the i-node pointed by that entry is actually owned by you - which is not the case with/bin/bash. It is not because/bin/bash is owned by root, it is because it is not owned by you. It has nothing to do with the i-nodes or hard links, but the way the sticky bit works, which was a really neat trick to solve a problem, but it has this side effect.
Is it a bug? Well, it's certainly a feature... Is it a security problem? I don't know, I am no security expert, but I haven't heard of an exploit based on links and the sticky bit yet.
It's not that they have no idea about the efforts and hardships. Some of them do, some don't. It's irrelevant to them. From their point of view it's not about moral and history, it's about money and control (which, ultimately, translates to money again).
If a second Enlightening would turn the currently powerful conservative elite (and their followers) into a science and art and culture loving, even atheist, but still authorative bunch, then Verizon would be glad to ban SMSs with the word 'God' in it, as long as it meant a cosy (and profitable) relationship with the ruling class.
Corporations are never ashamed. They exist for one single purpose: to make money. If shame has a dollar figure attached to it, they will look at it and evaluate it like any other income/expenditure item. Otherwise it has no role in the decision making process. That is, if there's an article about them that makes people to spit after mentioning their name and they suddenly reverse their questionable policies, it is not because they are ashamed or anything like that. They simply realise that they are going to loose customers (i.e. revenue) and as a business decision they turn around. Ethics has nothing to do with it.
Or take a look at Motorola mobiles. A handful of them runs Linux. The "developer network" is a bunch of users/companies who write applications that run on the phone. I repeat, not end-users but SW developers who develop SW to run on a Linux machine. You get the MOTODEV newsletter with boldface lines shouting "Motorola unveils $FLAVOR_OF_THE_MONTH Mobile Linux Platform!" and alike.
Now that means the platform in the phone. The SDK is *only* available for Windows. So they are catering only for developers who are happy to program *for* Linux but are otherwise living in Windowsland. For some strange reason I believe that Linux people would be quite inclined to write Linux SW, possibly more so than Windows people. Motorola apparently doesn't, they told me that they do not even plan to release dev. software on Linux (or on anything, actually, apart from Windows).
They probably figured that supporting the SDK on Linux would cost them an other engineer, which is a direct expenditure while the benefit would be a very indirect one, by having slightly more apps available for the phone making a tiny increase in phone sales - no deal.
Slashdot Mirror
> The Soviet Union had communism, not socialism.
:-)
The actual official line was that communism was the goal. Communism was to be reached through socialism, and the system of the time was socialism. Communism is sort of an utopian state and the harsh reality of the workd forced a temporary system that was implemented and named socialism. That's what they said, so it might be a question of definitions. If you mean social democracy when you say socialism, then you are right. However, from the other side of the curtain social democracy was still capitalism, for the means of production was still privately, rather than collectively, owned. (Note that we're talking about ownership of means of production and *not* personal property, the abolishemnt of personal belongings were never part of the official line).
> Though the Soviet Union was founded in the spirit of Marx's work, it was by no means the kind of state that Marx thought would
> necessarily appear. Marx's worker's state required an industrialized economy to arise (since this foster development of class
> consciousness among the proletariat), and there's no way you can fairly say that Russia was an industrial economy in 1917.
That's where Lenin came into the picture. The whole ideology inside the Block was called "Marxism-Leninism", not just Marxism. Lenin argued that the highly industrialised background is handy, but not necessary, to sweep capitalism out and through the socialist route you can still get to the ultimate goal, communism. The need of a class consciousness was replaced by simple misery and hunger. He understood Marx's arguments and he also insited on industrialisation (he had the famous equation, Rule_of_the_Soviets + Electrification = Communism, which, interestingly, is mathematically equivalent to Rule_of_the_Soviets = Communism - Electrification...) as well as education (an other of his favourites, "To learn, to learn, to learn") but he argued that while it was necessary for communism down the track, it was not necessary for the revolution here and now.
So what to the Western world is social democracy that to the Eastern Block was capitalism, Western communism mapped to Eastern socialism and what the Block called communism, the West didn't even had a word for
> While a fascist state could itself be oligarchical in nature, it would still seek direct control of
> power and not divest it to the political systems that exist in and serve corporate interests.
Unless, of course, you assume that the oligarchs and the would-be fascist rulers are one and the same. In that case distorting the existing political system so that it channels the power from its existing owners into your direction is exactly what you want to do.
