Physicians who treat arthritis have told me that they certainly can't deny that the number of patients seeking help with acute pain spikes during times of bad weather. They're not sure why; one surmise is that conditions associated with impending weather changes (perhaps not the actual barometric pressure change itself) trigger increased sensitivity to the pain is already there.
The Internet is a public place. Everything you do there is subject to scrutiny. Studying newsgroup behavior is as legitimate as, say, studying the behavior of fans at sporting events.
If you wouldn't put it on paper, sign it, and tape it to a wall at your favorite local hangout, don't post it on the Internet.
>> But ham radio is censored... that makes it much less useful
You've failed to support that assertion.
First, even with licensing issues, amateur radio is no more or no less self-censored than any other form of communications.
Second, We're talking about emergency communications. Of what relevance is the ability of some moron to mouth obscenities to that?
Third, self-censorship isn't evil. Typically, it's a good thing because it lubricates social relationships and keeps the noise ratio down. Look around here....What's the value of having a world full of uncensored Slashdot lamers? Just more static to be ignored.
>> A lot of people seem to say "Its much more valuable to have thousands of people get broadband internet access than to have ham radio....
You're correct to point out the folly of such opinions.
First, it isn't much of a leap to suggest that expanding broadbnd capabilities plays to the financial and employment prospects of many, or most, Slashdot readers. They're hardly an objective, or even thinking, bunch,
Second, DSL or cable access isn't going to do you much good when there's no electricity to power those PC's.
Third, just what are people supposed to do? Climb back into the rubble and send an email to the Fire Department about the tornado that just wiped out their house? Imagining that the Internet can act as a personal communications tool in an emergency is just that: imagination.
All in all, when the lights go out, I'd much rather have a bunch of licensed and emergency trained amateur radio operators around equipped with battery-powered VHF transceivers than a bunch a suburbanites trying to get their AOL client working.
Agree that SCO will be required to present their evidence as part of the legal proceedings coming out of their suit.
But, until that time, I don't think SCO has any reason to release the code for public scrutiny. In fact, I don't think SCO has any reason to release the code for public scrutiny, ever. Even when released during the proceedings, I'd expect SCO to seek to prevent access to the code outside the proceedings. They just have nothing to gain by doing otherwise.
(It seems to me that, in part, SCO's case rests on the private and proprietary nature of the code they allege has been infringed. That's the reason they require someone who accesses the code to sign an NDA. Allowing members of the public who are not parties to the suit to view the code without signing an NDA would weaken their ability, in the future, to claim that code as private and proprietary.)
1. SCO, presumably, has no interest in the opinion of the open source community. If SCO's claims are bogus, showing the code to community members would be the last thing they would want to do. They'd be weakening their own case in court. If SCO's claims are legitimate, they still have no reason to show the code to open source advocates. That "community" isn't a legal entity, can't be sued, and has nothing SCO wants. (They're after serious money from the corporate sector. not nickels and dimes from individual Linux users.)
2. SCO has, in fact, offered to show the code contingent upon acceptance of their NDA. SCO can simply argue that they are not attempting to impose onerous conditions, but simply following standard industry procedure. I believe SCO would weaken their legal position if they allowed the code to be viewed without the NDA.
3. I can accept that SCO's purpose in bringing suit is money. SCO's purpose, period, is money. So is Sun's, IBM's, RedHat's, Microsoft's, and any other profit-making organization. (Some community members need to realize that not everyone agrees that open source holds the ethical high ground, i.e., many normal people believe that selling proprietary closed code is just as ethical as releasing open code.) Permitting the Linux community to clean up any offending code won't bring them any money. Besdies, that's a cared they might need to play during court proceedings.
I'm pretty sure SCO is blowing smoke, but keeping their code under wraps until they're in court seems to be a reasonable strategy to me. Their success depends on convincing the court, not the open source community.
That said, I'm also pretty sure that SCO is dead wrong to argue that copyright law prevents others from making copies of your work. Copyright law protects an author's rights, which include establishing the conditions under which others can acquire copies of that author's works. Commercial software sells you a copy; free software gives you a copy.In both cases, rights to own a copy are transferred by the author to someone else. Whether or not payment was received is of secondary importance. In either case, copyright law protects the author.
A license is a different animal entirely, and it will be interesting to see ow the GPL fares in court.
You insult me by putting words in my mouth and by associating my comments with your unreasoning meanderings.
