I don't think the GPLv2 actually had a problem with patents, but there were certainly questions which would have made for difficult court cases. As you said, GPLv3 fixes that.
The problem of energy linkage is simple: If we run out of energy, we lose our technology. Without technology, most people will die.
The problem of labor is that automation is becoming increasingly intelligent. Cars that park themselves are already on the market. Semi-automated grocery store checkouts have begun to appear. Etc. Each such advance eliminate categories of jobs.
For some reason you also seem to think that corporations and automation will produces some sort of unholy, machine controlled dystopia. This is where you...
It think it has the potential to produce a dystopia. It also has potentials in the other direction. It all depends whether the ownership of wealth is centralized or distributed. Under such conditions it becomes increasingly difficult for significant wealth to be "earned".
P.S.: Value? People disagree on the value of things, both between people, and, over time, with themselves. The classic example is that to a starving man, a loaf of bread can be worth risking loss of a hand. It sure isn't worth that to me, now.
You don't know what you're talking about. Either that, or you've adopted a popular media definition of communism.
Now it's true that the philosophical descendants of Marx+Lenin were all dictatorial, that isn't the origin of communism. We can't really trace the origin of communism, but it predates the Roman Empire, and is probably the ancestral form of human government. The problem is that it doesn't scale. It works fine in a family. Acceptably in a small village. Poorly in a large village. And unacceptably poorly in any larger group.
I still have trouble placing it in the same category with Capitalism, though that's nearly as ancient. Possibly even more so. OTOH neither works acceptably well for large groups of humans. Unrestricted capitalism would be quite likely to result in nearly everyone dying...either that or revolt and redistribution of wealth. (Both scenarios have happened in the past. Both are rare because unrestricted capitalism is generally either a myth or an acknowledged falsehood.)
Marx was quite correct when he pointed out the problems with the loosely restricted capitalism that was dominant in his day. His solutions may not have been plausible, with their own inherent problems (blame Lenin for the dictatorship), but the problems he recognized were real.
Neither approach is a valid one for our own times when the value of labor is decreasing. Classically all people could provide valuable labor at, e.g., digging ditches, or as conscript warriors. The value of such labor has been decreasing, and is set to soon decrease rapidly. Either that, or we won't solve the energy crisis and will lose our civilization. In such case we must expect a die-off of over 90%...and I don't expect it to be peaceful. Presuming that we solve the energy crisis we face automation. Increasingly intelligent automation. Already we are using automated soldiers on a minor scale. Expect that to increase, and then consider what constraints that removes from arbitrary centralized government. And that most people won't contribute anything positive to the economy.
We already have laws that allow corporations to own other corporations. I don't know if the laws allow a mesh of corporations to own each other, but they may. If so, we are set for capital owning itself, with no human involvement. Is this really what we want? On what basis do you say yes or no? Don't you support capitalism?
We had not only rain, but hail on our wedding day. It was marvelous! We still remember it and talk about it occasionally nearly 2 decades later.
We had our wedding at a carousel, which we rented. There's nothing like riding a carousel watching the rain and hail sitting next to your bride and watching the rain and hail. Then we dashed across to the building were the wedding was performed. (Never mind what I can remember about the rest of the day.)
No. Linux is written by committee, but the design is by Linus. Similarly with Python, except the design is by BFDL Guido. Other projects have other heads...but the heads tend to be singular.
Note that the nominal authority of the FOSS project heads tends to be considerably more absolute than we would tolerate in most other areas. They can toss code on a whim. But this is restrained in the successful project because they mustn't alienate their developers...and they can't offer anything except acceptance (and a minimal bit of self-promotion).
Note also that anyone can fork a FOSS project, but very few such projects ever get far enough to even be noticed, much less release anything useful. Managing a FOSS project is a difficult art, and somehow you've got to fund both yourself and the project. It's cheap as things go, but it sure isn't free.
And the people like that don't all have fancy degrees.
