The story is "Solution Unsatisfactory" by Robert Heinlein. You can find it reprinted in "Expanded Universe."
You've got the details mostly right. It discusses using a radioactive dust as a weapon (probably since when the story was written, it was believed "impossible" to build an ICBM). Planes would "dust" cities to destroy them. Different dusts would have different strengths.
After ending WW II using the dust, every country in the world is supposed to turn its planes over to the UN. Whenthe stand-in for the Soviet Union turns in their planes, they dust the US instead. Moscow is then destroyed, and Manning (the head of the program) becomes world dictator.
There's a lot more, but just get a copy of the story. It's a good read.
I was actually involved in research on this very concept, back in 1996 (seems like pre-history, eh?). You can check out Professor Jude Shavlik's research at http://www.cs.wisc.edu.
I left the project because I don't think it works. The system would have involved THE WORLD LARGEST NEURAL NET, by having inputs which contain information describing all of the "important" words on the page and the distance between various words and the font size used to display the words.
IMHO, there were a few insurmountable problems with the project. One, the neural net was way too large. There are too many words to search, and the word list would need to grow over time (in 1996, would the words "Linux" and "PalmOS" and "WinCE" have been frequent enough to merit their own input nodes? Probably not. Today, on the other hand....). How do you design a neural net which changes the number of input nodes over time, but doesn't lose its current weights? I don't know if there's any research on this, but it would be interesting.
There are various problems with synonyms and related words as well. I also wasn't sure that the Hn tags were good indicators of importance. Web pages arent structured like outlines anymore.
The biggest problem is the lack of NEGATIVE feedback. You only tell the neural net search engine what you like, not what you don't like. Neural nets are initialized with random weights for various technical reasons (Prof. Shavlik has experimented with starting neural nets off with rule-based knowledge in his KBANN project). That means that some things which you DO like will most likely get negative weights at first and you'll never see them. While you might specify a list of words you do NOT want to see (which would help the inputs), you would probably not spend time examining pages to see if they do NOT interest you (which means you would never do back propagation with a negative answer). No one would want a product which says: "I think you will really hate this page. Am I right?" The problem is that this is a very necessary part of training a neural net.
This isn't to say that the research project hasn't shown some results, but it isn't as ideal of a solution as you'd think.
You're refering of course to the quality of the American-made Apple "NapalmBook"?
Sigh. Here we go again...
I used to keep the FAQ on Apple PowerBooks, and what happened with the PowerBook 5300 has been distorted beyond belief. Here are the FACTS:
1. Apple was going to ship the 5300 with a LiIon battery (this was in 1995, much earlier than most PC companies shipped with a LiIon).
2. Two 5300s _at Apple_ caught on fire, due to problems with the LiIon battery. No consumer ever got a "flaming PowerBook."
3. Rather than wait for a long time to figure out what went wrong, Apple released the 5300's with the NiMH battery for the PowerBook 190 (which used the same form factor). Apple also knocked $100 off the price of the 5300s.
4. Eventually, Apple figured out that it was the SONY battery which had a problem, not the Apple PowerBook. This problem was fixed for the PowerBook 3400 (which used a very similar form factor to the 5300s) and later PowerBooks.
It was the quality of the Japanese-made battery which made the PowerBook catch fire. Before you start nationalistic rantings, at least get your facts straight.
I think Apple should be spending time porting MacOS instead of squabbling over their different-thinking plastic casing.
I'm guessing you've never actually _created_ anything, have you?
If you want a/. metaphor, imagine someone taking slashdot.com or slashdot.net (or whatever TLD) and then doing a near-exact copy of slashdot.org. Sure, people who know better will go to slashdot.org, but a lot of people won't. What happens to the ad rates for/. when people start going to slashdot.com? I'll give you a hint: they ain't going up.
The VALUE of the name "SlashDot" came from all of the hard work put in on this site. If someone else appropriates that name for a knock-off, it should be (and is) illegal.
Now, considering how much money and effort Apple has put into the iMac brand (which includes its distinctive look), anyone who tries to ride off of it is breaking the law. It's that simple.
If the full VM isn't implemented, I can't copy my apps from OS A to PalmOS and have them just run--thus defeating the purpose of using Java in the first place.
Read a few of the press releases from Sun. Sun is defining three levels of Java2: Micro, Standard, and Enterprise. The Palm JVM is in the Micro class. You can take any app for Micro and run it on Standard or Enterprise, and any app for Standard will run on Enterprise. Going down the hierarchy may not work.
IMHO, this _rocks_. I'll be getting that IIIx any day now...
Remember that because once you start to walk down the path of the darkside its nearly impossible to get out.
For the life of me, I can't understand this argument. I keep hearing that MS is going to pollute Java by "tricking" programmers into using MS-only extensions.
How stupid do you think programmers are? As long as you have two bits of knowledge (1. COM is an MS-only technology. 2. WFC (Windows Foundation Classes) are Windows-only), you can pretty much tell which parts are cross-platform and which aren't. Heck, the whole java.* vs. com.ms.* package naming should be a huge hint all by itself.
And Apple is doing pretty much the same thing on the Mac. Apple's JDirect2 (they called their propriatary native interface JDirect a few months before MS released J/Direct) lets you write apps that are closely tied to the Mac OS (and soon, Mac OS X) in Java. It would take a supreme idjit to not notice that they were using classes in the com.macos.* package rather than one of the java.* or javax.* packages.
There is _nothing_ wrong with companies wanting to tie Java to their native platform. This is a tremendous boon for programers, since writing in Java is a lot more productive than writing in C or C++ (and anyone who disagrees with me on this one better have some solid research backing them up. I've yet to see a single paper which disagrees with me. Saying that you personally can write 100,000 LOC a day in C++ doesn't count.). Sun's licence ALLOWS this. All that Sun wants is the ability to write 100% Pure Java apps as well as platform-specific ones. That's why Sun sued MS.
Now, if Kaffe already supports standards like RMI and serialization and reflection, then they're pretty close to the standard. Sun gets what it wants, even if MS doesn't pay any licencing fees to Sun. If it doesn't, Kaffe is going to be irrelevant, since all of the effort on server-side Java depends on those technologies. Everyone and their grandmother is putting EJB support into their databases and application servers. DB vendors are allowing stored procedures in Java.
There's money in enterprise software, a heck of a lot more than there is in consumer software, where nearly half of it is stolen, anyway. MS has virtually no presence in this market. If MS wants a piece of that pie, they're going to be supporting Sun's Java, one way or another.
That might have been secondary. I think that getting Netscape Navigator OFF of the Mac and keeping Suns Java OFF of the Mac were the prime directive. The DOJ and QuickTime were secondary points on the shopping list. Look at what they were doing at that time.