First, I don't agree that the U.S. or the EU have a "permanent dependent" underclass. To the contrary, I do believe that there is more opportunity for personal financial growth in these countries than anywhere on the planet. That is why so many people want to leave their own countries and move here.
I believe that it is natural for some people in a society to have more wealth than others. That means that the people atone end of that spectrum will be always "poorer" than people at the other end. However, that doesn't mean they will be doomed to lead lives of poverty. Wealth is relative. (Better to be officially poor in the U.S. or the EU than to be poor in sub-Saharan Africa.)
I believe we measure economic fairness in terms of access to opportunity, not by forced distribution of wealth. People want to acquire more goods and services, and by working to ensure access to opportunities to increase personal wealth, we ensure that everyone has the means to do that. Politically or socially mandated efforts to artifically distribute wealth in a "fair" way simply remove the means to acquire personal wealth, creating a failed and stagnating economy. (That's the basic lesson of the failed USSR and all of its socialist cousins.)
If you want to call that "unfair", that is your right. But, it is also my right to assert that your opinion is driven by emotion and an incorrect understanding of human nature and economic fairness.
I usually don't even notice if one of my posts is moderated (What the hell is moderation anyway, and why would anyone care?), but you're right -- this is especially silly. Sort of illustrates that this is a cult (there's only one way to think) and not a community.
Somehow, I can't get rid of this image of some 19-year old sophomore slouched over a keyboard in his room in the dorm...
Primitive BASIC's were available in ROM on a few early consumer PC's -- Apple/Atari/Commodore -- because they were small (because they were primitive) and because they typically provided file handling capabilities, thereby either eliminating the need for an OS or reducing its footprint.
I'll agree that most commercial shrink-wrapped applications aren't written BASIC, but those apps represent a small segment of the market compared to "scripting, shareware and in-house apps". (If the shrink-wrapped market was the only one available to developers, there'd be very few developers.) Many of those "business-logic" apps are written in Visual Basic or some other BASIC. Why? Because the language is capable, easy to understand, appropriate to the task, and well supported by modern tools. Why would a BASIC developer switch to another language if that meant downtime for study, slower deliveries to customers, and no increase in useful capabilities?
How could BASIC be "dying" at the same time it was adding all those other features? No one applies similar logic to other languages.
Condemning today's BASIC's because they are much advanced over their 1970's predecessors is equivalent to condemning keyboards and video displays for replacing punch cards.
This story will surely provoke a batch of silly and ignorant BASIC-bashing posts from people who think learning about programming stops when they choose a language, but consider:
Suppose BASIC didn't exist, and some contemporary open source developer released a full-blown compiler for a language equivalent to ANSI BASIC, or the dialect supported by PowerBasic, or even Visual Basic. Some folks, I imagine, might like what they see.
You're confusing "pure" BASIC with line-numbered BASIC from a quarter century ago. ANSI BASIC or any commercially available dialect have long supported true procedures, functions, etc.
When you give free food to a hungry unemployed poor person, they're still unemployed, poor, and will get hungry again.
You don't reduce poverty by giving food to poor people. You reduce poverty by creating more jobs for more people. Building technology is a good way to do that.
Your's is a common, well-meaning notion driven by compassion. But it's wrong. Yes, feed the hungry, but if you stop there and don't create an economy that enables them to support themselves, all you've done is to create a permanent dependent underclass.
The dependency of good credit on incurring debt makes sense. Credit is the record of your performance in paying back debt. You can't have one without the other.
As for having to pay for a credit report: The credit bureaus are private, commercial, profit-making businesses. If they didn't charge you for a report, they'd just pass the cost on to their other customers -- the people you're trying to borrow money from. And, those folks would just raise the price of whatever it is that you're buying. One alternative might be to have the government do all this...if you're comfortable with that. I'm not.
If we don't find a way to eliminate the affects of age, then lifetimes measured in centuries could mean a globe populated by billions of stumbling old fools who can't take care of themselves.
I'm all for living forever if that means I stop aging after, say, 35. But, if it means I age until I'm 85 and then live for 3 more centuries, I might take a pass.
No, the missionary in Mecca is in danger because Saudi behavior is driven by a rejection of the fact that all people are created equal and, by virtue of their birth, have certain rights. In other words, the Saudis would be wrong.
It isn't the Declaration of Independence, or any other document, or any government, society or state that gives people those rights. We have those rights because we exist. Whether or not someone is American is irrelevant. Saudis living in Mecca have the same rights. If they cannot exercise those rights it is because they live in a society that represses them, and, sadly, because they choose to participate in their own repression.
