Assume that sooner or later, the vast majority of Americans, of all races, will be on the Net. I submit that once this happens, the cultural and social barriers between races might increase. Here's why:
Among people who are already online, there are obvious cliques. Linux fans, for example, have their own favorite newsgroups and Web pages, and their own set of sources that they trust. MacOS fans, I presume, have a different set of trusted sources. Within each group, there are people who will preach to the choir, praising the One True Superior Operating System and flaming all rivals. You can spend all your on-line time with your favorite clique, and never be confronted with a serious challenge to your OS preference.
I can imagine a future where different online news sources cater to different ethnic groups (the one popular among white Anglos will not be white-supremacist, of course, but just consider itself "mainstream"), filtering and spinning the news in a way that fits the biases of its editors and audiences, and members of each group get all the information they (think they) need from the source that's marketed to them.
In such an environment, how many members of one group will peek at another group's favorite news source, to see a different perspective on the world? (How many Linux fans read the Mac-oriented magazines and Web sites? How many white people read Ebony, Jet, Essence, and other black-oriented magazines?) If another race-related scandal, like the O. J. Simpson trial, reveals a deep chasm beteween black and white folks' view of the world, will people make an effort to understand why this chasm exists, or will they just shrug and say, "Those guys must be crazy to believe that"?
There's also a bit of the usual "There's not enough applications available. You can't take your Excel spreadsheet with you home." FUD.
On the appliances described in the article, you can't take your Excel spreadsheet home. These appliances have Linux or BeOS kernels, but they have their own GUIs and a restricted set of applications built in. Who knows what utilities and libraries they left out for the sake of conserving disk space?
The people who will buy these machines don't know how to download and install the latest version of Gnumeric from a command line. The people who manufacture these machines probably have no interest in (a) playing catch-up with Microsoft's file formats and (b) making it easy for users to update their machines to use the latest filters.
Besides, the people who need to take their work home can probably afford to buy one of the cheaper Windows 98 machines.
How much would it cost to put together a radar detector that would pick up the frequencies that these devices use? ("Don Corleone, we are being scanned by someone behind the south wall.") Or something that gives back a scrambled signal, so the cops can't pinpoint the bodies?
They were *film makers*, not survivalists. You get out in the woods, hungry and cold and scared shitless, and see if the first thing on *your* mind is "Let me read this book..."
Perhaps that's part of the reason why How To Stay Alive in the Woods includes suggestions on what to do before you leave civilization.
Besides, it's not like the instructions in HTSAitW are rocket science. How much intelligence or concentration do you need to set up signal fires, or to look up how to make them if you've forgotten?
"...to find out I need to follow the river to civilization" -- which, by the way, sometimes fails you.
Which, by the way, HTSAItW recommends against. But folks wiser than myself have argued for and against this point on previous BWP threads.
BWP is a great movie which has more psychological tension in it than anything which has come out of Hollywood in a long time,
True, but this is like calling someone "a better jazz musician than anyone in Iowa."
Well, that would have been the smart thing to do. But I think part of their getting lost was supposed to have been due to the witch clouding their minds.
I'll try using that plot device the next time my writers' workshop meets. "The heroes acted like complete idiots, but that's not because I can't write a sensible plot; it's because the villain was clouding their minds!"
The August 16 issue of The New Yorker has an article about the Microsoft trial. The article also contains some tidbits about Microsoft's internal culture, such as this (p.42):
[Gates and other Microsoft senior staff] invoked a phrase, "hard core," to describe both their stance and their corporate culture. To be hard core was to be a believer, a gladiator who preferred combat to compromise.... [Microsoft executives] would hold rallies in Redmond at which Steve Ballmer, now the company president, pumped up the troops by leading them in a war whoop, screaming for victory.
I can imagine employees in that kind of culture performing dirty tricks on their own initiative. Their managers may formally disapprove of such antics--the managers may even sincerely believe that pulling stunts like that is a bad idea. But if an attitude of "Microsoft is under siege and we must defend it" pervades the campus, then some employees will pay more attention to that attitude than to ethical formalities.
