I saw a great talk on PBS by Burt Rutan where someone from Florida asked him that very question. Sadly I can't find it on YouTube. He said he could never operate out of a government-run spaceport because the red tape and bureaucracy would never let him get anything done. He has tried it before at Vandenburg in California and he finds it cheaper to build a brand new private spaceport from scratch than to try to operate at a government-run facility.
Even though people use the word "property" for copyrighted material, it is not actually property, so those laws likely do not directly apply. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks, sometimes collectively referred to as "intellectual property", are ruled by a different set of laws.
OOP is not just for "business programming" and GUIs, it's actually perfect for large-scale simulations. Simulations have events and objects and forces and flows and all of these are very well modeled by objects. The sort of "units consistency" and dimension and bounds checking that Fortress wants to embed in the language can all be done in C++ with cleverly-designed template classes.
If debugging is hard it can be for a couple of different reasons. You may have poor debugging tools. Or the object abstractions used in the program may not be very conceptually clear and well-designed. Or maybe as a Fortran 77 programmer you're just used to seeing 500 lines of code all straight in one function modifying global variables and find it hard to step into lots of function calls, whereas on the other hand OOP programmers would feel lost in a massive 500-line function that modifies global variables and are more comfortable stepping into well-named functions with clearly defined inputs and outputs for which you can write clear, low-level unit tests.
What OOP is not generally good for, however, is speed and performance. The function calls are intended to mask the irrelevant details of how things are computed, but they end up also masking how long a computation takes and hide opportunities to eliminate redundant computations. The OOP community talks about optimizing compilers and function inlining, but in C++ anyway the problems of separate unit compilations and header file dependencies make these solutions nasty and suboptimal, and most other OOP languages have overheads that are even worse. It will be interesting to see how Fortress addresses these problems, with so many languages to learn from and no need for backwards compatibility they should be free to come up with something that enables the best of both worlds.
Wow, someone who actually read the article posting a comment!
Agreed, I don't think there should be any problems with private companies having security cameras at their premises, or likewise with government having security cameras around government buildings, or with police subpoenaing these records after the fact when a crime has been committed. However, there really has been no argument against these cameras. So when the original poster said "is there really a good basis for argument against these cameras?" I guess we all assumed he meant the broader concept of persistent and omni-present government-run public surveillance cameras. And yes, there are good arguments against those.
Back in high school I attended a talk by Admiral Hopper where she passed around a wire about 30 centimeters long and explained to us "this is how far light, or any electromagnetic signal, can travel in one nanosecond." That illustration has always stayed with me, it helps to explain a lot of the limitations inherent in hardware now that CPU speeds have become so fast.
For example, for a 3GHz CPU (.33 nanoseconds per clock cycle), electricity can only travel 10cm in one clock cycle. It's amazing that CPUs can do complex arithmetic when electrical signals inside the chip can only travel 10cm in that amount of time. Wonder why the CPU stalls when there's an access to main memory? Just look at your motherboard and gauge how far your memory is from the CPU, distance alone explains 4-5 clock cycles of the total delay.
The fact that this was an online poll means that it's not scientific, the results totally depend on what sites they put the question on and what sorts of people decided to respond.
Also the way the question was phrased:
should [UK recording artists] be protected for the same number of years as their American counterparts?is a blatantly biased way of asking the question. Sounds like they wanted to drum up some phony polls to present to parliament, and it sounds like they're not buying it.
Vandalism and destruction of other people's property is not "competition", and bureaucratic "regulation and oversight" to restrict competition is not the answer. Like any crime, enforcement of existing laws is what's needed - start getting these uniformed vandals on camera and arrest and fine them, maybe with some sort of sting operation.
The coining of the term "Intellectual Property" to cover three distinct areas of law - Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents - is an attempt to get us all to mentally associate these historically recent unnatural restrictions on our rights and freedoms with an ancient and natural concept that we all know and agree with: Property.
