If you are willing to drive 200 miles to Seattle to see it then I think Disney is completely and 100% correct to demand what they have been. Disney isn't FORCING anyone to do anything and it is obvious they have a hot property. When people drive several hours just to see it, there isn't going to be whole lot of pressure on Disney to change.
What if you don't have a floppy drive? I don't. iMacs don't.
All the GPL says is it has to be available on a media customarily used for exchanging software. It doesn't say it has to come with the program.
Just because you would prefer that the source were included with the binary doesn't mean they are WRONG to not include it on the same damn media.
Have you ever seen the source included on a Debian bootdisk? Yet there is room on my Debian bootdisks for it.
If you don't like the way the GPL is worded take it up with the FSF and RMS.
I was just pointing out that LinuxOne has done nothing wrong whatsoever by not including the source, contrary to what the author of the original article implied. If making a factual correction counts as trolling....then I'm a troll.
Nothing says there has to source code on the floppy. Even if they have made changes to hformat (which I didn't see you claim or prove) they STILL don't have to put the source on the floppy. All they have to do is make it available upon request. I don't think the GPL specifies what format they need to furnish it in. Maybe they'll send it to you on 8-track.
I think you make an interesting point. Given how many people defend explicit, manual memory allocation/deallocation because of its efficiency over garbage collection it seems strange that so many of the same people aren't rabidly defending explicit, manual processor allocation/deallocation. It seems like they are very similar to me. Letting the processor take care of context switching usually ends up making less sense than letting the compiler/runtime take care of memory deallocation, at least in the real time programs I write for a living.
I'm not sure the problem is with Linux geeks, so much as with/. geeks. Given the preponderance of posts about PHP and Perl and Apache and whatnot it is hard to escape the impression that many posters on/. don't spend much time doing hard real time programming.
Oh well, I guess it just means that in the same way the Unix fascists lord their superiority over Windows peons, real time programmers can lord their superiority over the lowly web hackers that seem to populate/.;-)
I don't know what you're talking about with all this static initialization whatchamacalit. My compiler has no such limitations. Oh, I see, you are talking only about C++. Well, you should have said so:-).
[I agree that the reviewer is off his rocker about delete this, though.]
Actually I'm pretty sure I also cannot post John Grisham's newest book on the Internet. I'm pretty sure I can't post the source code to Windows. I don't think I can post libelous or defamatory stuff. There's probably a lot of stuff that we as Americans aren't allowed by law to post.
You can also link to any "system" library. I'm not sure what all the specifics are but considering that the FSF considers a web browser and spreadsheet program as part of the Operating System it seems like you should be able to count just about any library as part of the "system".
Also, as I understand the GPL they do not have to "release" their sources. They simply have to make it available to people who ask for it. I'm pretty sure that the GPL is very vague about this. There was a discussion a little while ago about whether the GPL would allow someone to distribute not the C source but the compiled-to-assembly source of a program and still be legit. Or whether you could get away with distributing it only on huge tape reels or somesuch.
BTW, there has been a Solaris port of IE for over two years.
The choices which face us are fairly stark: either accept an ever sinking standard of living, or find more resources elsewhere.
This is a false dichotomy. Another scenario is we we drop back to a much smaller population that is supported with sustainable energy sources/agriculture/etc. In your eco-sensitive world what resources are we running out of that the pie is getting smaller?
We don't need a manned expedition to Mars to get very cheap energy from the sun. Similarly, if you don't want to curb population growth there is plenty of space on this planet that isn't being used. Why terraform Mars when you can terraform Kansas or Wyoming or, hell, even Western Massachusetts. And that's not even counting oceans. We also don't need a manned expedition to Mars to get mine minerals from the asteroids -- although now that I think about I've never heard a explanation for why we need to mine minerals from asteroids, are we running out of them on Earth? We don't need a manned expedition to build space habitats.
If those things are our real goals then we should make them our real goals. If Mars is just a PR stunt to help us towards our real goals then I can do without the waste of money.