Except that Apple still includes Netscape on the Mac OS CDs and MRJ (Mac Java) supports Sun's standards, but not MS' (apparently, the MS team didn't communicate with the MRJ team during the releases of MRJ 2.0 and 2.1. 2.2 might have some support for extensions to the security model which are MS-only, but that's the only sop to MS-Java.).
MS invested in Apple because Apple caught MS stealing its patents. Apple threatened to sue, MS threatened to announce that they were cancelling all Mac development, and the two companies negotiated. Quicktime should figure in somewhere in this story, but I'm just giving a high-level summation.
Sorry, but no process however badly written should be able to kill a system so bad it needs to be power-cycled. Yes, a runaway process might consume too many resources and slow the thing to a crawl, but it should still be possible to reboot it!
Oh, horse pucky. Back in the day, I took down several SunOS 4.x boxes with some buggy socket code in a user-level process when I was learning OS programming. This was in 1993 or so. I first tested the code on a remote access box (shared by a few dozen users), and the box just went away. This wasn't uncommon (there were only 4 remote access Suns at RPI then and they were heavily overloaded), so I switched to another one. I ran the code and _it_ disappeared too.
Being relatively smart, I noticed the pattern and tried a remote AIX box. It just gave me a core dump. I then went in to a campus computer lab and tried it on an unshared SunOS box. The box froze solid. I don't recall if Stop-A worked. I quickly changed computers and went to an AIX box to fix my code.
Moral of the story: holes in the kernel happen. As an aside, both Mac OS X and SunOS 4.x are BSD derivatives. Maybe BSD has a few issues; I dunno.
Let's look at this, point by point: Storage? Sorry, need to buy it. Recall the (justified) flap about the iMac?
Which is why the iMac has sold something like a bazillion units? The PSX II has _four_ ways to store data: PSX Memory Card (cookies and bookmarks for a PSX II browser could easily fit in one or two slots), FireWire, USB, and PC-Card. People who want large-scale storage are going to go FireWire.
Exapandibility? Yeah, like a laptop. We all know how often THEY get expanded. Keep in mind the difficulty of expanding what will still be a GAME machine too... if you start creating games that require expansions, things are going to get complicated. Enough expansions, and now you've got a PC level of complexity, without true PC expandibility.
There's no RAM expansion, and there's no PCI slots. Beyond that, we're talking about a pretty expandible unit here. The average home computer user never upgrades anything and never buys a new bit of software or hardware. For those who want to expand their toy, a PSX II has lots of room to grow.
I don't know what the device driver situation is with the PSX II, and I don't think anyone outside of Sony does, either. When they are done, we can see how it handles its expansion devices. I'd bet that Sony understand Plug and Play about a million times better than Microsoft.
Display? Nifty cool, it can pump out millions of polygons... to a TV screen. Wowie. Can it still do that to a real monitor?
Yes. Did you even look at the tech specs on the PSX II? It can drive a digital TV. That's sufficient resolution for consumer purposes.
Believe it or not, browsing the web is not the be-all, end-all of computing. Can you write a paper? Balance a checkbook?
If yes, then why on earth are you doing it on a game console?
Cost, cost, cost. There's no reason why you couldn't bundle a keyboard and low-end office software. A USB keyboard costs what? $20? A copy of Microsoft Works or ClarisWorks is around $70. Quicken is around $50. Charge $100 for a keyboard, word processor, and expense program and you could still make a good-sized profit. Everyone is going to have one of these boxes in their home anyway. What's $100 to make it practical? Data could be stored on a USB Zip drive or a FireWire drive, or maybe on a remote server.
Price? Look around. A $700 computer is already reasonably capable. Do you think that this is going to be any less true 6 months from now? And by the time this thing is out, we may be looking at the first breed of graphics accellerators that do geometry mapping as well.
PSX II will ship for under $300. I'd wager on that. If Sony is smart, they'll realize that adding on the ability to play back DVD movies is a huge win. Considering the number of teens and pre-teens with a TV in their room, this is a no-brainer. Buy one box for something like $250 and give the kid a game station, a DVD player, and a low-end Internet-capable box. Pop in the right software, a FireWire hard drive, and a DV Camera, you've got a low-end video and sound studio for schools and middle-class families with creative kids. Heck, you can Ethernet them together with a $50 Ethernet PC-Card. Sony'll sell 10million units in 3 months, easy.
Sony is being smart and not claiming that the PSX II is a low-end PC killer. But it is. I'm drooling already...
It seems they got a service call about a crash in the program. He asked the caller how important the software was to the organization--to determine how soon the problem needed fixing, I guess. The caller responded that he was a surgeon who used this software to keep track of patient information, and he was in the midst of open heart surgery. The moral? Even a spreadsheet can be safety-critical, to the point of human lives depending on it. (Yes, the problem was solved quickly enough. Yes, the surgeon should not have been relying on the spreadsheet for such important data. That matters little when the problem presented itself, however.)
Bah.
The surgeon was using the wrong tool for the job. Show me the spreadsheet which comes with a warranty which says that it will always function correctly. He trusted a piece of equipment which came with an explicit warning (its warranty) which said it could fail at any time. It would be like using a dull knife he found on the street to do brain surgery.
I'm pretty much against licencing of software engineers, but the more I think about it, the more it starts to seem like a good idea. Everyone in this industry _expects_ their products to be crap. That's why there's a Cover Your Ass warranty with every bit of software. Bridge-builders (and heck, toaster builders) can't get away with saying that their product just might not function correctly. Maybe if there was a threat of actual lawsuits or loss of job due to defective products, we could have software packages which are as reliable as a sheet of paper.
For those who think that the software industry is too immature to handle that sort of responsibility, check out the Code of Hammurabi. If you built a house for someone and it fell down and killed their kid, your kid would be put to death. Home builders have been able to handle responsibility since the dawn of civilization. It's about time that we did the same.
with the exception of mutlithreading, perl can certainly do this.
Which explains why no one is writing commercial-grade servers in Perl, while companies like WebLogic can sell themselves to BEA for $180Million, based on the strength of their Pure Java EJB server (and the roughly 1000 enterprise customers they grabbed in about 2 years).
Except that you would make an ass of yourself. Even Sun has toned down the cross-platform rhetoric now that they realize it cannot be made a reality.
I'm reasonably sure that I've said this before on/., but it bears repeating. I've written a multi-threaded messaging and middleware server which runs _without modification to any source or binary_ on Mac OS, Win32, Solaris, HP-UX, AS/400, and AIX. This was about one year ago, and Java has grown a bit in the past year. Name the other languages, then or now, which allow you to do the same thing.
