Do you have any insight into why the Gnu emacs xemacs split is staying split?
I actually think that this subject is really interesting... it would be really good to have someone do some serious historical research into code forks.
In particular, I suspect that BSD-licensed software is more suceptible to code forks than GPL software, because of the temptation to do proprietary closed source forks. It'd take more knowledge than I have to pin down whether this is really the way it works.
No, it just means that the moderators don't read the articles either.
The other day there was a thread where one of the first comments was entirely redundant, it pointed at a URL that was already pointed at in the article. The comment got moderated up to 5 for being "Informative", when it deserved to be slapped down as "Redundant".
> You forgot that smarter people use the > right tool (language) for the right job.
No, no no. Really smart people avoid learning new stuff if they already know something that works. The question is, would it be easier to learn about a another language than to convince everyone else that it isn't worth knowing?
That's the conventional wisdom all right, but I wonder if it's really true.
If Larry Wall is correct that the design of Perl reflects human natural language in a deep way, it could actually turn out that Perl isn't all that bad as a first language. If you've got the head of a math geek, Perl looks like a mess, but not everyone really has a head like that. Could it be that Perl would be a better first language for English majors?
I doubt that anyone has actually tried a pilot program "Introduction to Programming Using Perl". I bet that the main reason that people keep trying to discourage newbies from using perl is that the perl gods were getting tired of the hordes of clueless twits that descended on comp.lang.perl.misc when the web went critical.
This study is based on a grand total of 20 subjects. Even for a preliminary run, this seems like a rather small group, and it's definitely small to have it's results trumpeted in the press.
Will you look at this? They're acting like a difference between 37% and 32% is really significant:
Among the 10 subjects with the weakest memories and lowest blood-glucose levels, the average subject improved 37 per cent after eating barley, compared with their postplacebo results. There was a 32-per-cent improvement after eating mashed potatoes and an 8-per-cent improvement after ingesting the glucose drink.
That barley accounted for the strongest memory boost contradicts the theory that higher glucose levels alone can have this effect. Mr. Kaplan said this indicates more research is needed to understand how carbohydrates work on the mind.
Can someone fill me in on the recent history of the Sandman? I've refused to buy any Sandman stuff that isn't written by Gaiman, but I presumed that DC would be sharecropping this stuff out to different writers (for example there's that book "The Dreaming" which I think is still running). Did they try and keep the Sandman running for a while, and then have to drop it?
> Personally, I am kind of intimidated by > the idea that everything i do or say > could be monitored,
Ding. Can you say "chilling effect"? Suppose you were talking to a friend and you felt like saying something like "Well, just for arguments sake, maybe in some circumstances blowing up a federal building would be justified." Then you glance over your shoulder and notice that a man in a trenchcoat is writing down everything that you say.
> but honestly, I don't > think anyone would want to waste any spare > cycles on me. I'm just not that interesting.
This people have no lives, and no sense of proportion. They're given a huge amount of government money, and they have to spend it on something. The real bad guys are hard to find, and anyway, they're dangerous to get close to.
Still feel like you're not a tempting target? Sure you don't need to try harder at being boring?
It took some digging around, but I finally found some price information on the AlphaServer 800 (I really wish companies wouldn't be so coy about their prices... (no, I do not want to fill in a form so that you're sales people can call me back). Anyway, it looks like it's around $7000 (as of January). But the specs are 500Mhz, 64Mb, and a 4.3 Gb drive. If you want it configured with some real memory I would guess it's going to be an extra $1500 for 256Mb. Press release, prices of AlphaServers
Maybe I'm confused, but isn't this still kind-of pricey? Compare that to these guys, who've got a 256Mb alpha machine with a 9Gb drive listed for less that $3000: SWT Digital Alpha Linux System Or course, this is technically a "workstation" rather than a "server". But I don't understand what exactly it is that you get when you ask for server hardware, except a ten grand price tag.
> According to sources familiar with the new > companys plans, Andreessen and his pals are > charging full bore into the hosted > application space, building a complete > platform that'll comprise a database, > application server, directory server and > other critical elements. Essentially, the > new company--code-named VCellar--will > target Internet hosts and data-center > providers, which would offer this back-end > platform to dot-com start-ups
Ambitious? Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't this sound like Red Hat's Commerce Server?