We will also never explore and discover all there is to discover, and it is foolish to think we will. But that doesn't stop anyone from advocating exploring and discovering.
I think it would take something like a month for your invasion fleet to cross the Pacific (after all the Chinese are going to have to commandeer a lot of civilian transports to move their invasion force and you probably want most of your troops landing at around the same time). Assuming they somehow evaded all those subs and surface ships we have out there, do you really think your initial wave of a few thousand Chinese with little in the way of heavy weaponry are still going to be alive and holding out? Even if our response is slow it ain't going to be that slow.
P.S. AFAIK the Chinese don't have a carrier so it would a bit difficult to use one to support the troops. The Chinese admit that they aren't going to be capable of anything but regional naval power until around 2050.
In my totally uninformed opinion Chinese invasion is pure fiction. Coincidentally, Larry Bond has a new book coming out called "Invasion" about this very topic.
It's not an objection to them owning it, it's an objection to them owning it for ETERNITY.
But why? Anything else you make you own for eternity. If I build a house it doesn't revert to the state or The People upon my death. It gets transferred to my next of kin and they can do what they want with it. If they decide to sell my house to GE that's their choice -- it's their property.
Someone sold the rights to some random publisher. And that someone is the person who owned them. Are you saying we shouldn't be able to sell things we own?
When you die you don't need your money anymore. We could take all of it and divide it up among all Americans and you wouldn't bat an eye.
I don't think any of things have anything to do with daily builds. All a daily build means is that all of the checked in code builds together. It doesn't mean you have to check in your code at the end of every day. It doesn't mean you can't take an extra day to document everything before you check it in. It doesn't mean you can't take the time to architect and design and properly code your unit before you check it in. Daily builds also have nothing to do with arbitrary deadlines.
Where I work we do daily builds. But we are missing all of the other problems you cite. We are the first project at my company to have daily builds and we are also the first project to do a non-slapdash job with high code readability and non-crap software.
Your problems are with management, not daily builds.
If the famine is caused by market failures -- as recent Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argues -- then "educating" starving people isn't going to do anything.
It's the old saw about give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime
The problem with this is that if it takes him a week to learn how to fish and then another six weeks to actually catch anything you haven't done him the slightest good. He's just a dead fisherman instead of a dead farmer.
Besides, there is much more to it than just knowing how to fish. You might be interested in checking out some of Amartya Sen's writings, including On Poverty and Famine (I think that's the title).
There are answers to all of his questions without having to resort to his "wish list". He seems to be advocating a position that his New Net offers solutions that weren't available before. Sure you can construct new solutions to existing problems with the technologies provided but a more interesting question (that he doesn't ask) is why would a person use them?
If a competitor makes false claims you can sue them for false advertising and take out ads of your own. Why would bidirectional, typed filterable links be preferable to that? Your elderly aunts dies; you file a product liability suit. Why would someone want a web version? Someone dilutes your trademark; you sue them to discourage others from doing the same. Why would digital fingerprinting be preferable? People are starving in North Korea. Why is sending them a computer better than sending them necessary farm implements?
It's not just why one may or may not be better but why would he think that anyone would pick his high-tech ways?
Those are far more interesting questions, in my mind.
First off, his questions clearly show his Pollyanaish side. Instead of asking "I want to play poker with my friends but poker is illegal here" why not ask "I want to exchange child porn but it is illegal here"? Or perhaps, "My grandmother died and happened to be taking medicine at the same time. I don't think they had anything to do with one another but I want to cash in on it and get some quick money from the manufacturer." Or how about, "I want to lie about my product's capabilities and I want anyone who goes to my competitor's web site to know that my product is so much better and cheaper than theirs." The same technology can and will be used for both so why not admit it and move out of the Star Trek fantasy that it will only be used by the Good Guys for Good Reasons (tm)? The interaction between the possible uses would also be a more interesting question, IMHO.
The questions he asks are kinda stupid because they invite either
a) rote replies of "good answers" or b) amateurish "bad answers"
Look at the net poker thing. How many people are going to just happen to know how to implement a crypto-system that not only guarantees your anonymity but the validity of the deal, lack of cheating, and enforcement of bets and debts?