I'm currently writing a neat little program to help me organize fantasy baseball stats. I develop it at home on my Mac, and I run it unmodified on my NT box at work. The size of the Java executable (jar file): 60K. This program is sucking data down from Yahoo, organizing it, parsing date and time fields, saving files, and displaying data on-screen with Swing widgets. It's non-trivial. And it just works, cross-platform.
It's pretty clear that you don't know what you are talking about when it comes to Java and it's cross-platform capabilities.
All of this talk isn't just hot air- look at the mess VB has become under MS's closed control. Java will certainly go the same way as Sun morphs it into something more useful with Jini or whatever their latest plan is.
Funny you should mention VB. Java is turning into cross-platform VB. For building in-house apps, Java w/Swing is a great tool, with multiple vendors supplying builder environments. Enterprise Java Beans are a very cool server-side technology, with support from about a dozen vendors.
The key difference between Java and VB is that high-quality Java tools and environments are available from multiple vendors. The same is not true of VB. Java code can migrate and keep you from being locked into a particular vendor. The complete spec for the language and JVM are freely downloadable. Just because Sun OWNS Java doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of documentation out there.
Sun has franchised Java to multiple vendors. Those franchisees get to call their product Java. If you want to clean-room a Java clone, it's certainly possible, given the info that Sun has released. Do you refuse to eat at McDonald's because they don't let anyone who makes a hamburger put up the Golden Arches?
There are just way too many people here who say they will never use Java as long as it is under Sun's control.
That's a completely self-defeating attitude. Java is a great language/platform/whatever. Development times are greatly reduced, stupid pointer bugs are a thing of the past, and the class libraries are pretty robust. I could also chant "cross-platform" until I'm blue in the face, but that's not the most important Java feature, IMHO. Making life easier for developers produces better software. The time I used to spend tracking down errant pointers is now spent improving my code. It's that simple.
If you don't want to use a superior tool because you don't like the fact that it's not an officially sanctioned standard, you're making a serious mistake. If you're a professional, your competitors will just use the better tool and beat you. If you hack for the love of code, not using the most elegant tool pretty much defeats the point of writing elegant code. Use the best tool for the job; being a platform/language bigot is boring.
$2200/year!!!!! Man, did I go to school in the wrong country...
My undergrad degree cost around $15K/year (RPI), not counting food and a place to live. My grad degree was at a state school (UW-Madison), and as a funded grad student, I had the pleasure of only paying in-state tuition, which was deducted from my fairly minimal stipend. I think I actually lost money each year in grad school.
On the bright side, I now get paid a god-awful amount of money due to what I learned in school. Plus, the six years' experience as a starving student taught me to be frugal. Not a bad trade-off, all in all.
I'm guessing that you're talking about UW-Madison, where I got my Masters in CS. UW's CS department is ranked in the top 10, according to most of those "best grad school" polls, and the database group there is considered the best in the country. In short, it's an atypical school. I wasn't impressed with all of the students in the few undergrad classes I took, but that's par for the course at a large state school.
My alma mater (RPI), has done the smart thing, IMHO. It has created an IT department in parallel with its CS department. This separates the geeks who want to understand the theory (CS) from the people who don't care about the why and just want to get a job as a sys admin or low-level programmer.
Of course, that IT degree will be useless in 5 years, but if people want to be educated narrowly, you shouldn't deny them the opportunity to waste their money.
-jon
How to buy guns illegally
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As a result of these records, the police should be able to just go pick up these supposed gun-runners within days of finding an illegal gun in NYC or DC. Why they don't is a mystery to me. Either the criminals are using more sophisticated means to get their guns then you are claiming, or the BATF just doesn't have much interest in reducing the amount of gun-running going on. Actually, it's probably a bit of both. The criminals are probably obtaining fraudulent ID's, which is a problem the state DMV's need to address. The BATF probably doesn't want to deal with the reduction in their budget that would follow any real decrease in gun-running.
A bit cynical about BATF, eh?;-)
There's no need for fake IDs, just dishonest people selling guns. What seems to be happening is that certain gun sellers are known to be pretty lax about enforcing the requirement to purchase a gun. Here's a good article from the Washington Post which gives an example of how this "system" works (Post articles are only on the WWW for a couple of weeks, so if you don't read it soon, it'll be gone):
Either way, enforcing the laws we have now makes a lot more sense then just passing more laws that the police and criminals will ignore.
I agree completely that the laws should be enforced. But certain weapons should just not be allowed for public use. It's basically impossible for me to go and buy a tank. Why is that? Because the government controls who can buy them. Does that infringe on my rights? Sometimes when I'm stuck in traffic I think it does. Most of the time, I'm glad that the jerk-off who cut me off didn't have the ability to just lob a shell at my car. I wish he didn't have the ability to buy a machine gun, either.
-jon
Not Guns, Not Drugs, Not TV...
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One possibility is that the US has inherited the descendants of the crazy people from other countries. Emigrating to a new country attracts a certain kind of person who is willing to just pack up and leave behind their old life. That's more than just a little nuts.
There are also the criminals who are running from the law who made it to the States to start a new life. For example, the Korbel champange company was founded by three brothers, one of whom was an anarchist who was locked up in Austria-Hungary. When he escaped from prison, the brothers high-tailed it to the US. I'm sure it wasn't an uncommon pattern.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "crazy gene" (either passed along biologically or sociologically as a meme) is much more rampant among us decendants of immigrants than among the people who stayed behind in Europe.
(I know, Canada and Israel are also immigrant countries, but don't have the same crime rate. Canada has a much lower population; maybe that's a factor. Maybe it's just too cold up north;-) Israel may attract a different flavor of crazy. It's not a perfect theory and I'm not a socialogist. But it's a thought.)
I spent 6 years in our lovely nations capital. It is (was) illegal to own any type of firearm within the boundaries of the District of Columbia, but D.C has the highest-per-capita murder rate by shootings of *anywhere* in the world. At the time I was living there, on average a person was shot to death every 13 hours.
Ah, but the reason for the gun violence in DC was that Virginia has absurdly liberal gun laws. It's trivial to get a gun in VA and take it across the "border" to DC. Drug dealers would hire people with no criminal record to go to VA, buy a few dozen guns, and take them back to DC.
(As an aside, DC had lots more problems which led to rampant violence, besides illegal guns from VA. Lots of make-work jobs were created by Mayor Barry, who believed that make-work was better than welfare. This was all well and good, until those people who could afford to move to the suburbs did so and left for MD. Congress forbids DC from passing a commuter tax, so its tax base was shot. A good chunk of DC's land is federal government property and the feds don't give DC fair value for the land. There goes the taxes from businesses.
