My original switch, in 1999, was motivated by fairly standard Stallman-esque moral oposition to proprietary software.
About that time, I was starting to write more serious code, and quickly discovered that hacking on GNU/Linux is a lot more fun than hacking on Windows. So that made it easier to stick with GNU/Linux during some of the frustrations. (And there were plenty.)
Since about 2002, Linux frustration is a rare, rare thing. Debian (and now Ubuntu) just make sense. Software installation (and updating) is a breeze, system configuration too. Programs usually work like you'd expect them to work, and most of the time, if they don't you can change them easily. I've never lost data in an application crash, and I've never even experienced a system crash.
These days, it drives me up the wall when I have to use Windows in the computer lab on campus. Just last week, I lost two hours' work in Word because Internet Explorer crashed. I have absolutely no desire to swtich back.
I suppose the upshot is: I really do believe that GNU/Linux (and especially Debian) is manifestly superior to Windows. But switching still is (and might always be) enough of a challenge that some motive other than a desire for the best OS must be present to get you through the transition.
Try going to a movie in Sacramento, CA some time. It is impossible to go to a movie there (even indie/arthouse kinds of movies) without nearby people having full-volume conversations, answering or making cell-phone calls, narrating the movie to their partners, and so on. It's the rudest movie-going culture I've ever seen. I love going to the movies, but I won't go in Sacramento any longer, because it is plain basic impossible to enjoy them there.
No one has suggested modifying the GPL to ban porting software to Windows. This isn't a question of freedom at all. It's a question of good and bad ideas.
How does it happen that, in so many arguments, person P expressing the opinion that activity A is a bad activity in which to engage is treated as person P stripping everyone of the freedom to do A? It's an obvious strawman. Don't do it.
I am in X all the time, but I still use abcde for ripping/compressing CDs. It has the sane-est defaults of any ripper I've yet seen, and is eaiser to use than grip.
First, as most any professor will tell you, there are plagiarism-friendly and plagiarism-resistant assignments. Ask your kids to turn in an essay on what they did last summer, and you'll be flooded with rip-offs. Ask them to write about a specific and interesting question, relevant to the content of the course, and they will simply have trouble finding an essay to buy that answers the question.
Second, those profs who *have* to ask generic, plagiarism-friendly questions will be much better at identifying rip-offs than some for-pay service. More often than not, a cheater's paper sticks out because the content or the style jars so badly with what he has turned in previously. When a student who has turned in nonesense up to this point turns in a perfectly lucid paper, I am immediately suspicious.
But what if, you say, the professor has so many students that he can't get a feel for their writing? Well, this is a problem. But the solution is to fix class sizes, not to hire a private company to run regexes at a huge markup. The kids in the article are exaclty right: this program is about reducing the number of professors McGill has to hire. Not about improving the quality of student work.
If a copyright holder sends an online service provider a good-faith notification that they believe content availible on one of the OSP's pages is infringing, the DMCA requires the OSP to promptly remove the content.
So Best Buy is claiming that their price lists are copyrighted, and the DMCA requires anyone posting those prices to take them down, should Best Buy send them a letter.
The DMCA was designed to encourage a quick response on the part of OSPs. In reality, it chills speech by requiring OSPs to expose themselves to outrageous financial liability should they want to go to court to argue that their content is not infringing.
Most academics chafe at the fact that the publishers maintain such a stranglehold on the content they publish. Trust me, it pisses of Professor X that others who would like to include an article or chapter of his in a course packet have to pay outrageous licensing fees. (This isn't only because he doesn't see a dime from those fees, but also because he believes the free exchange of ideas is crucial to progress--one of the reasons he is publishing in the first place.)
So if amazon's service allows students to get isolated chapters or articles, without paying for them, it will be a boon for academic authors and a setback from academic publishers. Why is it the publishers who are supporting amazon's full text search and the Authors Guild that is crying foul?
The obvious answer is that the AG does not represent academic authors. The real question, then, is: why does the email from AG specifically mention college students and their dark desire to get single chapters without having to pay through the nose for them?
I wonder if there isn't some kind of disconnect between the Authors Guild and the authors that make up the guild.
I don't think most authors want people to be forced to buy their book in order to get at a couple of isolated pages. Most authors want people to buy the book because they like the book, and think it is worth owning a copy.
True reference books are doomed, appropriately, in the age of the internet. I no longer need a paper dictionary when I can use dictionary.com or get access to the OED through my university. But amazon's new feature is not responsible for the fact that definitions and other discrete pieces of factual information are more easily looked up online than on paper.
Everything from cookbooks to novels, whose gestalt quality is made up of more than simply the number of discrete facts they collect, are safe. You only want one page out of my published materials? Fine, take it. Heck, I'll make you a photocopy myself. You think what I have written, as a whole, has some value? Then by all means, buy it.
I have similar problems working in areas I just don't much care about. If you are working on something you really like, the Internet and such won't be a distraction, because they aren't as much fun as your schoolwork. Try some different fields. Maybe you'll have better luck studying history or biology than CS.
For me, it is philosophy. I still love to hack when the opportunity presents itself. But as for CS as an academic discipline... since I discovered philosophy I've never looked back.
What I'm trying to get at with this question is how the government interprets the AHRA. Remember that, if it is for friends, I am completely within my legal rights to copy an album and give it to them, whether or not they ever return it. (Even the RIAA buys this so long, they say, as the copy is made onto an analog tape.) What I want to know is, does the fact that I'm copying onto CD instead of tape make the act of copying illegal in the eyes of the government. So whether or not the friend returns the copied CD isn't relevant.
If your gut reaction is to think "well, it's illegal to copy music for a friend if the friend keeps it," realize that this position embraces an erosion of individual rights. Prior to the media and legal blitz by the RIAA, I could copy an album for a friend or family member without risking prosecution.
The RIAA has made it clear that it believes the Home Audio Recording Act is narrowly focused on analog copies, and that *any* digital copying of music is copyright infringement. This seems to fly in the face of fair use. A couple of concrete examples to focus the questions:
Whereas I used to make mix tapes to send home to my family, I now make mix CDs. The RIAA thinks this is illegal. Do you?
I regularly copy CDs to listen to in the car, mostly to minimize the loss if the car is broken in to. The RIAA thinks this is illegal. Do you?