Societies may or may recognize those rights, but they certainly don't endow people with them. Your notion that societies -- human creations -- give people their rights is both fundmantally wrong and fundamentally dangerous. Such a belief is the foundation of every philosophy that asserts the individual owes his life to the state and to society. In other words, that belief is the basis of facism and totalitarianism. That the world still suffers from it is attributable to people who, apparently like you, divide people into "the masses" and the "leader".
>> All the rights to your work belong to you only because society says they do.
Nope. Our rights exist because we exist, not because society gave them to us. As the Declaration of Independence says, everyone is endowed with rights. Society is obligated to respect and honor those rights, but they cannot bestow rights on anyone. (Society can, however, prevent someone -- a criminal, typically -- from exercising his rights. That's a restraint of behavior.)
A belief that rights flow to an individual from society is very dangerous, because it leads to the belief that society can take away those rights. The usual pattern, especially in European history and thought, has been for the state to claim it is synonymous with society, and that, therefore, all rights flow from the state. That way lies totalitarianism, as the last century taught us.
That's an opinion. Maybe the majority opinion. But it doesn't absolve you of your obligation to obey the law. If you feel morally compelled to violate a law, why should you escape punishment? Someone who violates the law for simple criminal gain faces punishment, so why does the fact that you have an opinion oblige society to treat you differently?
>> If you buy something, you should have the right to do anything you want with it.
No, you don't. If you think for a minute, I'm sure you will recall many examples of potential criminal behavior using one of your possessions. For example, buying a telescope does not give you the right to use it to look in my windows. Or, buying a television does not give you the right to modify it to get free cable.
>> Any law that opposes this is draconian, and a sign of a totalitarian government.
Sure, but if the proposal becomes law, then using the fake chips becomes illegal. Then, your right to do "anything you can" to bypass Ford's restrictions also carries with it your obligation to accept punishment if you're caught.
Too many people confuse the right to disagree with or oppose a law as immunity from penalty for breaking that law.
Slashdot Mirror
Physicians who treat arthritis have told me that they certainly can't deny that the number of patients seeking help with acute pain spikes during times of bad weather. They're not sure why; one surmise is that conditions associated with impending weather changes (perhaps not the actual barometric pressure change itself) trigger increased sensitivity to the pain is already there.
The Internet is a public place. Everything you do there is subject to scrutiny. Studying newsgroup behavior is as legitimate as, say, studying the behavior of fans at sporting events.
If you wouldn't put it on paper, sign it, and tape it to a wall at your favorite local hangout, don't post it on the Internet.
>> But ham radio is censored... that makes it much less useful
You've failed to support that assertion.
First, even with licensing issues, amateur radio is no more or no less self-censored than any other form of communications.
Second, We're talking about emergency communications. Of what relevance is the ability of some moron to mouth obscenities to that?
Third, self-censorship isn't evil. Typically, it's a good thing because it lubricates social relationships and keeps the noise ratio down. Look around here....What's the value of having a world full of uncensored Slashdot lamers? Just more static to be ignored.
>> A lot of people seem to say "Its much more valuable to have thousands of people get broadband internet access than to have ham radio....
You're correct to point out the folly of such opinions.
First, it isn't much of a leap to suggest that expanding broadbnd capabilities plays to the financial and employment prospects of many, or most, Slashdot readers. They're hardly an objective, or even thinking, bunch,
Second, DSL or cable access isn't going to do you much good when there's no electricity to power those PC's.
Third, just what are people supposed to do? Climb back into the rubble and send an email to the Fire Department about the tornado that just wiped out their house? Imagining that the Internet can act as a personal communications tool in an emergency is just that: imagination.
All in all, when the lights go out, I'd much rather have a bunch of licensed and emergency trained amateur radio operators around equipped with battery-powered VHF transceivers than a bunch a suburbanites trying to get their AOL client working.
Agree that SCO will be required to present their evidence as part of the legal proceedings coming out of their suit.
But, until that time, I don't think SCO has any reason to release the code for public scrutiny. In fact, I don't think SCO has any reason to release the code for public scrutiny, ever. Even when released during the proceedings, I'd expect SCO to seek to prevent access to the code outside the proceedings. They just have nothing to gain by doing otherwise.
(It seems to me that, in part, SCO's case rests on the private and proprietary nature of the code they allege has been infringed. That's the reason they require someone who accesses the code to sign an NDA. Allowing members of the public who are not parties to the suit to view the code without signing an NDA would weaken their ability, in the future, to claim that code as private and proprietary.)
