You would also need to look at other causes, like the effects of a sharp or gradual economic decline, the buying patterns for various seasons, changes in prime time marketing, the historical effect of the number of new pop/alternateen artists on immediate sales, etc. It's a fairly complex model, unless you don't actually care about why buying trends are up or down, and only want to promote Napster.
Since I'm not sure a pay-service would compete well with a multitude of free services, I can't really comment on the viability of such a system. I have a hunch that if it caught on, it would do more to make money for those violating copyright, more than to support actual artists.
As for Rob's comments on micropayments to remove ads, I think that's a step backwards. I, at least, do not want to pay to read cnn.com, slashdot.org, or any of the other web sites. If they wish to place ads, that's fine. My proxy does an excellent jobs of removing them from webpages, and it doesn't cost anything. If web hits were to cost money, they would quickly accumulate into a ridiculous amount, for anyone that utilizes the web for anything useful.
I can see how people with a vested interest in direct payment for web traffic would support such things, since it would mean a guranteed income of a size greater than ad revenue, for practically every site. Especially given the devaluation of ads by the commodity nature of internet traffic.
For the actual people involved, paying out of the pocket seems less desirable.
> > Even if anonymous submissions were removed, > > you'd still have the problem of people > > registering accounts and posting flames, spam, > > or what have you.
> Not at all true. [snip] > True, even in this case there are ways to get > around the system, but it requires a lot more > work for the average spammer.
So is it true or not?
If I wanted to "spam" slashdot, no amount of selective constraints sans the most personal would be effective.
Oh look, Joe Hax0r registered from an e-mail account from someone at his University. It's amazing what you can do with a packet sniffer.
Oh look, Joe Hax0r registered from an e-mail address from a random cracked machine. It's not like anyone has ever cracked people have ever violated the security of other systems, in order to cause havoc on a trendy pseudo-geek site.
Oh look, Joe Hax0r registered using one of the free e-mail services from the 9,000,000 offered in the U.S. and abroad.
1) Banning e-mail suppliers is nonsense 2) It wouldn't work anyway. The world is much bigger than Hotmail.
All of this to supress speech. I thought we've already determined that just isn't plausible, or desired.
Even if anonymous submissions were removed, you'd still have the problem of people registering accounts and posting flames, spam, or what have you. This tends to be fairly common now, so I don't imagine it'll do anything but increase.
Personally I browse at -1, because I find the moderation system to be pointless elitism. If someone posts something I don't like, I don't read it.
Well in the U.S. we have lower than average sales tax on gasoline, provide tax credits, and certain parts of the tax code work in their favor. Plus you could call the funds used for energy research as a 'oil subsidy,' but in the end these "subsidies" can't account for the higher prices of other countries.
I'd really like to hear from someone actually from Europe, and say one way or the other.
No kidding. And politicians get up and say "Mothers have to choose between getting gas for work, or buying food for their children." Unless you drive a tank, or work a good two hours from home, one week of feeding your family should cost more than a month's gasoline. They probably spend more on their television packages and alcohol, than they do gasoline.
I think the best thing that could happen, is if gas prices continued to stay high, for an overly extended period of time. This would either have the positive effect of increasing alternatives research/deployment, or the negative effect of increasing domestic oil production. The only other potential problem would be heating oil costs on the poor and lower middle class.
Often people forget that society does not exist outside of evolution. Simply because a species or an individual of a species are not naturally equipped to exist in forest, doesn't mean that they are not fit for survival. Physical prowess, eye sight, a genetic predisposition towards heart disease and diabetes, are all partially made irrelevant by the human ability to utilize its intellect and its fellow members of society in a manner that is beneficial to them all. So while "Darwin's observations" are part of the process that he saw, it's not the entirety of it.
These "dumbasses," (which you statistically will most likely fall into, in terms of your IQ), are both integral to your existance, and your childrens'. They provide many needed roles from road construction to child care, and aren't any less significant than Einstien, whom wouldn't last a year alone in a jungle.
To think that lawyers and politicians are "dumbasses," is rather laughable. Many of the brightest (top 2%) people choose these careers, regardless of the ethics of their actions. The fact that they probably live better lives and have a better chance of reproducing and supporting their young also indicates that in terms of a simplistic evolutionary view, they're a strong "species."
You should check the numbers of domestic lupin species to that of the various wolf species. One of them consists of endangered and nearly hunted to extinction animals, while the other is quite prolific. That's truly a deevolution.