I'm not suggesting that Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents are fundamentally bad. Relatively minor restrictions on our freedoms in order to reduce confusion and deception in marketing (Trademarks), incentivize writing and artistic innovation (Copyrights), and promote scientific progress (Patents) can lead to an overall societal benefit. But it's important that we understand Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents for what they are: government-enforced monopolies on the use of certain terms, the reproduction of certain texts, and the use of certain processes. As such they should be viewed with the same healthy skepticism with which we should view any other government-enforced monopoly. Associating these things with the concept of "Property" rather than with the concept of "Monopoly" is just an attempt by the holders of these monopolies to defend and justify their indefinite extension and expansion in scope well beyond the original reasons for which they were created.
I suggest we all start using the more appropriate term "Intellectual Monopoly" rather than the deceptive "Intellectual Property". We may indeed need government-enforced Intellectual Monopolies, but using the right term will remind us all to keep them as limited in scope and duration as possible.
The point of a democratic-like government is to allow the people to improve the body of law over time, to make it more fair and ethically just.
That's right, and we have a process for doing that. It's called "amending the constitution."
Encouraging judges to just do what they think is right on a case by case basis, as you support, rather than following and enforcing the laws and the constitution is a recipe for inconsistency, unfairness, and arbitrary expansion of government powers.
But then again, what do I know? I'm just someone who thinks for himself.
Your pointless name-calling and partisan ranting in response to a poster who explicitly pointed out that this was a non-partisan issue casts some serious doubt on that...
I wouldn't be surprised if they targeted C# after that.
There's already an open source project called QtSharp http://qtcsharp.sourceforge.net/ that does just that, but it looks like the project has been dormant for a couple of years.
Even without using QtSharp, Qt provides a way to write ActiveX wrappers around Qt objects, which can then be dropped into C# forms and applications.
So much for conservatives being opposed to "big government". I'll bet half the people who would support this are right-wing loonies who only oppose big government when it helps someone else but are the first to prop up regulation when it helps them. Assholes.
- a military ship was dead in the water because its computers BSOD-ed. If it was during a war, that could have cost lives _and_ billions of dollars very easily. And the irony here is that the military already imposes voluminous military specifications, required certifications, and other regulations on the acquisition and operations of its computer systems. So it's hard to see how "regulation" is going to help matters any here.
The US was using Iraq as a proxy against Iran decades before Kuwait. Well "decades" is certainly incorrect and "proxy" is overblown though there certainly was a lot of U.S. meddling. The U.S. hated Iraq in the 70s because it was supported and armed by the Soviets; following the Soviet model, Saddam had turned Iraq into a psuedo-socialist, brutal dictatorship. The U.S. supported Iran over Iraq until the islamists toppled the Shaw in 1979 and took over the U.S. embassy, killing 2 Americans and holding 50+ hostages for 444 days. When Saddam saw disorganization in Iran and attacked them a year or two later, the U.S. really hoped that both sides would lose.
It wasn't until 1983, when Iraq's army was up against suicidal human-wave attacks from Iran, that the U.S. became concerned that the islamic fundamentalist regime could actually take over Iraq and threaten Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well. That's when they started sending help to Saddam in the forms of guarantees on bank loans, and sometimes giving him information about Iranian military positions. Meanwhile, of course, the U.S. was also sending weapons to Iran as part of the Iran-Contra fiasco, so it seems the U.S. was still trying to ensure both sides would lose.
Frankly, I think considering the circumstances, Kuwait had it coming. Wow, that's pretty disgusting. Just because Kuwait refused to participate in price collusion to screw the rest of the world so that Saddam could repay the debt he racked up while butchering his neighbors and his own people, you think Kuwait "had it coming"?!?
They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod
That sounds to me like he's saying the US government funded research of those technologies in order to develop the iPod. Bush boned his speech; the Slashdot article accurately summarizes the literal claim he made.
No, it's pretty clear that endgadget is trying to create a Gore-like "I invented the internet" story by taking an obvious joke out of context. Read the whole context at http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT= 104&STORY=/www/story/04-19-2006/0004343272&EDATE=. Bush is giving a long speech to a bunch of college students explaining how he thinks the government has a limited role in funding basic research while the true innovations happen in industry, and he throws in an iPod joke. Endgadget takes it out of context and Slashdot gobbles it up unquestioningly.