When my friends ask to borrow a CD, I generally burn them a copy, rather than risk them losing or destroying the original. The RIAA thinks this is illegal. Do you?
If this plan were to actually work as promised, it would put the RIAA labels out of business.
The only reason the RIAA is still in business is that they are good at manufacturing hits. (boy bands, Brittany/Christina, rage rock.) The only reason they can manufacture hits is that they have near-total control over the means of distribution (radio). They are fighting hard to keep the current way of things. This P2P radio plan would destroy the current way of things.
Suppose a friend tells me that Australian Post-Industrial Tribal Ambient music kicks ass. Currently, the only way I can find out if he is right is to try to download some tracks illegally off of the p2p networks. Even my ability to do this much has the RIAA hopping mad. Now suppose I can have easy access to many many times more songs (that is one advantage of a central database) for $1 a month. I will find out that my friend is in fact right, and there is no chance that I will ever go back to Matchbox 20 and the Dixie Chicks.
A viable and legal means of wide distribution of independent labels and artists spells the death of the RIAA. They know it, and we all need to realize it, too. It maybe be that paying them heir $0.0007 royalty is the only way to kill 'em. So be it.
I found an argument that appears to give pause to some of those who are convinced that violent video games breed violent children. Show them Crazy Taxi.
For those who haven't played it, Crazy Taxi is a game in which your goal is to get fares to their destination as quickly as possible. To accomplish this, you take shortcuts across crowded parks, run cars off the road, and send pedestrians flying. The question is, should cabbies be forbidden from purchasing this game? Do you really think that, after playing this game, cabbies are going to "draw inspiration" from it and go rampaging across rooftops in their taxis? It turns out that not many people think so.
1) As many people have pointed and will continue to point out, classifying the report won't make any difference because people can re-create the work. And this wouldn't take much effort, because an attacker has no need to map the entire US, they can pick whatever area is convenient for them.
2) Slowing down internet connections doesn't scare people. Temporarily cutting corporate offices off from the grid doesn't scare anyone (save, perhaps, the CEO). Think how much more terror-bang a terrorist could get for his buck with a 9mm in mall. That would terrify people and significantly damage the economy. Attacking communications infrastructure isn't "terrorism," it's something else. It's guerilla warfare, directed against an economy rather than a person, I suppose. If our "war" descends to this point, we are totally screwed, as it is impossible to defend (or even think of) all the economically "soft" targets.
3) In the end, the security of all civillians and civillian infrastructure depends on good will. Well, that, and fear of punishment. But the latter doesn't apply to acts of international sabatoge and/or murder. I am sick of all this talk about defending our civillian infrastructure, securing the homeland, etc. It can't happen. Until there is a soldier in body armor with a rifle every few yards down every street in the USA, this goal will not be achieved. That isn't the society any of us want to live in. We haven't put any effort into civillian security up to this point, and I say: Good for us. We didn't need to, because the general good will of human beings was protecting us. Our effort would be better spent restoring *that* state of things, rather than moving toward the soldier-on-every-corner model. For those who would like to call me naive, I ask you: why has there not been an attack on soft infrastructure before? Why has there never been a wave of men with 9mms in malls? These things are undefended. The only reason it hasn't happened is that no one ever wanted to do it.
Three good reasons why it is a waste of time and effort to classify this fellow's dissertation. I'll let others cover the reasons why classifying it is damaging to security, an open society, and democracy.
There is no need to freak out about this being some sort of attack on open source software or agonize over what the unnamed commercial product used for comparison was.
The article seems to indicate that the.51 error density for "commercial software" is talking about commercial software in the abstract. Presumably, this isn't the error density of some secret web server, but the average density of all the commercial products they've analyzed so far.
This report is simply an attempt to prove a simple hypothesis about OSS: it gets increasinly refined as it matures.
Reasoning believes they've proved the hypothesis because Apache, a middle-aged project, I suppose, has an error density comparable to commercial software, while the TCP/IP stack, a mature project, has a significantly lower density.
This isn't inteded to be a comparison of web servers (come on, people, *of course* they didn't have access to IIS) it is intended to be a mildy interesting observation about the life-cycle of open source software.
It would be a lot more interesting if we could see an analysis of whether or not commercial software goes through a similar maturing process. Maybe commercial products also grow refined with age. Maybe not. If so, which matures faster?
Your premise is incorrect. A government does not need the approval of its people.
Denial is not a valid argument.;-) Besides, as I have already said, I have borrowed this premise from Hobbes and Machiavelli, among others. If I don't deserve a better response than "It's obvious that Saddam/Taliban/Saudi Royalty doesn't have the support of his people," surely H and M do. If your thesis is correct, and the powerful few really can subjugate the many weak, then the contractarian basis of American democracy is turned on its head. I don't get the impression that in advocating for war in Iraq your goal is to assail the foundations of American democracy. But it seems to me you've found a clever way to do it, nevertheless.
Democracies have never sprouted like weeds. Ever.
Who imposed democracy in ancient Greece? England? America? Europe? Your reading of western history must be dramatically different from mine. Democracy has been mutating and spreading like a delightful disease at least since Athens. It has never needed to be imposed at gunpoint. The fact that it was at one point in German and Japanese history does not mean they wouldn't have come to it on their own.
Are you saying that we... should back down from our demands on Iraq which have stood since 1991, and which Iraq has accepted in full, because they're a lot to ask?
No. I'm saying that, when disarmament is imposed at gunpoint, it is naive to expect Iraq to smile and say "thank you sir, may I have another." There is going to be tension, unpleasantness, anger, and machination on both sides of this thing. Whining that "they aren't being has helpful as they could be" is mostly a waste of time. They don't want to disarm. The international community wants to force them to disarm. We certainly shouldn't back down, but we may as well stop complaining, and start looking for ways to make the inspections as effective as possible.
According to defectors, Iraq's nuclear program in 1994 was stronger than it had been before the war
Defector testimony? Really? This sort of testimony has its place, but when it flatly contradicts the findings of IAEA, I know which is the definition of unreliable, and which is not.
I think I've muddied my own message here. To be clear: the guidelines of the law are not congruent with the guidelines of right conduct. Perhaps I was overly glib in describing our legal case against Iraq as a "loophole." What I am trying to say is that, in pressing on this legal right, we are exploiting a gap between the boundaries of legal and right action. And yes, I'm fully aware that we have been continually engaged in "military activities" in Iraq since 1991. Policing an agreed-upon no-fly zone is, as far as I can tell, both legal and right. Invading, overthrowing, and occupying the capitol is another matter.
