Not to mention the DBAs that have to try to keep the thing up and running. And if suddenly you've got secretaries and clerks who are contributing to ongoing, collaborative documents, then they're gonna need training that will begin to resemble the training required to become a DBA.
Maybe you think this is hard because you don't know how to implement it. I have implemented it (e.g. a database-backed document management system). It's not that hard, and you leverage all those things like databases (which don't cost that much anymore - Oracle is old hat).
Some software companies - like Microsoft, the planet's biggest beneficiary of the BSD license - might lose, but that's about it. For other companies, the GPL guarantees that they get access to excellent software that's contributed to by people and companies around the world. The BSD license has a way of making such contributions proprietary.
The GPL enforces cooperation, and that benefits companies, even if some shortsighted ones don't see that.
I've noticed this trend too, and I think it would be naive to assume that there's not some intent behind it. Perhaps Microsoft has noticed that their SCO plans are falling apart, and it's time to move onto the next thing.
I've been involved (not recently) with GPL'd or LGPL'd programs where the mailing lists are filled up for days with threads about how the license should be switched to BSD. The proponents of this switch always make two common claims: first, the desire to switch is driven by some perceived flaw in the GPL (which never has any actual basis); and second, that their motivation for wanting the switch has nothing to do with desire for personal or corporate gain.
The bottom line is that people who want to switch a program from GPL to BSD always have self-serving ulterior motives. In fact, it can save a lot of time if you point that out to them up front and get it out of the way, since it doesn't leave much room for them to argue their case successfully.
I'm communicating with you right through an advanced program which allows me to collaboratively edit a document containing the collected messages of thousands of users around the world.
The difficulties associated with accurate timekeeping are actually substantially more difficult than merely coordinating collaborative updates to data. There's plenty of technology that already does that sort of thing (relational databases and OLTP being some examples); now we're just talking about bringing that down to a level that individuals can exploit better.
Were they actually testing anything, or was this a thinly-veiled excuse to blow shit up?
I'll give away a little secret and point out that most things humans do are thinly veiled excuses for what they really want to do. I mean, women's beach volleyball in the Olympics? C'mon!
Programming is the act of automating complexity in order to make the use and reuse of the complexity easy for the user of the complexity. Programming is a recursive act, as shown by any code/programming being done above machine language. And it follows that it is of such recursion that Software will become genuinely free, or otherwise contridict its own primary concept and purpose.
Or in other words, we don't need no stinking sweat shop software factories, we only need a general population understanding of the physics and nature of software development or general automation, and the non-patentable tools that allow us all to cause a generation of code based upon our design.
No offense, but apparently we also need more reliable drug delivery for schizophrenics...
I don't buy that this is entirely the fault of the institutions. Google seems to think they're better than the rest of us at times (check out the recruiting ads). I don't exactly frown when I read these stories.
Right, if Google's IPO crashes, it's Google's fault for being arrogant; if it succeeds, that sticks it to the Wall Street insider fatcats. Either way, everyone else wins!;)
...other then to demand immediate profits at the expense of long term solubility.
I think Yahoo and Microsoft would like to hear more about Google's solubility - exactly what will it take to dissolve Google? Are we talking water, or maybe hydrochloric acid, or something else entirely?
I know that. However, the comment made by the Sun COO is ludicrous, without some context beyond what we've seen. I was speculating that there may be a context which we're not aware of. If it was made as a general competitive statement, then I'm back to agreeing with the OP, that this Sun exec at least is delusional.
OTOH. Jonathan Schwartz's comment compareing the situation to Microsoft explains a lot about why Sun has pissed away its market position. Their officers are obviously delusional.
It's hard to believe he/they can really be that delusional. Maybe he's trying to talk up the stock price (the average investor is provably delusional), or send some kind of message to IBM. I don't keep track, but if there are any IBM-Sun negotiations or lawsuits going on, this comment probably has to do with that.
It's from 1997. A monitor should last that amount of time, no matter what.
Oh please. Are you suggesting that out of all the monitors which Viewsonic manufactured SEVEN YEARS ago, it's not acceptable for any of them to have degraded since then?
I can only assume that you're as dim as the monitors you're complaining about.
How can you tell there's a mosquito in the room when you cannot see it?
RTFA:
Black holes cannot actually be seen, because they trap all matter and light that enters them. But if an active galaxy is viewed from above, the hole in the middle of the torus allows a good view of the accretion disk, allowing astronomers to infer the presence of the black hole.