(although I argue against this, since there is ample evidence that Roosevelt was aware of a potential Japanese attack in the Pacific, and maneuvered the Pacific fleet into an indefensible position and ignored the advice of the admiral in charge of the fleet to move it, but that's another debate entirely)
That's not another debate, that's a bunch of totally conspiratorial paranoid mumbo-jumbo, the mention of which pretty much removes all credibility from you or the rest of your post. What's next, "Elvis is still alive, but that's another debate entirely"?
"ownership" of intellectual "property" "rights" is just an absurd term to use for "exercising certain monopoly powers granted by governments to restrict other people's freedoms so you can make money." And given the absurdity of many recent patent claims, I think there's a good chance that the word "intellectual" doesn't really apply either.
I wholeheartedly agree, the current patent system is terribly busted and this proposal is an obvious improvement, yet the Slashdot crowd instinctively bashes it because it contains the word "patent."
One problem with the current system is the duration - 20 years - is an eternity in the high-tech industry. This proposal shortens it to 4! Slashdot should love that.
Another problem with the current system is that ignorant patent examiners have to review patents with no one leaning on them, no one whispering in their ear, no one giving them advice, other than the patent requestor. (Sure, the public can comment on claims, but at this early point in the process no one really has any incentive to do so.) So is it any surprise that the patent office approves almost all patents? The new system would turn the patent process into a rubberstamp by not requiring the patent office to do any work, but it also removes the presumption of validity, so until the patenting company decides to challenge it, it's basically worthless. I bet the patent office could implement this whole new system just as an online database where anyone is free to submit their claimed "patents" with little or no human interaction.
So yes, there will be an explosion of silly "patents", but since the patent office is really just a registry and not a verifier, all the action gets postponed until someone tries to enforce one of their "patents." If a patenting company wants to enforce its patent, it has to prove both that the patent is valid and that the defendant is infringing, shifting the burden of researching validity from the patent office (taxpayer) to the patenter and increasing their overall cost of enforcing patent claims. Increasing the cost of enforcing patents and shifting more burden of proof onto the patenter is another good thing that the Slashdot crowd should love.
If a small software company wants to write some software and finds an alleged patent that would cause them problems, they can judge for themselves whether they think the patent is valid and simply ignore it if they feel that it's not. If the patent filer wants to sue for infringement, the burden will be on the patenter to discover the potentially infringing software, prove infringement, and prove patent validity all at the same time.
Really, we should move to a system that abolishes all current 20-year patents and moves to this system for all patents!
By now you're redefining "ideologism" as "opinion" but there's a reason why they're not synonyms. "I think I might give some money to this beggar" is an opinion. "Let's kill the bloody people who have the nerve to oh gosh - actually WORK - and steal all their money and waste it on lowlife" is an ideology. The OpenBSD license is a bit like the first statement. GNU v3 is more like the second...
Actually neither of those statements sounds like an opinion or an ideology. If you change them from "I think I might" and "Let's" to "People should" then both sound like ideologies.
I think BSD and GPL both share almost the same ideology, "software should be free", but with different implementation paths. BSD says "software should be free, so I'm giving mine away." GPL says "software should be free, so I'm giving mine away, and ensuring that anyone who takes it also gives their software away."
The BSD license is like saying "food should be free" and then setting up one free food stand where folks can take all the food they want. I believe that it's very noble, admirable, and charitable to be sure. But it's unlikely to change the world. Rather it's most likely that a bunch of fat rich people will pull up with trucks, take all the food they can carry, and then go to the nearest market and resell it all.
Our company hosted a server with AIT for a year, their uptime was OK (a few short connectivity outages) but service was non-existent. Our server locked up and we needed them to just go and push a button on it to reboot it, we couldn't got hold of a human being and they never returned our phone calls, it ended up taking over a day of frequenty phone calls just to get them to press that button. And even though they had advertised "reboots" as being provided within the level of service that we had purchases, when we actually did talk to a human their main priority seemed to be to try to convince us to upgrade to a more expensive level of service. We were lucky - it was almost the end of our year-long service agreement and we were able to cancel our contract, and they did ship us back our server within a few days. Their contract generally gives you an extremely narrow window in which to cancel your contract or it will automatically renews for another year.
Glesga, you seem to have a pretty good understanding of history and world affairs, but like much of the world, your charicatures of U.S. behavior show a recently rising anti-American bias.