You're probably assuming that evolution is a process that transforms "lower" forms of life, such as monkeys, into "higher" forms, such as humans. That assumption is incorrect.
So now we have 2.7-billion-year-old eukaryotes. According to the article, the earliest prokaryotes (bacteria without nuclei) go back to 3.5 billion years ago.
<joke> When I told my wife about this, she said that evolution can't explain how eukaryotes evolved from prokaryotes in only 800 million years, and therefore, this discovery is proof for creationism. I won't believe in evolution until those scientists can show me some fossilized bacteria that are halfway between prokaryotes and eukaryotes. </joke>
Anyone stupid enough to buy software under those terms deserves exactly what they get.
At any one point in time, there is only a certain amount of capital available for investment. The businesses that respect their customers' intelligence, and the businesses that try to provide genuine services for the ignorant, are competing for capital investment with the businesses that exploit customers' stupidity.
Therefore, if you are a smart customer, laws that prevent businesses from exploiting customers' stupidity are in your enlightened self-interest.
If Web sites like/. and freshmeat stop serving the community, and nobody else has the resources to take over the job, we can always fall back on netnews and email lists....
When people are, you know, talking to an interviewer, a journalist, not, ummm, writing something where they can, er, edit, change what they wrote, make it compact, er, compact and clear, ummm, they often use a lot of words, more words than they really, uh, need to make their point, you know what I mean? So the journalist, you know, condenses, paraphrases.
(Or maybe the interviewer had a lousy tape recorder, and when he went back to his office to transcribe the tape, he discovered that many of the words were inaudible.)
Sierra Leone is a small contry in africa, founded in the 1800' by freed slaves from the United States.
Umm... actually, Liberia, which is right next door to Sierra Leone, is the country that was "founded" (or "received from the colonial powers") by US ex-slaves. The capital, Monrovia, was named after then-President Monroe.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled flames.
As pointed out in the article, the company has a responsibility to the shareholders. If those shareholders are hackers, then the responsibility is not only to make money, but mainly to provide a good open source solution and comply to standards.
Question for the legal beagles: Let's say a publically owned company does something that is utterly indefensible from a profit-making point of view, but pleases the people who own 51% of its stock. (E.g., the company gives away most of its assets to a cult that the majority shareholders belong to.) Do the unhappy 49% have grounds for a shareholder lawsuit?
If the answer is "yes", then hacker shareholders won't be able to put openness ahead of money in RHAT's list of priorities.
All other factors being equal, the more users a given open-source package has, the more developers are willing to extend and improve that package. There are probably dozens of Perl modules out there that could just as easily have been written in Scheme, but since Perl is more widely used than Scheme, the authors of those modules chose Perl instead.
Therefore, the quality and utility of an open-source package is likely to grow exponentially, up to some maximum. (Presumably, each package has some inherent maximum utility, beyond which extending it is just silly. If somebody wants to patch a new option into "ls", I don't want to know about it.)
With proprietary software, there is a brake on this exponential growth, as follows:
The owner of a proprietary package has to pay programmers (sorry for that alliteration) to maintain, debug, and extend it. For some packages, if a third party wants to make an extension, the package's owner can demand extra money for the appropriate software toolkit, APIs, or source-code license.
The money to pay these programmers and license fees can come from: (1) current assets; (2) sales of other products; (3) lenders who loan money at interest; (4) investors who expect a certain annual return on their investment.
Getting capital up front allows proprietary software companies to introduce new products more quickly, since they don't have to wait for a project to attract developers' interest. But then, when (if) money starts rolling in from sales, it can't all be spent on improving and maintaining the product. Some has to be skimmed off for interest on loans, dividends (or stock buybacks) to investors, and development of other projects -- not to mention marketing, taxes, legal fees, rent, and all the other standard expenses that a modern corporation has to deal with.