Actually, what you calculated is not boiling water. It is just bringing it to boiling point. The specific heat of boiling water, i.e. changing it from 100C liquid water to 100C gaseous water is many many times more. If I remember correctly (it was a long time ago...), the heat needed to melt ice is about 80cal/g and to boil water was 540cal/g (where cal is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1g liquid water by 1K or 1C, as you like it, under normal conditions as per pressure etc. so basically it is the specific heat of water used as an energy unit).
> There would be commercial software, it'd all be wrapped up in NDAs and Trade Secret clauses, encrypted and only
> available as binaries. It'd make use of all the best efforts of GPL and BSD software and contribute very little back.
If there was no copyright, you could not stop me or anyone else to distribute your binaries for free. So what would be your incentive to create that binary software in the first place? You can try to protect it (as game companies tried to do it in the C64 era) but I don't remember a single game back then that wasn't cracked in no time at all.
In a copyright-free environment the whole commercial SW development industry would not work in its current form. You would need a different busines model.
It is not exactly the right example, but indicates the possibilities: look at the FPGA manufacturers. They want to sell chips. So they spend a lot of money on developing synthesis software that they give away free. yes, it is copyright and all but it is pretty much free. They don't give you source because a) old reflexes b) support issues c) source would tell you about the internals of *chips*. Nevertheless, it is a move towards the direction where the copyright-based SW business model is replaced by a service oriented model (in this case, the SW itself is the service and the return on investment is realised in increased chip sales).
I think RMS was on the map a long time before Linux. The fact that most of the Linux crowd doesn't know of him is a different issue. RMS made Linux possible and created the subculture of free software.
If indeed noone takes him seriously that's very sad and frightening, IMHO. He might look creepy but if you listen to what he says, you will find content there. If having the Right to Read is Marxist philosphy, then I'll have to go and buy a hammer and a sickle...
Despite what George Bush thinks, the constitution applies to everybody in the US.
Remember this?
"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than the others."
Well, sort of. Maybe. Copyright allows you to distribute the code, in binary or source, while limiting the rights of others to re-distribute your work or work derived from yours. RMS very cleverly used the very copyright law to defeat it and guarantee that you can *not* limit the rights of the others to re-distribute. He also made a twist so that you must release the source and you must limit the recipient's right to change the licensing terms.
Yes, it helps open source software, within the current framework. However, if there was no copyright the current commercial SW model would not exist either, so you can not say that lack of copyright would life harder in the SW arena for non-commercial entities.
In addition, SW is only a fragment of the copyright market. There is no equivalent to 'source code' and 'binary code' in most other intellectual products, such as books, music, films, dance, maps, data compilations and whatnot. Without copyright these intellectual products would be available freely to everyone to obtain and disseminate without restriction. That would make the whole copyright business model dead and allow a very different business model, the value-added service model prevalent. The information is then available without restriction, but the service of organising, selecting, searching, refreshing, maintaining and so on the information *you* need presented the way *you want* can be purchased. There's nothing new in it, actually, that's what the Linux distros are doing.
So, while it is true that in the current, copyright-based environment the whole free-software stuff is based on the copyright law itself, you can not say that in a copyright-free environment the lack of the protection provided by the copyright law against *the very same copyright law* would hinder SW development, IMHO.
They may not know what they legislate on, but they know very well what the objective is. No, it's not saving the children from evil hackers & terrorists, it's to create legislation that makes a whole bunch of people guilty by default. Those people can be charged and convicted at any time the powers to be feel like it.
It's not knee-jerk stuff, it's power-grub stuff.
Have you realised that each of these seemingly meaningless knee-jerk reactions took a bit of civil liberty away and gave more power to the government (and its masters)?
I thought that it was a well established general opinion in geek circles that MS has never been innovative? A decade ago I think the concensus was that MS stole, copied or bought anything remotely new (to them, that is) in their stuff and usually screwed up the implementation. I seem to remember that the only thing really credited to MS was ODBC, everything else had been traced back to some already existing thing. There was some credit for TrueType, but I think there was some contraversy about that too (I don't remember what, so I'm not sure about that).
/. ?
Their business tactics were not new either. However, unlike their software, those were implemented very, very well. That was the key to their growth. The innovative company is just an image, sheer PR, nothing to do with actual innovation. A patent portfolio is a business weapon, not an indication of being technically creative.
So, I wonder, what happened in the past 10 years that shifted the opinion so much that 'Is MS the *most* innovative company?' as a question can even emerge and appear on
> H.264 and AAC were developed in standards organizations where members need to declare what
> patents they have that a new standard might infringe. So there should be no submarine patents
> from the main industry players.