It our state (Vermont), they inform you that it's for education, that you won't get rich off of it, and that you should only buy in a responsible manner. They also provide access to the various gambling addiction hotlines and organizations.
Perhaps you should write a letter to your state Government, so as to ensure that they're informing people.
Personally, I feel that it's obvious that you won't get rich, and that people just do it because they refuse to let go of a tiny ray of hope that their income might one day be more than $30k, for $1. It's a bit foolish, but telle est la vie.
> Java doesn't let you use primitives (int, short, > etc) as classes without wrapping them yourself > (lots of overhead).
No more overhead than C#'s wrappers.
Plus C#'s contradiction of being both derived from object and not is stupid inconsistancy. They add a program time distinction that could be determined by the runtime system, for the sake of performance. This, like Java's approach, is stupid, but C#'s is worse because of the ambigous inconsistancy in what exactly a native type is. It adds countless stupid features like ref and out, forever requiring their use, when something derived from object should be a reference automatically. Instead, you have this nonsensical native type distinction. This does not simplify the language any, and is hardly better than Java's method.
> Java doesn't let you drop down to native code > and turn off the garbage collector if you need > to. Or use pointers if you want to talk to the > underlying C-based OS.
Java does provide this, via JNI, so you're incorrect. I would contest that claiming that such a language is "simple" when it allows you to directly muck with this, is laughable. This is yet more complexity, for a language that is supposed to simplify C++.
> Java doesn't have a "foreach" statement. > Java doesn't support indexers (methods on a > class - say List, which allow you to take the > object of type List, and use it like an array
These two are importantly related. Java and C++ both provide iterator mechanism for navigating collections. These iterator types allow for efficient navigation of collections, since a given collection might not be easily accessible as a vector. If you were to index over a tree that is providing an array interface, how exactly is that efficient? What of a linked list? If all you provide is an index operator, you're definitely not providing a generic collection navigation mechanism.
> Java doesn't have property-handlers (eg. write > functions that are treated as member variables - > eg: > a.setName("MyName") would become: a.Name = > "MyName" - but it would still go through a > function. > > These are great for encapsulation. C# has it - > Java doesn't.
These provide nothing for encapsulation. This is a sad unneeded feature that will lead to inconsistancy in the naming of accessor/mutator methods. For a single variable "property" you have this stupid interface (which masquerades as a normal instance variable), while a property that is accessed by more than a variable name (such as by keys) sees no benefit. So now you have instance-variable look-alikes and set/get pairs. This is pointless inconsistancy, and provides nothing for encapsulation.
C# is itended be Java-like, in terms of syntax, simply because Java apparently has seen popularity due to its simplicity. No, it isn't exactly like Java, but it's anything but better.
In the end it's not simple, it doesn't provide type-safe parametric polymorphism, has pointless inconsistancies, and doesn't provide anything new to programming languages or even improve on an existing language, except by providing instant COMification, which is only useful for Windows.
Uhh, accessor/mutator names should be based upon what the property represents, not its variable name. The whole paradigm is to remove the functionality from the implementation.
setName("MyName"); would be appropriate, even if you were brainwashed enough to call your instance variables m_lpszname, or stored it in another object.
Sun did it for performance, though you'd think they'd be able to move the object to a primitive inside the VM, and still get this performance.
In any event, C#'s ambiguous "it's a primitive" "it's an object" and "it is pass-by-value while object are pass-by-reference...but then we add the ref keyword...and the out keyword" nonsense is a sad way to go about things. All it does is make the language pointlessly inconsistent, and adds a slew of keywords that fail to make the language simple.
Hmm, corporate lobbyists tend be for funding the patent office, since it's beneficial to them to have speedy returns on their patent applications. They have no fear that by funding the patent office more, that they'll be less likely to acquire a patent.
If you followed the recent debate about USPTO funding on the House floor, I'm sure you saw the Republicans pushing for moving more finances into the USPTO, because it's "integral to keeping our new economy growing."
Now actual reform on the process of granting, and the lifetime of patents would certainly meet great opposition by corporate lobbyists.
Apparently what they're getting into is betrayal by the people these agents and their families are working to serve.
Perhaps reporters should find and divulge the indentities of various undercover law enforcement agents, at home, and teach them a lesson. After all, they should know that it's the media's job to blow their cover, and get their kids car bombed. Damn them for trying to make the world a better place.