Well, if you ask me the 2D desktop metaphor for what's going on inside our computers today is also pretty ridiculous, but for some reason everybody seems to think it's super "intuitive" and therefore the way that everything has to be done. There are something's that *can't* be done now without resorting to this 2D desktop metaphor, because there aren't enough people like me to resist that momentum.
Watch out, or you may find yourself stuck in a "consenual hallucination" someday, and all your griping about how limited it all is isn't going to help you much.
The only direct knowledge that I have is for California, which is supposedly a "right to work" state, and it has laws that obviate a lot of the "non-competition" crap that gets put in employee agreements.
My personal experience with these things is that a lot of them are scarecrow agreements. The lawyers throw lots of intimidating shit into them that they know is unlikely to stand up in court, because they figure they've got nothing to lose by trying to con you.
The only company I've seen with a reasonable employee agreement is SGI (which actually volunteers to tell you about some of the laws that protect employees).
As it happens, I've got a copy of one here. At bottom it says:
California Labor Code Section 2870
a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer.
2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require any employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
Re:Origins of Snow Crash
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 2
> One thing that might interest those that have > read it is that the opening of the book was > originally a short story and quite a comic > one at that (calling the main character Hiro > Protagonist and making him a 'Pizza Deliverator'
My understanding was that the opening of the book was originally a premise for a video game, and when he ran into implementation problems he decided to write it up as a story.
This explains a lot of the flaws of the book, in my opinion, and also probably explains why so many slash geeks love it, and I should probably stop now because slagging on Neal Stephenson is no way to boost your karma.
This is workable, but I don't think you understand the problem I was getting at. You've got a shell script here that's essentially a one-shot, with the patterns "*.doc" and "*.txt" hardcoded.
In DOS you can just say
rename *.spa *.fon
for any values of "spa" or "fon", and it just works. It would also be logical if you could do other things like
rename bombfest.* whiztech.*
but I long ago learned not to assume that DOS would work logically, and I'd need to try this first.
Anyway, my main point is that you can't replace your hardcoded patterns with $1 and $2 and expect it to work as a complete clone of the DOS command. At the very least the user would have to escape asterix's, add quote marks, or *something* like that.
> alias copy="cp" > alias move="mv" > alias delete="rm" > > We call this a shell, and it's smart > enough that it can accomodate just about any > user.
Just to be a PITA: you really can't do perfect DOS emulation in a unix shell through any combination of aliases and shell scripts.
The unix shell handles wildcard expansion before the arguments are handed to the script. DOS requires each command to hack it's own wildcard expansion. Overall, this is kind of dumb, but it does allow for things like this:
rename *.doc *.pos
Writing a shell script to do anything that gets close to this is a relatively advanced problem -- and I don't believe it's possible without requiring some escaping/quoting/substituting to get the asterixes through the shell intact.
(You can see jwz's solution in the "Unix-Hater's Handbook".)
I *was* a localization engineer for 5+ years (thankfully I'm out of that now), and I'm much more positive on this idea than you are... (though I suspect you're right that the UN is the wrong agency to bring off something like this).
Don't think about it as "automatic" translation, it's much more likely to work out as semi-automatic. I expect that the process would be something like this:
Run automatic converter from natural language to intermediate.
Have an expert in the intermediate language review the translation.
Run automatic converters to the target natural languages.
Have linguists review the output.
The point is that the intermediate language should be designed to be free of the ambiguities that plague language translation. The hope is to minimize or eliminate step (4). A typical localization job is to take software written in English and translate it for a few dozen other countries. It would be a big win if you could get to the point where all the hard stuff is done just *once* instead of repeated over and over again for all of your target languages.
And no, this will not work for poetry or humor, but there's no good way to translate poetry and humor in any case. The idea would be to get it to work with technical, legal, and business language.
By the way, when I was thinking about doing something like this, I figured I would try and use Loglan: Loglan welcome page
So here's my question-I-would've-asked-if-I-hadn't-been-busy-co ding-this-week:
In all of the pop articles on the Viridian movement I've been seeing lately, Sterling asserts that the Global Warming theory is obviously correct, and anyone who disagrees is an idiot or a sellout. His evidence is just that the weather has been really weird lately... but no one disputes that, the only question is whether it's because of human pollution.