The new study looked at galaxies that were edge-on, but deduced the black holes by studying emissions in various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.
It's not so amazing if you think about it. NASA spends enormous resources on reliability. Your router, cable modem, and toaster are all mass-produced at more or less the lowest possible cost, with no redundancy, and often with built-in obsolescence in mind.
An example would be a public museum, which (usally) charges admission, yet it is still considered non-commercial.
I assume that's because it's not incorporated as a for-profit entity. I guess that's what my question boils down to: is one of the determining factors for "intended for... commercial advantage" whether an entity is incorporated for profit? For example, there are "universities" like DeVry in the U.S., which is "one of the three major players in the private, for-profit post secondary education sector in the North America" (from here). So would DeVry be unable to use non-commercial Creative Commons material, whereas other universities would? And is this something that's clearly determined by precedent?
One thing I don't get about the CC license is how educational use is supposed to fit in. Is there some legal precedent which rules that universities etc. are non-commercial? Universities charge money to educate people. Is the BBC releasing a whole lot of material that can't legally be used in education?
This is a serious question, I'd be interested in any informed replies.
Other replies have pointed out the size discrepancy as partly explaining the US cell issues. The other issue is historical: the US was a cellphone pioneer, and when technology changes, the substantial existing infrastructure investment has to be dealt with. Smaller countries, coming later to the game, have a big advantage.
Doctors are not the world's best source of
public health information. They live lifestyles
that make programmers look positively healthy
(I know - I do both professionally).
If you are, in fact, a mohel, then you're not a doctor, you're a butcher.
You seem to be talking about "measurement" in the old sense, prior to all the work on decoherence.
BTW, nothing you wrote seems like a concrete basis for rejecting many worlds. All that a many worlds hypothesis has to say is that for every quantum event which has multiple outcomes, multiple universes are spawned. The resulting explosion of universes probably defines a new kind of infinity, but so what? It doesn't really affect the math in any one universe.
A language I'd like to learn, for the reason you mention, grokking new ways of doing things, is Lisp, having heard the evangelism on/.:o)
Read a book like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). Not only does it teach you ways of doing things, it also teaches you ways of thinking about and analyzing those things, i.e. it should increase your understanding of the languages you have to work with. The biggest lesson the more academic languages have to teach has little to do with the languages themselves, and everything to do with gaining an understanding of the underlying concepts.
The Emperor's New Mind is a thoughtful and wide ranging essay.
...full of arguments that don't stand up to scrutiny. Emperor's New Mind demonstrates what can go wrong when a sharp and otherwise-rational thinker like Penrose attempts to justify his quasi-religious beliefs with the pretense of logical argument.
I'm not even a huge believer in strong AI, or at least in its medium-term practical achievability. I just don't think Penrose contributed anything useful to the debate - he mainly muddied things so that now he comes up in discussions about the subject, when the content of the book doesn't really justify such attention. Penrose exploited his reputation to create a soapbox for his personal ideology - kind of like Mel Gibson making "The Passion of the Christ".
This is not about defying tradition, it's about doing something that is meaningful to the people having the ceremony. Tradition is not something that's intended to prevent self-expression. Notice that in these weddings, there are still plenty of elements that are traditional.
If you see this sort of thing as defying tradition, that says much more about you and the circles you move in than it does about people in general.
I do think that in general, intelligent people are less likely to blindly follow tradition. That's another role for tradition, which is to tell unoriginal people how to behave. It's no surprise that some/. readers are making their own traditions.
I meant that the description of the law being violated was similar - the issue of "conspiracy to violate rights... under color of law/authority".
I'm not claiming the OP is right, I was just curious about where he might be coming from.
In any case, the issue is not just "asking for ID" - it's the police officer using intimidating tactics on a citizen in order to convince them that they are required to do something by law which in fact, they are not required to do. Strictly speaking, that probably is an offense of some kind, although the penalty is likely to be on the order of a reprimand.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's downloading the mpeg of the latest Stargate episode.
I'm sorry, you're overqualified - we're looking for someone with only 5 years of quantum encryption experience.
Some software companies - like Microsoft, the planet's biggest beneficiary of the BSD license - might lose, but that's about it. For other companies, the GPL guarantees that they get access to excellent software that's contributed to by people and companies around the world. The BSD license has a way of making such contributions proprietary.