All you are doing is making people think that these are easily answered questions -- something you can answer five of in an hour. And then we wonder why so many crypto-systems are designed by amateurs and are so easy to break. It invites answers like, "oh you just have the agents sort it out" hiding non-trivial implementation problems.
We already have lots of great thinkers in the world. The problem is that very few of them can actually practically implement their grand schemes.
I don't want a three paragraph answer that isn't telling me how to avoid laws I don't agree with. I want solutions in the real world and the people who can solve them. Not a bunch of sound bite buzz word compliant "great thinkers".
When you assign copyright to them, they promise to make the code available under a free licence (there is a form somewhere, I don't know where though).
Do they sign a contract or something? I mean, other than tons of bad karma, is there anything that would legally prevent them from selling all of their copyrights to Microsoft or relicensing it all to Sun under something non-GPL?
Or do we all just blindly trust in the FSF and Richard Stallman to Do The Right Thing(tm) even after Richard Stallman dies and the FSF has been taken over by people with a different ideology?
I mean, what kind of safeguards are really in place to make sure this code never becomes proprietary?
I thought that Flight Simulator was originally written by someone other than Microsoft and MS bought the company?
I thought some other company wrote Age of Empires (same for Close Combat) and MS just distributed it? Or perhaps they have bought them now?
In any case, why does it matter what games Microsoft makes? What good games does Sony make for their Playstation? It is the other developers that matter.
Long drawn out games? Final Fantasy isn't a long drawn out game? It is fast-paced? Baldur's Gate is coming out on Dreamcast. There are quite a few RTSs for consoles -- Age of Empires is just another RTS.
Game developers are also in direct competition with Sega yet they have written games for Sega platforms. Of course, those developers are also in competition with Microsoft, yet they write games that run on a Microsoft OS. I don't see how writing games that also run on MS hardware is any different.
Why will the first batch of games make of break the X-Box? IIRC, the first batch of games didn't make or break the Playstation.
That those aren't necessarily big contributions to Unix (tm) (although people will no doubt disagree about their relative merit). They are, however, "famous". The list really only includes "famous" things rather than "important" things. And Stallman is "famous" so his contributions will show up disproportionately more often than other people who also made (perhaps more important) contributions.
Notice that it is "Stallman invents GPL" and "Stallman founds FSF" (admittedly other accomplishments of his left the attribution off). I was under the impression that he had a lawyer help him write the GPL and other people were involved in the founding of the FSF. However, no names are mentioned when it comes to talking about the TCP/IP stack, pipes, sendmail, or "everything is a file". Is the GPL really more important to "Unix" than TCP/IP, pipes, and "everything is a file"?
It would still be on the brink of poverty since it doesn't exactly have an overabundance of natural resources.
Or do you mean what would happen if after sopping up billions of dollars of government welfare over the years what would happen if they were made independent today?:-)
I think they would probably run out of water awfully quick. I seem to recall that So Cal gets most of their water from No Cal. I'm sure California would be more than happy to sell water to SV at an exhorbitant rate, though. Does SV have any oil or coal reserves? So they would also be completely dependent on importing fuel reserves. What kind of farming/arable land do they have? So they also have to import all of their food. And I don't think they really have all that many institutions of higher learning given the size of their economic system; plus their population base is pretty small. So they would need to import all of their workers from other nations. All of their stocks would need to be delisted from NASDAQ and NYSE. New regulatory agencies would have to be set up before they could be relisted. I forget, does Silicon Valley have any ocean harbors or would all their imports have to be flown in (or perhaps the US could charge hefty usage fees for their ports and interstate road system to get goods to SV)? They probably wouldn't have to worry a whole lot about a military, being stuck in the heart of America but they might want a milita or National Guard to help clean up the ashes when a fire burns down several square blocks. And the couple of months of no trade with the US while Most Favored Nation status (or whatever it is called nowadays) and all the other trade treaties are negotiated would probably destroy the economy permanently.