Maybe I just barely escape being classed as an idiot, because I wouldn't claim that the human-induced warming theory is wrong, I'm just not convinced that it's right. Certainly it's the consensus view among climatologists at this point, but it seems a little naive to assume that climatologists actually know something about the climate...
Anyway, my question for Sterling would just be "what convinced you?" Ideally I'd like a pointer to a written argument.
(Sometime I may even bring it up on one of his Viridian mailing lists, but personally I think it's bad form to invade an activist's forum and try and start fights with the activists. They want to talk tactics and strategy, not hash out the basics over and over again.)
Yes, that installation was by the sound artist Trimpin, and it's probably the best thing I've seen (heard?) by him to date.
A visitor to this installation is confronted by a huge room full of dangling purple metal tubes of different lengths. There's a small set of controls in the center, with two knobs. One changes the scale, the other allows you play glissendo's on the selected scale. When you spin this knob back and forth, you can easily get sounds out of it that are reminiscent of the "impossible piano" sounds that appear in Conlon Nancarrow's work.
Playing with this thing was worth the $5 price of admission alone. Don't miss the other interactive stuff though (upstairs, hidden in one corner, is a set of homebuilt intruments that you're allowed to play with, including a "Bat" by Tom Nunn).
> I suggest anyone in the Bay Area check it out > (the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts slumbers > under the long shadow cast by the new Sony > Metreon/Temple of Doom.)
(Temple of what?) Doesn't this place have the first Microsoft only software retail outlet? I tend to call it the Merde-on.
ObGeek: This Saturday I'm going to check out the exhibit of the Apollo photos over in the SFMOMA across the street.
> There is a class of human, Stallman and Nader > among them, who bypass money as a means of > keeping score and get right to the heart of > the matter. They seek to self-aggrandize and > accrue as much power, within their limited > sphere of influence
There is a class of human that refuses to believe that anyone could sincerely be motivated by idealism. They should take it easy on voicing this thesis, though, because:
(1) they have no direct knowledge of someone else's motivations (2) motivations matter much less that actions and results (3) this attitude says more about them than it does about anyone else.
> BSD projects, notably *BSD OS's, seem to > get along just fine without the accretive > GPL.
I need to brush up on my history of Unix some time, but it seems to me that there were some nasty problems with Unix fragmenting into multiple commercial versions. Just as a thought experiment, imagine a world where Berkeley's Unix had been released under the GPL.
> ryungi (noryungi@yahoo.com) wrote: > > > The worst that can happen is that someone may > > have to fork the source tree if Big Greedy > > Corporation Inc. has decided to steal your work > > and make $$money$$ out of it. > > Stop spreading FUD about BSD licenses. Why are > you trying to make others fearful of a "Big Greedy > Corporation" making a copy of their code and > profiting from it? Red Hat is doing just that.
Ryungi is *possibly* being a little sloppy in refering to this as "stealing" (just as RMS is perhaps being a little creative in his use of the word "free"), but this doesn't deserve to be dismissed as FUD. This is a real drawback of BSD-style licenses, in that they lend themselves to proprietary forks, and hence encourage fragmentation.
Anyway, it strikes me that inventing a new license like this "TGPL" might be a good idea if only because it doesn't have any one company's name in the title. Part of the trouble with the NPL and the APL is that now everyone is going to want their own vanity license with their name on it.
But look at it from the point of view of a reader in a hurry. The fact that you said something first doesn't make any difference if there's a higher-ranked posting (for whatever reason) that also says it. There's no point in reading something twice, irrespective of who deserves priority.
It is, of course, unfair that this might affect your "karma" adversely. You did a good job, and you shouldn't be penalized just because someone else came along and maybe did something better.
Maybe being marked down as "redundant" shouldn't count the same way that being marked down as "flamebait" should be.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a way to get a listing of users sorted
by Karma?
Do you have any insight into why the Gnu emacs
xemacs split is staying split?