The media wants there to be secrets, in any event. This is why they'd release such a report in the first place; sensationalism. If it were publicly available, it wouldn't sell copies, and they wouldn't give a damn. Let's hear it for responsible journalism.
It's a rhetorical question. Next time I'll put around it, so a computer expert such as yourself can understand it. What the average person knows most likely wouldn't amount to an eighth grade education, and wouldn't include English. So no, the average person doesn't know what a RFC is, most likely any more than you know the first thing about Category Theory, playing the violin, or designing automobiles. How disadvantaged we all are. Perish the thought the average person would want safe drinking water, when it knows nothing of Chemistry.
> Are you this disingenuous in person or only when > it suits your argument? Do you really think that > if the government actively funded open source > development (this was brought up in part I or > II) that they wouldn't begin to make politically > correct demands about how their money was used?
Are you suggesting that State Universities require me to have homosexuals, or to develop disability functionality on my research project, which happens to be open source? Perhaps the Government isn't funding the State University, eh?
> In any case, there's not much that goes on in > open source development that affects anything > beyond developers and users.
So the realm of open source software has no effect on anyone not actively using or developing open source software? That's not even remotely logical. For instance, if I run a business and use open source software, perhaps it saves me money (either in price, or long-term maintenance), which can then be passed on to the consumer. No, this has no effect on anyone.
Or more related to the actual discussion, if the Government were to prefer open source software, or to prefer software vendors that preformed open disclosure of communication and storage protocols, interoperability between your grandmother's e-mail client, and your child's, may be less inclined to be totally and completely incompatible, because any given vendor wanted a larger piece of the pie.
And related to the actual comment you replied to, since Microsoft's business practices effect such a wide range of people (whether or not they use their products themselves), their lives are influenced by Word, Excel, VB, Windows, and many other MS products that millions of people use to get their work done. It's only natural that they have a say in whether or not Microsoft may harm them, just as we institute laws to gurantee food quality, automobile safety, and any other number of things.
> If you want to argue for reform of patent laws, > that's fine. If you want the government actively > involved in the generation of open source > software, well, I'm reminded of African-American > leaders in the late 80s asking for "help with > the crack epidemic." Be careful what you ask > for.
I'm not personally asking for anything in this matter. I simply believe that U.S. citizens are entitled to their say, if they are being harmed, whether or not they know what a RFC is, have ever implemented their own heap manager, or can count in octal.
I grow weary of correcting this...A republic is a democracy. If you remember your grammar school social studies, you'll note there was a fair amount of time discussing the difference between an indirect democracy, and a direct democracy.
But I will quote from the second edition of Webster's World Dictionary, for the benefit of everyone.
re-pub-lic (re pub'lik) n.[ L. respublica, public thing ] a state or government, specif. one headed by a president, in which the power is exercised by officials elected by the voters
and (without pronounciation, because I'm too lazy to type the accents)
de-moc-ra-cy n., pl. -cies [ Gr. demos, the people + kratein, to rule) 1. government by the people, directly or through representatives 2. a country, etc. with such government 3. equality of rights, opportunity, and treatment.
A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
Ironically, the Founding Fathers didn't leave the country in much of a state of equality. They more or less drafted the country into an eventual civil war.
Many people were unable to vote and people were enslaved, depending on the state. In most states, white males without property, women or any color or creed, and others were unable to vote. Thus the power of voting for the laws that you were supposedly equal under, was left in the hands of the social elite. That is, white property owners. There were a few exceptions, since a few states (like Vermont) didn't require property ownership to vote, and disallowed slavery. I think NY allowed women to vote if they had land, but were not married, until that too was taken from them.
The U.S. is indeed a Republican Democracy, but it's certainly not a truly equitable land in which to live. Even now homosexuals are denied many rights that their heterosexual counterparts are guranteed, as well as the right to serve in the military. Plus, women are still denied access to certain parts of combat.
We've certainly come a long ways since the ratification of the Constitution by the states, but we've still a ways to go before everyone is equitable before the law, very much in any other aspect of society.
> Yeah, you're right. So what. It's not like your > average person has a clue what the letters RFC > mean. Even if they do for some strange reason, > you can be pretty sure they don't care about.
What do you think the average person knows, exactly?
