There is a flaw in your reasoning: you assume that because you can charge a certain amount of money for doing something, you could charge the same amount for doing anything, which seems unlikely. If you are an educated, experienced software developer, for instance, opposed to an encyclopedist, chances are, noone would be willing to pay you as much for writing Wikipedia articles as your clients do for your programming (or whatever).
Thus, if you were only in it for the money, you wouldn't be writing Wikipedia articles—you would work longer hours doing what you normally do instead, making more money and working more (economically) efficiently.
That means, to calculate the economic value of your and others' contributions to Wikipedia, you can't just multiply the numer of hours spent updating Wikipedia with the hourly wage that the contributors would make performing their usual work. Rather, you would have to compute how much it would cost to recreate Wikipedia using paid contributors, which is surely vastly lower.
Whether the result of such a computation would justify placing ads on Wikipedia is another issue altogether, of course.
Writing larger amounts of code is not the only way to be more productive. Another way is to write an equal amount of code that does more work, i.e. moving to a higher-level programming language. Think moving from C to Java, from Java to Python, from Python to whatever comes next.
Faster computers will take care of the performance hit of using higher-level languages and alleviate the need of optimizing software, making it yet faster (i.e. cheaper) to produce. Higher-level languages will also reduce the number of bugs, further increasing productivity.
Speaking of mod_rewrite, do you know how it scales? Can it be used on a website with millions of users without significantly increasing load? Surely, the answer to this question will depend at least in part on the complexity of your rewrite rules, but do you know if there are some public load tests or guidelines? Thanks!
Placing your software in the public domain is not as easy as you might think. See this article by Larry Rosen in Linux Journal for instance: Why the Public Domain Isn't a License.
He was talking about local security, not physical security. A local security problem is exploitable by non-root users for privilege escalation (i.e. becoming root). The typical local security problem is a setuid binary with a security flaw that cannot be accessed from the network (like he said).
I don't want to confirm your claim that 2.6 is unstable, because for me it hasn't been. But either way, different people have different needs. While I'm using Linux on servers (and I'm happy with its stability), I also want to have support for all the hardware in my laptop when it comes out, not two years later, when I'm ready to sell it and upgrade to a new one (with yet more unsupported hardware).
With the new 2.6 development model, I mostly have this kind of support. In 2.4, I didn't.
Technically you are correct. However, these days most Europeans and European parties who call themselves liberal, including the Swedish party Folkpartiet (people's party) that was referenced earlier in this thread, are actually social liberals, which is closer to the American liberals than to libertarians.
Before wishing too much, though, please note that in Sweden, we don't even have a libertarian party, and most people have no clue that there is a thing like libertarianism. We also have the highest taxes of the world. Our gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita is only 71 % of the US'. Source: List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita.
Sorry, I'm not seeing this. The patents are a list which has O(1) insertion time once a patent is approved. Rejection is also O(1). Comparison of two patents takes some fixed value, C. In order to approve or reject a patent, the examiner has to iterate over each element (ie. n times) with overhead C for each element. That makes the complexity of "submit_patent_for_approval(my_patent)" O(C * n) = O(n).
Then we agree. I thought you were talking of the whole patent system, processing n patents/ideas, each requiring O(n) (or O(f(n))) time. Then the system as a whole would scale worse than linearly as n grows.
However, one thing is clear: the problem is one of scaling a centralized system. Each patent that comes in requires decoding from legalese, and comparison with every other patent in the system that was ever recorded for prior art. For you programmers out there, that's an O(n) algorithm. 'n' is very large nowadays. 'n' will continue getting larger. Without managing this complexity in some sort of structured fashion, it will inevitably become unmangeable, just like any poorly chosen algorithm. If this is the best we can hope to do, then we have to scale our efforts at O(n) to keep up with the growth (funding, man power, etc.).
It might be worse than O(n). If n is the number of patents (or ideas), the patent examiner may require O(n) time to search for prior art for each submitted patent. The complexity of the whole system would then be O(n^2).
On the other hand, the examiner might not require linear time (i.e. looking at every previous patent/idea) to examine an application, in which case the total complexity would be O(n*f(n)) for some function f (denoting the complexity of examining one application for prior art) that grows slower than n. It would still be worse than O(n).