I actually think that this subject is really
interesting... it would be really good to have
someone do some serious historical research
into code forks.
In particular, I suspect that BSD-licensed
software is more suceptible to code forks
than GPL software, because of the temptation
to do proprietary closed source forks. It'd
take more knowledge than I have to pin down
whether this is really the way it works.
Cyberpiracy? They can't pass a law with
"cyberpiracy" in the title.
Please no.
No, it just means that the moderators don't read
the articles either.
The other day there was a thread where one of
the first comments was entirely redundant, it
pointed at a URL that was already pointed at
in the article. The comment got moderated up
to 5 for being "Informative", when it deserved
to be slapped down as "Redundant".
> You forgot that smarter people use the
> right tool (language) for the right job.
No, no no. Really smart people avoid learning
new stuff if they already know something that
works. The question is, would it be easier to
learn about a another language than to convince
everyone else that it isn't worth knowing?
That's the conventional wisdom all right, but
I wonder if it's really true.
If Larry Wall is correct that the design of
Perl reflects human natural language in a deep
way, it could actually turn out that Perl isn't
all that bad as a first language. If you've
got the head of a math geek, Perl looks like
a mess, but not everyone really has a head like
that. Could it be that Perl would be a better
first language for English majors?
I doubt that anyone has actually tried a
pilot program "Introduction to Programming
Using Perl". I bet that the main reason
that people keep trying to discourage newbies
from using perl is that the perl gods were
getting tired of the hordes of clueless twits
that descended on comp.lang.perl.misc when
the web went critical.
This study is based on a grand total of 20 subjects. Even for a preliminary run, this seems like a rather small group, and it's definitely small to have it's results trumpeted in the press.
Will you look at this? They're acting like a difference between 37% and 32% is really significant:
Would you like to buy some Unamerican Activities? http://www.unamerican.com
Note: this is not advertising
Also note: Linux is the shit stickers
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
You've broken your reply link. Don't you realize that spam is a gazillion dollar business? How dare you.
Can someone fill me in on the recent history of
the Sandman? I've refused to buy any Sandman
stuff that isn't written by Gaiman, but I
presumed that DC would be sharecropping this
stuff out to different writers (for example
there's that book "The Dreaming" which I think
is still running). Did they try and keep the
Sandman running for a while, and then have to
drop it?
> Personally, I am kind of intimidated by
> the idea that everything i do or say
> could be monitored,
Ding. Can you say "chilling effect"? Suppose
you were talking to a friend and you felt like
saying something like "Well, just for arguments
sake, maybe in some circumstances blowing up
a federal building would be justified." Then
you glance over your shoulder and notice that
a man in a trenchcoat is writing down everything
that you say.
> but honestly, I don't
> think anyone would want to waste any spare
> cycles on me. I'm just not that interesting.
This people have no lives, and no sense of
proportion. They're given a huge amount of
government money, and they have to spend it
on something. The real bad guys are hard to
find, and anyway, they're dangerous to
get close to.
Still feel like you're not a tempting target?
Sure you don't need to try harder at being
boring?
It took some digging around, but I finally found some price information on the AlphaServer 800 (I really wish companies wouldn't be so coy about their prices... (no, I do not want to fill in a form so that you're sales people can call me back). Anyway, it looks like it's around $7000 (as of January). But the specs are 500Mhz, 64Mb, and a 4.3 Gb drive. If you want it configured with some real memory I would guess it's going to be an extra $1500 for 256Mb.
Press release, prices of AlphaServers
Maybe I'm confused, but isn't this still kind-of pricey? Compare that to these guys, who've got a 256Mb alpha machine with a 9Gb drive listed for less that $3000:
SWT Digital Alpha Linux System
Or course, this is technically a "workstation" rather than a "server". But I don't understand what exactly it is that you get when you ask for server hardware, except a ten grand price tag.
> According to sources familiar with the new
> companys plans, Andreessen and his pals are
> charging full bore into the hosted
> application space, building a complete
> platform that'll comprise a database,
> application server, directory server and
> other critical elements. Essentially, the
> new company--code-named VCellar--will
> target Internet hosts and data-center
> providers, which would offer this back-end
> platform to dot-com start-ups
Ambitious? Maybe I'm missing something, but
doesn't this sound like Red Hat's Commerce
Server?