I'm not sure yet just how ready I am to assent to the thesis that inspections are useless when the inspectee is unwilling. My uncertainty springs from two sources. First, in addition to willingness, trust between parties is needed. Yes, South Africa appeared willing in their disarmament. But if we didn't trust that appearances reflected reality, we never would have been satisfied with the inspectors declarations; and for good reason: it is impossible to prove constructively a negative. In the end, we are really only confident that SA disarmed because they said they did. Can you imagine any scenario in which the US would declare Iraq's intentions genuine? Did the president deliberately set us on a path he could never be satisfied with when he originally supported inspections?
Second, inspections worked pretty well from '91-'98, with no real help from Iraq. In fact, they worked a heck of a lot better than the war itself did. Something near 80% of stockpiles destroyed due to inspections, right? And even if inspections aren't good at finding secret caches of buried weapons, they seem pretty good at preventing new development. If IAEA is right, and Iraq has no nuke program, they won't be developing one as long as inspectors are there. It worked well in North Korea. I do agree that it would be a lot easier with genuine Iraqi compliance, but that's a lot to expect of any country in a region so volatile. Let alone from a country with an, as you have pointed out, ambitious dictator.
The natural order is for the strong to subjugate the weak. If we don't impose freedom and democracy on Iraq, it will never happen.
Wow, a level of cynicism unmatched in the press! I disagree, of course. Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and most of the founding fathers also disagree. Hobbes is particularly convincing on this point: there is no man so strong that he can't be ganged up on and beaten; no man so clever that he can't be killed while he sleeps. Subjugation doesn't work without the complicity of the people. Given that any government must have the at-least-tacit approval of its people, what is so unnatural about democracy? It seems that the only requisites for democracy and freedom are prosperity and security from external threat. Any time these two things coexist, democracies sprout like weeds. And there are many vastly superior ways of bringing peace and prosperity to the middle east. Better than war and occupation, that is.
Surprisingly, torture, imprisonment, and mass executions work extremely well as a subjucation strategy.
They can work against minorities, yes. I don't buy that a single man, or the Ba'ath party, can forcibly subjugate an entire country. See above authors.
Do you want to wait for them to connect all of those dots?
I know it is hard for you to believe, but yes. I'd at least like to see Iraq start to draw the lines. I suspect this is a point of fundamental dissagreement between us that can't possibly be resolved through discussion. I simply do not think that a risk a future really bad things is justification for present really bad things. Risk is part of living in the world. It can be a scary place. If everyone killed everyone who scared them, or presented a possible future risk, it would be an unliveable place.
First, let me say that I appreciate the thoroughness of your response. I enjoyed reading it.
[re: legal justification for war] You say that it is Mr. Powell's position that the Gulf War is technically in a state of temporary cease-fire, and Iraq is in violation of the terms of that cease-fire.
I concede this point, so long as there is due stress put on technically. Sure, the administration thinks they technically can go to war without being in clear violation of international law. If they thought this case was compelling--legally, yes, but especially morally--they wouldn't be engaged at the UN. I don't know anything about international law, so I can't really say whether or not Powell is technically right on this technical point, but I do believe that if he is, this is little more than exploiting a loophole. And this is the attitude that I think the Bush administration shares. After all, we have a new first-strike defense doctrine, a new foreign policy declaration, and months of debate at the UN, all to justify a war we are technically allowed to undertake anyway.
>>He had weapons that he didn't use. How is that a funny notion of deterence?
>Okay, I'll be more specific. You have a uselessly narrow notion of deterrence.
I want to push on this point a little more, because I think it is a major mistake to blur the lines between nuclear and chem/bio weapons, and between chem/bio and conventional weapons. To say a notion of deterrence that doesn't include all three levels of weapons is "uselessly narrow" is dangerous. Conflicts will happen periodically, and if they can be kept from escallating to chemical or nuclear conflicts, this is no small thing. Deterence of ABC weapons is certainly not useless. And I say again, our pre-Bush defense policies might well have deterred Iraq from a conventional attack, had those policies been clearly and consistently applied.
[re: the "relevance" of the UN] The UNSC, in this particular situation is damned either way. They did an inadequate job of enforcing previous resolutions, and this is a mark against them. However, it is the clear opinion of the majority that war is not, at least at the moment, the solution to the problem. If they flipflop and sign on to a war that only three members are pushing for, they will be irrelevant by virtue of becoming yes-men for the USA. This is a tough position for them to be in, and I at least partly blame incompetent diplomacy out of the USA. There had to be a way to allow the UNSC to correct past wrongs without having to completely subjugate itself to the whim of the US. Of course, as we see in your later points, disarmament is not the point here, which is probably why UNSC was not given the option of enhanced or more forecful inspections regimes.
[re: Saddam is ambitious] Granted. He is also living in a country that is completely incapable of acting on these ambitions. He has few weapons, no infrastructure, a small military of questionable loyalty, and a populace that, if we are to believe the news media, hates him. Continued inspections can insure that he doesn't develop new weapons, and IAEA has tentatively concluded that he is completely free of a nuclear program. As far as I'm concerned, he can be ambitious all he wants, so long as he doesn't have the weapons to make good on his ambitions. And all indications are that he currently does not.
[re: Saddam is evil] This, I think, is the most compelling argument for regime change. But this is completely independent of invasion and occupation. If he is as evil as you say, surely he must be widely hated. Surely it must be possible to encourage a popular uprising. Surely there must be thousands or millions in his own country who are plotting overthrow or assissination. Surely the Iraqi people are no less competent to decide when they've had enough than were, say, Americans in the late 18th century.
[re: bringing democracy to the middle east] I just watched president Bush's comments to American Enterprise, and got a kick out of his comparing the current state of things in Iraq to the state of Germany at the end of WWII. The salient difference, I think, is that Germany was a burgeoning democracy that was co-opted by a fascist dictator. In helping rebuild Germany, we were helping to restore the pre-Nazi way of things. (Has anyone really made the claim that German culture was incapable of accommodating democracy?) The same can't be said of Iraq. I am all for promoting and encouraging freedom and democracy around the world. But I do not believe these things can be externally imposed. It seems pretty clear that imposed democracy and enforced freedom are oxymorons from the start.