(So we have a city with no tax base, no middle class, and blatent mismanagement by a drug-addled mayor. Add lots of high-powered weapons coming across the border, and it's not a big surprise that DC became a disaster. There's no question that the illegal guns made it worse, though.)
VA's gun laws aren't just a problem for DC; NY police believe that gun-running from VA to NY up I-95 is the source for most of the guns in NYC.
And that's part of the problem, unforseen by Jefferson and others. 220+ years ago, laws in VA didn't have much bearing on behavior in NY. Imagine a gun-running ring where it took 3 weeks to place and order and 3 more weeks to deliver the goods! Combine that with the accuracy and firepower of 1780's guns and your enemies would die of old age before you shot them.
It's not like the Founding Fathers didn't believe in some sorts of gun control, either. I don't think they let people keep cannons for personal use. As far as I can tell, the only difference between a gun and a cannon is size. We don't let people keep atomic bombs or F-16s for personal protection. It's a matter of degree. Allowing people to own automatic or semi-automatic weapons is like allowing people to yell "Fire" in a crowded theatre.
If there's going to be a real reduction in gun violence, then this problem needs to be solved by all the states working together. As long as different states disagree on the dangers from guns, there are going to be different laws and guns are going to flow, legal or otherwise.
This is an extraordinarily messy concept. If you want to look at it literally, I have dozens of choices: Mac OS, Linux, Be, the other frreeware unices, Sun, SGI, and many smaller ones. Now it is true that none of these are approriate for some tasks, but I fail to see how one can reasonably draw a brightline between the cases where we do and do not have "enough" freedom of choice. Do you use market share? number of competitors? how agressively the monopolist competes?
Here's a simple metric to use: when one company controls the vast majority of the supply lines for an essential product class, they've got a legally-controllable monopoly. It doesn't matter whether it's oil or steel or phone calls or software. Once that point is reached, competition will inevitably decrease and the consumer will suffer, either from increased prices or stagnant product. Breaking up these logjams (and preventing companies from abusing the control of them) is the purpose of anti-trust laws.
Sure there are other options for operating systems, and there are a few ways to get PCs without MS OSes (or MS applications, like MSIE and Office). But they impose a severe hardship on people (don't tell me about the tiny companies that sell Linux PCs. The average person cannot find these companies).
MS acquired control over the distribution channel through mostly legal means (pending the Caldera lawsuit, where it appears that MS committed fraud to imply that a competitor's product wouldn't work when in fact it did). That's not the problem. The problem is that MS then ABUSED that distribution chanel ownership to kill Netscape, and tried to do the same with QuickTime and various other technologies. This hurt the consumer by limiting their choices.
Now, how do you remove MS' control? There are a few options. One is to allow multiple people to sell the same product. That would involve taking MS' property away, which is a bit problematic. Forcing MS to just publish the APIs for its product, however, would allow other companies the chance to produce their own implementations.
I can't seriously accept any argument that an API is property. It's an alphabet, which the Supreme Court has already ruled can't be protected (Intel/AMD lawsuits). Or, you could look at it as "look and feel." If Apple can't prevent companies from making Mac-like interfaces, then APIs aren't ownable.
Open APIs don't just benefit OS cloners. They also benefits app makers. MS apps always have an inside track when it comes to working well with Windows. This has been known for a long time. If MS can't have secret API for Word, the quality of other word processors is going to increase.
Whether or not you believe in anti-trust laws is irrelevant to the case; they are the law of the land. Has MS violated them? You bet your sweet bippie they have. Opening up APIs is the best way to level the playing field.
The difference between the PSX2 and a PC is that we're talking about a box that is going to sell for around $250. Upgradability doesn't enter into it; it costs less than a kick-ass video card. When there's a faster PSX3 which can render a googol polygons/sec, you'll throw away your old PSX2 and buy a new $250 PSX3.
In the time in-between the PSX2 and PSX3, lots of peripherals can be hooked up via those PC-Card, Firewire, and USB connectors. That's pretty neat.
Sony is going to be selling an incredibly powerful box for an incredibly low price. PC makers should be _very_ afraid.
Let's just try to set this up in reverse. That is, while exposing the subject to scenes of violence, we give him the company of friends/family/significant-others, the delicious smell of popcorn, a soda, or a good beer. We don't even have to strap him down, because why would he leave? What do you think the result will be here?
First of all, the book was better;-)
Secondly, it was a movie. It isn't possible to strap someone down, shoot them with drugs, and show them movies to make them unable to commit violent acts. If there was, we'd be able to do away with a TON of prisons.
Conversely, mentally healthy people aren't affected by violent media. Mentally unstable minors shouldn't be exposed by their parents to this media. Therefore, these parents, while they've suffered greatly, are nothing more than leeches. Sony et al should be able to counter-sue and the lawyers who thought up this abomination should lose their licences.
Man, I wish civil suits in this country worked under a "loser pays" system...and the money would have to be put up before the trial started, so you couldn't declare bankruptcy or some other such nonsense.
I take it that you are not familiar with the latest research available on the influence of media on violence in children. In a nutshell: healthy kids don't get more violent from being exposed to violent media. Kids who are already damaged (either physical brain damage or known psychological abuse) might.
Take a look at the Japanese. Somehow, they are able to have incredibly raunchy and violent cartoons, video games, and movies, yet their rape and murder rates are virtually non-existent. Why is that?
As Dennis Miller said, "If anything Gene Simmons says has any effect on your kids, you aren't doing your job as a parent."
I don't think people have thought this one out. Ending trademarks (as Alsop suggests) would be awful.
Anyone out there keep Kosher? The Kosher-certifying organizations place their seals of approval on products, and those seals are protected by trademark law, a form of IP. No more trademark law means that anyone can slap those labels on. It already happens (wwww.kashrut.com keeps track of mislabeled products), even with legal protection backing up those symbols. They would be completely meaningless without trademark law.
Trademarks in general have been around to ensure that the person who made the product is who they say they are. I like knowing that there is some legal punishment for a company masquerading as someone else. Getting rid of trademarks will be the end of cheap "Sorny" stereos and the beginning of cheap "Sony" stereos. How can you tell the difference between a real Sony and a fake if the boxes look the same and the outside cases are the same?
Once again, Allsop has half-thought through one of his columns.
Inner classes are a pretty nice way to do function pointers; that's their original intent (Providing callbacks for GUI components). Anonymous inner classes are a lot like lambda functions in Lisp; write a class which is only needed for one small task.
