The answer to this question is one that atheists typically don't like: God was not created. The name that he gave himself in the Old Testament means "I am." He always has existed and always will exist; the mere fact that a finite mind cannot comprehend infinite time makes no difference.
You can just as easily apply this answer to the previous question, namely that the universe or a metauniverse which in some sense contains our universe has always existed. No God required.
The program needs to say things like "I'm not sure if I'm interested" or "That doesn't sound like a good idea" - the kind of weak objections that the telemarketers are trained to try to overcome. Every now and then, use some positive reinforcement, like "That sounds interesting, but I'll have to think about it". That'll keep those suckers going!
Doesn't applying for a patent require that the applicant be able to show some evidence that they've made progress toward using the patented techniques? Shouldn't the patent office require a prototype in order to grant such a patent?
Prototypes are not required. I believe there used to be a requirement along these lines, but it was dropped as inventions became too complex to justify this.
All that is required in a patent application is enough information to allow people "of ordinary skill in the field" to make the invention.
Yes, I've read Kuhn and am keenly aware of the theories
in this field. I took Philosophy of Science at university, among other things.
Before I respond, I'd like to point out quite ironically that theories like
those of Kuhn are very much socially constructed - they depend on people
interpreting ambiguous and incomplete evidence in the same way. That said, I'll
grant that what Kuhn says seems useful, but he doesn't claim that all advances
occur during revolutions. Similarly to the theory of punctuated
equilibrium in evolution, science has evolved in between revolutions and it has
aggregated much of what has come before. There has been a relatively
linear and aggregative development in our mathematics, logic and
technology. Mathematics and logic in particular, having a definitional
basis, have traditionally had been more rigorous and less subject to social
construction in many respects - the fact that Indiana legislators were
unsuccessful in legislating the value of pi to 3 would be a nice example of
this.
I'd like to address an example you gave. This is
similar to my response in another message on this thread. In the case of
general relativity vs. Newtonian gravitation, you claim that "The two
are completely disctinct conceptions of the universe that happen to intersect on
a particular body of predictions." This is simplistic.
There are many aspects to any physical theory, and conflating them all loses
valuable information (a typical problem in postmodernist thought). Two
important aspects of any physical theory are its calculational utility, and its
ontological implications. Not coincidentally, calculation utility is the
only perspective which the Copenhagen interpretation of QM considers to be
valid. The Copenhagen epistemology is important, because it explicitly
separates out these components.
From a calculational utility perspective, GR is a clean
superset of Newtonian gravitation, in that it provides the same predictions
except in situations involving extreme gravitational fields interacting at
relatively small distances. We don't usually apply this perspective to the
change from a geocentric to heliocentric world view, however. The reason
for this is that we have assigned a high degree of certainty to the
"reality" of the relationship between the Earth and the Sun. (A
degree of certainty which has certainly increased over time, again as our
mathematics, technology, and physical theories have improved.) The
computational "artifact" which requires the Earth to orbit the Sun has
been accepted as reflecting reality, to a high degree of certainty.
However, Newtonian gravitation doesn't have the same kind
of ontological implications when it comes to what gravity "is".
Newton simply claims that masses attract each other - something which can be
confirmed observationally and evidentially with a high degree of
certainty. Newton then defines the formula which governs this
attraction. GR arguably goes a step further, in postulating a curved
spacetime in which the curvature "explains" gravity, but in fact it
does nothing of the sort - it just substitutes one theoretical artifact,
"gravitational attraction", for another, "spacetime
curvature". We can demonstrate that these theoretical artifacts have
an analog in the observable universe, and that they are essentially
equivalent. But that doesn't really tell us very much about whether
spacetime is "curved", or what that means. The Copenhagen School
would tell us to consider curved spacetime a theoretical artifact, and leave it
at that. Either way, these two theories are not such different conceptions
of the universe as you claim.
Anyway, I'm not going to develop this too much further in
this forum, but I'd like to restate my original claim a bit more broadly: the
history of the past few thousand years has been one of achieving a higher degree
of certainty about certain physical theories, while at the same time rejecting
others, i.e. achieving a high degree of certainty about their invalidity.
Most of our replacement theories do indeed encompass the theories which they
replace. I claim that these theories, with their foundation in disciplines
such as mathematics and logic, and tested rigorously over long periods of time,
go beyond simple social construction and could be mapped isomorphically to
theories and concepts arrived at by, for example, alien races; unfortunately,
I'll have to wait for SETI to report back on that one.
One more thing:
Evidence is not objective, it has to be interpreted.
Well, everything has to be interpreted. That's the entire
basis of the postmodernist premise, and about as far as pomo has gotten, since
it seems unable to make any useful claims beyond this point. But degrees
of certainty apply to evidence, as to many other things. If this is not
acknowledged and addressed, you end up with exactly with the pomo conclusions
that are considered problematic by those who don't accept the pomo belief
structure. But pomo has the disadvantage that lacking a rigorous basis, it
is internally inconsistent and cannot even justify itself to its adherents
without a religion-like sheer act of faith. Perhaps in future, credible
theories will be developed to deal with issues of uncertainty regarding
interpretation of evidence, ontological implications of theories, and so on, but
pomo certainly hasn't yet succeeded in doing so, nor does it seem likely to in
the absense of greater academic rigor.
FWIW, I've expanded on some of this (god help us!:) in this message.
I see a conflict between these two statements
of yours:
"Now while there are those who would throw
everything out because of this, I am not one of them and I have not personally
met any of these people."
and
"in many ways proves my point that belief in
science has replaced in belief in religion."
It seems to me that by putting science and
religion on an effectively equal footing as simply "beliefs", you
are "throwing everything out", and you're completely
discounting any validity to the "evidence, logic and tests" I
mentioned. Sure, they're socially constructed - but what does socially
constructed mean, what are its implications? Apparently, you
claim that the implication is that it is invalid to assign relative degrees of
certainty to, for example, the belief that our equations of motion accurately
describe the way in which objects move when subject to certain forces, vs. the
belief that Jesus Christ did in fact literally convert water into wine, say.
If this is an accurate characterization of your claims,
then you've taken a basic uncertainty related to the limits on human perception
and social construction, and translated it into the position that it's
impossible to ever know anything about anything. I assume your actual
position may be different than this; if so, you haven't made it very
clear. I think perhaps you're so intent on defending your "belief in
science replaces belief in religion" claim that you're ignoring the broader
consequences of that claim.
You also say that postmodernists have not taken the
time to understand "it." I personally received my undergraduate
dergee in mathematics (and English) and one of the professors in my current
graduate school department is a former engineer, so while the two of us may not
have as firm an understanding of concepts as perhaps some do, I think that most
people would agree that we have a better understanding than most.