I truly hope I'm wrong about this last point. I would love to see the democratic virus catch in the middle east. I also wish this was the true motivation of the administration, and not a PR stunt. Then, it might be the case that some real care would be taken for the lives of Iraqi civilians.
And finally, I want to get back to issue of the first-strike policy. You say we need to re-define imminent. And you support it by citing the terrorist threat. I can see the claim with regards to terrorist, but again, I say it is a major error to lump states, which can be deterred, whose plots can be spied on, whose troop movements can be observed, together with terrorist groups. First strikes against proven terrorist training camps I wouldn't object to too loudly. First strikes against countries that might someday develop a weapon that they might someday decide to give to a terrorist group is not only morally wrong, it is bad public policy.
If you could have decimated the German Panzer brigades on the eve of the invasion of Poland, would it have been right or wrong?
No, countries are already broadly assumed to have the right to defend themselves from an imminent attack. An attack on German tank divisions on the eve of the invasion of Poland would have been fine, and we wouldn't have needed a Bush Doctrine to do it. But if we had bombed Berlin to ruble in 1932, when Hitler was ascendent, would that have been wrong? I think so. In the same way, if Saddam were amassing troops to invade another country (particular if that country were the US) it would be permissible to attack. Without the Bush Doctrine.
But more importantly, there's nothing pre-emptive about this war. This was started on August 2, 1990, remember? When Iraq invaded Kuwait. We went through a period of temporary cease-fire from April, 1991, to December, 1998, but since December, 1998, we've legally been in a state of all-out war.
Hmm. I don't think even the Bush administration agrees with you on this one. If they did, we wouldn't be at all engaged at the UN. The Gulf War ended with a surrender. The weapons inspectors left voluntarily in 1998. They are back on the ground now. There is absolutely nothing in any of that to justify the claim that the first war never ended.
You have a funny definition of "deterrence," I think. If Iraq was so deterred, how come they rolled their tanks into Kuwait City?
He had weapons that he didn't use. How is that a funny notion of deterence? We had nukes we didn't use in Vietnam. Why? because we were deterred by Soviet nukes. Is that a funny notion of deterence? With a little clairty in US foriegn policy at the time, we might have been able to deter Iraq from a conventional war, as well.
I don't understand how you could say that unless you grossly misunderstood either the India/Pakistan conflict or our reasons for invading Iraq.
Well, that is one of at least two possibilities. At the very least you can agree that India feels a much more clear and present danger from Pakistan (and vice-versa) than we feel from Iraq. And you will certainly agree that a pre-emptive strike by either party would be a very bad thing.
Allow me to turn the tables, if you will. You seem awfully convinced that this is a great idea for a war. Why? And please don't feed me any line about liberating the Iraqi people from an evil dictator (when has any country ever wanted to be "liberated" by an invading power?) or national security (when the threat to us is not from states, but from terrorist organizations). How is this war a good idea, either in a moral sense, or in a US'-best-interests sense?
Here is why I am totally opposed to this war: pre-emptive war is *always* wrong. There are a host of moral reasons to claim this--what I can't understand is why the president doesn't seem to grok the political reasons.
I think, perhaps, the single biggest mistake the Bush administration has made since taking power is in lumping states together with terrorist organizations under the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive strikes. The claimed reason for this doctrine is that terrorist organizations can't be deterred. This is almost certainly true. However, it is clear that Saddam/Iraq *can* be deterred. Recall that Iraq didn't use chem/bio weapons during the 1991 war, even though they had them. Why not? Because the military power of the US and the condemnation of the global community provided sufficent deterrent.
In proclaiming the US' willingness to strike first, the president has all but squandered the military's value as a deterent. When the US launches a pre-emptive invasion/occupation of Iraq, I strongly doubt that Saddam will refrain from using chem/bio weapons (assuming he has them.) The value of a "Big Stick" is that people fear beatings, so they listen when you speak softly. When you run around beating everyone who pisses you off, they have absolutely no incentive to listen to you.
This is a massively destabalizing doctrine. After all, India and Pakistan have much better reasons for invading one another than we have for invading Iraq. China has better reasons for invading Taiwan. The list goes on. If Bush is successful in conving the world that First Strike is a reasonable position for a civilized society to take, the world will become a much worse place.
There are many reasons why I am opposed to this particular war, but I hope this makes clear at least some of the reason why I am opposed to pre-emptive war categorically.
As far as I know, there is no archive of public domain movies available on the Net. Why not rent a stack of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin classics, rip 'em to DivX, and make the world a better place? I know I'd love to be able to download stuff like that from any of the P2P networks... maybe I should finally get around to buying a DVD-ROM drive...
Dyson sets up Joy's argument as a strawman, and then knocks it down in a manner that *still* isn't entirely convincing. It's a shame, as I would love to hear a well-considered reply to a generous reading of Joy.
The key thesis of Joy's thinking on technology is that *there are some technologies that aren't worth pursuing.* This suggestion is anethema to that class of technolophiles that insists that all technology is neutral, and it is only the individual uses of technology that can be called good or bad. Those who hold this position tend to believe that the pursuit of more powerful technology is basically a moral imperative, because it gives us more options, and more control of our lives. In my experience, this is the position natrually held by most scientists and engineers.
One problem with the belief that technology is value neutral is that the believers should be able to articulate a convincing argument for why we *shouldn't* have abandoned biological weapons research, or why, to use another example from Dyson's article, the international biological community shouldn't have voluntarily forbidden certain gene-splicing experiments. After all, these are merely researches into technology--and all such research gives us more options, and more control over our lives.
But this is a hard case to make. Most of us are glad that the US hasn't agressively pursued bioweapons for the last 30 years. Dyson conveniently avoids having to argue this case by saying: look how fantastic it is that these people censored themselves, and look at how bad Bill Joy is for wanting someone else to cesnor them. But, (at least as far as I understand him) Joy isn't advocating the interference of the UN in the affairs of scientists--he's calling on scientists to think about the likely effects of their research before they engage in it.
The upshot of the Dyson piece is that there are technologies that shouldn't be pursued. Joy agrees. Dyson creates a debate by putting fascist words into Joy's mouth--which makes him easier to argue against.
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My original switch, in 1999, was motivated by fairly standard Stallman-esque moral oposition to proprietary software.