This has the nice side-effect of keeping your namespaces clean; all these little utility classes are hidden away.
Once you've started using inner classes, it's hard to stop.
If Cygnus doesn't have inner class support done yet, I don't think their Java tools have any worth, IMHO.
Your examples are a different catagory. Neither of them have any value if they were public property. (Well, your tax information might, but privacy concens limit that, just as national security concerns limit nuclear technology).
You don't think computers for everyone has value? Walk down the street today and ask people if they'd like a free (or heavily subsidzied) computer and Internet connection. 90% will say yes, I bet.
Think of tax money as an investment. You expect a return, right? You payed for that government research, you ought to have rights to it.
Taxes aren't an investment and I'm still not sure where "rights" enter into it. I don't remember a clause in the Consitution which enumerates the right to all products of government expenditure, except for private stuff and military secrets. I don't even think it's implied. You're saying that everyone has equal rights to the benefits of every penny the goverment distributes. Social Security? Medicare? Farm subsidies? I'm not sure how that would work. The government allots funds to different groups for different uses on purpose. Claiming that you have a "right" to that money (or its results, which are the same thing) is silly.
RMS did AI research, and then started the GNU project on that public funding. I'd say you got back much more than payed for (assuming you were alive and paying taxes at the time). If that's "welfare", we should encourage more people to get on the dole.:)
Most AI research was/is dreck (speaking as someone who nearly got a PhD in AI), so that was no bargain. I don't know what RMS did, specifically. Maybe his stuff was good; I dunno.
I'm not sure how much GNU has changed my life, personally. I used gcc and gdb when I was in school (because that's what was provided), but professionally I've used commercial compilers. I don't run Linux. At home, I compile with CodeWarrior. I hate EMACS. I can't imagine that the cost of commercial compilers would have increased my tuition all that much.
My objection to RMS is that he wants EVERYONE to work the way he works (and at public expense, no less). I don't see the difference between putting all software in the public domain and putting all intellectual property in the public domain. Heck, taking apart a toaster to find out how it works is easier than taking apart Windows NT. Why not put all toaster makers on the dole, too, and all Americans could then contribute to making the best possible toaster! If this sounds like a good idea to you, we can move on to whatever industry employs you. Profit margins collapse when products become commodities, and everything will be a commodity under this model. That's just a wee bit scary.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got the details mostly right. It discusses using a radioactive dust as a weapon (probably since when the story was written, it was believed "impossible" to build an ICBM). Planes would "dust" cities to destroy them. Different dusts would have different strengths.
After ending WW II using the dust, every country in the world is supposed to turn its planes over to the UN. Whenthe stand-in for the Soviet Union turns in their planes, they dust the US instead. Moscow is then destroyed, and Manning (the head of the program) becomes world dictator.
There's a lot more, but just get a copy of the story. It's a good read.
-jon
I left the project because I don't think it works. The system would have involved THE WORLD LARGEST NEURAL NET, by having inputs which contain information describing all of the "important" words on the page and the distance between various words and the font size used to display the words.
IMHO, there were a few insurmountable problems with the project. One, the neural net was way too large. There are too many words to search, and the word list would need to grow over time (in 1996, would the words "Linux" and "PalmOS" and "WinCE" have been frequent enough to merit their own input nodes? Probably not. Today, on the other hand....). How do you design a neural net which changes the number of input nodes over time, but doesn't lose its current weights? I don't know if there's any research on this, but it would be interesting.
There are various problems with synonyms and related words as well. I also wasn't sure that the Hn tags were good indicators of importance. Web pages arent structured like outlines anymore.
The biggest problem is the lack of NEGATIVE feedback. You only tell the neural net search engine what you like, not what you don't like. Neural nets are initialized with random weights for various technical reasons (Prof. Shavlik has experimented with starting neural nets off with rule-based knowledge in his KBANN project). That means that some things which you DO like will most likely get negative weights at first and you'll never see them. While you might specify a list of words you do NOT want to see (which would help the inputs), you would probably not spend time examining pages to see if they do NOT interest you (which means you would never do back propagation with a negative answer). No one would want a product which says: "I think you will really hate this page. Am I right?" The problem is that this is a very necessary part of training a neural net.
This isn't to say that the research project hasn't shown some results, but it isn't as ideal of a solution as you'd think.
-jon
Sigh. Here we go again...
I used to keep the FAQ on Apple PowerBooks, and what happened with the PowerBook 5300 has been distorted beyond belief. Here are the FACTS:
1. Apple was going to ship the 5300 with a LiIon battery (this was in 1995, much earlier than most PC companies shipped with a LiIon).
2. Two 5300s _at Apple_ caught on fire, due to problems with the LiIon battery. No consumer ever got a "flaming PowerBook."
3. Rather than wait for a long time to figure out what went wrong, Apple released the 5300's with the NiMH battery for the PowerBook 190 (which used the same form factor). Apple also knocked $100 off the price of the 5300s.
4. Eventually, Apple figured out that it was the SONY battery which had a problem, not the Apple PowerBook. This problem was fixed for the PowerBook 3400 (which used a very similar form factor to the 5300s) and later PowerBooks.
It was the quality of the Japanese-made battery which made the PowerBook catch fire. Before you start nationalistic rantings, at least get your facts straight.
-jon
I'm guessing you've never actually _created_ anything, have you?
If you want a /. metaphor, imagine someone taking slashdot.com or slashdot.net (or whatever TLD) and then doing a near-exact copy of slashdot.org. Sure, people who know better will go to slashdot.org, but a lot of people won't. What happens to the ad rates for /. when people start going to slashdot.com? I'll give you a hint: they ain't going up.
The VALUE of the name "SlashDot" came from all of the hard work put in on this site. If someone else appropriates that name for a knock-off, it should be (and is) illegal.
Now, considering how much money and effort Apple has put into the iMac brand (which includes its distinctive look), anyone who tries to ride off of it is breaking the law. It's that simple.
-jon
Read a few of the press releases from Sun. Sun is defining three levels of Java2: Micro, Standard, and Enterprise. The Palm JVM is in the Micro class. You can take any app for Micro and run it on Standard or Enterprise, and any app for Standard will run on Enterprise. Going down the hierarchy may not work.
IMHO, this _rocks_. I'll be getting that IIIx any day now...
-jon
For the life of me, I can't understand this argument. I keep hearing that MS is going to pollute Java by "tricking" programmers into using MS-only extensions.
How stupid do you think programmers are? As long as you have two bits of knowledge (1. COM is an MS-only technology. 2. WFC (Windows Foundation Classes) are Windows-only), you can pretty much tell which parts are cross-platform and which aren't. Heck, the whole java.* vs. com.ms.* package naming should be a huge hint all by itself.