> Yeah. Again, so what. Who else should decide? > The government. ..give me a break. If the > government decided who coded what or, more > eerily, what gets coded, how much developer time > would be *wasted* on goofy sh*t like access for > the disabled, Ebonics error messages, and > application of equal opportunity laws to open > source projects?
All of the people having a say in decisions that effect them, has little or nothing to do with the Government saying who can program, and what they can program. Whether Microsoft is fragmented or not, doesn't decide who can work on the next Perl interpreter, or whether or not programs should be written keeping in mind the disabled. It doesn't even require the GNOME crowd to allow homosexuals to develop for it.
> He is right, although put this way it sounds > inflamatory. Let me explain why. First, hackers > write the code for open source projects. We can > choose to scratch our own itches, or help out > some non-hacker who needs a feature. But in the > end, we do the work. The choice of which work is > ours.
Car manufacturers are the people that create automobiles. Yet I'm sure you'd prefer automobiles have safety features that the Government requires them to implement. If you're familiar with the early car industry, I'm sure you're aware they took a "cars are safe, as long as you drive correctly" attitude towards automotive safety. People like Ralph Nader did a lot to get the Government to change that sort of nonsense.
As for the rest of your sentiment, specifically regarding choice, this isn't really part of the discussion. It's a given that the Government isn't being asked by any of these people to keep me from working on any project that I see fit. It's not a one or the other issue. That is, you aren't forced to choose between anarchy and totalitarian control.
> As for Microsoft, many open source projects are > competing with Microsoft products. There are > only three groups of people who should have any > say in who wins: Microsoft owners and employees; > open source companies, their owners and open > source programmers; and users of the products. > The problem for Microsoft is that open source > can't be bought out or bankrupted the way > another company can. Open source is not a > single target.
I'm afraid that in society, there are more people than Microsoft owners, employees, direct competitors, and consumers. So while I don't believe the Government should fragment the company for its acts, I don't believe that acts and punishment should be solely a matter of the market, since the ramifications of these acts effect a larger group of people. If a company is dumping toxins in the water, then it's not the free market that should remedy the situation. If a car company is selling rather unsafe automobiles to save a few dollars, then the people have the right to demand they follow safety guidelines. If radio stations wish to broadcast, then the good of the people is more important than a radio station's ability to intentionally bleed out a competitor's signal. If a meat packager wants to sell their products, then it's reasonable to expect them to follow stringent health guidelines. So if it is determined that a certain amount of Government influence is required to help the evolution of the net along, then that too should be done. Whether or not this is necessary is a topic of debate. Trying to force people to use open standards would be short sighted, but perhaps requiring corporations to publish these standards might be effective. On the other hand, things that traditionally rely on obscurity (e.g. games) might suffer as a result. So any action should be first met with great thought on the cost-benefit.
> In the end, open source hackers, unless their > sheer numbers are great enough, won't kill > Microsoft. How many mosquitoes would it take to > kill a lion? But open source can set a standard. > If Microsoft misses that standard > badly enough, their customers will leave. That > is simply competition and it is something that > Microsoft is good at.
Open Source, in modern times, isn't often in the position to set a standard, for which Microsoft would have to abide. Even large companies like Sun had a hard time forcing Microsoft to a standard, and Microsoft's developer base wasn't as strongly behind this action as you might think. So while there may be a collection of pre-existing standards that have been embraced by Open Source, and whose original implementation may very well have been, further standards (either open or closed) have very much been lead by large corporate interests. You need look no further than HTML for this, but if you want to, there're dozens of other such "standards."
Slashdot Mirror
You would also need to look at other causes, like the effects of a sharp or gradual economic decline, the buying patterns for various seasons, changes in prime time marketing, the historical effect of the number of new pop/alternateen artists on immediate sales, etc. It's a fairly complex model, unless you don't actually care about why buying trends are up or down, and only want to promote Napster.
And what the other person is saying, is if you have the text to render to the pixmap, you can just as easily export it through the selection
system.
It's really no different than writing text to
any other window.
Since I'm not sure a pay-service would compete well with a multitude of free services, I can't really comment on the viability of such a system.
I have a hunch that if it caught on, it would do more to make money for those violating copyright, more than to support actual artists.
As for Rob's comments on micropayments to remove ads, I think that's a step backwards. I, at least, do not want to pay to read cnn.com, slashdot.org, or any of the other web sites. If they wish to place ads, that's fine. My proxy does an excellent jobs of removing them from webpages, and it doesn't cost anything.