By "it", I mean the theories on which
conclusions are being based. The problem is that unless you've worked
through the math of theories like special and general relativity, and quantum
physics, how can you possibly draw conclusions related to those theories in the
epistemological domain? You made two claims related to these specific
theories in your original message. Both of these are fairly typical
postmodernist statements, which translate complex theories into suspect one-line
summaries which are then used to make claims in totally unrelated areas.
This sort of non-logic was wonderfully parodied by Alan Sokal.
Postmodernism defeats itself in the sense that the very things it claims are
socially constructed and therefore suspect, are the things which could lend its
conclusions some integrity. Lacking rules other than social ones,
postmodernism opens itself wide to Sokalian parody and loses all claim to any
useful outcome.
One thing postmodernism shows by its very existence,
though, is that reality is socially constructed. The existence of a large
enough group of people semi-informed on certain subjects but willing to draw
conclusions based on their limited understanding of those subjects, using an
argument style that would be forbidden in any debating club because of its lack
of any formal rules or integrity, results in a reality which certainly isn't
shared by the rest of us.
Respondents to my post seem to have a problem
understanding that simply because I refute that a current commonly held
conception of the physical world is not the only one that may be correct, that I
imply that the currently held conception is therefore wrong and I don't believe
in it.
That's not my problem at all. In any case,
pointing out that different models may equally validly predict and explain
something doesn't refute those models at all. But that is central to the
issue which I dispute. Given multiple models that describe the same
phenomena equally well, and assuming that they have the same degree of
calculational utility, one may be left with a difference in ontological
implications, assuming the theories are not isomorphic on an ontological
level. In such a situation, we would have to say that we are unable to
apply a high degree of certainty to either set of ontological consequences, even
if we can apply a high degree of certainty to the calculational utility of both
models. This kind of distinction is one that nearly all postmodernist
writers apparently almost completely miss, or ignore - the fact that ontological
implications can be uncertain while calculational utility can be very certain.
A concrete comparison can be made here using the
examples we've been discussing. Heliocentricity and geocentricity were
both ontological consequences of the formulae used to describe the observed
motion of the planets. Given the evidence available to us today, it seems
that our belief in a heliocentric solar system can be accorded a high degree of
certainty. To put this another, more strongly realist way, we can find
nothing to indicate that every conscious observer we are able to contact, as
well as every inanimate object we are able to detect, occupies the same reality,
in which we are gravitationally bound to a planet which orbits a dense spherical
gas cloud powered by nuclear fusion. To refute this, you would have to
provide an alternative perspective which describes my reality as well
as yours, with an equal degree of success. Simply claiming that our
conclusions are social constructions is essentially meaningless: you have to
present a coherent argument as to what the consequences of that are, and
why.
You may think that my position is a naive one and that
I'm simply "trapped in the hegemony": but either you have to provide a
plausible alternative theory that's equally successful, or provide an
alternative means for measuring the success (and thus belief-worthiness) of
theories, or you cannot refute my claim that the theories to which we ascribe a
high degree of certainty would be perceivable, even if from a different
ontological perspective, by hydrogen intelligences from Tau Ceti, or
time-travelling cavemen, or multidimensional creatures from beyond our universe,
or a non-physical hyperconsciousness that is capable of detecting events in our
universe.
By contrast, we're not really in a position to accord
the same degree of certainty to the idea of spacetime being a four-dimensional
Riemannian hypersphere. That's an ontological implication of GR, but the
degree to which it corresponds to an independently verifiable reality is an open
question. Unlike the Earth's orbit around the Sun, hyperspheres are almost
certainly beyond the direct grasp of our senses. Evidence such as
gravitational lensing effects, and minor discrepancies in calculations of
planetary orbits, indicate that GR's calculational utility is good, but without
independent corroborating evidence, for all we know the model just happens to
work out well, and the ontological implications are simply a red herring.
For example, it's possible that an improvement of the quantum Standard Model,
perhaps involving a better understanding of the Higgs field, could lead to a
different understanding of the "meaning" of GR and its geometric
analogy for spacetime. It's also possible that we will never be able to
assign a high degree of certainty to the "meaning" of GR. In a
sense, it doesn't really matter, except insofar as "ultimate truth"
will remain out of our reach, but that may simply be because "ultimate
truth" in the sense some people imagine it, does not exist.
I've touched on issues here, but haven't really fleshed
them out, which goes to the confusion which I see apparent in much postmodernist
writing, which is that our knowledge of the world around us covers an incredible
spectrum of information interrelated in some very complex and subtle ways, yet
pomo writings rarely, if ever, attempt to address or even acknowledge the
existence of this spectrum as much more than a huge indivisible
"hegemony", except when it is picking ignorantly at individual
theories which tickle its fancy, such as relativity and quantum theory.
Postmodernism purports to make epistemological claims,
but actually does nothing of the sort. It hasn't gotten beyond its basic
premise of social construction. Lacking a logical or other basis on which
to analyze things, postmodernism is about as useful as poetry as a means of
arriving at epistemological claims. Postmodernists have to first provide
some rationale that justifies the conclusions which they arrive at, before they
can validly arrive at any conclusions.
Just to give a brief hypothetical example, the
selection of tests to be run on a given topic are in part pased on experience,
but they are also based on economics. If all evidence points to a certain
assumption but another test has been theoried to invalidate that assumption, but
it will be extremely expensive to conduct and will take a long time to conduct
(say years or even decades) then in the vast majority such a test will not be
conducted.
That's not hypothetical, it's happening right now with
the Higgs boson. The existing collider at CERN is being shut down to make
way for the Large Hadron Collider, which may be better equipped to detect the
Higgs boson. But in the meantime, no-one is claiming certain knowledge
that the Higgs boson "exists". The degree of certainty regarding
the Higgs boson will necessarily remain much lower than it would otherwise be,
until such time as its existence can be experimentally verified. The
aspect of "social construction" you're referring to here is known, and
can be adjusted for in our evaluation of our theories and their predictions.
You cite my use of the earth centered universe and
suggest that such a notion was based more on belief than evidence. I counter
that it was based on the evidence and understanding of the universe available to
them at that time. They interpreted the available evidence and believed the
result. This is exactly what modern science does.
I disagree. The earth-centered universe was based
on an assumption that was either not challenged, or could not successfully be
challenged because of prevailing beliefs (e.g. religious or anthropocentric)
that had no basis in evidence or theory. The earth's position was seen as
axiomatic, and theories were based on that assumption. This is certainly a
good example of social construction acting as an impediment to good science, but
that's the point - it is not good science. This goes to the issue of the
evolution of science, another issue not well addressed in pomo writings, which
tend to treat different times in the history of science as separate but
comparable examples of socially constructed realities. This is misleading,
exactly because of the close historical relationship - our science now is an
evolution from Galileo's science, not a parallel universe. Anyone at that
time asking how we know that the earth is the center of the universe would not
have been met by very convincing arguments (other than "if you don't agree,
we'll chop off your head"). There's a difference here that's more
than just social construction. When pomo gets to the point of
acknowledging that difference and being able to address it, it will have
achieved something useful.