Three points:
1. SCO, presumably, has no interest in the opinion of the open source community. If SCO's claims are bogus, showing the code to community members would be the last thing they would want to do. They'd be weakening their own case in court. If SCO's claims are legitimate, they still have no reason to show the code to open source advocates. That "community" isn't a legal entity, can't be sued, and has nothing SCO wants. (They're after serious money from the corporate sector. not nickels and dimes from individual Linux users.)
2. SCO has, in fact, offered to show the code contingent upon acceptance of their NDA. SCO can simply argue that they are not attempting to impose onerous conditions, but simply following standard industry procedure. I believe SCO would weaken their legal position if they allowed the code to be viewed without the NDA.
3. I can accept that SCO's purpose in bringing suit is money. SCO's purpose, period, is money. So is Sun's, IBM's, RedHat's, Microsoft's, and any other profit-making organization. (Some community members need to realize that not everyone agrees that open source holds the ethical high ground, i.e., many normal people believe that selling proprietary closed code is just as ethical as releasing open code.) Permitting the Linux community to clean up any offending code won't bring them any money. Besdies, that's a cared they might need to play during court proceedings.
I'm pretty sure SCO is blowing smoke, but keeping their code under wraps until they're in court seems to be a reasonable strategy to me. Their success depends on convincing the court, not the open source community.
That said, I'm also pretty sure that SCO is dead wrong to argue that copyright law prevents others from making copies of your work. Copyright law protects an author's rights, which include establishing the conditions under which others can acquire copies of that author's works. Commercial software sells you a copy; free software gives you a copy.In both cases, rights to own a copy are transferred by the author to someone else. Whether or not payment was received is of secondary importance. In either case, copyright law protects the author.
A license is a different animal entirely, and it will be interesting to see ow the GPL fares in court.
What's "Genious"?
/. spelling.
Must be the
Asm() is not part of C. It's a common extra provided by compiler vendors. BASIC's "Call" is more akin to C's "System".
You insult me by putting words in my mouth and by associating my comments with your unreasoning meanderings.
First, I don't agree that the U.S. or the EU have a "permanent dependent" underclass. To the contrary, I do believe that there is more opportunity for personal financial growth in these countries than anywhere on the planet. That is why so many people want to leave their own countries and move here.
I believe that it is natural for some people in a society to have more wealth than others. That means that the people atone end of that spectrum will be always "poorer" than people at the other end. However, that doesn't mean they will be doomed to lead lives of poverty. Wealth is relative. (Better to be officially poor in the U.S. or the EU than to be poor in sub-Saharan Africa.)
I believe we measure economic fairness in terms of access to opportunity, not by forced distribution of wealth. People want to acquire more goods and services, and by working to ensure access to opportunities to increase personal wealth, we ensure that everyone has the means to do that. Politically or socially mandated efforts to artifically distribute wealth in a "fair" way simply remove the means to acquire personal wealth, creating a failed and stagnating economy. (That's the basic lesson of the failed USSR and all of its socialist cousins.)
If you want to call that "unfair", that is your right. But, it is also my right to assert that your opinion is driven by emotion and an incorrect understanding of human nature and economic fairness.
I usually don't even notice if one of my posts is moderated (What the hell is moderation anyway, and why would anyone care?), but you're right -- this is especially silly. Sort of illustrates that this is a cult (there's only one way to think) and not a community.
Somehow, I can't get rid of this image of some 19-year old sophomore slouched over a keyboard in his room in the dorm...
Looks like BASIC to me. A CALL statement is legitimate BASIC.
Primitive BASIC's were available in ROM on a few early consumer PC's -- Apple/Atari/Commodore -- because they were small (because they were primitive) and because they typically provided file handling capabilities, thereby either eliminating the need for an OS or reducing its footprint.
I'll agree that most commercial shrink-wrapped applications aren't written BASIC, but those apps represent a small segment of the market compared to "scripting, shareware and in-house apps". (If the shrink-wrapped market was the only one available to developers, there'd be very few developers.) Many of those "business-logic" apps are written in Visual Basic or some other BASIC. Why? Because the language is capable, easy to understand, appropriate to the task, and well supported by modern tools. Why would a BASIC developer switch to another language if that meant downtime for study, slower deliveries to customers, and no increase in useful capabilities?
How could BASIC be "dying" at the same time it was adding all those other features? No one applies similar logic to other languages.