Good encryption or not, I'd be more worried about the recent moves of the FCC to allow law enforcement virtual wiretap access.
Encryption is exactly what we should worry about. As long as there is good end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter how much the authorities want to listen in on your conversation. Wiretap access will do them no good, unless you have really powerful enemies and NSA knows things the public doesn't, in which case you're out of luck anyway.
Ssh! Don't try to apply logic here. We prefer complex technological solutions that will work only under certain conditions designed to meet threats we have already seen. Somehow this makes us feel safer than general preparations to deal with any number of unspecified threats or emergencies which might arise.
No, the problem is not with the validator's parser. The "&" character has specific meaning in SGML and XML. It is used to start an entity reference. If you want a verbatim apersand you need to use "&".
For those who are interested in the guilds in history, it might be worth noting the following:
They began as business alliances that through their increasing wealth eventually brought into law their privelleged right to a monopoly on certain areas. Sounds familiar?
They used their influence in Europe to choose local leaders, dissolve town councils that interfered with them, etc. Sound familiar?
They were frequently criticised for interfering with free trade and innovation. Sound familiar?
One of their best known critics was the arch-prince of Capitalism, Adam Smith. Well, Adam Smith is dead, but I believe he would have found modern corporate practices like this to be just as anti-capitalistic as the guilds.
All of what you say can also be said about trade unions, by the way—at least in regions like Sweden, where trade unions wield a lot of power and is tightly linked to the dominant political party.
This is one of those cases where some of the people that want devices like these have absolutely no idea how to use them correctly. To me, it's like handing the keys to a Ferrari to a 12 year old. ALL of my neighbors have open access points, so whenever people come over to my house with wireless equipment, I don't even bother to modify my network to let them in - I just tell them to sit by a window and inevitably they get all the bandwidth they need.
One could argue that corporations pay taxes, too—but I agree: end corporate welfare as well as protectionism, whether it's for the supposed benefit of workers, firms or both.
Great quote, but this goes for the people complaining about out-sourcing and global competition, too. I'm sure Heinlein would concur that individuals crying for increased economic protectionism (including limits on immigration) when faced with competition for jobs is just as bad as corporations crying for more corporate welfare and legislation to protect their failing business models when faced with new technology.
Mobile IP provides an efficient, scalable mechanism for node mobility within the Internet. Using Mobile IP, nodes may change their point-of-attachment to the Internet without changing their IP address. This allows them to maintain transport and higher-layer connections while moving. Node mobility is realized without the need to propagate host-specific routes throughout the Internet routing fabric.
Open source did not create IM, but they copied it to death. How does Jabber and the lot innovate?
Ever heard of talk, Zephyr or IRC? Zephyr provided decentralized networks and cryptographically secure authentication (via Kerberos) of the origin of messages in 1987, something most (all?) proprietary IM protocols still don't do today.
As for the innovativeness of Jabber, please have a look at the list of Jabber Enhancement Proposals. There are quite a few neat things in there.
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There is a flaw in your reasoning: you assume that because you can charge a certain amount of money for doing something, you could charge the same amount for doing anything, which seems unlikely. If you are an educated, experienced software developer, for instance, opposed to an encyclopedist, chances are, noone would be willing to pay you as much for writing Wikipedia articles as your clients do for your programming (or whatever).
Thus, if you were only in it for the money, you wouldn't be writing Wikipedia articles—you would work longer hours doing what you normally do instead, making more money and working more (economically) efficiently.
That means, to calculate the economic value of your and others' contributions to Wikipedia, you can't just multiply the numer of hours spent updating Wikipedia with the hourly wage that the contributors would make performing their usual work. Rather, you would have to compute how much it would cost to recreate Wikipedia using paid contributors, which is surely vastly lower.
Whether the result of such a computation would justify placing ads on Wikipedia is another issue altogether, of course.
Writing larger amounts of code is not the only way to be more productive. Another way is to write an equal amount of code that does more work, i.e. moving to a higher-level programming language. Think moving from C to Java, from Java to Python, from Python to whatever comes next.