And Apple is doing pretty much the same thing on the Mac. Apple's JDirect2 (they called their propriatary native interface JDirect a few months before MS released J/Direct) lets you write apps that are closely tied to the Mac OS (and soon, Mac OS X) in Java. It would take a supreme idjit to not notice that they were using classes in the com.macos.* package rather than one of the java.* or javax.* packages.
There is _nothing_ wrong with companies wanting to tie Java to their native platform. This is a tremendous boon for programers, since writing in Java is a lot more productive than writing in C or C++ (and anyone who disagrees with me on this one better have some solid research backing them up. I've yet to see a single paper which disagrees with me. Saying that you personally can write 100,000 LOC a day in C++ doesn't count.). Sun's licence ALLOWS this. All that Sun wants is the ability to write 100% Pure Java apps as well as platform-specific ones. That's why Sun sued MS.
Now, if Kaffe already supports standards like RMI and serialization and reflection, then they're pretty close to the standard. Sun gets what it wants, even if MS doesn't pay any licencing fees to Sun. If it doesn't, Kaffe is going to be irrelevant, since all of the effort on server-side Java depends on those technologies. Everyone and their grandmother is putting EJB support into their databases and application servers. DB vendors are allowing stored procedures in Java.
There's money in enterprise software, a heck of a lot more than there is in consumer software, where nearly half of it is stolen, anyway. MS has virtually no presence in this market. If MS wants a piece of that pie, they're going to be supporting Sun's Java, one way or another.
-jon
Except that Apple still includes Netscape on the Mac OS CDs and MRJ (Mac Java) supports Sun's standards, but not MS' (apparently, the MS team didn't communicate with the MRJ team during the releases of MRJ 2.0 and 2.1. 2.2 might have some support for extensions to the security model which are MS-only, but that's the only sop to MS-Java.).
MS invested in Apple because Apple caught MS stealing its patents. Apple threatened to sue, MS threatened to announce that they were cancelling all Mac development, and the two companies negotiated. Quicktime should figure in somewhere in this story, but I'm just giving a high-level summation.
-jon
Oh, horse pucky. Back in the day, I took down several SunOS 4.x boxes with some buggy socket code in a user-level process when I was learning OS programming. This was in 1993 or so. I first tested the code on a remote access box (shared by a few dozen users), and the box just went away. This wasn't uncommon (there were only 4 remote access Suns at RPI then and they were heavily overloaded), so I switched to another one. I ran the code and _it_ disappeared too.
Being relatively smart, I noticed the pattern and tried a remote AIX box. It just gave me a core dump. I then went in to a campus computer lab and tried it on an unshared SunOS box. The box froze solid. I don't recall if Stop-A worked. I quickly changed computers and went to an AIX box to fix my code.
Moral of the story: holes in the kernel happen. As an aside, both Mac OS X and SunOS 4.x are BSD derivatives. Maybe BSD has a few issues; I dunno.
-jon
Which is why the iMac has sold something like a bazillion units? The PSX II has _four_ ways to store data: PSX Memory Card (cookies and bookmarks for a PSX II browser could easily fit in one or two slots), FireWire, USB, and PC-Card. People who want large-scale storage are going to go FireWire.
Exapandibility? Yeah, like a laptop. We all know how often THEY get expanded. Keep in mind the difficulty of expanding what will still be a GAME machine too... if you start creating games that require expansions, things are going to get complicated. Enough expansions, and now you've got a PC level of complexity, without true PC expandibility.
There's no RAM expansion, and there's no PCI slots. Beyond that, we're talking about a pretty expandible unit here. The average home computer user never upgrades anything and never buys a new bit of software or hardware. For those who want to expand their toy, a PSX II has lots of room to grow.
I don't know what the device driver situation is with the PSX II, and I don't think anyone outside of Sony does, either. When they are done, we can see how it handles its expansion devices. I'd bet that Sony understand Plug and Play about a million times better than Microsoft.
Display? Nifty cool, it can pump out millions of polygons... to a TV screen. Wowie. Can it still do that to a real monitor?
Yes. Did you even look at the tech specs on the PSX II? It can drive a digital TV. That's sufficient resolution for consumer purposes.
Believe it or not, browsing the web is not the be-all, end-all of computing. Can you write a paper? Balance a checkbook?
If yes, then why on earth are you doing it on a game console?
Cost, cost, cost. There's no reason why you couldn't bundle a keyboard and low-end office software. A USB keyboard costs what? $20? A copy of Microsoft Works or ClarisWorks is around $70. Quicken is around $50. Charge $100 for a keyboard, word processor, and expense program and you could still make a good-sized profit. Everyone is going to have one of these boxes in their home anyway. What's $100 to make it practical? Data could be stored on a USB Zip drive or a FireWire drive, or maybe on a remote server.
Price? Look around. A $700 computer is already reasonably capable. Do you think that this is going to be any less true 6 months from now? And by the time this thing is out, we may be looking at the first breed of graphics accellerators that do geometry mapping as well.
PSX II will ship for under $300. I'd wager on that. If Sony is smart, they'll realize that adding on the ability to play back DVD movies is a huge win. Considering the number of teens and pre-teens with a TV in their room, this is a no-brainer. Buy one box for something like $250 and give the kid a game station, a DVD player, and a low-end Internet-capable box. Pop in the right software, a FireWire hard drive, and a DV Camera, you've got a low-end video and sound studio for schools and middle-class families with creative kids. Heck, you can Ethernet them together with a $50 Ethernet PC-Card. Sony'll sell 10million units in 3 months, easy.
Sony is being smart and not claiming that the PSX II is a low-end PC killer. But it is. I'm drooling already...
-jon
Bah.
The surgeon was using the wrong tool for the job. Show me the spreadsheet which comes with a warranty which says that it will always function correctly. He trusted a piece of equipment which came with an explicit warning (its warranty) which said it could fail at any time. It would be like using a dull knife he found on the street to do brain surgery.
I'm pretty much against licencing of software engineers, but the more I think about it, the more it starts to seem like a good idea. Everyone in this industry _expects_ their products to be crap. That's why there's a Cover Your Ass warranty with every bit of software. Bridge-builders (and heck, toaster builders) can't get away with saying that their product just might not function correctly. Maybe if there was a threat of actual lawsuits or loss of job due to defective products, we could have software packages which are as reliable as a sheet of paper.
For those who think that the software industry is too immature to handle that sort of responsibility, check out the Code of Hammurabi. If you built a house for someone and it fell down and killed their kid, your kid would be put to death. Home builders have been able to handle responsibility since the dawn of civilization. It's about time that we did the same.