About that time, I was starting to write more serious code, and quickly discovered that hacking on GNU/Linux is a lot more fun than hacking on Windows. So that made it easier to stick with GNU/Linux during some of the frustrations. (And there were plenty.)
Since about 2002, Linux frustration is a rare, rare thing. Debian (and now Ubuntu) just make sense. Software installation (and updating) is a breeze, system configuration too. Programs usually work like you'd expect them to work, and most of the time, if they don't you can change them easily. I've never lost data in an application crash, and I've never even experienced a system crash.
These days, it drives me up the wall when I have to use Windows in the computer lab on campus. Just last week, I lost two hours' work in Word because Internet Explorer crashed. I have absolutely no desire to swtich back.
I suppose the upshot is: I really do believe that GNU/Linux (and especially Debian) is manifestly superior to Windows. But switching still is (and might always be) enough of a challenge that some motive other than a desire for the best OS must be present to get you through the transition.
Try going to a movie in Sacramento, CA some time. It is impossible to go to a movie there (even indie/arthouse kinds of movies) without nearby people having full-volume conversations, answering or making cell-phone calls, narrating the movie to their partners, and so on. It's the rudest movie-going culture I've ever seen. I love going to the movies, but I won't go in Sacramento any longer, because it is plain basic impossible to enjoy them there.
Notorious. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
No one has suggested modifying the GPL to ban porting software to Windows. This isn't a question of freedom at all. It's a question of good and bad ideas.
How does it happen that, in so many arguments, person P expressing the opinion that activity A is a bad activity in which to engage is treated as person P stripping everyone of the freedom to do A? It's an obvious strawman. Don't do it.
I am in X all the time, but I still use abcde for ripping/compressing CDs. It has the sane-est defaults of any ripper I've yet seen, and is eaiser to use than grip.
First, as most any professor will tell you, there are plagiarism-friendly and plagiarism-resistant assignments. Ask your kids to turn in an essay on what they did last summer, and you'll be flooded with rip-offs. Ask them to write about a specific and interesting question, relevant to the content of the course, and they will simply have trouble finding an essay to buy that answers the question.
Second, those profs who *have* to ask generic, plagiarism-friendly questions will be much better at identifying rip-offs than some for-pay service. More often than not, a cheater's paper sticks out because the content or the style jars so badly with what he has turned in previously. When a student who has turned in nonesense up to this point turns in a perfectly lucid paper, I am immediately suspicious.
But what if, you say, the professor has so many students that he can't get a feel for their writing? Well, this is a problem. But the solution is to fix class sizes, not to hire a private company to run regexes at a huge markup. The kids in the article are exaclty right: this program is about reducing the number of professors McGill has to hire. Not about improving the quality of student work.
If a copyright holder sends an online service provider a good-faith notification that they believe content availible on one of the OSP's pages is infringing, the DMCA requires the OSP to promptly remove the content.
So Best Buy is claiming that their price lists are copyrighted, and the DMCA requires anyone posting those prices to take them down, should Best Buy send them a letter.
The DMCA was designed to encourage a quick response on the part of OSPs. In reality, it chills speech by requiring OSPs to expose themselves to outrageous financial liability should they want to go to court to argue that their content is not infringing.
Most academics chafe at the fact that the publishers maintain such a stranglehold on the content they publish. Trust me, it pisses of Professor X that others who would like to include an article or chapter of his in a course packet have to pay outrageous licensing fees. (This isn't only because he doesn't see a dime from those fees, but also because he believes the free exchange of ideas is crucial to progress--one of the reasons he is publishing in the first place.)
So if amazon's service allows students to get isolated chapters or articles, without paying for them, it will be a boon for academic authors and a setback from academic publishers. Why is it the publishers who are supporting amazon's full text search and the Authors Guild that is crying foul?
The obvious answer is that the AG does not represent academic authors. The real question, then, is: why does the email from AG specifically mention college students and their dark desire to get single chapters without having to pay through the nose for them?
I wonder if there isn't some kind of disconnect between the Authors Guild and the authors that make up the guild.
I don't think most authors want people to be forced to buy their book in order to get at a couple of isolated pages. Most authors want people to buy the book because they like the book, and think it is worth owning a copy.
True reference books are doomed, appropriately, in the age of the internet. I no longer need a paper dictionary when I can use dictionary.com or get access to the OED through my university. But amazon's new feature is not responsible for the fact that definitions and other discrete pieces of factual information are more easily looked up online than on paper.
Everything from cookbooks to novels, whose gestalt quality is made up of more than simply the number of discrete facts they collect, are safe. You only want one page out of my published materials? Fine, take it. Heck, I'll make you a photocopy myself. You think what I have written, as a whole, has some value? Then by all means, buy it.
I have similar problems working in areas I just don't much care about. If you are working on something you really like, the Internet and such won't be a distraction, because they aren't as much fun as your schoolwork. Try some different fields. Maybe you'll have better luck studying history or biology than CS.
For me, it is philosophy. I still love to hack when the opportunity presents itself. But as for CS as an academic discipline... since I discovered philosophy I've never looked back.
What I'm trying to get at with this question is how the government interprets the AHRA. Remember that, if it is for friends, I am completely within my legal rights to copy an album and give it to them, whether or not they ever return it. (Even the RIAA buys this so long, they say, as the copy is made onto an analog tape.) What I want to know is, does the fact that I'm copying onto CD instead of tape make the act of copying illegal in the eyes of the government. So whether or not the friend returns the copied CD isn't relevant.
If your gut reaction is to think "well, it's illegal to copy music for a friend if the friend keeps it," realize that this position embraces an erosion of individual rights. Prior to the media and legal blitz by the RIAA, I could copy an album for a friend or family member without risking prosecution.
The RIAA has made it clear that it believes the Home Audio Recording Act is narrowly focused on analog copies, and that *any* digital copying of music is copyright infringement. This seems to fly in the face of fair use. A couple of concrete examples to focus the questions:
Whereas I used to make mix tapes to send home to my family, I now make mix CDs. The RIAA thinks this is illegal. Do you?
I regularly copy CDs to listen to in the car, mostly to minimize the loss if the car is broken in to. The RIAA thinks this is illegal. Do you?
When my friends ask to borrow a CD, I generally burn them a copy, rather than risk them losing or destroying the original. The RIAA thinks this is illegal. Do you?
If this plan were to actually work as promised, it would put the RIAA labels out of business.