Does DDR RAM ring a bell?
> Do you want to withhold the sick population from cheaper drugs just
> because the current patent holder is too dumb to produce it cheaper?
The current patent holder *does* produce it very cheap. But due to the patent protection, with high license fees (or refusing to license it) they can make everybody else's production cost very high (or inifinite).
The current patent holders are not dumb at all. They are *greedy*. They don't really care about the sick population (other than a market segment, i.e. 'consumer'), they care about profit. They do not develop medicines to cure the sick, they develop them to make money. It's just a product like any other and the future of humanity and the wellbeing of mankind and other stuff like that has nothing to do with it.
Well, I thought that was globalisation? I am Mr. Gamer and I want to buy product GAME that is $$$ here and $ there. Due to the regulation you praise, I must pay $$$ for the product. Fine. Now I am Mr. Company and I want to buy product PROGRAMMER that is $$$ here but only $ there. Should not the same regulation apply? I mean, Mr. Company off-shores their administration, the pressing of the DVD, the making of the booklet, the customer service center and chances are, part of the programming as well - because it's cheaper to buy it there.
They want it both ways: they can buy stuff on the global market at the lowest achievable price. Then they come around and mandate that humans can not do that. Why? What makes a company more important than you or me? Companies scream around that regulation is bad, everything must be totally deregulated - except their customers, who must be heavily regulated to guarantee profit to the company and preferably executed if they do not comply.
Once I read in old book, that a long, lo9ng time ago there was this crazy idea that we elect governments and give them certain powers in order to make *our* lives better. We also allow the government to give certain rights to non-living entities, such as corporations, *as long as* it helps the government's primary goal: to make our lives better. What a silly, pinko-commie sentiment! Fortunately, we know it better: it must be the other way around. Corporations are the ruling class and they give power to the government to control us so that our behaviour furthers the corporations' wellbeing. We call it democracy, which is some ancient word for the power over the people!
> Actually I'm English (but living in the US). Last time I checked the news the UK are still fighting terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan too.
As far as I know there was no terrorism in Iraq when the US/UK marched in and they by no means were connected to the 9/11. There is a lot there now, so the war OF terror seems to work very well indeed. In addition, if I remember correctly, the Taliban was entranched and supported by the very same US that fights them now, when it was handy to support any extremist/terrorist organisation against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Just as Saddam Hussein was a best of friends of the US when he was in war with Iran. Against the ayatollah, who got to power in a revolution against a brutal dictator shah who, in turn got to power with the help of guess who, because the democratically elected secular(!) government of Iran seemed too pinkish to some (in Particular, British Petroleum). Of course Iran is in the crosshairs of the coalition of the willing again, as a rogue terrorist state, even though 9/11 was organised by a Saudi and executed by Saudis and as a matter of fact, it was the US that shot down an Iranian passanger plane, not the other way around. Now Iran didn't get much better off with Khomeini or with Ahmadinejad, but at least the latter they chose themselves. He might be a nutcase but he (unlike some other nations with high moral stance) did not attack any sovereign country, signed (and reasonably obeyed) the NNPT (unlike some friends of the US, like India and Pakistan, who, incidently, *do* have nuclear weapons).
As an Englishman, you must also know that your local terrorists (IRA) were funded to a large extent from the US. Not by muslims, not by cave-dwelling bearded semi-prophets, but higher-middle and upper class, Bible waving, God fearing nice white people with roots in the United Kingdom.
The "war on terror" rhetoric from Faux News and Halliburton, I mean, White House, is kind of like a Hollywood action movie, bad guy does bad deed, innocent people die, good guy can't stand it, beats the living crap out of bad guy (with sufficient struggle and twists to show how backstabbing, evil monster the bad guy is), everybody cheers, world peace and freedom of humanity saved, closing credits. The reality seems to be somewhat different.
> I thought we were meant to be the good guys that don't do this kind of thing.
... otherwise what are we fighting for?
I think you would find that outside of the borders of the US the above sentiment is not generally accepted. Neither the good guys bit, nor the don't do bit.
>
Oil revenue + arms deals revenue.
I thought you wore the suit to show that *you* respected the audience...
> Democracy doesn't work. We've had them for thousands of years, and they always
:-)
> fail as the majority learns they can just vote to steal from the minority.
Yeah, but capitalism allows a minority to exploit the majority, so it all balances out, doesn't it
> It was the first "usable" version of Windows. It did things that were arguably miraculous.