The GPL enforces cooperation, and that benefits companies, even if some shortsighted ones don't see that.
I've noticed this trend too, and I think it would be naive to assume that there's not some intent behind it. Perhaps Microsoft has noticed that their SCO plans are falling apart, and it's time to move onto the next thing.
I've been involved (not recently) with GPL'd or LGPL'd programs where the mailing lists are filled up for days with threads about how the license should be switched to BSD. The proponents of this switch always make two common claims: first, the desire to switch is driven by some perceived flaw in the GPL (which never has any actual basis); and second, that their motivation for wanting the switch has nothing to do with desire for personal or corporate gain.
The bottom line is that people who want to switch a program from GPL to BSD always have self-serving ulterior motives. In fact, it can save a lot of time if you point that out to them up front and get it out of the way, since it doesn't leave much room for them to argue their case successfully.
I'm communicating with you right through an advanced program which allows me to collaboratively edit a document containing the collected messages of thousands of users around the world.
The difficulties associated with accurate timekeeping are actually substantially more difficult than merely coordinating collaborative updates to data. There's plenty of technology that already does that sort of thing (relational databases and OLTP being some examples); now we're just talking about bringing that down to a level that individuals can exploit better.
It's hard to believe he/they can really be that delusional. Maybe he's trying to talk up the stock price (the average investor is provably delusional), or send some kind of message to IBM. I don't keep track, but if there are any IBM-Sun negotiations or lawsuits going on, this comment probably has to do with that.
Simple by what metric? Ever written a parser for C?
If you want simple syntax, try Scheme or Lisp. Opinions differ on its beauty (it grows on you, though).
Oh please. Are you suggesting that out of all the monitors which Viewsonic manufactured SEVEN YEARS ago, it's not acceptable for any of them to have degraded since then?
I can only assume that you're as dim as the monitors you're complaining about.
RTFA:
It's not so amazing if you think about it. NASA spends enormous resources on reliability. Your router, cable modem, and toaster are all mass-produced at more or less the lowest possible cost, with no redundancy, and often with built-in obsolescence in mind.
I assume that's because it's not incorporated as a for-profit entity. I guess that's what my question boils down to: is one of the determining factors for "intended for ... commercial advantage" whether an entity is incorporated for profit? For example, there are "universities" like DeVry in the U.S., which is "one of the three major players in the private, for-profit post secondary education sector in the North America" (from here). So would DeVry be unable to use non-commercial Creative Commons material, whereas other universities would? And is this something that's clearly determined by precedent?
This is a serious question, I'd be interested in any informed replies.
Other replies have pointed out the size discrepancy as partly explaining the US cell issues. The other issue is historical: the US was a cellphone pioneer, and when technology changes, the substantial existing infrastructure investment has to be dealt with. Smaller countries, coming later to the game, have a big advantage.
BTW, nothing you wrote seems like a concrete basis for rejecting many worlds. All that a many worlds hypothesis has to say is that for every quantum event which has multiple outcomes, multiple universes are spawned. The resulting explosion of universes probably defines a new kind of infinity, but so what? It doesn't really affect the math in any one universe.
Read a book like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). Not only does it teach you ways of doing things, it also teaches you ways of thinking about and analyzing those things, i.e. it should increase your understanding of the languages you have to work with. The biggest lesson the more academic languages have to teach has little to do with the languages themselves, and everything to do with gaining an understanding of the underlying concepts.
I'm not even a huge believer in strong AI, or at least in its medium-term practical achievability. I just don't think Penrose contributed anything useful to the debate - he mainly muddied things so that now he comes up in discussions about the subject, when the content of the book doesn't really justify such attention. Penrose exploited his reputation to create a soapbox for his personal ideology - kind of like Mel Gibson making "The Passion of the Christ".
If you see this sort of thing as defying tradition, that says much more about you and the circles you move in than it does about people in general.
I do think that in general, intelligent people are less likely to blindly follow tradition. That's another role for tradition, which is to tell unoriginal people how to behave. It's no surprise that some /. readers are making their own traditions.
I'm not claiming the OP is right, I was just curious about where he might be coming from.
In any case, the issue is not just "asking for ID" - it's the police officer using intimidating tactics on a citizen in order to convince them that they are required to do something by law which in fact, they are not required to do. Strictly speaking, that probably is an offense of some kind, although the penalty is likely to be on the order of a reprimand.