You long for the USA that helped rebuilt Japan and Germany, after wars in which we helped topple brutal dictatorial regimes and install democracy. But you dismiss Iraq as "unwise" and make allusions to oil, without even considering the fact that what we're doing there - toppling a brutal dictator in order to install a democratic system - is basically the same thing. Yes, it's currently a big bloody mess, yes it's possible that it will not become peaceful for years, yes, in retrospect it may have even been "unwise", and we might even eventually not succeed - especially if the rest of the world has its way. But to point to a war in which we've toppled a brutal dictator and installed a democracy as nothing but aggression is a pretty biased world-view.
What do you think of Afghanistan? Should we have left the Taliban in charge there? Is toppling an oligarchy that made women wear sacks and prevented them from getting an education just another indicator of our aggression?
How did this get modded as "Insightful" when it's more like offtopic flamebait?
Back to the topic at hand, let's keep in mind that
(a) the article poses this as "control of the internet" when in fact it's only "de facto control of top-level domain name registration". (By de facto I mean that the only thing that gives the body authority is the fact that people think it has authority - anyone could independently create a new TLD, you'd just have to convince all the world's nameservers to support it, and this is the only body that has the clout to do that.)
(b) it's a California non-profit body that's keeping this de facto control, not some U.S. government agency.
(c) who really cares if we get more TLD's anyway? everyone pretty much uses.com or country codes anyway.
It's time to stop the fallacious recent trend to extend the term "property" to include copyright, trademarks, and patents. "Property" refers to physical objects for whom possession by one person implies lack of possession by someone else. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are government-granted monopolies that limit the rights of anyone other than the monopoly-grantee to a particular writing, name, or process for the sole purpose of promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts", according to the U.S. Constitution anyway. Take the case of patents, for example: you can invent a process or idea in your own living room, yet the patent system denies you the right to use that process for your own benefit or for commercial gain if someone else has hired a lawyer and registered it first.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to copyrights, trademarks, and patents. It's just that using a term like "Intellectual Property" is a recent dishonest attempt by those who would prefer that we extend those monopolies almost infinitely to benefit large corporations at the expense of individuals' freedoms to do as they please by emotionally appealing to our reverance for protection of and rights to physical "property", a custom that has built up over many thousands of years of history. If we all start using the term "property" to refer to these government-granted monopolies, then no matter how hard we argue and no matter what side we argue on, eventually the little guy will lose and the big corporations will win.
Just say "No" to the term "Intellectual Property!"
Slashdot Mirror
I saw a great talk on PBS by Burt Rutan where someone from Florida asked him that very question. Sadly I can't find it on YouTube. He said he could never operate out of a government-run spaceport because the red tape and bureaucracy would never let him get anything done. He has tried it before at Vandenburg in California and he finds it cheaper to build a brand new private spaceport from scratch than to try to operate at a government-run facility.
Even though people use the word "property" for copyrighted material, it is not actually property, so those laws likely do not directly apply. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks, sometimes collectively referred to as "intellectual property", are ruled by a different set of laws.
OOP is not just for "business programming" and GUIs, it's actually perfect for large-scale simulations. Simulations have events and objects and forces and flows and all of these are very well modeled by objects. The sort of "units consistency" and dimension and bounds checking that Fortress wants to embed in the language can all be done in C++ with cleverly-designed template classes.
If debugging is hard it can be for a couple of different reasons. You may have poor debugging tools. Or the object abstractions used in the program may not be very conceptually clear and well-designed. Or maybe as a Fortran 77 programmer you're just used to seeing 500 lines of code all straight in one function modifying global variables and find it hard to step into lots of function calls, whereas on the other hand OOP programmers would feel lost in a massive 500-line function that modifies global variables and are more comfortable stepping into well-named functions with clearly defined inputs and outputs for which you can write clear, low-level unit tests.
What OOP is not generally good for, however, is speed and performance. The function calls are intended to mask the irrelevant details of how things are computed, but they end up also masking how long a computation takes and hide opportunities to eliminate redundant computations. The OOP community talks about optimizing compilers and function inlining, but in C++ anyway the problems of separate unit compilations and header file dependencies make these solutions nasty and suboptimal, and most other OOP languages have overheads that are even worse. It will be interesting to see how Fortress addresses these problems, with so many languages to learn from and no need for backwards compatibility they should be free to come up with something that enables the best of both worlds.