You mean *on a PC*. Win3.1 was only miraculous if you came from DOS. Look at the other players around that time (Win3.1 came out in '92, Win3.0 in '90), such as Acorn, Mac, Amiga, Atari: they all had all those miraculous features *for years* (I don't mention the unix variants for they were not affordable then). Heck, they even allowed you to create a folder within a desktop folder, that 3.11 did not allow you to do, IIRC. I had both Amigas and Win3.1 boxes at home and I was using a Sun Sparc at work. It was painful to use the Win3.1 box. There was nothing new there, except for those who already were not used to anything but MS at the time. Win3.1 was a 16-bit OS, all the others I mentioned were 32 bit *and* had been for at least 5 years...
Good example, wrong argument.
To get someone to be thrown to Gitmo you do not have to prove anything. In fact you do not even have to have a bad feeling about that person. It's enough to point your finger and say that (s)he is an enemy combatant or that (s)he had thoughts of terrorism and (s)he disappears. There's only one requirement: you are one of the Good Guys. A Good Guy, by definition, is a person who other Good Guys say is a Good Guy. All other people are Suspicious Persons, with the exception of some Bad Guys. Now Bad Guys are shipped to Gitmo and any person shipped to Gitmo is declared, retrospectively, a Bad Guy.
Similarly, there are Pirates, who should be boilt in oil in public (attendance fees apply) executions after confiscating all their assets, but this practice is currently suspended due to the high price of oil (see Terrorists and the Axis of Evil). Then there are the Good Guys (a subset of the above mentioned Good Guys), who protect the Artists from the Pirates. The rest of the population is Suspected Thieves, actually including the Artists themselves. A Suspected Thief can be declared a Pirate by a Good Guy at any time, simply by pointing a finger. Sometimes these freshly minted Pirates question their promotion, but since almost nobody is spending 24/7 buying products from the Good Guys (even though it is one of the Responsibilities as a Citizen of Any Country Whatsoever), the Loss of Profit Due To Consumer Inactivity clause applies and makes the Pirate eligible for a further promotion to Bad Guy, ready to ship to Gitmo.
Actually, I would not mind that much if music as an *industry* was killed. I much more liked music as an art form, a media to express something rather than mass-produced products dropping from a conveyor belt to be consumed. I sort of like to be a listener, not a consumer when it comes to music, but hey, I'm living in the past.
Well, scheduling performance can only be quantified to a degree. When I'm editing a document while running two computationally and disk intensive tasks in the background (e.g big simulations) I don't really care if the background calculations will finish 5 minutes later, but I do care about the editor and every GUI thing I have on the screen being snappy, just as snappy as if there was nothing running in the background. I'm not running the latest&greatest, just some older version of 2.6.??? but that does not seem to be the case, as a matter of fact. So until the for example "perceived responsiveness" gets a firm definition and a method of quantifying it, scheduling performance is scientificly quantified only with the qualifier "..., neglecting all other factors that we can not quantify or care about."
> Seriously, companies like Nokia that "open" their products need to be
> rewarded regardless of their motivations
They will be rewarded, at least they expect to be: if opening the product had not been predicted to generate extra revenue, they would not have done it.
Nokia did not actually open their phone, they just did not enter to an exclusive deal with a telco. If a telco paid enough to Nokia to deliver their latest&greatest uber-phone locked to their network (note I said "enough", to compensate for lost revenue on all other networks), then Nokia would happily deliver locked phones - the CEO's #1 responsibility is to maximise RoI. Since nobody asked (== offered enough) Nokia to deliver their phone exclusively for a particular network, they figured they could make a few extra sales on the Apple/AT&T contraversy.
Try this: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/16383
If you scroll down, there's a relatively long piece with the title "Customer advantages from Novell's collaboration with Microsoft", written by Justin Steinman (although he has not been positively verified as the source by the site admins). That piece contains the quote.
> Apparently, you don't know what a hard link is.
/bin directory file. In addition, the reference count in the i-node has been bumped up by 1. One file is one i-node and that inode contains the owner, permission and timestamp info as well as the disc blocks that the file uses. For all practical purposes the file and the i-node are the same thing. A dir entry contains a name for the file and a pointer to the inode. There can be as many dir entries in different directories to the same file as you wish. The i-node also contains a reference count of how many dir entries point to it. When you rm a file, it will remove the dir entry and decrement the refcount in the i-node. When the refcount reaches 0, the file is actually deleted (actually it will only be deleted if it is not open at the time, but that's a separate issue).