No, I don't think Silicon Valley could be an independent, self-sustaining nation.
If the NSA spies on thousands of "innocent" people, they should be held directly accountable for that. The question is... how?
I think it is interesting that you think the NSA should be held directly accountable but that software pirates shouldn't. You are in essence claiming that government should be held to a higher moral standard than the people it governs. Yet we are in a government of the people and by the people - making it difficult to reconcile a moral government with an immoral people. Not to mention many people have a tough time swallowing it when people apply double standards of morality.
Think how outraged your average person feels when Senator So-And-So says that adultery is immoral and then is found to have had an 12-year affair. Aren't the people at the NSA going to feel essentially the same way when the people of the US say "you have to play by the rules but we don't"?
I'm not saying that government shouldn't be held to a higher standard -- they have more power than the average person. But I think you are going to have a hell of a time implementing it. I don't think true direct democracy would solve anything -- especially with the historically low voter turn outs in most republican nations; I think republican governments tend to moderate the power of swing voting blocks, which is a good thing.
It means whitespace is important to the syntax, which is a bad idea (my opinion)
I realize this is only your opinion but here's my experience: In four years of Python programming (and other languages with similar conventions) I have never once had it cause a problem. I have never personally known anyone who had it cause a problem. I believe that Visual Basic also uses white space significantly -- to separate statements -- and yet hundreds of thousands of so-called "stupid VB programmers" don't seem to have any problems with it. I'm surprised that so many hard core Real Men C programmers are so scared of it.
I think that your objection is not only unfounded but mostly pointless. Every language has problems because of how it handles syntax. I would argue that C's sometimes optional braces cause far more problems than using a newline as the statement separator. Contrary to the widely feared but never seen white space problem, I've seen the optional braces cause problems in production code.
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If you are willing to drive 200 miles to Seattle to see it then I think Disney is completely and 100% correct to demand what they have been. Disney isn't FORCING anyone to do anything and it is obvious they have a hot property. When people drive several hours just to see it, there isn't going to be whole lot of pressure on Disney to change.
Judges don't grant patents.
Why do you need libc symbols if you aren't debugging libc? Or do you often need to debug libc? I'm confused.
What GPLed program have they modified and refused to release the source for?
What if you don't have a floppy drive? I don't. iMacs don't.
All the GPL says is it has to be available on a media customarily used for exchanging software. It doesn't say it has to come with the program.
Just because you would prefer that the source were included with the binary doesn't mean they are WRONG to not include it on the same damn media.
Have you ever seen the source included on a Debian bootdisk? Yet there is room on my Debian bootdisks for it.
If you don't like the way the GPL is worded take it up with the FSF and RMS.
I was just pointing out that LinuxOne has done nothing wrong whatsoever by not including the source, contrary to what the author of the original article implied. If making a factual correction counts as trolling....then I'm a troll.
Nothing says there has to source code on the floppy. Even if they have made changes to hformat (which I didn't see you claim or prove) they STILL don't have to put the source on the floppy. All they have to do is make it available upon request. I don't think the GPL specifies what format they need to furnish it in. Maybe they'll send it to you on 8-track.
I think you make an interesting point. Given how many people defend explicit, manual memory allocation/deallocation because of its efficiency over garbage collection it seems strange that so many of the same people aren't rabidly defending explicit, manual processor allocation/deallocation. It seems like they are very similar to me. Letting the processor take care of context switching usually ends up making less sense than letting the compiler/runtime take care of memory deallocation, at least in the real time programs I write for a living.
/. geeks. Given the preponderance of posts about PHP and Perl and Apache and whatnot it is hard to escape the impression that many posters on /. don't spend much time doing hard real time programming.
/. ;-)
I'm not sure the problem is with Linux geeks, so much as with
Oh well, I guess it just means that in the same way the Unix fascists lord their superiority over Windows peons, real time programmers can lord their superiority over the lowly web hackers that seem to populate
I don't know what you're talking about with all this static initialization whatchamacalit. My compiler has no such limitations. Oh, I see, you are talking only about C++. Well, you should have said so :-).