The only reason the RIAA is still in business is that they are good at manufacturing hits. (boy bands, Brittany/Christina, rage rock.) The only reason they can manufacture hits is that they have near-total control over the means of distribution (radio). They are fighting hard to keep the current way of things. This P2P radio plan would destroy the current way of things.
Suppose a friend tells me that Australian Post-Industrial Tribal Ambient music kicks ass. Currently, the only way I can find out if he is right is to try to download some tracks illegally off of the p2p networks. Even my ability to do this much has the RIAA hopping mad. Now suppose I can have easy access to many many times more songs (that is one advantage of a central database) for $1 a month. I will find out that my friend is in fact right, and there is no chance that I will ever go back to Matchbox 20 and the Dixie Chicks.
A viable and legal means of wide distribution of independent labels and artists spells the death of the RIAA. They know it, and we all need to realize it, too. It maybe be that paying them heir $0.0007 royalty is the only way to kill 'em. So be it.
I found an argument that appears to give pause to some of those who are convinced that violent video games breed violent children. Show them Crazy Taxi.
For those who haven't played it, Crazy Taxi is a game in which your goal is to get fares to their destination as quickly as possible. To accomplish this, you take shortcuts across crowded parks, run cars off the road, and send pedestrians flying. The question is, should cabbies be forbidden from purchasing this game? Do you really think that, after playing this game, cabbies are going to "draw inspiration" from it and go rampaging across rooftops in their taxis? It turns out that not many people think so.
1) As many people have pointed and will continue to point out, classifying the report won't make any difference because people can re-create the work. And this wouldn't take much effort, because an attacker has no need to map the entire US, they can pick whatever area is convenient for them.
2) Slowing down internet connections doesn't scare people. Temporarily cutting corporate offices off from the grid doesn't scare anyone (save, perhaps, the CEO). Think how much more terror-bang a terrorist could get for his buck with a 9mm in mall. That would terrify people and significantly damage the economy. Attacking communications infrastructure isn't "terrorism," it's something else. It's guerilla warfare, directed against an economy rather than a person, I suppose. If our "war" descends to this point, we are totally screwed, as it is impossible to defend (or even think of) all the economically "soft" targets.
3) In the end, the security of all civillians and civillian infrastructure depends on good will. Well, that, and fear of punishment. But the latter doesn't apply to acts of international sabatoge and/or murder. I am sick of all this talk about defending our civillian infrastructure, securing the homeland, etc. It can't happen. Until there is a soldier in body armor with a rifle every few yards down every street in the USA, this goal will not be achieved. That isn't the society any of us want to live in. We haven't put any effort into civillian security up to this point, and I say: Good for us. We didn't need to, because the general good will of human beings was protecting us. Our effort would be better spent restoring *that* state of things, rather than moving toward the soldier-on-every-corner model. For those who would like to call me naive, I ask you: why has there not been an attack on soft infrastructure before? Why has there never been a wave of men with 9mms in malls? These things are undefended. The only reason it hasn't happened is that no one ever wanted to do it.
Three good reasons why it is a waste of time and effort to classify this fellow's dissertation. I'll let others cover the reasons why classifying it is damaging to security, an open society, and democracy.
There is no need to freak out about this being some sort of attack on open source software or agonize over what the unnamed commercial product used for comparison was.
.51 error density for "commercial software" is talking about commercial software in the abstract. Presumably, this isn't the error density of some secret web server, but the average density of all the commercial products they've analyzed so far.
The article seems to indicate that the
This report is simply an attempt to prove a simple hypothesis about OSS: it gets increasinly refined as it matures.
Reasoning believes they've proved the hypothesis because Apache, a middle-aged project, I suppose, has an error density comparable to commercial software, while the TCP/IP stack, a mature project, has a significantly lower density.
This isn't inteded to be a comparison of web servers (come on, people, *of course* they didn't have access to IIS) it is intended to be a mildy interesting observation about the life-cycle of open source software.
It would be a lot more interesting if we could see an analysis of whether or not commercial software goes through a similar maturing process. Maybe commercial products also grow refined with age. Maybe not. If so, which matures faster?
It isn't that hard to plug in words that make sense while preserving her delicate lyrical cadence. For instance:
It's a black fly in your chardonnay
It's a death row pardon two minutes too late
Isn't it a bummer, don't you think?
Your premise is incorrect. A government does not need the approval of its people.
;-) Besides, as I have already said, I have borrowed this premise from Hobbes and Machiavelli, among others. If I don't deserve a better response than "It's obvious that Saddam/Taliban/Saudi Royalty doesn't have the support of his people," surely H and M do. If your thesis is correct, and the powerful few really can subjugate the many weak, then the contractarian basis of American democracy is turned on its head. I don't get the impression that in advocating for war in Iraq your goal is to assail the foundations of American democracy. But it seems to me you've found a clever way to do it, nevertheless.
... should back down from our demands on Iraq which have stood since 1991, and which Iraq has accepted in full, because they're a lot to ask?
Denial is not a valid argument.
Democracies have never sprouted like weeds. Ever.
Who imposed democracy in ancient Greece? England? America? Europe? Your reading of western history must be dramatically different from mine. Democracy has been mutating and spreading like a delightful disease at least since Athens. It has never needed to be imposed at gunpoint. The fact that it was at one point in German and Japanese history does not mean they wouldn't have come to it on their own.
Are you saying that we
No. I'm saying that, when disarmament is imposed at gunpoint, it is naive to expect Iraq to smile and say "thank you sir, may I have another." There is going to be tension, unpleasantness, anger, and machination on both sides of this thing. Whining that "they aren't being has helpful as they could be" is mostly a waste of time. They don't want to disarm. The international community wants to force them to disarm. We certainly shouldn't back down, but we may as well stop complaining, and start looking for ways to make the inspections as effective as possible.
According to defectors, Iraq's nuclear program in 1994 was stronger than it had been before the war
Defector testimony? Really? This sort of testimony has its place, but when it flatly contradicts the findings of IAEA, I know which is the definition of unreliable, and which is not.
Not a technicality, not a loophole.