-jon
Which explains why no one is writing commercial-grade servers in Perl, while companies like WebLogic can sell themselves to BEA for $180Million, based on the strength of their Pure Java EJB server (and the roughly 1000 enterprise customers they grabbed in about 2 years).
-jon
I'm reasonably sure that I've said this before on /., but it bears repeating. I've written a multi-threaded messaging and middleware server which runs _without modification to any source or binary_ on Mac OS, Win32, Solaris, HP-UX, AS/400, and AIX. This was about one year ago, and Java has grown a bit in the past year. Name the other languages, then or now, which allow you to do the same thing.
I'm currently writing a neat little program to help me organize fantasy baseball stats. I develop it at home on my Mac, and I run it unmodified on my NT box at work. The size of the Java executable (jar file): 60K. This program is sucking data down from Yahoo, organizing it, parsing date and time fields, saving files, and displaying data on-screen with Swing widgets. It's non-trivial. And it just works, cross-platform.
It's pretty clear that you don't know what you are talking about when it comes to Java and it's cross-platform capabilities.
All of this talk isn't just hot air- look at the mess VB has become under MS's closed control. Java will certainly go the same way as Sun morphs it into something more useful with Jini or whatever their latest plan is.
Funny you should mention VB. Java is turning into cross-platform VB. For building in-house apps, Java w/Swing is a great tool, with multiple vendors supplying builder environments. Enterprise Java Beans are a very cool server-side technology, with support from about a dozen vendors.
The key difference between Java and VB is that high-quality Java tools and environments are available from multiple vendors. The same is not true of VB. Java code can migrate and keep you from being locked into a particular vendor. The complete spec for the language and JVM are freely downloadable. Just because Sun OWNS Java doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of documentation out there.
Sun has franchised Java to multiple vendors. Those franchisees get to call their product Java. If you want to clean-room a Java clone, it's certainly possible, given the info that Sun has released. Do you refuse to eat at McDonald's because they don't let anyone who makes a hamburger put up the Golden Arches?
-jon
That's a completely self-defeating attitude. Java is a great language/platform/whatever. Development times are greatly reduced, stupid pointer bugs are a thing of the past, and the class libraries are pretty robust. I could also chant "cross-platform" until I'm blue in the face, but that's not the most important Java feature, IMHO. Making life easier for developers produces better software. The time I used to spend tracking down errant pointers is now spent improving my code. It's that simple.
If you don't want to use a superior tool because you don't like the fact that it's not an officially sanctioned standard, you're making a serious mistake. If you're a professional, your competitors will just use the better tool and beat you. If you hack for the love of code, not using the most elegant tool pretty much defeats the point of writing elegant code. Use the best tool for the job; being a platform/language bigot is boring.
-jon
Java hacker since 1996
My undergrad degree cost around $15K/year (RPI), not counting food and a place to live. My grad degree was at a state school (UW-Madison), and as a funded grad student, I had the pleasure of only paying in-state tuition, which was deducted from my fairly minimal stipend. I think I actually lost money each year in grad school.
On the bright side, I now get paid a god-awful amount of money due to what I learned in school. Plus, the six years' experience as a starving student taught me to be frugal. Not a bad trade-off, all in all.
-jon
My alma mater (RPI), has done the smart thing, IMHO. It has created an IT department in parallel with its CS department. This separates the geeks who want to understand the theory (CS) from the people who don't care about the why and just want to get a job as a sys admin or low-level programmer.
Of course, that IT degree will be useless in 5 years, but if people want to be educated narrowly, you shouldn't deny them the opportunity to waste their money.
-jon
A bit cynical about BATF, eh? ;-)
There's no need for fake IDs, just dishonest people selling guns. What seems to be happening is that certain gun sellers are known to be pretty lax about enforcing the requirement to purchase a gun. Here's a good article from the Washington Post which gives an example of how this "system" works (Post articles are only on the WWW for a couple of weeks, so if you don't read it soon, it'll be gone):
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/199 9-04/12/053l-041299-idx.html
Either way, enforcing the laws we have now makes a lot more sense then just passing more laws that the police and criminals will ignore.
I agree completely that the laws should be enforced. But certain weapons should just not be allowed for public use. It's basically impossible for me to go and buy a tank. Why is that? Because the government controls who can buy them. Does that infringe on my rights? Sometimes when I'm stuck in traffic I think it does. Most of the time, I'm glad that the jerk-off who cut me off didn't have the ability to just lob a shell at my car. I wish he didn't have the ability to buy a machine gun, either.
-jon
There are also the criminals who are running from the law who made it to the States to start a new life. For example, the Korbel champange company was founded by three brothers, one of whom was an anarchist who was locked up in Austria-Hungary. When he escaped from prison, the brothers high-tailed it to the US. I'm sure it wasn't an uncommon pattern.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "crazy gene" (either passed along biologically or sociologically as a meme) is much more rampant among us decendants of immigrants than among the people who stayed behind in Europe.
(I know, Canada and Israel are also immigrant countries, but don't have the same crime rate. Canada has a much lower population; maybe that's a factor. Maybe it's just too cold up north ;-) Israel may attract a different flavor of crazy. It's not a perfect theory and I'm not a socialogist. But it's a thought.)
-jon
Ah, but the reason for the gun violence in DC was that Virginia has absurdly liberal gun laws. It's trivial to get a gun in VA and take it across the "border" to DC. Drug dealers would hire people with no criminal record to go to VA, buy a few dozen guns, and take them back to DC.
(As an aside, DC had lots more problems which led to rampant violence, besides illegal guns from VA. Lots of make-work jobs were created by Mayor Barry, who believed that make-work was better than welfare. This was all well and good, until those people who could afford to move to the suburbs did so and left for MD. Congress forbids DC from passing a commuter tax, so its tax base was shot. A good chunk of DC's land is federal government property and the feds don't give DC fair value for the land. There goes the taxes from businesses.
(So we have a city with no tax base, no middle class, and blatent mismanagement by a drug-addled mayor. Add lots of high-powered weapons coming across the border, and it's not a big surprise that DC became a disaster. There's no question that the illegal guns made it worse, though.)
VA's gun laws aren't just a problem for DC; NY police believe that gun-running from VA to NY up I-95 is the source for most of the guns in NYC.
And that's part of the problem, unforseen by Jefferson and others. 220+ years ago, laws in VA didn't have much bearing on behavior in NY. Imagine a gun-running ring where it took 3 weeks to place and order and 3 more weeks to deliver the goods! Combine that with the accuracy and firepower of 1780's guns and your enemies would die of old age before you shot them.