I knew a C coder that was in love with macros with obscure names (like lTsh). I could never figure out WHAT his code was doing. It didn't have an exceptional number of errors...but it was well obfuscated. When he left another person was designated for several years to translate his stuff. (And he was only there a couple of years.) But if you asked him about any particular macro, he could justify why he had created it. (They did shorten the code considerably.)
He left to become a full-time consultant working out of an ISP. I think he did rather well, but I admit that I didn't keep track of him for very long.
Who can prosecute them for it? I've never, ever, heard of that statement being invoked against anyone. (I did hear an explanation as to why it's essentially meaningless unless you are representing yourself...but I don't remember it anymore.)
Does GM still use that "Body by Fischer" logo with the picture of a carriage? I think that the automakers *DO* still use products from the carriage companies...just not the buggy whip companies. And it's not clear to me that the news organizations are offering news, anyway. They don't appear to verify their sources carefully. Every event I've been at that was reported on a news channel was atrociously distorted, etc. I think they're selling spin.
Google SHOULD refuse to carry their publications...but it *is* a search engine.
E.g., select the black animals. Select the animals with pointy ears. Etc. So the same pictures could be used frequently in combination with different questions. You'd just need to have someone tag each picture with the appropriate term tags, and the captcha could be generated from a database and so could a question. As the number of pictures increased, however, adding additional tags could get expensive.
Of course that could be solved with a large database...but the penetrator would need to parse the sentence, so non-standard forms could be recognized. E.g.: Lightbulb change: How many elephants?
On further contemplation I think you got that bit about "permanent revolution" from Orwell. I'm not going to re-read him and find out where, he was just too totally depressing. (Right more often than not, but still depressing.)
That wasn't Marxism, though it might have been Leninism...I've not read what he wrote.
Marx got a lot of things wrong, but he was an academic (of a peculiar stripe, admittedly) and didn't worry a lot about how to motivate people. (Well, it's been a few decades, so he may have mentioned it, but it certainly wasn't anything near central to his writing.)
No. The electrical control network was originally totally separate from the net. It should have been kept that way. If it wasn't, it was a bad decision.
(I remember reading about a nuclear plant whose control network got connected to the net for the convenience of monitoring...so it isn't always beancounters making the boneheaded decision.)
Actually, it's a lot more common than that, if you study history. Whenever one group feels unfairly suppressed, and the means of suppression is disabled more than temporarily, you're apt to have an, at least minor, uprising. It usually doesn't lead to anything more than worse oppression in the future, of course, but it is a predictable result. (Doesn't *always* happen, but it's the way to bet.)
I beg to dispute point 3: 3) Yes, tax dollars do contribute a huge amount to healthcare - even more per capita than some public healthcare countries.
Yes, as stated it's correct. Unfortunately you are measuring dollars spent rather than services provided. A very large part of the health-care budget is siphoned off by insurance company bureaucracies. Another large part is spent on research into drugs known to be useless in advance. (Well, not totally useless...their point is to maintain patent coverage over drugs that would soon be slipping out of patent coverage.) And, of course, the bureaucracy to manage such activities. And lobbyists.
I'm sure that there are other features of the current system that I haven't mentioned that are equally wasteful. E.g., I don't know how much is spent promoting drugs known to be actually useless, or even harmful...i.e., known by those who conducted the research that was suppressed by the corporation funding the research. Occasionally such stories break into media coverage, but if one considers HOW such stories become known, it's very clear that what we hear about is less than the tip of the iceberg.
I'll agree that tax dollars SHOULD promote the health of the citizenry. This isn't how dollars spent in the health field are used, however...except possibly 1/3 of them. And I'm including reasonable overhead for administrators of doctors and hospitals as being spent on health. The US not only spends very little on the health of the citizenry, what it spends it spends incredibly inefficiently. Research needs to be separated from manufacturing, and no manufacturer should have a monopoly on any drug. That's just a starting point, but it's an essential change. Exclusive licenses to sell drugs should be forbidden. Which means that the company that manufactures and sells the drugs must be separated from the company that does the development. Even that doesn't suffice. Negative results are as important as positive results, and MUST be published. The groups that verify a drug as safe and effective must not have a financial stake in selling the drug. (I'm sure you can see why.) Etc.