[I agree that the reviewer is off his rocker about delete this, though.]
Actually I'm pretty sure I also cannot post John Grisham's newest book on the Internet. I'm pretty sure I can't post the source code to Windows. I don't think I can post libelous or defamatory stuff. There's probably a lot of stuff that we as Americans aren't allowed by law to post.
You can also link to any "system" library. I'm not sure what all the specifics are but considering that the FSF considers a web browser and spreadsheet program as part of the Operating System it seems like you should be able to count just about any library as part of the "system".
Also, as I understand the GPL they do not have to "release" their sources. They simply have to make it available to people who ask for it. I'm pretty sure that the GPL is very vague about this. There was a discussion a little while ago about whether the GPL would allow someone to distribute not the C source but the compiled-to-assembly source of a program and still be legit. Or whether you could get away with distributing it only on huge tape reels or somesuch.
BTW, there has been a Solaris port of IE for over two years.
The choices which face us are fairly stark: either accept an ever sinking standard of living, or find more resources elsewhere.
This is a false dichotomy. Another scenario is we we drop back to a much smaller population that is supported with sustainable energy sources/agriculture/etc. In your eco-sensitive world what resources are we running out of that the pie is getting smaller?
We don't need a manned expedition to Mars to get very cheap energy from the sun. Similarly, if you don't want to curb population growth there is plenty of space on this planet that isn't being used. Why terraform Mars when you can terraform Kansas or Wyoming or, hell, even Western Massachusetts. And that's not even counting oceans. We also don't need a manned expedition to Mars to get mine minerals from the asteroids -- although now that I think about I've never heard a explanation for why we need to mine minerals from asteroids, are we running out of them on Earth? We don't need a manned expedition to build space habitats.
If those things are our real goals then we should make them our real goals. If Mars is just a PR stunt to help us towards our real goals then I can do without the waste of money.
We will also never explore and discover all there is to discover, and it is foolish to think we will. But that doesn't stop anyone from advocating exploring and discovering.
Thomas Jefferson wasn't at the Constitutional Convention so I'm not sure he's a great reference to turn to when trying to understand the Constitution.
I think it would take something like a month for your invasion fleet to cross the Pacific (after all the Chinese are going to have to commandeer a lot of civilian transports to move their invasion force and you probably want most of your troops landing at around the same time). Assuming they somehow evaded all those subs and surface ships we have out there, do you really think your initial wave of a few thousand Chinese with little in the way of heavy weaponry are still going to be alive and holding out? Even if our response is slow it ain't going to be that slow.
P.S. AFAIK the Chinese don't have a carrier so it would a bit difficult to use one to support the troops. The Chinese admit that they aren't going to be capable of anything but regional naval power until around 2050.
In my totally uninformed opinion Chinese invasion is pure fiction. Coincidentally, Larry Bond has a new book coming out called "Invasion" about this very topic.
It's not an objection to them owning it, it's an objection to them owning it for ETERNITY.
But why? Anything else you make you own for eternity. If I build a house it doesn't revert to the state or The People upon my death. It gets transferred to my next of kin and they can do what they want with it. If they decide to sell my house to GE that's their choice -- it's their property.
Someone sold the rights to some random publisher. And that someone is the person who owned them. Are you saying we shouldn't be able to sell things we own?
When you die you don't need your money anymore. We could take all of it and divide it up among all Americans and you wouldn't bat an eye.
I don't think any of things have anything to do with daily builds. All a daily build means is that all of the checked in code builds together. It doesn't mean you have to check in your code at the end of every day. It doesn't mean you can't take an extra day to document everything before you check it in. It doesn't mean you can't take the time to architect and design and properly code your unit before you check it in. Daily builds also have nothing to do with arbitrary deadlines.
Where I work we do daily builds. But we are missing all of the other problems you cite. We are the first project at my company to have daily builds and we are also the first project to do a non-slapdash job with high code readability and non-crap software.
Your problems are with management, not daily builds.