It's not like the Founding Fathers didn't believe in some sorts of gun control, either. I don't think they let people keep cannons for personal use. As far as I can tell, the only difference between a gun and a cannon is size. We don't let people keep atomic bombs or F-16s for personal protection. It's a matter of degree. Allowing people to own automatic or semi-automatic weapons is like allowing people to yell "Fire" in a crowded theatre.
If there's going to be a real reduction in gun violence, then this problem needs to be solved by all the states working together. As long as different states disagree on the dangers from guns, there are going to be different laws and guns are going to flow, legal or otherwise.
-jon
Here's a simple metric to use: when one company controls the vast majority of the supply lines for an essential product class, they've got a legally-controllable monopoly. It doesn't matter whether it's oil or steel or phone calls or software. Once that point is reached, competition will inevitably decrease and the consumer will suffer, either from increased prices or stagnant product. Breaking up these logjams (and preventing companies from abusing the control of them) is the purpose of anti-trust laws.
Sure there are other options for operating systems, and there are a few ways to get PCs without MS OSes (or MS applications, like MSIE and Office). But they impose a severe hardship on people (don't tell me about the tiny companies that sell Linux PCs. The average person cannot find these companies).
MS acquired control over the distribution channel through mostly legal means (pending the Caldera lawsuit, where it appears that MS committed fraud to imply that a competitor's product wouldn't work when in fact it did). That's not the problem. The problem is that MS then ABUSED that distribution chanel ownership to kill Netscape, and tried to do the same with QuickTime and various other technologies. This hurt the consumer by limiting their choices.
Now, how do you remove MS' control? There are a few options. One is to allow multiple people to sell the same product. That would involve taking MS' property away, which is a bit problematic. Forcing MS to just publish the APIs for its product, however, would allow other companies the chance to produce their own implementations.
I can't seriously accept any argument that an API is property. It's an alphabet, which the Supreme Court has already ruled can't be protected (Intel/AMD lawsuits). Or, you could look at it as "look and feel." If Apple can't prevent companies from making Mac-like interfaces, then APIs aren't ownable.
Open APIs don't just benefit OS cloners. They also benefits app makers. MS apps always have an inside track when it comes to working well with Windows. This has been known for a long time. If MS can't have secret API for Word, the quality of other word processors is going to increase.
Whether or not you believe in anti-trust laws is irrelevant to the case; they are the law of the land. Has MS violated them? You bet your sweet bippie they have. Opening up APIs is the best way to level the playing field.
-jon
In the time in-between the PSX2 and PSX3, lots of peripherals can be hooked up via those PC-Card, Firewire, and USB connectors. That's pretty neat.
Sony is going to be selling an incredibly powerful box for an incredibly low price. PC makers should be _very_ afraid.
-jon
First of all, the book was better ;-)
Secondly, it was a movie. It isn't possible to strap someone down, shoot them with drugs, and show them movies to make them unable to commit violent acts. If there was, we'd be able to do away with a TON of prisons.
Conversely, mentally healthy people aren't affected by violent media. Mentally unstable minors shouldn't be exposed by their parents to this media. Therefore, these parents, while they've suffered greatly, are nothing more than leeches. Sony et al should be able to counter-sue and the lawyers who thought up this abomination should lose their licences.
Man, I wish civil suits in this country worked under a "loser pays" system...and the money would have to be put up before the trial started, so you couldn't declare bankruptcy or some other such nonsense.
-jon
Take a look at the Japanese. Somehow, they are able to have incredibly raunchy and violent cartoons, video games, and movies, yet their rape and murder rates are virtually non-existent. Why is that?
As Dennis Miller said, "If anything Gene Simmons says has any effect on your kids, you aren't doing your job as a parent."
-jon
Anyone out there keep Kosher? The Kosher-certifying organizations place their seals of approval on products, and those seals are protected by trademark law, a form of IP. No more trademark law means that anyone can slap those labels on. It already happens (wwww.kashrut.com keeps track of mislabeled products), even with legal protection backing up those symbols. They would be completely meaningless without trademark law.
Trademarks in general have been around to ensure that the person who made the product is who they say they are. I like knowing that there is some legal punishment for a company masquerading as someone else. Getting rid of trademarks will be the end of cheap "Sorny" stereos and the beginning of cheap "Sony" stereos. How can you tell the difference between a real Sony and a fake if the boxes look the same and the outside cases are the same?
Once again, Allsop has half-thought through one of his columns.
-jon
This has the nice side-effect of keeping your namespaces clean; all these little utility classes are hidden away.
Once you've started using inner classes, it's hard to stop.
If Cygnus doesn't have inner class support done yet, I don't think their Java tools have any worth, IMHO.
-jon
You don't think computers for everyone has value? Walk down the street today and ask people if they'd like a free (or heavily subsidzied) computer and Internet connection. 90% will say yes, I bet.
Think of tax money as an investment. You expect a return, right? You payed for that government research, you ought to have rights to it.
Taxes aren't an investment and I'm still not sure where "rights" enter into it. I don't remember a clause in the Consitution which enumerates the right to all products of government expenditure, except for private stuff and military secrets. I don't even think it's implied. You're saying that everyone has equal rights to the benefits of every penny the goverment distributes. Social Security? Medicare? Farm subsidies? I'm not sure how that would work. The government allots funds to different groups for different uses on purpose. Claiming that you have a "right" to that money (or its results, which are the same thing) is silly.
RMS did AI research, and then started the GNU project on that public funding. I'd say you got back much more than payed for (assuming you were alive and paying taxes at the time). If that's "welfare", we should encourage more people to get on the dole. :)
Most AI research was/is dreck (speaking as someone who nearly got a PhD in AI), so that was no bargain. I don't know what RMS did, specifically. Maybe his stuff was good; I dunno.
I'm not sure how much GNU has changed my life, personally. I used gcc and gdb when I was in school (because that's what was provided), but professionally I've used commercial compilers. I don't run Linux. At home, I compile with CodeWarrior. I hate EMACS. I can't imagine that the cost of commercial compilers would have increased my tuition all that much.
My objection to RMS is that he wants EVERYONE to work the way he works (and at public expense, no less). I don't see the difference between putting all software in the public domain and putting all intellectual property in the public domain. Heck, taking apart a toaster to find out how it works is easier than taking apart Windows NT. Why not put all toaster makers on the dole, too, and all Americans could then contribute to making the best possible toaster! If this sounds like a good idea to you, we can move on to whatever industry employs you. Profit margins collapse when products become commodities, and everything will be a commodity under this model. That's just a wee bit scary.
-jon