Wow, someone who actually read the article posting a comment!
Agreed, I don't think there should be any problems with private companies having security cameras at their premises, or likewise with government having security cameras around government buildings, or with police subpoenaing these records after the fact when a crime has been committed. However, there really has been no argument against these cameras. So when the original poster said "is there really a good basis for argument against these cameras?" I guess we all assumed he meant the broader concept of persistent and omni-present government-run public surveillance cameras. And yes, there are good arguments against those.
I would think you'd understand already, wasn't George Orwell British?
Back in high school I attended a talk by Admiral Hopper where she passed around a wire about 30 centimeters long and explained to us "this is how far light, or any electromagnetic signal, can travel in one nanosecond." That illustration has always stayed with me, it helps to explain a lot of the limitations inherent in hardware now that CPU speeds have become so fast.
For example, for a 3GHz CPU (.33 nanoseconds per clock cycle), electricity can only travel 10cm in one clock cycle. It's amazing that CPUs can do complex arithmetic when electrical signals inside the chip can only travel 10cm in that amount of time. Wonder why the CPU stalls when there's an access to main memory? Just look at your motherboard and gauge how far your memory is from the CPU, distance alone explains 4-5 clock cycles of the total delay.
The fact that this was an online poll means that it's not scientific, the results totally depend on what sites they put the question on and what sorts of people decided to respond.
Also the way the question was phrased: should [UK recording artists] be protected for the same number of years as their American counterparts?is a blatantly biased way of asking the question. Sounds like they wanted to drum up some phony polls to present to parliament, and it sounds like they're not buying it.
Vandalism and destruction of other people's property is not "competition", and bureaucratic "regulation and oversight" to restrict competition is not the answer. Like any crime, enforcement of existing laws is what's needed - start getting these uniformed vandals on camera and arrest and fine them, maybe with some sort of sting operation.
The coining of the term "Intellectual Property" to cover three distinct areas of law - Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents - is an attempt to get us all to mentally associate these historically recent unnatural restrictions on our rights and freedoms with an ancient and natural concept that we all know and agree with: Property.
I'm not suggesting that Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents are fundamentally bad. Relatively minor restrictions on our freedoms in order to reduce confusion and deception in marketing (Trademarks), incentivize writing and artistic innovation (Copyrights), and promote scientific progress (Patents) can lead to an overall societal benefit. But it's important that we understand Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents for what they are: government-enforced monopolies on the use of certain terms, the reproduction of certain texts, and the use of certain processes. As such they should be viewed with the same healthy skepticism with which we should view any other government-enforced monopoly. Associating these things with the concept of "Property" rather than with the concept of "Monopoly" is just an attempt by the holders of these monopolies to defend and justify their indefinite extension and expansion in scope well beyond the original reasons for which they were created.
I suggest we all start using the more appropriate term "Intellectual Monopoly" rather than the deceptive "Intellectual Property". We may indeed need government-enforced Intellectual Monopolies, but using the right term will remind us all to keep them as limited in scope and duration as possible.
That's right, and we have a process for doing that. It's called "amending the constitution."
Encouraging judges to just do what they think is right on a case by case basis, as you support, rather than following and enforcing the laws and the constitution is a recipe for inconsistency, unfairness, and arbitrary expansion of government powers.
Your pointless name-calling and partisan ranting in response to a poster who explicitly pointed out that this was a non-partisan issue casts some serious doubt on that...
There's already an open source project called QtSharp http://qtcsharp.sourceforge.net/ that does just that, but it looks like the project has been dormant for a couple of years.
Even without using QtSharp, Qt provides a way to write ActiveX wrappers around Qt objects, which can then be dropped into C# forms and applications.
So much for conservatives being opposed to "big government". I'll bet half the people who would support this are right-wing loonies who only oppose big government when it helps someone else but are the first to prop up regulation when it helps them. Assholes.
Good luck resolving those anger issues.
- a military ship was dead in the water because its computers BSOD-ed. If it was during a war, that could have cost lives _and_ billions of dollars very easily.