I posit that we may within the scientific community
come ever closer to that magical 100% but never actually in reality meet it.
Sure. I don't think many scientists would
disagree. That's still very different than saying that belief in the more
strongly supported current scientific theories requires no more of a leap of
faith than belief in religion, which seems to be what you're implying.
Note also that I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't entertain religious beliefs,
only that a different degree of faith is required, which correlates strongly to
the certainty about theories to which I referred.
Thus even those within the community would say that
while many do consider something to be a TRUTH that designation is not
technically correct and thus, by my conception it is one of many truths.
The one doesn't follow from the other, according to any logic I'm aware of. If I consider GR to be
ultimate truth, but I am wrong, it doesn't automatically follow that there are
many truths. We need more rigor than this to have a serious discussion.
I've been accused of almost the opposite, namely plagiarizing Adams, in the past; I think it's because I read all those books at an age where they had an irreversible impact on the wiring of my brain. I can't watch a sofa being carried up a flight of stairs without imagining its rotating image on a computer screen.
One thing Adams missed out on, though, in THHGTTG, was that amongst the marketers and telephone sanitizers stranded on Earth so long ago, was a not insignificant number of postmodernists...
I take it you don't work as a software developer, and haven't been on the receiving end of legal bullying tactics in this area.
The reality of these agreements is far, far from their apparent legal intent. The reality is that companies who are concerned about IP in this way ant just one thing in practice: to maximize their ability to have an apparently solid basis for lawsuits, in order to be able to gain injunctions and other "remedies" against parties which are capable of competing with them. On the surface, this might seem reasonable, but in practice, such claims are often very unsound, and could often be successfully challenged in court. However, employees and ex-employees typically do not have the financial and legal resources to fight such cases. As a result, what companies really gain by these agreements is a strategic edge in the game of "my overall legal position is stronger than yours", which allows them to bully ex-employees into not doing anything even remotely close to competing with them, and in some cases not even pursuing ideas that the employee had prior to joining that company.
Also, as to your assertion that most of what programmers do doesn't qualify as "invention", try telling that to the Patent Office! Unfortunately, the legal environment is currently such that you can get a patent for many, many things that to any reasonable person, should not qualify as an invention. As such, it is dangerous to sign away rights when in fact, your dumb idea about using a single button-click to place an order on a website could in fact be incredibly valuable IP, in this distorted Kafkaesque world of VC-funded rich thugs with lawyers.
In every class I teach I tell my students to question the things I tell them.
I hope and expect that they will.
That's good, since judging by your
message, you don't have a very good grasp of the issues you're
discussing.
You're completely ignoring the idea that we can actually
evaluate different assumptions or beliefs based on evidence, logic, and tests,
which leaves you lumping together belief in gods with our understanding of
mathematics.
You're also seriously confusing facts, interpretation of
evidence, hypotheses, theories, and beliefs. Unless you're going to take things
to the point of saying "this could all be a dream", all sorts of essentially
"irrefutable" facts do exist. When it comes to logical, mathematical and
scientific knowledge, we also have the ability in many cases to categorically
determine whether a hypothesis is or isn't valid. In other areas, we aren't
able to be so definitive, but we can be sure of the accuracy of a successful
theory to a degree equal to our ability to test it.
An example might be
Newton vs. Einstein: Einstein's special relativity replaced Newton's theories of
motion, and general relativity replaced Newton's theory of gravitation, but in
both cases, even though Einstein's theories have enormous conceptual
consequences, the quantitative effect was relatively small and only affects
extreme situations. While Newton's theories held force, they could be
demonstrated to hold true under any circumstance which could be devised to test
them. Once testing became more sophisticated, i.e. the evidence available to us
changed, it became clear that the theory, while accurate to a point, didn't
account for all cases, and more refined theories had to be developed.
The
history of science has been characterized by this process: as we gather more
evidence about the world around us, so we are able to develop better theories
about how that world works. Galileo came to his understanding about the solar
system based on his use of a telescope, a tool not previously available. In the
early history of science, there were many cases in which large assumptions were
made due to the limitations on the evidence available at the time. Theories
about the Earth or the Sun being at the center of the universe were such
theories: they were based not so much on evidence as on belief. As such, it's
not completely accurate to characterize these beliefs as "science".
The
point of all this is that when it comes to "hard" scientific knowledge, it is
possible to assess the facts and theories we rely on as to the degree of "truth"
they contain. Rather than talk in black and white terms, it is better to talk
about degrees of certainty. On many subjects, we come close enough to 100%
certainty to be able to talk about "irrefutable" facts. On other subjects, such
as quantum physics, we're acutely aware of the shortcomings in existing
theories, and are actively looking for ways to improve or replace those
theories.
This process has been in progress for a few thousand years now - the
process of gathering evidence, interpreting it, and developing theories to
account for it. On many fronts, we're asymptotically approaching an
"irrefutable" position, and the only reason postmodernists don't recognize
that is because they haven't spent the time to understand it. It's certainly
true that if one believes a theory is false, and refuses to consider the evidence
that it is true, it will remain false, for you, even as you fall to your death
over a cliff in an arc described by Newton's laws.
Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that even the physical
laws of our universe only apply locally. And as I understand it, quantum physics
tells us that nothing is impossible, just very very very unlikely.
It's
silly to talk about such things when you clearly don't understand them. In what
way do "the physical laws of our universe only apply locally"? What relativity
says is simply that measurements necessarily apply to a reference frame. It's
actually one of the most intuitive theories in existence today, and can be
derived from first principles on a piece of paper, using simple thought
experiments. It certainly doesn't create any uncertainty about the laws of
physics throughout the universe. As for quantum mechanics, your understanding
doesn't match that of the scientific community. It's true that any individual
particle, while undergoing some change or interaction, has the potential to do
all sorts of strange things, with some of the stranger ones constrained only by
being statistically very unlikely. However, the mathematics of the quantum wave
function, which is one of the most well-tested formulae in existence, shows that
every interaction which a particle undergoes with its environment reduces the
possibilities available to it, so that impossible things remain impossible, and
you don't come home to find your sofa hanging three feet above the
floor.
Having said all that, it certainly isn't possible or wise to ignore
the social construction issues and linguistic/conceptual constraints which we
all, as non-omnipotent beings, face. But that doesn't mean that all beliefs are
created equal. I agree with you that skepticism is important, but never more so
than when evaluating the application of postmodernist relativism to hard
science.
The softer sciences, of course, are another story entirely, but
that's largely because of the issue I've already mentioned: solid evidence is
harder to come by, which necessitates much assumption. But we know this, and if
we're being honest, we can assign a lesser degree of certainty to our theories
about anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.
My girlfriend runs W2K Professional. She still gets blue screens. Seems the only way MS will ever get rid of those is by changing the code that produces those screens, to use a different color...