Meanwhile, if a proprietary system has an open-source competitor, even if the competitor is not as good, it will build up more and more users and developers over time, and so the product will improve exponentially. To remain competitive with the free system, the proprietary system's owners, after paying back loans and so on, must have enough resources to keep up exponential quality improvements, with a growth constant greater than or equal to the open-source competitor's growth constant. If the proprietary system doesn't maintain that, it loses, just as Scribe lost to TeX. (What's Scribe, you ask? I rest my case.)
Some day, I want to learn enough economic theory to translate the above analysis into a set of equations. I would love to have a more complete and robust theory regarding when a free package has the advantage over its proprietary competitor, and when the reverse is true. (If the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank hike interest rates, would that be good for Linux?:-) If anyone out there wants to beat me to such an analysis, please let me know.
It is an almost perfect weapon... it primarily uses human weakness (unprotected sex, drugs, etc.) as a means for transportation.
Oh, puhleeze.
You don't need a conspiracy to create a disease to attack people who inject themselves with dirty needles. The skin is the body's first line of defense against infectious disease; if a large group of people puncture their skin with non-sterile objects and then share those objects, they're creating an ecological niche that pathogens can exploit. (Easy access to a human bloodstream! No need to harden yourself against stomach acids or water-purification systems! No need to keep a host animal, like a rat or a flea, alive long enough to be transported to the human target! Step right up!) Likewise for a large group of people who have unprotected sex in non-committed relationships. Evolution, not engineering, provides all the explanation you need.
If one wanted to wipe out the human race, or at least a certain ethniticity or culture, this is about one of the most subtle ways to go about it.
Since AIDS has yet to wipe out a single culture or ethnic group, it's being too subtle by half...
I'm not a libertarian, but in this flaming liberal's opinion, if we're gonna have free trade, we oughtta have free immigration, too.
There are lots of well-financed lobbyists advocating the free international movement of capital, but hardly anyone speaks up for the free movement of labor -- even though, from an orthodox economist's perspective, the case for free trade applies equally to capital and labor. Gosh, I wonder why.
This was a great concept, but seriously flawed in execution, for two reasons:
As campers, the characters were inept. (I posted details of the mistakes they made in comment #85, which of course contains spoilers.)
The movie spends a lot of time focusing on the characters talking about how scared they are, rather than letting the things that scared them speak for themselves.
While I was nonplussed by the movie, I hope it makes a lot of money -- it might make subtle and gore-free horror movies become trendy in Hollywood.
And judging from other people's reactions to the movie, if you don't know anything about camping, the movie will give you a good scare.
More spoilers! More spoilers! Danger, Will Robinson!
There were also some moments you thought were just too unbelievable like that Josh knew enough to put a tarp down under a tent before you pitch, but didn't know enough to follow a stream downstream to civilization (I'm an ex-boy scout; I notice these things).
According to my wife (who, unlike the characters in the movie, actually read How to Stay Alive in the Woods, following a stream doesn't always get you to civilization; sometimes the stream empties into a pond that is even harder to navigate around.
She had a whole list of things the characters would have done if they'd been marginally intelligent campers:
Leave a "flight plan" with friends, and a note under the car's windshield wiper, saying where they would be and when they were expected back.
Bring provisions for at least twice as many days as they expected to be out there.
Bring signaling mirrors.
When lost, light signal fires.
When being weirded-out at night, sleep during the day and move at night.
Don't enter an abandoned building (not because it might be haunted, but because you could fall through a rotting floorboard and break a leg).
Granted, this continent is crawling with undergraduates who really are stupid enough to go on a camping trip and neglect all these safety precautions. But it's much harder to empathize with horror-movie characters who are so careless about protecting themselves. If the characters had done everything right and still gotten zapped, this would have been a kick-ass movie.
Re:How can this hold up in court?
on
UCITA is passed
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· Score: 1
How can I agree to something (the EULA) that I haven't even seen until I've opened the package, which, at times, constitutes "acceptance" of certain EULAs?