If web hits were to cost money, they would quickly accumulate into a ridiculous amount, for anyone that utilizes the web for anything useful.
I can see how people with a vested interest in direct payment for web traffic would support such things, since it would mean a guranteed income of a size greater than ad revenue, for practically every site. Especially given the devaluation of ads by the commodity nature of internet traffic.
For the actual people involved, paying out of the pocket seems less desirable.
This is a good example of why moderation is really quite sad.
If I see a penis bird, surely I can tell that a post isn't worth my time to read.
If I browse the post, and it contains ERIC RAYMOND IS A COMMUNIST, I think it's safe to say I don't always bother to read the rest.
If you don't browse at a level to see ACs or the posts of those moderated down, how can you tell if an interesting AC is modded up?
> > Even if anonymous submissions were removed,
> > you'd still have the problem of people
> > registering accounts and posting flames, spam,
> > or what have you.
> Not at all true.
[snip]
> True, even in this case there are ways to get
> around the system, but it requires a lot more
> work for the average spammer.
So is it true or not?
If I wanted to "spam" slashdot, no amount of selective constraints sans the most personal
would be effective.
Oh look, Joe Hax0r registered from an e-mail
account from someone at his University. It's
amazing what you can do with a packet sniffer.
Oh look, Joe Hax0r registered from an e-mail
address from a random cracked machine. It's not
like anyone has ever cracked people have ever
violated the security of other systems, in order
to cause havoc on a trendy pseudo-geek site.
Oh look, Joe Hax0r registered using one of the
free e-mail services from the 9,000,000 offered
in the U.S. and abroad.
1) Banning e-mail suppliers is nonsense
2) It wouldn't work anyway. The world is much bigger than Hotmail.
All of this to supress speech. I thought we've
already determined that just isn't plausible,
or desired.
Even if anonymous submissions were removed, you'd still have the problem of people registering accounts and posting flames, spam, or what have you. This tends to be fairly common now, so I don't imagine it'll do anything but increase.
Personally I browse at -1, because I find the moderation system to be pointless elitism.
If someone posts something I don't like, I don't read it.
Well in the U.S. we have lower than average sales tax on gasoline, provide tax credits, and certain parts of the tax code work in their favor.
Plus you could call the funds used for energy research as a 'oil subsidy,' but in the end these "subsidies" can't account for the higher prices of other countries.
I'd really like to hear from someone actually from Europe, and say one way or the other.
No kidding. And politicians get up and say "Mothers have to choose between getting gas for work, or buying food for their children." Unless you drive a tank, or work a good two hours from home, one week of feeding your family should cost more than a month's gasoline. They probably spend more on their television packages and alcohol, than they do gasoline.
I think the best thing that could happen, is if gas prices continued to stay high, for an overly extended period of time. This would either have the positive effect of increasing alternatives research/deployment, or the negative effect of increasing domestic oil production.
The only other potential problem would be heating oil costs on the poor and lower middle class.
I've read that European countries intentionally tax their gasoline very high, in order to curb its usage. Is this true?
I laughed my ass off when I saw "ignores blink tag" as a feature on IE3's web site.
;-)
Let it never be said Microsoft doesn't pour salt in the wounds of the fallen.
Often people forget that society does not exist outside of evolution. Simply because a species or an individual of a species are not naturally equipped to exist in forest, doesn't mean that they are not fit for survival. Physical prowess, eye sight, a genetic predisposition towards heart disease and diabetes, are all partially made irrelevant by the human ability to utilize its intellect and its fellow members of society in a manner that is beneficial to them all.
So while "Darwin's observations" are part of the process that he saw, it's not the entirety of it.
These "dumbasses," (which you statistically will most likely fall into, in terms of your IQ), are both integral to your existance, and your childrens'. They provide many needed roles from road construction to child care, and aren't any less significant than Einstien, whom wouldn't last a year alone in a jungle.
To think that lawyers and politicians are "dumbasses," is rather laughable. Many of the brightest (top 2%) people choose these careers, regardless of the ethics of their actions. The fact that they probably live better lives and have a better chance of reproducing and supporting their young also indicates that in terms of a simplistic evolutionary view, they're a strong "species."
You should check the numbers of domestic lupin species to that of the various wolf species. One of them consists of endangered and nearly hunted to extinction animals, while the other is quite prolific. That's truly a deevolution.