Well, if you ask me the 2D desktop metaphor
for what's going on inside our computers
today is also pretty ridiculous, but for some
reason everybody seems to think it's super
"intuitive" and therefore the way that
everything has to be done. There are
something's that *can't* be done now without
resorting to this 2D desktop metaphor,
because there aren't enough people like
me to resist that momentum.
Watch out, or you may find yourself stuck in
a "consenual hallucination" someday, and all
your griping about how limited it all is isn't
going to help you much.
The only direct knowledge that I have is for
California, which is supposedly a "right to
work" state, and it has laws that obviate a lot
of the "non-competition" crap that gets put
in employee agreements.
My personal experience with these things is that
a lot of them are scarecrow agreements. The
lawyers throw lots of intimidating shit into them
that they know is unlikely to stand up in
court, because they figure they've got nothing
to lose by trying to con you.
The only company I've seen with a reasonable
employee agreement is SGI (which actually
volunteers to tell you about some of the laws
that protect employees).
As it happens, I've got a copy of one here. At
bottom it says:
California Labor Code Section 2870
a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer.
2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require any employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
> One thing that might interest those that have
> read it is that the opening of the book was
> originally a short story and quite a comic
> one at that (calling the main character Hiro
> Protagonist and making him a 'Pizza Deliverator'
My understanding was that the opening of the book
was originally a premise for a video game, and
when he ran into implementation problems he
decided to write it up as a story.
This explains a lot of the flaws of the book,
in my opinion, and also probably explains why
so many slash geeks love it, and I should
probably stop now because slagging on Neal
Stephenson is no way to boost your karma.
This is workable, but I don't think you understand
the problem I was getting at. You've got a
shell script here that's essentially a one-shot,
with the patterns "*.doc" and "*.txt" hardcoded.
In DOS you can just say
rename *.spa *.fon
for any values of "spa" or "fon", and it just works. It would also be logical if you could
do other things like
rename bombfest.* whiztech.*
but I long ago learned not to assume that DOS
would work logically, and I'd need to try this
first.
Anyway, my main point is that you can't replace
your hardcoded patterns with $1 and $2 and
expect it to work as a complete clone of the
DOS command. At the very least the user would
have to escape asterix's, add quote marks, or
*something* like that.
Damn, I thought Taco Bell was owned by
Stanford.
davie (dwollmann@ibmhelp.com) wrote:
> alias copy="cp"
> alias move="mv"
> alias delete="rm"
>
> We call this a shell, and it's smart
> enough that it can accomodate just about any
> user.
Just to be a PITA: you really can't do perfect
DOS emulation in a unix shell through any
combination of aliases and shell scripts.
The unix shell handles wildcard expansion before
the arguments are handed to the script. DOS
requires each command to hack it's own wildcard
expansion. Overall, this is kind of dumb, but it
does allow for things like this:
rename *.doc *.pos
Writing a shell script to do anything that gets
close to this is a relatively advanced problem --
and I don't believe it's possible without
requiring some escaping/quoting/substituting to
get the asterixes through the shell intact.
(You can see jwz's solution in the "Unix-Hater's
Handbook".)
Don't think about it as "automatic" translation, it's much more likely to work out as semi-automatic. I expect that the process would be something like this:
The point is that the intermediate language should be designed to be free of the ambiguities that plague language translation. The hope is to minimize or eliminate step (4). A typical localization job is to take software written in English and translate it for a few dozen other countries. It would be a big win if you could get to the point where all the hard stuff is done just *once* instead of repeated over and over again for all of your target languages.
And no, this will not work for poetry or humor, but there's no good way to translate poetry and humor in any case. The idea would be to get it to work with technical, legal, and business language.
By the way, when I was thinking about doing something like this, I figured I would try and use Loglan:
Loglan welcome page
So here's my question-I-would've-asked-if-I-hadn't-been-busy-co ding-this-week:
In all of the pop articles on the Viridian movement I've been seeing lately, Sterling asserts that the Global Warming theory is obviously correct, and anyone who disagrees is an idiot or a sellout. His evidence is just that the weather has been really weird lately... but no one disputes that, the only question is whether it's because of human pollution.