Under the current Uniform Commercial Code, as interpreted in most states, you can't. In most cases where shrink-wrap licenses have been tested in court, they've been thrown out for precisely this reason.
If UCITA passes in your state, however, that will change. That's why software companies have been lobbying for UCITA.
Re:No, it is not a great news...
on
UCITA is passed
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· Score: 1
The kind of software that would be mostly affected by this mesure NEVER will be open source. We will not see any viable free alternatives to ERP applications, industrial strength CAD/CAM, large custom data mining solutions etc in our lifetime.
Industrial-strength programs aren't really covered by UCITA, because the people who buy and sell industrial-strength programs don't use the same kind of licenses.
My employer sells telecommunication billing software; the price varies depending on the exact configuration, but it can be over US$1M. (Our customers include @Home, AT&T Worldnet, GTE Internetworking, MCI Worldcom, France Telecom... you get the idea.)
Do we rely on a shrink-wrap or click-wrap license to protect ourselves? Hell, no -- we draw up a detailed license on paper, and our customers, unlike the average MS Office customer, have lawyers that look over every line.
Does our license say "this product is sold as is, no warranty, if it blows up in your face you'll be lucky to get your purchase price refunded"? Hell, no -- our customers aren't stupid enough to consent to such an agreement, considering how much a flaky billing system would cost them.
Researchers believe that the nerdy image of the Internet user has given way to a new elite that shops online, trades stocks in cyberspace, buys plane tickets and performs a multitude of other daily tasks with seemingly effortless ease.
In other words: to qualify for the "Net Set", you have to use the Internet to buy lots of stuff. Any other Internet-related knowledge or skills are irrelevant, as far as these "researchers" are concerned.
What community in the real world has an admission requirement like that?
Create a bunch of "anony-bots" that log on to chat rooms, bulletin boards, etc., and generate random defamatory remarks about randomly selected companies. The bots could read the bulletin boards as well, and adjust their list of companies to defame based on what companies were already being defamed -- so that, for example, if a certain board had lots of complaints about Coke, the bot would generate complaints about Pepsi.
Then, Lilly, Raytheon, et al. could make themselve safe from anonymous postings without having to sue anyone. Their disgruntled employees and ex-employees could post anything they wanted, but since the bots would be posting equally nasty remarks about competing companies, nobody's reputation would suffer.
Re:The danger is that something like this succeeds
on
Beaming Money
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· Score: 1
According to the Wired article on Confinity, the money involved in the transfers will pass through an escrow account managed by Merrill Lynch. So I have to trust that Confinity and Merrill Lynch will not use their position to invade my privacy or cheat me.
If you offered me software that implemented true crypto-cash, I wouldn't have to trust an intermediary bank -- but I would have to trust that the software implemented a secure crypto-cash protocol in a correct way. Even if I had the source code in front of me, I couldn't verify that myself, so I'd have to trust some experts in the field to verify the program's reliability for me.
Furthermore, the average palmtop owners don't have a clue about who to trust on crypto issues, but they do trust the name "Merrill Lynch". So a pseudo-ecash system backed by Merrill Lynch is likely to go farther in the marketplace than a true ecash system backed by, say, Bruce Schneier.
Slashdot Mirror
Among people who are already online, there are obvious cliques. Linux fans, for example, have their own favorite newsgroups and Web pages, and their own set of sources that they trust. MacOS fans, I presume, have a different set of trusted sources. Within each group, there are people who will preach to the choir, praising the One True Superior Operating System and flaming all rivals. You can spend all your on-line time with your favorite clique, and never be confronted with a serious challenge to your OS preference.
I can imagine a future where different online news sources cater to different ethnic groups (the one popular among white Anglos will not be white-supremacist, of course, but just consider itself "mainstream"), filtering and spinning the news in a way that fits the biases of its editors and audiences, and members of each group get all the information they (think they) need from the source that's marketed to them.