Value is an ill-defined term, and different observers will value the same transaction differently. This isn't only because it's ill-defined, but also because valuation is observer centric.
Because of this the law is both too vague to be useful, and silly. Many observers will only value some of the transactions. Others will value some of the transactions negatively. Etc.
E.g., what is the value of the advertisement that may appear at the top of this page? To slashdot it's valued as a source of income. To the advertiser it's valued as a way of attracting business. To most readers it's ignored. To some readers it's a nuisance. Each means of valuing the ad gives it a different valuation...and each valuation is clearly observer-centric.
It doesn't bother me that Google is selling to advertisers that I search using them, so they might as well include ads relevant to the search. That's a totally separate matter. It would bother me if the ads were intrusive, but they aren't.
This doesn't mean that I'll agree to an EULA that allows them to control what I can see on the web when I'm *not* at their site. And that's what the Chrome EULA looks like.
You're right, but that's a part of the design of the system. Voting for a third party is just a fancy way to not vote. If we went to Condorcet or Instant Runoff, this wouldn't be true, but with the current system it is.
FWIW, I stopped buying Apple products over some EULA wording.
"Comparable to Apple" doesn't make it acceptable. Now Google isn't exactly trying to sell me something, but unless I hear a convincing explanation as to why it's harmless (not could be harmless, or should be harmless, or is intended to be harmless), then I'm not going to consider Chrome as an acceptable product.
And that was just blatantly provocative. The FBI has a record of getting even totally absurd warrants on request that's difficult to beat.
So they were basically saying "Warrants! We don' got to show you no stinking warrants!". They didn't need to, but they did it anyway. Either because they could, to prove that they could, or as a justifier for something else.
It's the kind of action that really *should* be allowed to be punished as treason, but which doesn't meet the constitutional definition. Malfeasance is evident. Anyone doubt that they'll get away unpunished?
The FBI get to choose whichever judge they feel will give them the best terms. Given that, it's not surprising that they can find a pliant judge.
I'd say that should be fixed, but in the few cases where a particular court needs to be the one to approve the warrant, records tend to show stunningly few refusals. Apparently only the most pliant of judges ever get appointed to such courts. Which seems to mean that the entire system has a bug at a much more basic level.
The constitutional definition of treason is highly circumscribed. You can't point to evidence that even Bush or Chaney were guilty of it. Malfeasance, nearly certainly. Treason, probably not. Violation of their oath of office. Definitely. But not treason.
Treason traditionally, and outside the domain of criminal law, just means betrayal. In that sense he's a traitor. But in the restricted meaning that applies within the domain of criminal law, I really, really doubt it.
I'm not exactly a lefty (well, I don't think I am), but I *did* vote for Obama. (Mainly because the opposition appeared worse.)
I didn't expect him to be good, just to stop pushing things to totalitarian quite as fast. And possibly to reduce the scale of the war on the govt. against it's citizenry. He hasn't exactly done that, but he *does* appear to be less malign. He generally has at least a veneer of a reasonable argument. (But I *haven't* been pleased by the media honchos that he's been appointing to communications posts. And I despise the way he continues to support increased war.)
The things that he's doing that are bad aren't anything that the previous administration wasn't already doing. And he's making a few steps toward helping people. Not a very high recommendation, but considering the alternatives...
In other words, *IF* this is about "Wolverine" they don't know whether it's a criminal act or a civil tort...and they took down 911 anyway.
This makes me really TRUST the govt.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 1
The only possible correction is to get Linux machines sold pre-configured with Linux. Then the vendor ensures that the configuration works before selling it.
This is something that MS knows, which is why they sabotaged Linux on Netbooks.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the GPLv2 actually had a problem with patents, but there were certainly questions which would have made for difficult court cases. As you said, GPLv3 fixes that.