I think I've muddied my own message here. To be clear: the guidelines of the law are not congruent with the guidelines of right conduct. Perhaps I was overly glib in describing our legal case against Iraq as a "loophole." What I am trying to say is that, in pressing on this legal right, we are exploiting a gap between the boundaries of legal and right action. And yes, I'm fully aware that we have been continually engaged in "military activities" in Iraq since 1991. Policing an agreed-upon no-fly zone is, as far as I can tell, both legal and right. Invading, overthrowing, and occupying the capitol is another matter.
I'm not sure yet just how ready I am to assent to the thesis that inspections are useless when the inspectee is unwilling. My uncertainty springs from two sources. First, in addition to willingness, trust between parties is needed. Yes, South Africa appeared willing in their disarmament. But if we didn't trust that appearances reflected reality, we never would have been satisfied with the inspectors declarations; and for good reason: it is impossible to prove constructively a negative. In the end, we are really only confident that SA disarmed because they said they did. Can you imagine any scenario in which the US would declare Iraq's intentions genuine? Did the president deliberately set us on a path he could never be satisfied with when he originally supported inspections?
Second, inspections worked pretty well from '91-'98, with no real help from Iraq. In fact, they worked a heck of a lot better than the war itself did. Something near 80% of stockpiles destroyed due to inspections, right? And even if inspections aren't good at finding secret caches of buried weapons, they seem pretty good at preventing new development. If IAEA is right, and Iraq has no nuke program, they won't be developing one as long as inspectors are there. It worked well in North Korea. I do agree that it would be a lot easier with genuine Iraqi compliance, but that's a lot to expect of any country in a region so volatile. Let alone from a country with an, as you have pointed out, ambitious dictator.
The natural order is for the strong to subjugate the weak. If we don't impose freedom and democracy on Iraq, it will never happen.
Wow, a level of cynicism unmatched in the press! I disagree, of course. Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and most of the founding fathers also disagree. Hobbes is particularly convincing on this point: there is no man so strong that he can't be ganged up on and beaten; no man so clever that he can't be killed while he sleeps. Subjugation doesn't work without the complicity of the people. Given that any government must have the at-least-tacit approval of its people, what is so unnatural about democracy? It seems that the only requisites for democracy and freedom are prosperity and security from external threat. Any time these two things coexist, democracies sprout like weeds. And there are many vastly superior ways of bringing peace and prosperity to the middle east. Better than war and occupation, that is.
Surprisingly, torture, imprisonment, and mass executions work extremely well as a subjucation strategy.
They can work against minorities, yes. I don't buy that a single man, or the Ba'ath party, can forcibly subjugate an entire country. See above authors.
Do you want to wait for them to connect all of those dots?
I know it is hard for you to believe, but yes. I'd at least like to see Iraq start to draw the lines. I suspect this is a point of fundamental dissagreement between us that can't possibly be resolved through discussion. I simply do not think that a risk a future really bad things is justification for present really bad things. Risk is part of living in the world. It can be a scary place. If everyone killed everyone who scared them, or presented a possible future risk, it would be an unliveable place.
First, let me say that I appreciate the thoroughness of your response. I enjoyed reading it.
[re: legal justification for war]
You say that it is Mr. Powell's position that the Gulf War is technically in a state of temporary cease-fire, and Iraq is in violation of the terms of that cease-fire.
I concede this point, so long as there is due stress put on technically. Sure, the administration thinks they technically can go to war without being in clear violation of international law. If they thought this case was compelling--legally, yes, but especially morally--they wouldn't be engaged at the UN. I don't know anything about international law, so I can't really say whether or not Powell is technically right on this technical point, but I do believe that if he is, this is little more than exploiting a loophole. And this is the attitude that I think the Bush administration shares. After all, we have a new first-strike defense doctrine, a new foreign policy declaration, and months of debate at the UN, all to justify a war we are technically allowed to undertake anyway.
>>He had weapons that he didn't use. How is that a funny notion of deterence?
>Okay, I'll be more specific. You have a uselessly narrow notion of deterrence.
I want to push on this point a little more, because I think it is a major mistake to blur the lines between nuclear and chem/bio weapons, and between chem/bio and conventional weapons. To say a notion of deterrence that doesn't include all three levels of weapons is "uselessly narrow" is dangerous. Conflicts will happen periodically, and if they can be kept from escallating to chemical or nuclear conflicts, this is no small thing. Deterence of ABC weapons is certainly not useless. And I say again, our pre-Bush defense policies might well have deterred Iraq from a conventional attack, had those policies been clearly and consistently applied.
[re: the "relevance" of the UN]
The UNSC, in this particular situation is damned either way. They did an inadequate job of enforcing previous resolutions, and this is a mark against them. However, it is the clear opinion of the majority that war is not, at least at the moment, the solution to the problem. If they flipflop and sign on to a war that only three members are pushing for, they will be irrelevant by virtue of becoming yes-men for the USA. This is a tough position for them to be in, and I at least partly blame incompetent diplomacy out of the USA. There had to be a way to allow the UNSC to correct past wrongs without having to completely subjugate itself to the whim of the US. Of course, as we see in your later points, disarmament is not the point here, which is probably why UNSC was not given the option of enhanced or more forecful inspections regimes.
[re: Saddam is ambitious]
Granted. He is also living in a country that is completely incapable of acting on these ambitions. He has few weapons, no infrastructure, a small military of questionable loyalty, and a populace that, if we are to believe the news media, hates him. Continued inspections can insure that he doesn't develop new weapons, and IAEA has tentatively concluded that he is completely free of a nuclear program. As far as I'm concerned, he can be ambitious all he wants, so long as he doesn't have the weapons to make good on his ambitions. And all indications are that he currently does not.
[re: Saddam is evil]
This, I think, is the most compelling argument for regime change. But this is completely independent of invasion and occupation. If he is as evil as you say, surely he must be widely hated. Surely it must be possible to encourage a popular uprising. Surely there must be thousands or millions in his own country who are plotting overthrow or assissination. Surely the Iraqi people are no less competent to decide when they've had enough than were, say, Americans in the late 18th century.
[re: bringing democracy to the middle east]
I just watched president Bush's comments to American Enterprise, and got a kick out of his comparing the current state of things in Iraq to the state of Germany at the end of WWII. The salient difference, I think, is that Germany was a burgeoning democracy that was co-opted by a fascist dictator. In helping rebuild Germany, we were helping to restore the pre-Nazi way of things. (Has anyone really made the claim that German culture was incapable of accommodating democracy?) The same can't be said of Iraq. I am all for promoting and encouraging freedom and democracy around the world. But I do not believe these things can be externally imposed. It seems pretty clear that imposed democracy and enforced freedom are oxymorons from the start.