In such an environment, how many members of one group will peek at another group's favorite news source, to see a different perspective on the world? (How many Linux fans read the Mac-oriented magazines and Web sites? How many white people read Ebony, Jet, Essence, and other black-oriented magazines?) If another race-related scandal, like the O. J. Simpson trial, reveals a deep chasm beteween black and white folks' view of the world, will people make an effort to understand why this chasm exists, or will they just shrug and say, "Those guys must be crazy to believe that"?
What can prevent, or alleviate, this problem?
The people who will buy these machines don't know how to download and install the latest version of Gnumeric from a command line. The people who manufacture these machines probably have no interest in (a) playing catch-up with Microsoft's file formats and (b) making it easy for users to update their machines to use the latest filters.
Besides, the people who need to take their work home can probably afford to buy one of the cheaper Windows 98 machines.
How much would it cost to put together a radar detector that would pick up the frequencies that these devices use? ("Don Corleone, we are being scanned by someone behind the south wall.") Or something that gives back a scrambled signal, so the cops can't pinpoint the bodies?
Besides, it's not like the instructions in HTSAitW are rocket science. How much intelligence or concentration do you need to set up signal fires, or to look up how to make them if you've forgotten?
Which, by the way, HTSAItW recommends against. But folks wiser than myself have argued for and against this point on previous BWP threads. True, but this is like calling someone "a better jazz musician than anyone in Iowa."You're probably assuming that evolution is a process that transforms "lower" forms of life, such as monkeys, into "higher" forms, such as humans. That assumption is incorrect.
<joke>
When I told my wife about this, she said that evolution can't explain how eukaryotes evolved from prokaryotes in only 800 million years, and therefore, this discovery is proof for creationism. I won't believe in evolution until those scientists can show me some fossilized bacteria that are halfway between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
</joke>
Therefore, if you are a smart customer, laws that prevent businesses from exploiting customers' stupidity are in your enlightened self-interest.
If Web sites like /. and freshmeat stop serving the community, and nobody else has the resources to take over the job, we can always fall back on netnews and email lists....
(Or maybe the interviewer had a lousy tape recorder, and when he went back to his office to transcribe the tape, he discovered that many of the words were inaudible.)
We now return you to your regularly scheduled flames.
If the answer is "yes", then hacker shareholders won't be able to put openness ahead of money in RHAT's list of priorities.
Therefore, the quality and utility of an open-source package is likely to grow exponentially, up to some maximum. (Presumably, each package has some inherent maximum utility, beyond which extending it is just silly. If somebody wants to patch a new option into "ls", I don't want to know about it.)
With proprietary software, there is a brake on this exponential growth, as follows:
The owner of a proprietary package has to pay programmers (sorry for that alliteration) to maintain, debug, and extend it. For some packages, if a third party wants to make an extension, the package's owner can demand extra money for the appropriate software toolkit, APIs, or source-code license.
The money to pay these programmers and license fees can come from: (1) current assets; (2) sales of other products; (3) lenders who loan money at interest; (4) investors who expect a certain annual return on their investment.
Getting capital up front allows proprietary software companies to introduce new products more quickly, since they don't have to wait for a project to attract developers' interest. But then, when (if) money starts rolling in from sales, it can't all be spent on improving and maintaining the product. Some has to be skimmed off for interest on loans, dividends (or stock buybacks) to investors, and development of other projects -- not to mention marketing, taxes, legal fees, rent, and all the other standard expenses that a modern corporation has to deal with.
Meanwhile, if a proprietary system has an open-source competitor, even if the competitor is not as good, it will build up more and more users and developers over time, and so the product will improve exponentially. To remain competitive with the free system, the proprietary system's owners, after paying back loans and so on, must have enough resources to keep up exponential quality improvements, with a growth constant greater than or equal to the open-source competitor's growth constant. If the proprietary system doesn't maintain that, it loses, just as Scribe lost to TeX. (What's Scribe, you ask? I rest my case.)