Faster computers will take care of the performance hit of using higher-level languages and alleviate the need of optimizing software, making it yet faster (i.e. cheaper) to produce. Higher-level languages will also reduce the number of bugs, further increasing productivity.
Ok, thanks! I'll probably just have to test it. :)
Speaking of mod_rewrite, do you know how it scales? Can it be used on a website with millions of users without significantly increasing load? Surely, the answer to this question will depend at least in part on the complexity of your rewrite rules, but do you know if there are some public load tests or guidelines? Thanks!
Placing your software in the public domain is not as easy as you might think. See this article by Larry Rosen in Linux Journal for instance: Why the Public Domain Isn't a License.
But the webcam-based scanner tool won't work on anything besides Mac OS X and Windows because it requires Flash 8. :/
He was talking about local security, not physical security. A local security problem is exploitable by non-root users for privilege escalation (i.e. becoming root). The typical local security problem is a setuid binary with a security flaw that cannot be accessed from the network (like he said).
I don't want to confirm your claim that 2.6 is unstable, because for me it hasn't been. But either way, different people have different needs. While I'm using Linux on servers (and I'm happy with its stability), I also want to have support for all the hardware in my laptop when it comes out, not two years later, when I'm ready to sell it and upgrade to a new one (with yet more unsupported hardware).
With the new 2.6 development model, I mostly have this kind of support. In 2.4, I didn't.
Technically you are correct. However, these days most Europeans and European parties who call themselves liberal, including the Swedish party Folkpartiet (people's party) that was referenced earlier in this thread, are actually social liberals , which is closer to the American liberals than to libertarians.
FYI: libertarianism, Libertarian Party. Libertarianism does not mean what you think it means.
In the Swedish general elections of 2002, 71.1 +/- 6.7 % of males aged 18 to 29 participated. Source: Electoral Participation in the 2002 General Election (PDF).
Before wishing too much, though, please note that in Sweden, we don't even have a libertarian party, and most people have no clue that there is a thing like libertarianism. We also have the highest taxes of the world. Our gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita is only 71 % of the US'. Source: List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita.
Then we agree. I thought you were talking of the whole patent system, processing n patents/ideas, each requiring O(n) (or O(f(n))) time. Then the system as a whole would scale worse than linearly as n grows.
It might be worse than O(n). If n is the number of patents (or ideas), the patent examiner may require O(n) time to search for prior art for each submitted patent. The complexity of the whole system would then be O(n^2).
On the other hand, the examiner might not require linear time (i.e. looking at every previous patent/idea) to examine an application, in which case the total complexity would be O(n*f(n)) for some function f (denoting the complexity of examining one application for prior art) that grows slower than n. It would still be worse than O(n).
Perhaps you should read up on Ray Kurzweil before you say the man has no ideas himself.
Encryption is exactly what we should worry about. As long as there is good end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter how much the authorities want to listen in on your conversation. Wiretap access will do them no good, unless you have really powerful enemies and NSA knows things the public doesn't, in which case you're out of luck anyway.
Exactly! This is a typical example of what Bruce Schneier calls movie-plot threats.
No, the problem is not with the validator's parser. The "&" character has specific meaning in SGML and XML. It is used to start an entity reference. If you want a verbatim apersand you need to use "&".
Why wouldn't that hypothetical Indian just run the bot himself?
One could argue that corporations pay taxes, too—but I agree: end corporate welfare as well as protectionism, whether it's for the supposed benefit of workers, firms or both.
Great quote, but this goes for the people complaining about out-sourcing and global competition, too. I'm sure Heinlein would concur that individuals crying for increased economic protectionism (including limits on immigration) when faced with competition for jobs is just as bad as corporations crying for more corporate welfare and legislation to protect their failing business models when faced with new technology.
That's why mobile IP was created:
Ever heard of talk, Zephyr or IRC? Zephyr provided decentralized networks and cryptographically secure authentication (via Kerberos) of the origin of messages in 1987, something most (all?) proprietary IM protocols still don't do today.
As for the innovativeness of Jabber, please have a look at the list of Jabber Enhancement Proposals. There are quite a few neat things in there.You mentioned "googler" yourself.