Learn to adapt, or become irrelevant.
It our state (Vermont), they inform you that it's for education, that you won't get rich off of it, and that you should only buy in a responsible manner. They also provide access to the various gambling addiction hotlines and organizations.
Perhaps you should write a letter to your state Government, so as to ensure that they're informing people.
Personally, I feel that it's obvious that you won't get rich, and that people just do it because they refuse to let go of a tiny ray of hope that their income might one day be more than $30k, for $1. It's a bit foolish, but telle est la vie.
No, C# uses single inheritance. It's right there in the documentation.
"Classes support single inheritance"
> Java doesn't let you use primitives (int, short,
> etc) as classes without wrapping them yourself
> (lots of overhead).
No more overhead than C#'s wrappers.
Plus C#'s contradiction of being both derived from object and not is stupid inconsistancy. They add a program time distinction that could be determined by the runtime system, for the sake of performance. This, like Java's approach, is stupid, but C#'s is worse because of the ambigous inconsistancy in what exactly a native type is.
It adds countless stupid features like ref and out, forever requiring their use, when something derived from object should be a reference automatically. Instead, you have this nonsensical native type distinction. This does not simplify the language any, and is hardly better than Java's method.
> Java doesn't let you drop down to native code
> and turn off the garbage collector if you need
> to. Or use pointers if you want to talk to the
> underlying C-based OS.
Java does provide this, via JNI, so you're incorrect.
I would contest that claiming that such a language is "simple" when it allows you to directly muck with this, is laughable. This is yet more complexity, for a language that is supposed to simplify C++.
> Java doesn't have a "foreach" statement.
> Java doesn't support indexers (methods on a
> class - say List, which allow you to take the
> object of type List, and use it like an array
These two are importantly related.
Java and C++ both provide iterator mechanism for navigating collections. These iterator types allow for efficient navigation of collections, since a given collection might not be easily accessible as a vector.
If you were to index over a tree that is providing an array interface, how exactly is that efficient?
What of a linked list?
If all you provide is an index operator, you're definitely not providing a generic collection navigation mechanism.
> Java doesn't have property-handlers (eg. write
> functions that are treated as member variables -
> eg:
> a.setName("MyName") would become: a.Name =
> "MyName" - but it would still go through a
> function.
>
> These are great for encapsulation. C# has it -
> Java doesn't.
These provide nothing for encapsulation. This is a sad unneeded feature that will lead to inconsistancy in the naming of accessor/mutator methods. For a single variable "property" you have this stupid interface (which masquerades as a normal instance variable), while a property that is accessed by more than a variable name (such as by keys) sees no benefit. So now you have instance-variable look-alikes and set/get pairs.
This is pointless inconsistancy, and provides nothing for encapsulation.
C# is itended be Java-like, in terms of syntax, simply because Java apparently has seen popularity due to its simplicity. No, it isn't exactly like Java, but it's anything but better.
In the end it's not simple, it doesn't provide type-safe parametric polymorphism, has pointless inconsistancies, and doesn't provide anything new to programming languages or even improve on an existing language, except by providing instant COMification, which is only useful for Windows.
Uhh, accessor/mutator names should be based upon what the property represents, not its variable name.
The whole paradigm is to remove the functionality from the implementation.
setName("MyName"); would be appropriate, even if you were brainwashed enough to call your instance variables m_lpszname, or stored it in another object.
Sun did it for performance, though you'd think they'd be able to move the object to a primitive inside the VM, and still get this performance.
In any event, C#'s ambiguous "it's a primitive" "it's an object" and "it is pass-by-value while object are pass-by-reference...but then we add the ref keyword...and the out keyword" nonsense is a sad way to go about things.
All it does is make the language pointlessly inconsistent, and adds a slew of keywords that fail to make the language simple.
Hmm, corporate lobbyists tend be for funding the patent office, since it's beneficial to them to have speedy returns on their patent applications. They have no fear that by funding the patent office more, that they'll be less likely to acquire a patent.
If you followed the recent debate about USPTO funding on the House floor, I'm sure you saw the Republicans pushing for moving more finances into the USPTO, because it's "integral to keeping our new economy growing."
Now actual reform on the process of granting, and the lifetime of patents would certainly meet great opposition by corporate lobbyists.