Condemning today's BASIC's because they are much advanced over their 1970's predecessors is equivalent to condemning keyboards and video displays for replacing punch cards.
This story will surely provoke a batch of silly and ignorant BASIC-bashing posts from people who think learning about programming stops when they choose a language, but consider:
Suppose BASIC didn't exist, and some contemporary open source developer released a full-blown compiler for a language equivalent to ANSI BASIC, or the dialect supported by PowerBasic, or even Visual Basic. Some folks, I imagine, might like what they see.
You're confusing "pure" BASIC with line-numbered BASIC from a quarter century ago. ANSI BASIC or any commercially available dialect have long supported true procedures, functions, etc.
What's your point? Everything is object code in the end.
When you give free food to a hungry unemployed poor person, they're still unemployed, poor, and will get hungry again.
You don't reduce poverty by giving food to poor people. You reduce poverty by creating more jobs for more people. Building technology is a good way to do that.
Your's is a common, well-meaning notion driven by compassion. But it's wrong. Yes, feed the hungry, but if you stop there and don't create an economy that enables them to support themselves, all you've done is to create a permanent dependent underclass.
The dependency of good credit on incurring debt makes sense. Credit is the record of your performance in paying back debt. You can't have one without the other.
As for having to pay for a credit report: The credit bureaus are private, commercial, profit-making businesses. If they didn't charge you for a report, they'd just pass the cost on to their other customers -- the people you're trying to borrow money from. And, those folks would just raise the price of whatever it is that you're buying. One alternative might be to have the government do all this...if you're comfortable with that. I'm not.
Sucks all around, doesn't it?
If we don't find a way to eliminate the affects of age, then lifetimes measured in centuries could mean a globe populated by billions of stumbling old fools who can't take care of themselves.
I'm all for living forever if that means I stop aging after, say, 35. But, if it means I age until I'm 85 and then live for 3 more centuries, I might take a pass.
No, the missionary in Mecca is in danger because Saudi behavior is driven by a rejection of the fact that all people are created equal and, by virtue of their birth, have certain rights. In other words, the Saudis would be wrong.
It isn't the Declaration of Independence, or any other document, or any government, society or state that gives people those rights. We have those rights because we exist. Whether or not someone is American is irrelevant. Saudis living in Mecca have the same rights. If they cannot exercise those rights it is because they live in a society that represses them, and, sadly, because they choose to participate in their own repression.
Societies may or may recognize those rights, but they certainly don't endow people with them. Your notion that societies -- human creations -- give people their rights is both fundmantally wrong and fundamentally dangerous. Such a belief is the foundation of every philosophy that asserts the individual owes his life to the state and to society. In other words, that belief is the basis of facism and totalitarianism. That the world still suffers from it is attributable to people who, apparently like you, divide people into "the masses" and the "leader".
Don't forget to click your heels on the way out.
>> All the rights to your work belong to you only because society says they do.
Nope. Our rights exist because we exist, not because society gave them to us. As the Declaration of Independence says, everyone is endowed with rights. Society is obligated to respect and honor those rights, but they cannot bestow rights on anyone. (Society can, however, prevent someone -- a criminal, typically -- from exercising his rights. That's a restraint of behavior.)
A belief that rights flow to an individual from society is very dangerous, because it leads to the belief that society can take away those rights. The usual pattern, especially in European history and thought, has been for the state to claim it is synonymous with society, and that, therefore, all rights flow from the state. That way lies totalitarianism, as the last century taught us.
>> Then that law is wrong.
That's an opinion. Maybe the majority opinion. But it doesn't absolve you of your obligation to obey the law. If you feel morally compelled to violate a law, why should you escape punishment? Someone who violates the law for simple criminal gain faces punishment, so why does the fact that you have an opinion oblige society to treat you differently?
>> If you buy something, you should have the right to do anything you want with it.
No, you don't. If you think for a minute, I'm sure you will recall many examples of potential criminal behavior using one of your possessions. For example, buying a telescope does not give you the right to use it to look in my windows. Or, buying a television does not give you the right to modify it to get free cable.
>> Any law that opposes this is draconian, and a sign of a totalitarian government.
Again, that's your opinion. I disagree.
Sure, but if the proposal becomes law, then using the fake chips becomes illegal. Then, your right to do "anything you can" to bypass Ford's restrictions also carries with it your obligation to accept punishment if you're caught.
Too many people confuse the right to disagree with or oppose a law as immunity from penalty for breaking that law.
Presumably, that was via eminent domain. That's not equivalent to society assuming ownership of something I made.