/bin/bash foo
/tmp:
/tmp /bin/bash foo
/tmp /home/zoltan /home/zoltan /tmp
/tmp can be written by anyone. Note the 't' at the end of the permissons of /tmp: that is the sticky bit. Normally, if you have write permission on a directory, you can add, delete and rename files in that directory, no matter who actually owns those files (since you do not want to touch the file, you only change the directory file, which you have right to). If the sticky is set, however, an entry can only be removed (or, for that matter, renamed) by the owner of the file pointed by that entry. This is actually a trick (kludge, if you like) to solve the problem that sometimes you need to be able to create files in a common place (e.g. lock files) but you must not let anyone but the owner delete them and the basic UNIX acces right model is not enough for that. One such place is /tmp, an other prominent example is /var/lock. Since creating a hard link is to insert an entry to the directory file you can do it in such a directory - anyone can add entries, as the directory is word-writable. However, if the sticky is set, you can only remove (or rename) an entry if the i-node pointed by that entry is actually owned by you - which is not the case with /bin/bash. It is not because /bin/bash is owned by root, it is because it is not owned by you. It has nothing to do with the i-nodes or hard links, but the way the sticky bit works, which was a really neat trick to solve a problem, but it has this side effect.
>
> You haven't created a file owned by root. You've created an i-node pointing to the
> data blocks of a file owned by root.
No, you didn't.
You created a directory entry pointing to the i-node of the file which is also pointed
by the 'sh' entry in the
You can delete a hard link to a file owned by anyone if you have write permission on the directory that contains a link:
zoltan@gep:~> ln
zoltan@gep:~> ls -l foo
-rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 572200 2005-09-10 03:43 foo
zoltan@gep:~> rm foo
rm: remove write-protected regular file `foo'? y
zoltan@gep:~>
On the other hand, if you try it in
zoltan@gep:~> cd
zoltan@gep:/tmp> ln
zoltan@gep:/tmp> ls -l foo
-rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 572200 2005-09-10 03:43 foo
zoltan@gep:/tmp> rm foo
rm: remove write-protected regular file `foo'? y
rm: cannot remove `foo': Operation not permitted
zoltan@gep:/tmp>
The reason for that strange behaviour is this:
zoltan@gep:/tmp> ls -ld
drwxr-x--- 114 zoltan users 16248 2007-09-28 14:23
drwxrwxrwt 32 root root 3176 2007-09-28 14:25
The
Is it a bug? Well, it's certainly a feature... Is it a security problem? I don't know, I am no security expert, but I haven't heard of an exploit based on links and the sticky bit yet.
It's not that they have no idea about the efforts and hardships. Some of them do, some don't. It's irrelevant to them. From their point of view it's not about moral and history, it's about money and control (which, ultimately, translates to money again).
If a second Enlightening would turn the currently powerful conservative elite (and their followers) into a science and art and culture loving, even atheist, but still authorative bunch, then Verizon would be glad to ban SMSs with the word 'God' in it, as long as it meant a cosy (and profitable) relationship with the ruling class.
Corporations are never ashamed. They exist for one single purpose: to make money. If shame has a dollar figure attached to it, they will look at it and evaluate it like any other income/expenditure item. Otherwise it has no role in the decision making process. That is, if there's an article about them that makes people to spit after mentioning their name and they suddenly reverse their questionable policies, it is not because they are ashamed or anything like that. They simply realise that they are going to loose customers (i.e. revenue) and as a business decision they turn around. Ethics has nothing to do with it.
Or take a look at Motorola mobiles. A handful of them runs Linux. The "developer network" is a bunch of users/companies who write applications that run on the phone. I repeat, not end-users but SW developers who develop SW to run on a Linux machine. You get the MOTODEV newsletter with boldface lines shouting "Motorola unveils $FLAVOR_OF_THE_MONTH Mobile Linux Platform!" and alike.
Now that means the platform in the phone. The SDK is *only* available for Windows. So they are catering only for developers who are happy to program *for* Linux but are otherwise living in Windowsland. For some strange reason I believe that Linux people would be quite inclined to write Linux SW, possibly more so than Windows people. Motorola apparently doesn't, they told me that they do not even plan to release dev. software on Linux (or on anything, actually, apart from Windows).
They probably figured that supporting the SDK on Linux would cost them an other engineer, which is a direct expenditure while the benefit would be a very indirect one, by having slightly more apps available for the phone making a tiny increase in phone sales - no deal.