The problem of energy linkage is simple:
If we run out of energy, we lose our technology. Without technology, most people will die.
The problem of labor is that automation is becoming increasingly intelligent. Cars that park themselves are already on the market. Semi-automated grocery store checkouts have begun to appear. Etc. Each such advance eliminate categories of jobs.
For some reason you also seem to think that corporations and automation will produces some sort of unholy, machine controlled dystopia. This is where you...
It think it has the potential to produce a dystopia. It also has potentials in the other direction. It all depends whether the ownership of wealth is centralized or distributed. Under such conditions it becomes increasingly difficult for significant wealth to be "earned".
P.S.: Value? People disagree on the value of things, both between people, and, over time, with themselves. The classic example is that to a starving man, a loaf of bread can be worth risking loss of a hand. It sure isn't worth that to me, now.
You don't know what you're talking about. Either that, or you've adopted a popular media definition of communism.
Now it's true that the philosophical descendants of Marx+Lenin were all dictatorial, that isn't the origin of communism. We can't really trace the origin of communism, but it predates the Roman Empire, and is probably the ancestral form of human government. The problem is that it doesn't scale. It works fine in a family. Acceptably in a small village. Poorly in a large village. And unacceptably poorly in any larger group.
I still have trouble placing it in the same category with Capitalism, though that's nearly as ancient. Possibly even more so. OTOH neither works acceptably well for large groups of humans. Unrestricted capitalism would be quite likely to result in nearly everyone dying...either that or revolt and redistribution of wealth. (Both scenarios have happened in the past. Both are rare because unrestricted capitalism is generally either a myth or an acknowledged falsehood.)
Marx was quite correct when he pointed out the problems with the loosely restricted capitalism that was dominant in his day. His solutions may not have been plausible, with their own inherent problems (blame Lenin for the dictatorship), but the problems he recognized were real.
Neither approach is a valid one for our own times when the value of labor is decreasing. Classically all people could provide valuable labor at, e.g., digging ditches, or as conscript warriors. The value of such labor has been decreasing, and is set to soon decrease rapidly. Either that, or we won't solve the energy crisis and will lose our civilization. In such case we must expect a die-off of over 90%...and I don't expect it to be peaceful. Presuming that we solve the energy crisis we face automation. Increasingly intelligent automation. Already we are using automated soldiers on a minor scale. Expect that to increase, and then consider what constraints that removes from arbitrary centralized government. And that most people won't contribute anything positive to the economy.
We already have laws that allow corporations to own other corporations. I don't know if the laws allow a mesh of corporations to own each other, but they may. If so, we are set for capital owning itself, with no human involvement. Is this really what we want? On what basis do you say yes or no? Don't you support capitalism?
We had not only rain, but hail on our wedding day. It was marvelous! We still remember it and talk about it occasionally nearly 2 decades later.
We had our wedding at a carousel, which we rented. There's nothing like riding a carousel watching the rain and hail sitting next to your bride and watching the rain and hail. Then we dashed across to the building were the wedding was performed. (Never mind what I can remember about the rest of the day.)
No. Linux is written by committee, but the design is by Linus. Similarly with Python, except the design is by BFDL Guido. Other projects have other heads...but the heads tend to be singular.
Note that the nominal authority of the FOSS project heads tends to be considerably more absolute than we would tolerate in most other areas. They can toss code on a whim. But this is restrained in the successful project because they mustn't alienate their developers...and they can't offer anything except acceptance (and a minimal bit of self-promotion).
Note also that anyone can fork a FOSS project, but very few such projects ever get far enough to even be noticed, much less release anything useful. Managing a FOSS project is a difficult art, and somehow you've got to fund both yourself and the project. It's cheap as things go, but it sure isn't free.
And the people like that don't all have fancy degrees.