I truly hope I'm wrong about this last point. I would love to see the democratic virus catch in the middle east. I also wish this was the true motivation of the administration, and not a PR stunt. Then, it might be the case that some real care would be taken for the lives of Iraqi civilians.
And finally, I want to get back to issue of the first-strike policy. You say we need to re-define imminent. And you support it by citing the terrorist threat. I can see the claim with regards to terrorist, but again, I say it is a major error to lump states, which can be deterred, whose plots can be spied on, whose troop movements can be observed, together with terrorist groups. First strikes against proven terrorist training camps I wouldn't object to too loudly. First strikes against countries that might someday develop a weapon that they might someday decide to give to a terrorist group is not only morally wrong, it is bad public policy.
If you could have decimated the German Panzer brigades on the eve of the invasion of Poland, would it have been right or wrong?
No, countries are already broadly assumed to have the right to defend themselves from an imminent attack. An attack on German tank divisions on the eve of the invasion of Poland would have been fine, and we wouldn't have needed a Bush Doctrine to do it. But if we had bombed Berlin to ruble in 1932, when Hitler was ascendent, would that have been wrong? I think so. In the same way, if Saddam were amassing troops to invade another country (particular if that country were the US) it would be permissible to attack. Without the Bush Doctrine.
But more importantly, there's nothing pre-emptive about this war. This was started on August 2, 1990, remember? When Iraq invaded Kuwait. We went through a period of temporary cease-fire from April, 1991, to December, 1998, but since December, 1998, we've legally been in a state of all-out war.
Hmm. I don't think even the Bush administration agrees with you on this one. If they did, we wouldn't be at all engaged at the UN. The Gulf War ended with a surrender. The weapons inspectors left voluntarily in 1998. They are back on the ground now. There is absolutely nothing in any of that to justify the claim that the first war never ended.
You have a funny definition of "deterrence," I think. If Iraq was so deterred, how come they rolled their tanks into Kuwait City?
He had weapons that he didn't use. How is that a funny notion of deterence? We had nukes we didn't use in Vietnam. Why? because we were deterred by Soviet nukes. Is that a funny notion of deterence? With a little clairty in US foriegn policy at the time, we might have been able to deter Iraq from a conventional war, as well.
I don't understand how you could say that unless you grossly misunderstood either the India/Pakistan conflict or our reasons for invading Iraq.
Well, that is one of at least two possibilities. At the very least you can agree that India feels a much more clear and present danger from Pakistan (and vice-versa) than we feel from Iraq. And you will certainly agree that a pre-emptive strike by either party would be a very bad thing.
Allow me to turn the tables, if you will. You seem awfully convinced that this is a great idea for a war. Why? And please don't feed me any line about liberating the Iraqi people from an evil dictator (when has any country ever wanted to be "liberated" by an invading power?) or national security (when the threat to us is not from states, but from terrorist organizations). How is this war a good idea, either in a moral sense, or in a US'-best-interests sense?
Here is why I am totally opposed to this war: pre-emptive war is *always* wrong. There are a host of moral reasons to claim this--what I can't understand is why the president doesn't seem to grok the political reasons.
I think, perhaps, the single biggest mistake the Bush administration has made since taking power is in lumping states together with terrorist organizations under the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive strikes. The claimed reason for this doctrine is that terrorist organizations can't be deterred. This is almost certainly true. However, it is clear that Saddam/Iraq *can* be deterred. Recall that Iraq didn't use chem/bio weapons during the 1991 war, even though they had them. Why not? Because the military power of the US and the condemnation of the global community provided sufficent deterrent.
In proclaiming the US' willingness to strike first, the president has all but squandered the military's value as a deterent. When the US launches a pre-emptive invasion/occupation of Iraq, I strongly doubt that Saddam will refrain from using chem/bio weapons (assuming he has them.) The value of a "Big Stick" is that people fear beatings, so they listen when you speak softly. When you run around beating everyone who pisses you off, they have absolutely no incentive to listen to you.
This is a massively destabalizing doctrine. After all, India and Pakistan have much better reasons for invading one another than we have for invading Iraq. China has better reasons for invading Taiwan. The list goes on. If Bush is successful in conving the world that First Strike is a reasonable position for a civilized society to take, the world will become a much worse place.
There are many reasons why I am opposed to this particular war, but I hope this makes clear at least some of the reason why I am opposed to pre-emptive war categorically.
As far as I know, there is no archive of public domain movies available on the Net. Why not rent a stack of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin classics, rip 'em to DivX, and make the world a better place? I know I'd love to be able to download stuff like that from any of the P2P networks... maybe I should finally get around to buying a DVD-ROM drive...
Dyson sets up Joy's argument as a strawman, and then knocks it down in a manner that *still* isn't entirely convincing. It's a shame, as I would love to hear a well-considered reply to a generous reading of Joy.
The key thesis of Joy's thinking on technology is that *there are some technologies that aren't worth pursuing.* This suggestion is anethema to that class of technolophiles that insists that all technology is neutral, and it is only the individual uses of technology that can be called good or bad. Those who hold this position tend to believe that the pursuit of more powerful technology is basically a moral imperative, because it gives us more options, and more control of our lives. In my experience, this is the position natrually held by most scientists and engineers.
One problem with the belief that technology is value neutral is that the believers should be able to articulate a convincing argument for why we *shouldn't* have abandoned biological weapons research, or why, to use another example from Dyson's article, the international biological community shouldn't have voluntarily forbidden certain gene-splicing experiments. After all, these are merely researches into technology--and all such research gives us more options, and more control over our lives.
But this is a hard case to make. Most of us are glad that the US hasn't agressively pursued bioweapons for the last 30 years. Dyson conveniently avoids having to argue this case by saying: look how fantastic it is that these people censored themselves, and look at how bad Bill Joy is for wanting someone else to cesnor them. But, (at least as far as I understand him) Joy isn't advocating the interference of the UN in the affairs of scientists--he's calling on scientists to think about the likely effects of their research before they engage in it.
The upshot of the Dyson piece is that there are technologies that shouldn't be pursued. Joy agrees. Dyson creates a debate by putting fascist words into Joy's mouth--which makes him easier to argue against.