If you're not prepared to hack the source code, what's the point in having it?
That depends. You might know people who can hack the source code, or the existence of a larger community of source code hackers may help you get what you want. That's one of the benefits of Linux, even notwithstanding some of its shortcomings: its popularity means that it now fits a staggering variety of applications, from diskette-based routers to massively parallel supercomputers, just to take one measure of its breadth. Sure, there are always exceptions, things that it doesn't do well, and any user has to evaluate their requirements and choose what's most appropriate for them.
["Evil" is] a simple expression of the fact that the core Free Software movement considers commercial software to be morally wrong. See Richard Stallman's essay on the subject.
I'm not an expert on Stallman's position, but I don't see this in the essay you referenced. He doesn't actually use the word "evil" in the essay, and the strongest adjective I could find applied to proprietary software was that it is "harmful". His only use of the word "moral" is related to the moral obligation of users to pay developers for their efforts.
Stallman's objection is to software for which the source code is not available - not necessarily "commercial" software but rather "proprietary" software. His position is based entirely on what I've been saying about proprietary software: "...doesn't come with source code, and therefore wouldn't be as useful to [users]".
This pragmatic and fairly uncontroversial observation forms the basis for Stallman's other claims. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the underlying premise remains valid, and has nothing to do with good or evil: instead, it's eminently practical - all things being equal, open source is better than closed source, for the user. No religion necessary.
Apparently, Mac OS X is open source.:) I don't use PPC or Mac so haven't been paying attention, sorry.
The argument I was making still applies in a broader sense. As far as Mac OS X goes, I guess it would come down to the Apple Public Source License vs. the GPL, which I assume may be what you were alluding to when you said "proprietary product". The same kind of rational reasons vs. religious reasons would apply in that case, but since I know nothing about the APSL, I'll leave it at that.
The sole basis for disagreement seems to be that Mac OS is a proprietary product, and therefore evil.
I would phrase this as "Mac OS doesn't come with source code, and therefore wouldn't be as useful to me". "Evil" is nicely inflammatory shorthand for that.
Unfortunately, Open Source is a religion to many people
One could just as easily say "Unfortunately, [Mac OS | Windows | Java | Catholicism | etc] is a religion to many people". It's just an aspect of human nature, that some people lead the way and many others follow, with the followers often not completely understanding why they follow - they have delegated their decisions in certain areas to the leaders they are following. But it makes little sense to argue with a movement by arguing with follower-level positions like "x is evil". You have to get past that to more fundamental things - like the actual benefits of having access to the source code of the systems you use. Once you get to that, you might find that there are rational reasons not to use Mac OS, at least for those who know how to benefit from and leverage the availability of source code.
Don't leap into a religous lecture unless it's a religious issue.
You seemed intent on making it a religious issue, though:
...but it's just software, not the New Jerusalem....
Oh wait, there's the "Free Software" religion.
which rather detracts from any serious point you might have.
That said, I agree with what you're saying:
Since we don't pay Linus to maintain the kernel for us, what obligation does he have to maintain it any way but his own? If it's important to anyone that the kernel have more PPC features than Linus is willing to include, they're free to start their own branch. The same goes for any other open source product.
And that seems to be exactly what's already happened: the PPC folk maintain their own version of the kernel.
The whole Open Source thing relies on people with a "Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way" mentality. If you say, "I want X to happen, but I want somebody else to take responsibility for it," you're thinking in terms of commercial software, no matter how many RMS mantras you recite.
Actually, I think in many respects, people relying on free software have a better chance of getting what they really need, even without doing it themselves, than those who're dependent on large companies to fix things or add features.
Open source and/or free software is far more important than the "New Jerusalem", in that it's real and provides tangible and important benefits in the here-and-now.
If you don't recognize the benefits of having access to the source code for the software platform(s) on which you or your company depend, you either aren't a developer or CTO, or else you haven't really thought it through yet. Religion has nothing to do with it. The religious ones are just those who are following the smart ones, because they recognize that they're onto something important, something that liberates them from being at the mercy of large software companies with private agendas that don't put the interests of their customers first.
Because that generally requires predicting the future, which is effectively impossible. An application that is designed to link against glibc 2.1 would have to have anticipated the changes in interface and functionality in 2.2 to be able to work with 2.2.
True forward compatibility would require some kind of interface and functionality discovery mechanism, in which an application says "I'm looking for a version of function x which has such and such behavior", and is then given a reference to the appropriate function by the OS or some other middleware like CORBA or COM. These systems do support a weak form of interface versioning based on a version number. However, all such systems still require you to keep earlier versions around, so you won't easily get away from the requirement to maintain old library versions.
What is there to linux if you have to hack a system together that is totally incomprehensable to proffessionaly maintain on a commercial software level (ie, not having the sourcecode like in the original question).
The basic issue is not specific to any OS or language: it's a simple logical constraint. Why can't an old vinyl LP record player play CDs? Same reason.
The leap I make comes from the fact that RAMBUS is one of the only high-profile companies operating the way that it does, i.e. as a pure licensor of IP. I don't think companies like this should be encouraged, especially not when their claim to their IP, even under the laws as they stand, seems a little weak. The mentality of "let's get some patents and then sue everyone who wanders nearby, and hope that some of the cases stick" is not the way to a productive and efficient economy.
Besides, if this were just about RAMBUS' own technology, that would be a little different; but their broader claims against the industry go to far, and I don't think should be allowed to stand:
Those patents were granted to them, wether they deserve them or not. There's nothing wrong with them trying to enforce them fully.
I disagree. Patents are an incredibly wooly area, and companies like RAMBUS push their claims beyond the bounds of sanity. It's up to a company how it chooses to handle its patents, and many companies seem to be capable of behaving quite responsibly. Usually, the ones that don't behave responsibly are those that are failing in other areas (e.g. Unisys, Amazon), or those like RAMBUS which have no other value whatsoever.
I don't even think that these companies serve their investors well, except in the short term. Long term, they're toast, because everyone else is going to find a way around them.
It's simple: RAMBUS doesn't make anything, but they make life difficult for a lot of companies that do make useful things. The very existence of RAMBUS is the consequence of the particular set of rather arbitrary intellectual "property" laws we have now. RAMBUS need to be taken down hard, and my bet is it's going to happen, sooner or later.
Aside from the fact that Hemos was clear about his editorializing and thus doesn't violate any journalistic ethics, there are a few reasons to keep the editorial comments:
If Taco, Hemos et al are laboring under some kind of misconception about something, we'll fix that! This wouldn't work as well if the editors posted to their own stories - Jon Katz tried that in his Saving Silverman review and gotted modded down (deservedly!) as Offtopic. Go moderators!;)
Editorial comments remind you what forum you're on and may help keep undesirables away, or at least remind them of the prevailing opinion. If you disagreed the actual content of Hemos' comment about Rambus, perhaps you really belong over at www.patentandsue.com.