Maybe I just barely escape being classed as an idiot, because I wouldn't claim that the human-induced warming theory is wrong, I'm just not convinced that it's right. Certainly it's the consensus view among climatologists at this point, but it seems a little naive to assume that climatologists actually know something about the climate...
Anyway, my question for Sterling would just be "what convinced you?" Ideally I'd like a pointer to a written argument.
(Sometime I may even bring it up on one of his Viridian mailing lists, but personally I think it's bad form to invade an activist's forum and try and start fights with the activists. They want to talk tactics and strategy, not hash out the basics over and over again.)
Yes, that installation was by the sound artist
Trimpin, and it's probably the best thing I've
seen (heard?) by him to date.
A visitor to this installation is confronted by
a huge room full of dangling purple metal
tubes of different lengths. There's a small
set of controls in the center, with two knobs.
One changes the scale, the other allows you play glissendo's on the selected scale. When you spin
this knob back and forth, you can easily get
sounds out of it that are reminiscent of the
"impossible piano" sounds that appear in Conlon
Nancarrow's work.
Playing with this thing was worth the $5 price of
admission alone. Don't miss the other interactive
stuff though (upstairs, hidden in one corner,
is a set of homebuilt intruments that you're
allowed to play with, including a "Bat" by Tom
Nunn).
> I suggest anyone in the Bay Area check it out
> (the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts slumbers
> under the long shadow cast by the new Sony
> Metreon/Temple of Doom.)
(Temple of what?) Doesn't this place have the
first Microsoft only software retail outlet?
I tend to call it the Merde-on.
ObGeek: This Saturday I'm going to check out the
exhibit of the Apollo photos over in the SFMOMA
across the street.
Bob&Max wrote:
> There is a class of human, Stallman and Nader
> among them, who bypass money as a means of
> keeping score and get right to the heart of
> the matter. They seek to self-aggrandize and
> accrue as much power, within their limited
> sphere of influence
There is a class of human that refuses to
believe that anyone could sincerely
be motivated by idealism. They should take
it easy on voicing this thesis, though,
because:
(1) they have no direct knowledge of someone
else's motivations
(2) motivations matter much less that actions
and results
(3) this attitude says more about them than it
does about anyone else.
> BSD projects, notably *BSD OS's, seem to
> get along just fine without the accretive
> GPL.
I need to brush up on my history of Unix
some time, but it seems to me that there
were some nasty problems with Unix
fragmenting into multiple commercial
versions. Just as a thought experiment,
imagine a world where Berkeley's Unix had
been released under the GPL.
Ded Bob wrote:
> ryungi (noryungi@yahoo.com) wrote:
>
> > The worst that can happen is that someone may
> > have to fork the source tree if Big Greedy
> > Corporation Inc. has decided to steal your work
> > and make $$money$$ out of it.
>
> Stop spreading FUD about BSD licenses. Why are
> you trying to make others fearful of a "Big Greedy
> Corporation" making a copy of their code and
> profiting from it? Red Hat is doing just that.
Ryungi is *possibly* being a little
sloppy in refering to this as
"stealing" (just as RMS is perhaps
being a little creative in his use
of the word "free"), but this
doesn't deserve to be dismissed as
FUD. This is a real drawback of
BSD-style licenses, in that they
lend themselves to proprietary
forks, and hence encourage
fragmentation.
Anyway, it strikes me that inventing
a new license like this "TGPL" might
be a good idea if only because it
doesn't have any one company's name
in the title. Part of the trouble
with the NPL and the APL is that now
everyone is going to want their own
vanity license with their name on
it.
But look at it from the point of view of a reader in a hurry. The fact that you said something first doesn't make any difference if there's a higher-ranked posting (for whatever reason) that also says it. There's no point in reading something twice, irrespective of who deserves priority.
It is, of course, unfair that this might affect your "karma" adversely. You did a good job, and you shouldn't be penalized just because someone else came along and maybe did something better.
Maybe being marked down as "redundant" shouldn't count the same way that being marked down as "flamebait" should be.