If the famine is caused by market failures -- as recent Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argues -- then "educating" starving people isn't going to do anything.
It's the old saw about give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime
The problem with this is that if it takes him a week to learn how to fish and then another six weeks to actually catch anything you haven't done him the slightest good. He's just a dead fisherman instead of a dead farmer.
Besides, there is much more to it than just knowing how to fish. You might be interested in checking out some of Amartya Sen's writings, including On Poverty and Famine (I think that's the title).
There are answers to all of his questions without having to resort to his "wish list". He seems to be advocating a position that his New Net offers solutions that weren't available before. Sure you can construct new solutions to existing problems with the technologies provided but a more interesting question (that he doesn't ask) is why would a person use them?
If a competitor makes false claims you can sue them for false advertising and take out ads of your own. Why would bidirectional, typed filterable links be preferable to that? Your elderly aunts dies; you file a product liability suit. Why would someone want a web version? Someone dilutes your trademark; you sue them to discourage others from doing the same. Why would digital fingerprinting be preferable? People are starving in North Korea. Why is sending them a computer better than sending them necessary farm implements?
It's not just why one may or may not be better but why would he think that anyone would pick his high-tech ways?
Those are far more interesting questions, in my mind.
First off, his questions clearly show his Pollyanaish side. Instead of asking "I want to play poker with my friends but poker is illegal here" why not ask "I want to exchange child porn but it is illegal here"? Or perhaps, "My grandmother died and happened to be taking medicine at the same time. I don't think they had anything to do with one another but I want to cash in on it and get some quick money from the manufacturer." Or how about, "I want to lie about my product's capabilities and I want anyone who goes to my competitor's web site to know that my product is so much better and cheaper than theirs." The same technology can and will be used for both so why not admit it and move out of the Star Trek fantasy that it will only be used by the Good Guys for Good Reasons (tm)? The interaction between the possible uses would also be a more interesting question, IMHO.
The questions he asks are kinda stupid because they invite either
a) rote replies of "good answers" or
b) amateurish "bad answers"
Look at the net poker thing. How many people are going to just happen to know how to implement a crypto-system that not only guarantees your anonymity but the validity of the deal, lack of cheating, and enforcement of bets and debts?
All you are doing is making people think that these are easily answered questions -- something you can answer five of in an hour. And then we wonder why so many crypto-systems are designed by amateurs and are so easy to break. It invites answers like, "oh you just have the agents sort it out" hiding non-trivial implementation problems.
We already have lots of great thinkers in the world. The problem is that very few of them can actually practically implement their grand schemes.
I don't want a three paragraph answer that isn't telling me how to avoid laws I don't agree with. I want solutions in the real world and the people who can solve them. Not a bunch of sound bite buzz word compliant "great thinkers".
When you assign copyright to them, they promise to make the code available under a free licence (there is a form somewhere, I don't know where though).
Do they sign a contract or something? I mean, other than tons of bad karma, is there anything that would legally prevent them from selling all of their copyrights to Microsoft or relicensing it all to Sun under something non-GPL?
Or do we all just blindly trust in the FSF and Richard Stallman to Do The Right Thing(tm) even after Richard Stallman dies and the FSF has been taken over by people with a different ideology?
I mean, what kind of safeguards are really in place to make sure this code never becomes proprietary?
The reason is that they want to be able to relicense it under a closed source license.
Is that the same reason that the FSF wants you to assign your copyright to them?
I thought that Flight Simulator was originally written by someone other than Microsoft and MS bought the company?
I thought some other company wrote Age of Empires (same for Close Combat) and MS just distributed it? Or perhaps they have bought them now?
In any case, why does it matter what games Microsoft makes? What good games does Sony make for their Playstation? It is the other developers that matter.
Long drawn out games? Final Fantasy isn't a long drawn out game? It is fast-paced? Baldur's Gate is coming out on Dreamcast. There are quite a few RTSs for consoles -- Age of Empires is just another RTS.