I knew a C coder that was in love with macros with obscure names (like lTsh). I could never figure out WHAT his code was doing. It didn't have an exceptional number of errors...but it was well obfuscated. When he left another person was designated for several years to translate his stuff. (And he was only there a couple of years.) But if you asked him about any particular macro, he could justify why he had created it. (They did shorten the code considerably.)
He left to become a full-time consultant working out of an ISP. I think he did rather well, but I admit that I didn't keep track of him for very long.
Who can prosecute them for it? I've never, ever, heard of that statement being invoked against anyone. (I did hear an explanation as to why it's essentially meaningless unless you are representing yourself...but I don't remember it anymore.)
Does GM still use that "Body by Fischer" logo with the picture of a carriage? I think that the automakers *DO* still use products from the carriage companies...just not the buggy whip companies. And it's not clear to me that the news organizations are offering news, anyway. They don't appear to verify their sources carefully. Every event I've been at that was reported on a news channel was atrociously distorted, etc. I think they're selling spin.
Google SHOULD refuse to carry their publications...but it *is* a search engine.
Variations on that are possible, too.
E.g., select the black animals. Select the animals with pointy ears. Etc. So the same pictures could be used frequently in combination with different questions. You'd just need to have someone tag each picture with the appropriate term tags, and the captcha could be generated from a database and so could a question. As the number of pictures increased, however, adding additional tags could get expensive.
How about riddles?
Of course that could be solved with a large database...but the penetrator would need to parse the sentence, so non-standard forms could be recognized. E.g.:
Lightbulb change: How many elephants?
Unfortunately, I don't know the answer. Whoops!
On further contemplation I think you got that bit about "permanent revolution" from Orwell. I'm not going to re-read him and find out where, he was just too totally depressing. (Right more often than not, but still depressing.)
That wasn't Marxism, though it might have been Leninism...I've not read what he wrote.
Marx got a lot of things wrong, but he was an academic (of a peculiar stripe, admittedly) and didn't worry a lot about how to motivate people. (Well, it's been a few decades, so he may have mentioned it, but it certainly wasn't anything near central to his writing.)
No. The electrical control network was originally totally separate from the net. It should have been kept that way. If it wasn't, it was a bad decision.
(I remember reading about a nuclear plant whose control network got connected to the net for the convenience of monitoring...so it isn't always beancounters making the boneheaded decision.)
Actually, it's a lot more common than that, if you study history. Whenever one group feels unfairly suppressed, and the means of suppression is disabled more than temporarily, you're apt to have an, at least minor, uprising. It usually doesn't lead to anything more than worse oppression in the future, of course, but it is a predictable result. (Doesn't *always* happen, but it's the way to bet.)
I beg to dispute point 3:
3) Yes, tax dollars do contribute a huge amount to healthcare - even more per capita than some public healthcare countries.
Yes, as stated it's correct. Unfortunately you are measuring dollars spent rather than services provided. A very large part of the health-care budget is siphoned off by insurance company bureaucracies. Another large part is spent on research into drugs known to be useless in advance. (Well, not totally useless...their point is to maintain patent coverage over drugs that would soon be slipping out of patent coverage.) And, of course, the bureaucracy to manage such activities. And lobbyists.
I'm sure that there are other features of the current system that I haven't mentioned that are equally wasteful. E.g., I don't know how much is spent promoting drugs known to be actually useless, or even harmful...i.e., known by those who conducted the research that was suppressed by the corporation funding the research. Occasionally such stories break into media coverage, but if one considers HOW such stories become known, it's very clear that what we hear about is less than the tip of the iceberg.
I'll agree that tax dollars SHOULD promote the health of the citizenry. This isn't how dollars spent in the health field are used, however...except possibly 1/3 of them. And I'm including reasonable overhead for administrators of doctors and hospitals as being spent on health. The US not only spends very little on the health of the citizenry, what it spends it spends incredibly inefficiently. Research needs to be separated from manufacturing, and no manufacturer should have a monopoly on any drug. That's just a starting point, but it's an essential change. Exclusive licenses to sell drugs should be forbidden. Which means that the company that manufactures and sells the drugs must be separated from the company that does the development. Even that doesn't suffice. Negative results are as important as positive results, and MUST be published. The groups that verify a drug as safe and effective must not have a financial stake in selling the drug. (I'm sure you can see why.) Etc.