Often the editorial comments aren't carefully thought through (euphemism for "dumb"). But that usually simply adds to the vigorousness of the ensuing dialog. Like pouring gasoline on a fire!
Not only would that bring/. one step back from dropping off my "read daily" list,
Actually, I suspect the goal of many publications,/. included, is to be on the very edge of a lot of people's "read daily" lists. Something you read because you have to - for whatever reason - not because you want to. Taste is fickle, compulsion less so.
It's probably not what you're looking for, but I'm sure there are ways to contribute by writing code for processing the enormous mountains of data that these experiments produce. Some of the scientific data processing and visualization apps are GPL'd or otherwise open, for example.
Not as much fun as generating TeV energies in your basement, though!
This description at space.com made me wonder how sure you can be of the muon velocity, given its importance to the experiment, as described in point 3 on the linked page. Is this considered a significant area of uncertainty? More specifically, if the muon velocity were incorrect, such that their spin was being affected by the confinement field, would that be "easily" detectable in the results?
Calvinbola got me grinning, too. You have clearly been blessed by Jeebus. Since I don't have mod status today, you'll have to settle for my lame adulation, sorry!
I'm having difficulty seeing the novelty of Eidola. It's certainly not the first language to have a basis in a formal semantic calculus -- the lambda calculus for functional languages goes back to the 1930's. Eidola is also not the first to aim at a rich yet provably correct type system.
I agree. I don't see anything on the Eidola site about the author's background or credentials, so it's hard to tell where he's coming from; but he either seems to be unaware of a lot of work in this exact field, or is ignoring it for reasons he doesn't explain. The fact that he provides no bibliographies (that I saw) or other references to prior work by others doesn't help.
Besides, the notion of different representations of the same program is an almost trivial one, and doesn't really need a special language to support it.
Slashdot Mirror
You can just as easily apply this answer to the previous question, namely that the universe or a metauniverse which in some sense contains our universe has always existed. No God required.
The program needs to say things like "I'm not sure if I'm interested" or "That doesn't sound like a good idea" - the kind of weak objections that the telemarketers are trained to try to overcome. Every now and then, use some positive reinforcement, like "That sounds interesting, but I'll have to think about it". That'll keep those suckers going!
Prototypes are not required. I believe there used to be a requirement along these lines, but it was dropped as inventions became too complex to justify this.
All that is required in a patent application is enough information to allow people "of ordinary skill in the field" to make the invention.
Yes, I've read Kuhn and am keenly aware of the theories in this field. I took Philosophy of Science at university, among other things. Before I respond, I'd like to point out quite ironically that theories like those of Kuhn are very much socially constructed - they depend on people interpreting ambiguous and incomplete evidence in the same way. That said, I'll grant that what Kuhn says seems useful, but he doesn't claim that all advances occur during revolutions. Similarly to the theory of punctuated equilibrium in evolution, science has evolved in between revolutions and it has aggregated much of what has come before. There has been a relatively linear and aggregative development in our mathematics, logic and technology. Mathematics and logic in particular, having a definitional basis, have traditionally had been more rigorous and less subject to social construction in many respects - the fact that Indiana legislators were unsuccessful in legislating the value of pi to 3 would be a nice example of this.
I'd like to address an example you gave. This is similar to my response in another message on this thread. In the case of general relativity vs. Newtonian gravitation, you claim that "The two are completely disctinct conceptions of the universe that happen to intersect on a particular body of predictions." This is simplistic. There are many aspects to any physical theory, and conflating them all loses valuable information (a typical problem in postmodernist thought). Two important aspects of any physical theory are its calculational utility, and its ontological implications. Not coincidentally, calculation utility is the only perspective which the Copenhagen interpretation of QM considers to be valid. The Copenhagen epistemology is important, because it explicitly separates out these components.
From a calculational utility perspective, GR is a clean superset of Newtonian gravitation, in that it provides the same predictions except in situations involving extreme gravitational fields interacting at relatively small distances. We don't usually apply this perspective to the change from a geocentric to heliocentric world view, however. The reason for this is that we have assigned a high degree of certainty to the "reality" of the relationship between the Earth and the Sun. (A degree of certainty which has certainly increased over time, again as our mathematics, technology, and physical theories have improved.) The computational "artifact" which requires the Earth to orbit the Sun has been accepted as reflecting reality, to a high degree of certainty.
However, Newtonian gravitation doesn't have the same kind of ontological implications when it comes to what gravity "is". Newton simply claims that masses attract each other - something which can be confirmed observationally and evidentially with a high degree of certainty. Newton then defines the formula which governs this attraction. GR arguably goes a step further, in postulating a curved spacetime in which the curvature "explains" gravity, but in fact it does nothing of the sort - it just substitutes one theoretical artifact, "gravitational attraction", for another, "spacetime curvature". We can demonstrate that these theoretical artifacts have an analog in the observable universe, and that they are essentially equivalent. But that doesn't really tell us very much about whether spacetime is "curved", or what that means. The Copenhagen School would tell us to consider curved spacetime a theoretical artifact, and leave it at that. Either way, these two theories are not such different conceptions of the universe as you claim.
Anyway, I'm not going to develop this too much further in this forum, but I'd like to restate my original claim a bit more broadly: the history of the past few thousand years has been one of achieving a higher degree of certainty about certain physical theories, while at the same time rejecting others, i.e. achieving a high degree of certainty about their invalidity. Most of our replacement theories do indeed encompass the theories which they replace. I claim that these theories, with their foundation in disciplines such as mathematics and logic, and tested rigorously over long periods of time, go beyond simple social construction and could be mapped isomorphically to theories and concepts arrived at by, for example, alien races; unfortunately, I'll have to wait for SETI to report back on that one.
One more thing:
Evidence is not objective, it has to be interpreted.
Well, everything has to be interpreted. That's the entire basis of the postmodernist premise, and about as far as pomo has gotten, since it seems unable to make any useful claims beyond this point. But degrees of certainty apply to evidence, as to many other things. If this is not acknowledged and addressed, you end up with exactly with the pomo conclusions that are considered problematic by those who don't accept the pomo belief structure. But pomo has the disadvantage that lacking a rigorous basis, it is internally inconsistent and cannot even justify itself to its adherents without a religion-like sheer act of faith. Perhaps in future, credible theories will be developed to deal with issues of uncertainty regarding interpretation of evidence, ontological implications of theories, and so on, but pomo certainly hasn't yet succeeded in doing so, nor does it seem likely to in the absense of greater academic rigor.
FWIW, I've expanded on some of this (god help us! :) in this message.
I see a conflict between these two statements of yours:
"Now while there are those who would throw everything out because of this, I am not one of them and I have not personally met any of these people."
and
"in many ways proves my point that belief in science has replaced in belief in religion."