Apparently what they're getting into is betrayal by the people these agents and their families are working to serve.
Perhaps reporters should find and divulge the indentities of various undercover law enforcement agents, at home, and teach them a lesson. After all, they should know that it's the media's job to blow their cover, and get their kids car bombed. Damn them for trying to make the world a better place.
The media wants there to be secrets, in any event. This is why they'd release such a report in the first place; sensationalism. If it were publicly available, it wouldn't sell copies, and they wouldn't give a damn. Let's hear it for responsible journalism.
> What kind of question is that. You can be
It's a rhetorical question. Next time I'll put around it, so a computer expert such as yourself can understand it.
What the average person knows most likely wouldn't amount to an eighth grade education, and wouldn't include English.
So no, the average person doesn't know what a RFC is, most likely any more than you know the first thing about Category Theory, playing the violin, or designing automobiles.
How disadvantaged we all are. Perish the thought the average person would want safe drinking water, when it knows nothing of Chemistry.
> Are you this disingenuous in person or only when
> it suits your argument? Do you really think that
> if the government actively funded open source
> development (this was brought up in part I or
> II) that they wouldn't begin to make politically
> correct demands about how their money was used?
Are you suggesting that State Universities require me to have homosexuals, or to develop disability functionality on my research project, which happens to be open source?
Perhaps the Government isn't funding the State University, eh?
> In any case, there's not much that goes on in
> open source development that affects anything
> beyond developers and users.
So the realm of open source software has no effect on anyone not actively using or developing open source software? That's not even remotely logical. For instance, if I run a business and use open source software, perhaps it saves me money (either in price, or long-term maintenance), which can then be passed on to the consumer. No, this has no effect on anyone.
Or more related to the actual discussion, if the Government were to prefer open source software, or to prefer software vendors that preformed open disclosure of communication and storage protocols, interoperability between your grandmother's e-mail client, and your child's, may be less inclined to be totally and completely incompatible, because any given vendor wanted a larger piece of the pie.
And related to the actual comment you replied to, since Microsoft's business practices effect such a wide range of people (whether or not they use their products themselves), their lives are influenced by Word, Excel, VB, Windows, and many other MS products that millions of people use to get their work done. It's only natural that they have a say in whether or not Microsoft may harm them, just as we institute laws to gurantee food quality, automobile safety, and any other number of things.
> If you want to argue for reform of patent laws,
> that's fine. If you want the government actively
> involved in the generation of open source
> software, well, I'm reminded of African-American
> leaders in the late 80s asking for "help with
> the crack epidemic." Be careful what you ask
> for.
I'm not personally asking for anything in this matter. I simply believe that U.S. citizens are entitled to their say, if they are being harmed, whether or not they know what a RFC is, have ever implemented their own heap manager, or can count in octal.
Dr. Raymond? From ESR's resume:
"Education
Undergraduate studies (including some graduate-level courses) in mathematics and philosophy at the University of
Pennsylvania.
I have never taken any courses in computer science or software engineering."
He doesn't even seem to admit to any degree, very much a PhD.
Or are you refering to another person?
*sigh* That last part was from dictionary.com. Sorry for not citing it explicitly. It was for "republic", which I also failed to note =)
I grow weary of correcting this...A republic is a democracy. If you remember your grammar school social studies, you'll note there was a fair amount of time discussing the difference between an indirect democracy, and a direct democracy.
But I will quote from the second edition of Webster's World Dictionary, for the benefit of everyone.
re-pub-lic (re pub'lik) n.[ L. respublica, public thing ] a state or government, specif. one headed by a president, in which the power is exercised by officials elected by the voters
and (without pronounciation, because I'm too lazy to type the accents)
de-moc-ra-cy n., pl. -cies [ Gr. demos, the people + kratein, to rule) 1. government by the people, directly or through representatives 2. a country, etc. with such government 3. equality of rights, opportunity, and treatment.
A political order in which the supreme power lies in a
body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers
and representatives responsible to them.
Ironically, the Founding Fathers didn't leave the country in much of a state of equality. They more or less drafted the country into an eventual civil war.
Many people were unable to vote and people were enslaved, depending on the state. In most states, white males without property, women or any color or creed, and others were unable to vote. Thus the power of voting for the laws that you were supposedly equal under, was left in the hands of the social elite. That is, white property owners.