And the irony here is that the military already imposes voluminous military specifications, required certifications, and other regulations on the acquisition and operations of its computer systems. So it's hard to see how "regulation" is going to help matters any here.
The US was using Iraq as a proxy against Iran decades before Kuwait.
Well "decades" is certainly incorrect and "proxy" is overblown though there certainly was a lot of U.S. meddling. The U.S. hated Iraq in the 70s because it was supported and armed by the Soviets; following the Soviet model, Saddam had turned Iraq into a psuedo-socialist, brutal dictatorship. The U.S. supported Iran over Iraq until the islamists toppled the Shaw in 1979 and took over the U.S. embassy, killing 2 Americans and holding 50+ hostages for 444 days. When Saddam saw disorganization in Iran and attacked them a year or two later, the U.S. really hoped that both sides would lose.
It wasn't until 1983, when Iraq's army was up against suicidal human-wave attacks from Iran, that the U.S. became concerned that the islamic fundamentalist regime could actually take over Iraq and threaten Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well. That's when they started sending help to Saddam in the forms of guarantees on bank loans, and sometimes giving him information about Iranian military positions. Meanwhile, of course, the U.S. was also sending weapons to Iran as part of the Iran-Contra fiasco, so it seems the U.S. was still trying to ensure both sides would lose.
Frankly, I think considering the circumstances, Kuwait had it coming.
Wow, that's pretty disgusting. Just because Kuwait refused to participate in price collusion to screw the rest of the world so that Saddam could repay the debt he racked up while butchering his neighbors and his own people, you think Kuwait "had it coming"?!?
No, it's pretty clear that endgadget is trying to create a Gore-like "I invented the internet" story by taking an obvious joke out of context. Read the whole context at http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT
That's not another debate, that's a bunch of totally conspiratorial paranoid mumbo-jumbo, the mention of which pretty much removes all credibility from you or the rest of your post. What's next, "Elvis is still alive, but that's another debate entirely"?
"ownership" of intellectual "property" "rights" is just an absurd term to use for "exercising certain monopoly powers granted by governments to restrict other people's freedoms so you can make money." And given the absurdity of many recent patent claims, I think there's a good chance that the word "intellectual" doesn't really apply either.
I wholeheartedly agree, the current patent system is terribly busted and this proposal is an obvious improvement, yet the Slashdot crowd instinctively bashes it because it contains the word "patent."
One problem with the current system is the duration - 20 years - is an eternity in the high-tech industry. This proposal shortens it to 4! Slashdot should love that.
Another problem with the current system is that ignorant patent examiners have to review patents with no one leaning on them, no one whispering in their ear, no one giving them advice, other than the patent requestor. (Sure, the public can comment on claims, but at this early point in the process no one really has any incentive to do so.) So is it any surprise that the patent office approves almost all patents? The new system would turn the patent process into a rubberstamp by not requiring the patent office to do any work, but it also removes the presumption of validity, so until the patenting company decides to challenge it, it's basically worthless. I bet the patent office could implement this whole new system just as an online database where anyone is free to submit their claimed "patents" with little or no human interaction.
So yes, there will be an explosion of silly "patents", but since the patent office is really just a registry and not a verifier, all the action gets postponed until someone tries to enforce one of their "patents." If a patenting company wants to enforce its patent, it has to prove both that the patent is valid and that the defendant is infringing, shifting the burden of researching validity from the patent office (taxpayer) to the patenter and increasing their overall cost of enforcing patent claims. Increasing the cost of enforcing patents and shifting more burden of proof onto the patenter is another good thing that the Slashdot crowd should love.
If a small software company wants to write some software and finds an alleged patent that would cause them problems, they can judge for themselves whether they think the patent is valid and simply ignore it if they feel that it's not. If the patent filer wants to sue for infringement, the burden will be on the patenter to discover the potentially infringing software, prove infringement, and prove patent validity all at the same time.
Really, we should move to a system that abolishes all current 20-year patents and moves to this system for all patents!
Actually neither of those statements sounds like an opinion or an ideology. If you change them from "I think I might" and "Let's" to "People should" then both sound like ideologies.
I think BSD and GPL both share almost the same ideology, "software should be free", but with different implementation paths. BSD says "software should be free, so I'm giving mine away." GPL says "software should be free, so I'm giving mine away, and ensuring that anyone who takes it also gives their software away."