Game developers are also in direct competition with Sega yet they have written games for Sega platforms. Of course, those developers are also in competition with Microsoft, yet they write games that run on a Microsoft OS. I don't see how writing games that also run on MS hardware is any different.
Why will the first batch of games make of break the X-Box? IIRC, the first batch of games didn't make or break the Playstation.
That those aren't necessarily big contributions to Unix (tm) (although people will no doubt disagree about their relative merit). They are, however, "famous". The list really only includes "famous" things rather than "important" things. And Stallman is "famous" so his contributions will show up disproportionately more often than other people who also made (perhaps more important) contributions.
Notice that it is "Stallman invents GPL" and "Stallman founds FSF" (admittedly other accomplishments of his left the attribution off). I was under the impression that he had a lawyer help him write the GPL and other people were involved in the founding of the FSF. However, no names are mentioned when it comes to talking about the TCP/IP stack, pipes, sendmail, or "everything is a file". Is the GPL really more important to "Unix" than TCP/IP, pipes, and "everything is a file"?
It would still be on the brink of poverty since it doesn't exactly have an overabundance of natural resources.
:-)
Or do you mean what would happen if after sopping up billions of dollars of government welfare over the years what would happen if they were made independent today?
I think they would probably run out of water awfully quick. I seem to recall that So Cal gets most of their water from No Cal. I'm sure California would be more than happy to sell water to SV at an exhorbitant rate, though. Does SV have any oil or coal reserves? So they would also be completely dependent on importing fuel reserves. What kind of farming/arable land do they have? So they also have to import all of their food. And I don't think they really have all that many institutions of higher learning given the size of their economic system; plus their population base is pretty small. So they would need to import all of their workers from other nations. All of their stocks would need to be delisted from NASDAQ and NYSE. New regulatory agencies would have to be set up before they could be relisted. I forget, does Silicon Valley have any ocean harbors or would all their imports have to be flown in (or perhaps the US could charge hefty usage fees for their ports and interstate road system to get goods to SV)? They probably wouldn't have to worry a whole lot about a military, being stuck in the heart of America but they might want a milita or National Guard to help clean up the ashes when a fire burns down several square blocks. And the couple of months of no trade with the US while Most Favored Nation status (or whatever it is called nowadays) and all the other trade treaties are negotiated would probably destroy the economy permanently.
No, I don't think Silicon Valley could be an independent, self-sustaining nation.
If the NSA spies on thousands of "innocent" people, they should be held directly accountable for that. The question is... how?
I think it is interesting that you think the NSA should be held directly accountable but that software pirates shouldn't. You are in essence claiming that government should be held to a higher moral standard than the people it governs. Yet we are in a government of the people and by the people - making it difficult to reconcile a moral government with an immoral people. Not to mention many people have a tough time swallowing it when people apply double standards of morality.
Think how outraged your average person feels when Senator So-And-So says that adultery is immoral and then is found to have had an 12-year affair. Aren't the people at the NSA going to feel essentially the same way when the people of the US say "you have to play by the rules but we don't"?
I'm not saying that government shouldn't be held to a higher standard -- they have more power than the average person. But I think you are going to have a hell of a time implementing it. I don't think true direct democracy would solve anything -- especially with the historically low voter turn outs in most republican nations; I think republican governments tend to moderate the power of swing voting blocks, which is a good thing.
It means whitespace is important to the syntax, which is a bad idea (my opinion)
I realize this is only your opinion but here's my experience: In four years of Python programming (and other languages with similar conventions) I have never once had it cause a problem. I have never personally known anyone who had it cause a problem. I believe that Visual Basic also uses white space significantly -- to separate statements -- and yet hundreds of thousands of so-called "stupid VB programmers" don't seem to have any problems with it. I'm surprised that so many hard core Real Men C programmers are so scared of it.
I think that your objection is not only unfounded but mostly pointless. Every language has problems because of how it handles syntax. I would argue that C's sometimes optional braces cause far more problems than using a newline as the statement separator. Contrary to the widely feared but never seen white space problem, I've seen the optional braces cause problems in production code.