There were a few exceptions, since a few states (like Vermont) didn't require property ownership to vote, and disallowed slavery. I think NY allowed women to vote if they had land, but were not married, until that too was taken from them.
The U.S. is indeed a Republican Democracy, but it's certainly not a truly equitable land in which to live. Even now homosexuals are denied many rights that their heterosexual counterparts are guranteed, as well as the right to serve in the military. Plus, women are still denied access to certain parts of combat.
We've certainly come a long ways since the ratification of the Constitution by the states, but we've still a ways to go before everyone is equitable before the law, very much in any other aspect of society.
> Yeah, you're right. So what. It's not like your
.give me a break. If the
> average person has a clue what the letters RFC
> mean. Even if they do for some strange reason,
> you can be pretty sure they don't care about.
What do you think the average person knows, exactly?
> Yeah. Again, so what. Who else should decide?
> The government. .
> government decided who coded what or, more
> eerily, what gets coded, how much developer time
> would be *wasted* on goofy sh*t like access for
> the disabled, Ebonics error messages, and
> application of equal opportunity laws to open
> source projects?
All of the people having a say in decisions that effect them, has little or nothing to do with the Government saying who can program, and what they can program. Whether Microsoft is fragmented or not, doesn't decide who can work on the next Perl interpreter, or whether or not programs should be written keeping in mind the disabled. It doesn't even require the GNOME crowd to allow homosexuals to develop for it.
> He is right, although put this way it sounds
> inflamatory. Let me explain why. First, hackers
> write the code for open source projects. We can
> choose to scratch our own itches, or help out
> some non-hacker who needs a feature. But in the
> end, we do the work. The choice of which work is
> ours.
Car manufacturers are the people that create automobiles. Yet I'm sure you'd prefer automobiles have safety features that the Government requires them to implement. If you're familiar with the early car industry, I'm sure you're aware they took a "cars are safe, as long as you drive correctly" attitude towards automotive safety. People like Ralph Nader did a lot to get the Government to change that sort of nonsense.
As for the rest of your sentiment, specifically regarding choice, this isn't really part of the discussion. It's a given that the Government isn't being asked by any of these people to keep me from working on any project that I see fit.
It's not a one or the other issue. That is, you aren't forced to choose between anarchy and totalitarian control.
> As for Microsoft, many open source projects are
> competing with Microsoft products. There are
> only three groups of people who should have any
> say in who wins: Microsoft owners and employees;
> open source companies, their owners and open
> source programmers; and users of the products.
> The problem for Microsoft is that open source
> can't be bought out or bankrupted the way
> another company can. Open source is not a
> single target.
I'm afraid that in society, there are more people than Microsoft owners, employees, direct competitors, and consumers. So while I don't believe the Government should fragment the company for its acts, I don't believe that acts and punishment should be solely a matter of the market, since the ramifications of these acts effect a larger group of people.
If a company is dumping toxins in the water, then it's not the free market that should remedy the situation. If a car company is selling rather unsafe automobiles to save a few dollars, then the people have the right to demand they follow safety guidelines. If radio stations wish to broadcast, then the good of the people is more important than a radio station's ability to intentionally bleed out a competitor's signal. If a meat packager wants to sell their products, then it's reasonable to expect them to follow stringent health guidelines.
So if it is determined that a certain amount of Government influence is required to help the evolution of the net along, then that too should be done. Whether or not this is necessary is a topic of debate.
Trying to force people to use open standards would be short sighted, but perhaps requiring corporations to publish these standards might be effective. On the other hand, things that traditionally rely on obscurity (e.g. games) might suffer as a result. So any action should be first met with great thought on the cost-benefit.
> In the end, open source hackers, unless their
> sheer numbers are great enough, won't kill
> Microsoft. How many mosquitoes would it take to
> kill a lion? But open source can set a standard.
> If Microsoft misses that standard
> badly enough, their customers will leave. That
> is simply competition and it is something that
> Microsoft is good at.
Open Source, in modern times, isn't often in the position to set a standard, for which Microsoft would have to abide. Even large companies like Sun had a hard time forcing Microsoft to a standard, and Microsoft's developer base wasn't as strongly behind this action as you might think.
So while there may be a collection of pre-existing standards that have been embraced by Open Source, and whose original implementation may very well have been, further standards (either open or closed) have very much been lead by large corporate interests.
You need look no further than HTML for this, but if you want to, there're dozens of other such "standards."