Some day, I want to learn enough economic theory to translate the above analysis into a set of equations. I would love to have a more complete and robust theory regarding when a free package has the advantage over its proprietary competitor, and when the reverse is true. (If the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank hike interest rates, would that be good for Linux? :-) If anyone out there wants to beat me to such an analysis, please let me know.
You don't need a conspiracy to create a disease to attack people who inject themselves with dirty needles. The skin is the body's first line of defense against infectious disease; if a large group of people puncture their skin with non-sterile objects and then share those objects, they're creating an ecological niche that pathogens can exploit. (Easy access to a human bloodstream! No need to harden yourself against stomach acids or water-purification systems! No need to keep a host animal, like a rat or a flea, alive long enough to be transported to the human target! Step right up!) Likewise for a large group of people who have unprotected sex in non-committed relationships. Evolution, not engineering, provides all the explanation you need.
Since AIDS has yet to wipe out a single culture or ethnic group, it's being too subtle by half...There are lots of well-financed lobbyists advocating the free international movement of capital, but hardly anyone speaks up for the free movement of labor -- even though, from an orthodox economist's perspective, the case for free trade applies equally to capital and labor. Gosh, I wonder why.
- As campers, the characters were inept. (I posted details of the mistakes they made in comment #85, which of course contains spoilers.)
- The movie spends a lot of time focusing on the characters talking about how scared they are, rather than letting the things that scared them speak for themselves.
While I was nonplussed by the movie, I hope it makes a lot of money -- it might make subtle and gore-free horror movies become trendy in Hollywood.And judging from other people's reactions to the movie, if you don't know anything about camping, the movie will give you a good scare.
She had a whole list of things the characters would have done if they'd been marginally intelligent campers:
- Leave a "flight plan" with friends, and a note under the car's windshield wiper, saying where they would be and when they were expected back.
- Bring provisions for at least twice as many days as they expected to be out there.
- Bring signaling mirrors.
- When lost, light signal fires.
- When being weirded-out at night, sleep during the day and move at night.
- Don't enter an abandoned building (not because it might be haunted, but because you could fall through a rotting floorboard and break a leg).
Granted, this continent is crawling with undergraduates who really are stupid enough to go on a camping trip and neglect all these safety precautions. But it's much harder to empathize with horror-movie characters who are so careless about protecting themselves. If the characters had done everything right and still gotten zapped, this would have been a kick-ass movie.If UCITA passes in your state, however, that will change. That's why software companies have been lobbying for UCITA.
My employer sells telecommunication billing software; the price varies depending on the exact configuration, but it can be over US$1M. (Our customers include @Home, AT&T Worldnet, GTE Internetworking, MCI Worldcom, France Telecom ... you get the idea.)
Do we rely on a shrink-wrap or click-wrap license to protect ourselves? Hell, no -- we draw up a detailed license on paper, and our customers, unlike the average MS Office customer, have lawyers that look over every line.
Does our license say "this product is sold as is, no warranty, if it blows up in your face you'll be lucky to get your purchase price refunded"? Hell, no -- our customers aren't stupid enough to consent to such an agreement, considering how much a flaky billing system would cost them.
What community in the real world has an admission requirement like that?
Then, Lilly, Raytheon, et al. could make themselve safe from anonymous postings without having to sue anyone. Their disgruntled employees and ex-employees could post anything they wanted, but since the bots would be posting equally nasty remarks about competing companies, nobody's reputation would suffer.
If you offered me software that implemented true crypto-cash, I wouldn't have to trust an intermediary bank -- but I would have to trust that the software implemented a secure crypto-cash protocol in a correct way. Even if I had the source code in front of me, I couldn't verify that myself, so I'd have to trust some experts in the field to verify the program's reliability for me.
Furthermore, the average palmtop owners don't have a clue about who to trust on crypto issues, but they do trust the name "Merrill Lynch". So a pseudo-ecash system backed by Merrill Lynch is likely to go farther in the marketplace than a true ecash system backed by, say, Bruce Schneier.
Remember, worse is better.