It seems to me that by putting science and religion on an effectively equal footing as simply "beliefs", you are "throwing everything out", and you're completely discounting any validity to the "evidence, logic and tests" I mentioned. Sure, they're socially constructed - but what does socially constructed mean, what are its implications? Apparently, you claim that the implication is that it is invalid to assign relative degrees of certainty to, for example, the belief that our equations of motion accurately describe the way in which objects move when subject to certain forces, vs. the belief that Jesus Christ did in fact literally convert water into wine, say.
If this is an accurate characterization of your claims, then you've taken a basic uncertainty related to the limits on human perception and social construction, and translated it into the position that it's impossible to ever know anything about anything. I assume your actual position may be different than this; if so, you haven't made it very clear. I think perhaps you're so intent on defending your "belief in science replaces belief in religion" claim that you're ignoring the broader consequences of that claim.
You also say that postmodernists have not taken the time to understand "it." I personally received my undergraduate dergee in mathematics (and English) and one of the professors in my current graduate school department is a former engineer, so while the two of us may not have as firm an understanding of concepts as perhaps some do, I think that most people would agree that we have a better understanding than most.
By "it", I mean the theories on which conclusions are being based. The problem is that unless you've worked through the math of theories like special and general relativity, and quantum physics, how can you possibly draw conclusions related to those theories in the epistemological domain? You made two claims related to these specific theories in your original message. Both of these are fairly typical postmodernist statements, which translate complex theories into suspect one-line summaries which are then used to make claims in totally unrelated areas. This sort of non-logic was wonderfully parodied by Alan Sokal. Postmodernism defeats itself in the sense that the very things it claims are socially constructed and therefore suspect, are the things which could lend its conclusions some integrity. Lacking rules other than social ones, postmodernism opens itself wide to Sokalian parody and loses all claim to any useful outcome.
One thing postmodernism shows by its very existence, though, is that reality is socially constructed. The existence of a large enough group of people semi-informed on certain subjects but willing to draw conclusions based on their limited understanding of those subjects, using an argument style that would be forbidden in any debating club because of its lack of any formal rules or integrity, results in a reality which certainly isn't shared by the rest of us.
Respondents to my post seem to have a problem understanding that simply because I refute that a current commonly held conception of the physical world is not the only one that may be correct, that I imply that the currently held conception is therefore wrong and I don't believe in it.
That's not my problem at all. In any case, pointing out that different models may equally validly predict and explain something doesn't refute those models at all. But that is central to the issue which I dispute. Given multiple models that describe the same phenomena equally well, and assuming that they have the same degree of calculational utility, one may be left with a difference in ontological implications, assuming the theories are not isomorphic on an ontological level. In such a situation, we would have to say that we are unable to apply a high degree of certainty to either set of ontological consequences, even if we can apply a high degree of certainty to the calculational utility of both models. This kind of distinction is one that nearly all postmodernist writers apparently almost completely miss, or ignore - the fact that ontological implications can be uncertain while calculational utility can be very certain.
A concrete comparison can be made here using the examples we've been discussing. Heliocentricity and geocentricity were both ontological consequences of the formulae used to describe the observed motion of the planets. Given the evidence available to us today, it seems that our belief in a heliocentric solar system can be accorded a high degree of certainty. To put this another, more strongly realist way, we can find nothing to indicate that every conscious observer we are able to contact, as well as every inanimate object we are able to detect, occupies the same reality, in which we are gravitationally bound to a planet which orbits a dense spherical gas cloud powered by nuclear fusion. To refute this, you would have to provide an alternative perspective which describes my reality as well as yours, with an equal degree of success. Simply claiming that our conclusions are social constructions is essentially meaningless: you have to present a coherent argument as to what the consequences of that are, and why.
You may think that my position is a naive one and that I'm simply "trapped in the hegemony": but either you have to provide a plausible alternative theory that's equally successful, or provide an alternative means for measuring the success (and thus belief-worthiness) of theories, or you cannot refute my claim that the theories to which we ascribe a high degree of certainty would be perceivable, even if from a different ontological perspective, by hydrogen intelligences from Tau Ceti, or time-travelling cavemen, or multidimensional creatures from beyond our universe, or a non-physical hyperconsciousness that is capable of detecting events in our universe.
By contrast, we're not really in a position to accord the same degree of certainty to the idea of spacetime being a four-dimensional Riemannian hypersphere. That's an ontological implication of GR, but the degree to which it corresponds to an independently verifiable reality is an open question. Unlike the Earth's orbit around the Sun, hyperspheres are almost certainly beyond the direct grasp of our senses. Evidence such as gravitational lensing effects, and minor discrepancies in calculations of planetary orbits, indicate that GR's calculational utility is good, but without independent corroborating evidence, for all we know the model just happens to work out well, and the ontological implications are simply a red herring. For example, it's possible that an improvement of the quantum Standard Model, perhaps involving a better understanding of the Higgs field, could lead to a different understanding of the "meaning" of GR and its geometric analogy for spacetime. It's also possible that we will never be able to assign a high degree of certainty to the "meaning" of GR. In a sense, it doesn't really matter, except insofar as "ultimate truth" will remain out of our reach, but that may simply be because "ultimate truth" in the sense some people imagine it, does not exist.
I've touched on issues here, but haven't really fleshed them out, which goes to the confusion which I see apparent in much postmodernist writing, which is that our knowledge of the world around us covers an incredible spectrum of information interrelated in some very complex and subtle ways, yet pomo writings rarely, if ever, attempt to address or even acknowledge the existence of this spectrum as much more than a huge indivisible "hegemony", except when it is picking ignorantly at individual theories which tickle its fancy, such as relativity and quantum theory.
Postmodernism purports to make epistemological claims, but actually does nothing of the sort. It hasn't gotten beyond its basic premise of social construction. Lacking a logical or other basis on which to analyze things, postmodernism is about as useful as poetry as a means of arriving at epistemological claims. Postmodernists have to first provide some rationale that justifies the conclusions which they arrive at, before they can validly arrive at any conclusions.
Just to give a brief hypothetical example, the selection of tests to be run on a given topic are in part pased on experience, but they are also based on economics. If all evidence points to a certain assumption but another test has been theoried to invalidate that assumption, but it will be extremely expensive to conduct and will take a long time to conduct (say years or even decades) then in the vast majority such a test will not be conducted.
That's not hypothetical, it's happening right now with the Higgs boson. The existing collider at CERN is being shut down to make way for the Large Hadron Collider, which may be better equipped to detect the Higgs boson. But in the meantime, no-one is claiming certain knowledge that the Higgs boson "exists". The degree of certainty regarding the Higgs boson will necessarily remain much lower than it would otherwise be, until such time as its existence can be experimentally verified. The aspect of "social construction" you're referring to here is known, and can be adjusted for in our evaluation of our theories and their predictions.
You cite my use of the earth centered universe and suggest that such a notion was based more on belief than evidence. I counter that it was based on the evidence and understanding of the universe available to them at that time. They interpreted the available evidence and believed the result. This is exactly what modern science does.