The BSD license is like saying "food should be free" and then setting up one free food stand where folks can take all the food they want. I believe that it's very noble, admirable, and charitable to be sure. But it's unlikely to change the world. Rather it's most likely that a bunch of fat rich people will pull up with trucks, take all the food they can carry, and then go to the nearest market and resell it all.
Not just a "random" company, a company with a well-documented history of taking people's money and providing terrible service. See http://www.hostsearch.com/review/ait_review.asp, http://www.webhostingjury.com/reviews/AIT_, http://www.webhostingratings.com/plans/AIT-Review
Our company hosted a server with AIT for a year, their uptime was OK (a few short connectivity outages) but service was non-existent. Our server locked up and we needed them to just go and push a button on it to reboot it, we couldn't got hold of a human being and they never returned our phone calls, it ended up taking over a day of frequenty phone calls just to get them to press that button. And even though they had advertised "reboots" as being provided within the level of service that we had purchases, when we actually did talk to a human their main priority seemed to be to try to convince us to upgrade to a more expensive level of service. We were lucky - it was almost the end of our year-long service agreement and we were able to cancel our contract, and they did ship us back our server within a few days. Their contract generally gives you an extremely narrow window in which to cancel your contract or it will automatically renews for another year.
Glesga, you seem to have a pretty good understanding of history and world affairs, but like much of the world, your charicatures of U.S. behavior show a recently rising anti-American bias.
You long for the USA that helped rebuilt Japan and Germany, after wars in which we helped topple brutal dictatorial regimes and install democracy. But you dismiss Iraq as "unwise" and make allusions to oil, without even considering the fact that what we're doing there - toppling a brutal dictator in order to install a democratic system - is basically the same thing. Yes, it's currently a big bloody mess, yes it's possible that it will not become peaceful for years, yes, in retrospect it may have even been "unwise", and we might even eventually not succeed - especially if the rest of the world has its way. But to point to a war in which we've toppled a brutal dictator and installed a democracy as nothing but aggression is a pretty biased world-view.
What do you think of Afghanistan? Should we have left the Taliban in charge there? Is toppling an oligarchy that made women wear sacks and prevented them from getting an education just another indicator of our aggression?
How did this get modded as "Insightful" when it's more like offtopic flamebait?
.com or country codes anyway.
Back to the topic at hand, let's keep in mind that
(a) the article poses this as "control of the internet" when in fact it's only "de facto control of top-level domain name registration". (By de facto I mean that the only thing that gives the body authority is the fact that people think it has authority - anyone could independently create a new TLD, you'd just have to convince all the world's nameservers to support it, and this is the only body that has the clout to do that.)
(b) it's a California non-profit body that's keeping this de facto control, not some U.S. government agency.
(c) who really cares if we get more TLD's anyway? everyone pretty much uses
The terminology is:
- 1/4 square mile = 0.25 times 1 square mile (1/4 of a square mile, such as 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile square)
- 1/4 mile squared =
.0625 times 1 square mile (a square 1/4 mile by 1/4 mile)
So the original poster was correct.It's time to stop the fallacious recent trend to extend the term "property" to include copyright, trademarks, and patents. "Property" refers to physical objects for whom possession by one person implies lack of possession by someone else. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are government-granted monopolies that limit the rights of anyone other than the monopoly-grantee to a particular writing, name, or process for the sole purpose of promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts", according to the U.S. Constitution anyway. Take the case of patents, for example: you can invent a process or idea in your own living room, yet the patent system denies you the right to use that process for your own benefit or for commercial gain if someone else has hired a lawyer and registered it first.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to copyrights, trademarks, and patents. It's just that using a term like "Intellectual Property" is a recent dishonest attempt by those who would prefer that we extend those monopolies almost infinitely to benefit large corporations at the expense of individuals' freedoms to do as they please by emotionally appealing to our reverance for protection of and rights to physical "property", a custom that has built up over many thousands of years of history. If we all start using the term "property" to refer to these government-granted monopolies, then no matter how hard we argue and no matter what side we argue on, eventually the little guy will lose and the big corporations will win.
Just say "No" to the term "Intellectual Property!"