Value is an ill-defined term, and different observers will value the same transaction differently. This isn't only because it's ill-defined, but also because valuation is observer centric.
Because of this the law is both too vague to be useful, and silly. Many observers will only value some of the transactions. Others will value some of the transactions negatively. Etc.
E.g., what is the value of the advertisement that may appear at the top of this page? To slashdot it's valued as a source of income. To the advertiser it's valued as a way of attracting business. To most readers it's ignored. To some readers it's a nuisance. Each means of valuing the ad gives it a different valuation...and each valuation is clearly observer-centric.
It doesn't bother me that Google is selling to advertisers that I search using them, so they might as well include ads relevant to the search. That's a totally separate matter. It would bother me if the ads were intrusive, but they aren't.
This doesn't mean that I'll agree to an EULA that allows them to control what I can see on the web when I'm *not* at their site. And that's what the Chrome EULA looks like.
You're right, but that's a part of the design of the system. Voting for a third party is just a fancy way to not vote. If we went to Condorcet or Instant Runoff, this wouldn't be true, but with the current system it is.
FWIW, I stopped buying Apple products over some EULA wording.
"Comparable to Apple" doesn't make it acceptable. Now Google isn't exactly trying to sell me something, but unless I hear a convincing explanation as to why it's harmless (not could be harmless, or should be harmless, or is intended to be harmless), then I'm not going to consider Chrome as an acceptable product.
And that was just blatantly provocative. The FBI has a record of getting even totally absurd warrants on request that's difficult to beat.
So they were basically saying "Warrants! We don' got to show you no stinking warrants!". They didn't need to, but they did it anyway. Either because they could, to prove that they could, or as a justifier for something else.
It's the kind of action that really *should* be allowed to be punished as treason, but which doesn't meet the constitutional definition. Malfeasance is evident. Anyone doubt that they'll get away unpunished?
The FBI get to choose whichever judge they feel will give them the best terms. Given that, it's not surprising that they can find a pliant judge.
I'd say that should be fixed, but in the few cases where a particular court needs to be the one to approve the warrant, records tend to show stunningly few refusals. Apparently only the most pliant of judges ever get appointed to such courts. Which seems to mean that the entire system has a bug at a much more basic level.
That's not treason. That's malfeasance.
The constitutional definition of treason is highly circumscribed. You can't point to evidence that even Bush or Chaney were guilty of it. Malfeasance, nearly certainly. Treason, probably not. Violation of their oath of office. Definitely. But not treason.
Treason traditionally, and outside the domain of criminal law, just means betrayal. In that sense he's a traitor. But in the restricted meaning that applies within the domain of criminal law, I really, really doubt it.
Caution: IANAL.
I'm not exactly a lefty (well, I don't think I am), but I *did* vote for Obama. (Mainly because the opposition appeared worse.)
I didn't expect him to be good, just to stop pushing things to totalitarian quite as fast. And possibly to reduce the scale of the war on the govt. against it's citizenry. He hasn't exactly done that, but he *does* appear to be less malign. He generally has at least a veneer of a reasonable argument. (But I *haven't* been pleased by the media honchos that he's been appointing to communications posts. And I despise the way he continues to support increased war.)
The things that he's doing that are bad aren't anything that the previous administration wasn't already doing. And he's making a few steps toward helping people. Not a very high recommendation, but considering the alternatives...
(Does that meet your criteria?)
In other words, *IF* this is about "Wolverine" they don't know whether it's a criminal act or a civil tort...and they took down 911 anyway.
This makes me really TRUST the govt.
The only possible correction is to get Linux machines sold pre-configured with Linux. Then the vendor ensures that the configuration works before selling it.
This is something that MS knows, which is why they sabotaged Linux on Netbooks.