I disagree. The earth-centered universe was based on an assumption that was either not challenged, or could not successfully be challenged because of prevailing beliefs (e.g. religious or anthropocentric) that had no basis in evidence or theory. The earth's position was seen as axiomatic, and theories were based on that assumption. This is certainly a good example of social construction acting as an impediment to good science, but that's the point - it is not good science. This goes to the issue of the evolution of science, another issue not well addressed in pomo writings, which tend to treat different times in the history of science as separate but comparable examples of socially constructed realities. This is misleading, exactly because of the close historical relationship - our science now is an evolution from Galileo's science, not a parallel universe. Anyone at that time asking how we know that the earth is the center of the universe would not have been met by very convincing arguments (other than "if you don't agree, we'll chop off your head"). There's a difference here that's more than just social construction. When pomo gets to the point of acknowledging that difference and being able to address it, it will have achieved something useful.
I posit that we may within the scientific community come ever closer to that magical 100% but never actually in reality meet it.
Sure. I don't think many scientists would disagree. That's still very different than saying that belief in the more strongly supported current scientific theories requires no more of a leap of faith than belief in religion, which seems to be what you're implying. Note also that I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't entertain religious beliefs, only that a different degree of faith is required, which correlates strongly to the certainty about theories to which I referred.
Thus even those within the community would say that while many do consider something to be a TRUTH that designation is not technically correct and thus, by my conception it is one of many truths.
The one doesn't follow from the other, according to any logic I'm aware of. If I consider GR to be ultimate truth, but I am wrong, it doesn't automatically follow that there are many truths. We need more rigor than this to have a serious discussion.
One thing Adams missed out on, though, in THHGTTG, was that amongst the marketers and telephone sanitizers stranded on Earth so long ago, was a not insignificant number of postmodernists...
The reality of these agreements is far, far from their apparent legal intent. The reality is that companies who are concerned about IP in this way ant just one thing in practice: to maximize their ability to have an apparently solid basis for lawsuits, in order to be able to gain injunctions and other "remedies" against parties which are capable of competing with them. On the surface, this might seem reasonable, but in practice, such claims are often very unsound, and could often be successfully challenged in court. However, employees and ex-employees typically do not have the financial and legal resources to fight such cases. As a result, what companies really gain by these agreements is a strategic edge in the game of "my overall legal position is stronger than yours", which allows them to bully ex-employees into not doing anything even remotely close to competing with them, and in some cases not even pursuing ideas that the employee had prior to joining that company.
Also, as to your assertion that most of what programmers do doesn't qualify as "invention", try telling that to the Patent Office! Unfortunately, the legal environment is currently such that you can get a patent for many, many things that to any reasonable person, should not qualify as an invention. As such, it is dangerous to sign away rights when in fact, your dumb idea about using a single button-click to place an order on a website could in fact be incredibly valuable IP, in this distorted Kafkaesque world of VC-funded rich thugs with lawyers.
That's good, since judging by your message, you don't have a very good grasp of the issues you're discussing.
You're completely ignoring the idea that we can actually evaluate different assumptions or beliefs based on evidence, logic, and tests, which leaves you lumping together belief in gods with our understanding of mathematics.
You're also seriously confusing facts, interpretation of evidence, hypotheses, theories, and beliefs. Unless you're going to take things to the point of saying "this could all be a dream", all sorts of essentially "irrefutable" facts do exist. When it comes to logical, mathematical and scientific knowledge, we also have the ability in many cases to categorically determine whether a hypothesis is or isn't valid. In other areas, we aren't able to be so definitive, but we can be sure of the accuracy of a successful theory to a degree equal to our ability to test it.
An example might be Newton vs. Einstein: Einstein's special relativity replaced Newton's theories of motion, and general relativity replaced Newton's theory of gravitation, but in both cases, even though Einstein's theories have enormous conceptual consequences, the quantitative effect was relatively small and only affects extreme situations. While Newton's theories held force, they could be demonstrated to hold true under any circumstance which could be devised to test them. Once testing became more sophisticated, i.e. the evidence available to us changed, it became clear that the theory, while accurate to a point, didn't account for all cases, and more refined theories had to be developed.
The history of science has been characterized by this process: as we gather more evidence about the world around us, so we are able to develop better theories about how that world works. Galileo came to his understanding about the solar system based on his use of a telescope, a tool not previously available. In the early history of science, there were many cases in which large assumptions were made due to the limitations on the evidence available at the time. Theories about the Earth or the Sun being at the center of the universe were such theories: they were based not so much on evidence as on belief. As such, it's not completely accurate to characterize these beliefs as "science".
The point of all this is that when it comes to "hard" scientific knowledge, it is possible to assess the facts and theories we rely on as to the degree of "truth" they contain. Rather than talk in black and white terms, it is better to talk about degrees of certainty. On many subjects, we come close enough to 100% certainty to be able to talk about "irrefutable" facts. On other subjects, such as quantum physics, we're acutely aware of the shortcomings in existing theories, and are actively looking for ways to improve or replace those theories.
This process has been in progress for a few thousand years now - the process of gathering evidence, interpreting it, and developing theories to account for it. On many fronts, we're asymptotically approaching an "irrefutable" position, and the only reason postmodernists don't recognize that is because they haven't spent the time to understand it. It's certainly true that if one believes a theory is false, and refuses to consider the evidence that it is true, it will remain false, for you, even as you fall to your death over a cliff in an arc described by Newton's laws.
Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that even the physical laws of our universe only apply locally. And as I understand it, quantum physics tells us that nothing is impossible, just very very very unlikely.
It's silly to talk about such things when you clearly don't understand them. In what way do "the physical laws of our universe only apply locally"? What relativity says is simply that measurements necessarily apply to a reference frame. It's actually one of the most intuitive theories in existence today, and can be derived from first principles on a piece of paper, using simple thought experiments. It certainly doesn't create any uncertainty about the laws of physics throughout the universe. As for quantum mechanics, your understanding doesn't match that of the scientific community. It's true that any individual particle, while undergoing some change or interaction, has the potential to do all sorts of strange things, with some of the stranger ones constrained only by being statistically very unlikely. However, the mathematics of the quantum wave function, which is one of the most well-tested formulae in existence, shows that every interaction which a particle undergoes with its environment reduces the possibilities available to it, so that impossible things remain impossible, and you don't come home to find your sofa hanging three feet above the floor.
Having said all that, it certainly isn't possible or wise to ignore the social construction issues and linguistic/conceptual constraints which we all, as non-omnipotent beings, face. But that doesn't mean that all beliefs are created equal. I agree with you that skepticism is important, but never more so than when evaluating the application of postmodernist relativism to hard science.
The softer sciences, of course, are another story entirely, but that's largely because of the issue I've already mentioned: solid evidence is harder to come by, which necessitates much assumption. But we know this, and if we're being honest, we can assign a lesser degree of certainty to our theories about anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.
My girlfriend runs W2K Professional. She still gets blue screens. Seems the only way MS will ever get rid of those is by changing the code that produces those screens, to use a different color...
That depends. You might know people who can hack the source code, or the existence of a larger community of source code hackers may help you get what you want. That's one of the benefits of Linux, even notwithstanding some of its shortcomings: its popularity means that it now fits a staggering variety of applications, from diskette-based routers to massively parallel supercomputers, just to take one measure of its breadth. Sure, there are always exceptions, things that it doesn't do well, and any user has to evaluate their requirements and choose what's most appropriate for them.
["Evil" is] a simple expression of the fact that the core Free Software movement considers commercial software to be morally wrong. See Richard Stallman's essay on the subject.
I'm not an expert on Stallman's position, but I don't see this in the essay you referenced. He doesn't actually use the word "evil" in the essay, and the strongest adjective I could find applied to proprietary software was that it is "harmful". His only use of the word "moral" is related to the moral obligation of users to pay developers for their efforts.
Stallman's objection is to software for which the source code is not available - not necessarily "commercial" software but rather "proprietary" software. His position is based entirely on what I've been saying about proprietary software: "...doesn't come with source code, and therefore wouldn't be as useful to [users]".
This pragmatic and fairly uncontroversial observation forms the basis for Stallman's other claims. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the underlying premise remains valid, and has nothing to do with good or evil: instead, it's eminently practical - all things being equal, open source is better than closed source, for the user. No religion necessary.
The argument I was making still applies in a broader sense. As far as Mac OS X goes, I guess it would come down to the Apple Public Source License vs. the GPL, which I assume may be what you were alluding to when you said "proprietary product". The same kind of rational reasons vs. religious reasons would apply in that case, but since I know nothing about the APSL, I'll leave it at that.
I would phrase this as "Mac OS doesn't come with source code, and therefore wouldn't be as useful to me". "Evil" is nicely inflammatory shorthand for that.
Unfortunately, Open Source is a religion to many people
One could just as easily say "Unfortunately, [Mac OS | Windows | Java | Catholicism | etc] is a religion to many people". It's just an aspect of human nature, that some people lead the way and many others follow, with the followers often not completely understanding why they follow - they have delegated their decisions in certain areas to the leaders they are following. But it makes little sense to argue with a movement by arguing with follower-level positions like "x is evil". You have to get past that to more fundamental things - like the actual benefits of having access to the source code of the systems you use. Once you get to that, you might find that there are rational reasons not to use Mac OS, at least for those who know how to benefit from and leverage the availability of source code.
You seemed intent on making it a religious issue, though:
which rather detracts from any serious point you might have.
That said, I agree with what you're saying:
And that seems to be exactly what's already happened: the PPC folk maintain their own version of the kernel.
Actually, I think in many respects, people relying on free software have a better chance of getting what they really need, even without doing it themselves, than those who're dependent on large companies to fix things or add features.
If you don't recognize the benefits of having access to the source code for the software platform(s) on which you or your company depend, you either aren't a developer or CTO, or else you haven't really thought it through yet. Religion has nothing to do with it. The religious ones are just those who are following the smart ones, because they recognize that they're onto something important, something that liberates them from being at the mercy of large software companies with private agendas that don't put the interests of their customers first.
Because that generally requires predicting the future, which is effectively impossible. An application that is designed to link against glibc 2.1 would have to have anticipated the changes in interface and functionality in 2.2 to be able to work with 2.2.
True forward compatibility would require some kind of interface and functionality discovery mechanism, in which an application says "I'm looking for a version of function x which has such and such behavior", and is then given a reference to the appropriate function by the OS or some other middleware like CORBA or COM. These systems do support a weak form of interface versioning based on a version number. However, all such systems still require you to keep earlier versions around, so you won't easily get away from the requirement to maintain old library versions.
What is there to linux if you have to hack a system together that is totally incomprehensable to proffessionaly maintain on a commercial software level (ie, not having the sourcecode like in the original question).
The basic issue is not specific to any OS or language: it's a simple logical constraint. Why can't an old vinyl LP record player play CDs? Same reason.
Besides, if this were just about RAMBUS' own technology, that would be a little different; but their broader claims against the industry go to far, and I don't think should be allowed to stand:
Those patents were granted to them, wether they deserve them or not. There's nothing wrong with them trying to enforce them fully.
I disagree. Patents are an incredibly wooly area, and companies like RAMBUS push their claims beyond the bounds of sanity. It's up to a company how it chooses to handle its patents, and many companies seem to be capable of behaving quite responsibly. Usually, the ones that don't behave responsibly are those that are failing in other areas (e.g. Unisys, Amazon), or those like RAMBUS which have no other value whatsoever.
I don't even think that these companies serve their investors well, except in the short term. Long term, they're toast, because everyone else is going to find a way around them.
It's simple: RAMBUS doesn't make anything, but they make life difficult for a lot of companies that do make useful things. The very existence of RAMBUS is the consequence of the particular set of rather arbitrary intellectual "property" laws we have now. RAMBUS need to be taken down hard, and my bet is it's going to happen, sooner or later.
- If Taco, Hemos et al are laboring under some kind of misconception about something, we'll fix that! This wouldn't work as well if the editors posted to their own stories - Jon Katz tried that in his Saving Silverman review and gotted modded down (deservedly!) as Offtopic. Go moderators!
;)
- Editorial comments remind you what forum you're on and may help keep undesirables away, or at least remind them of the prevailing opinion. If you disagreed the actual content of Hemos' comment about Rambus, perhaps you really belong over at www.patentandsue.com.
- Often the editorial comments aren't carefully thought through (euphemism for "dumb"). But that usually simply adds to the vigorousness of the ensuing dialog. Like pouring gasoline on a fire!
Not only would that bringActually, I suspect the goal of many publications, /. included, is to be on the very edge of a lot of people's "read daily" lists. Something you read because you have to - for whatever reason - not because you want to. Taste is fickle, compulsion less so.
Thanks! I'm satisfied, carry on! ;)
Not as much fun as generating TeV energies in your basement, though!
Good luck with your data analysis!
[Obvious Troll] - I like it! Acronymic polymorphism in action...
Calvinbola got me grinning, too. You have clearly been blessed by Jeebus. Since I don't have mod status today, you'll have to settle for my lame adulation, sorry!
I agree. I don't see anything on the Eidola site about the author's background or credentials, so it's hard to tell where he's coming from; but he either seems to be unaware of a lot of work in this exact field, or is ignoring it for reasons he doesn't explain. The fact that he provides no bibliographies (that I saw) or other references to prior work by others doesn't help.
Besides, the notion of different representations of the same program is an almost trivial one, and doesn't really need a special language to support it.
You misspelled that - I believe it's spelled t-r-o-l-l.