Huh? I've read that book a couple of years ago, and I can't remember any such discussion... I don't have it here, but anyway, all I remember is that TimBL wanted to release everything to the public domain from the start, and he emphasizes strongly that this was what made it take off. I may be totally off now, I admit...
I tend to agree. While it is my opinion that software patents should not be granted, and I think that may be TimBL's position too, it is not the W3C's mission to reform a flawed Intellectual Property policy.
Also, W3C needs to be a bit careful, as it does run the risk of getting run over by the big patent-holders. Those have a lot of power in the market place. Probably, we should be happy with what we've achieved, W3C is currently pretty much the only big industry consortium that doesn't have a RAND policy. For off-web applications, it seems Linus' position of ignoring the patents is the only viable route.
And, BTW, just to make sure people hear this: W3C is not a standards body. It is an industry consortium and has never claimed to be a standards body.
BTW2, it has been posted before but has apparently now been made worthy of the front page.
Well, I didn't RTFA, but one thing struck me with this scenario: One of the reasons why the Hiroshima bomb was 12-kilotons is that that was the easiest to build. With that kind of explosion, you can make a simple uranium cannon, you get to the critical mass quite easily, but on the other hand, you keep the amount of weapon-grade uranium to the minimum. A 12-kiloton bomb is about the easiest you can make.
5-kiloton or smaller bombs are a lot harder to build. In fact, they are talking about it now, because a bunch of rather moronic US politicians want to use nukes as regular battlefield weapons.
They are referred to as mini-nukes.
If this explosion was about 2-5 kilotons, I find it hard to believe it was a nuke. That's simply too small.
Anonymous reader, yeah sure! I mean, posting this job advert on slashdot, what would that cost? I'm telling you, this is Bill posting job adverts disguising them as "new features"!:-)
Well, really, the obvious use for condoms is to have more sex. If you don't use condoms, there will be more pregnancies, so you can't have that much sex.
ESA has a Science Programme Committee that has the main say in which projects to pursue. The members are scientists from each of the member countries.
To some extent, everything is politics, but the scientists of the ESA-SPC have generally been well focused on scientific merits, and on consensus within the scientific community.
Who gets what contracts is on a different level, and I have no idea how that happens.
Well, my spam count is about 120 spams a day now. I think I can deal with too, SpamAssassin does a good job. Yet, that is a significant amount of bandwidth, and I could have spent the time I spend setting up SA, submit spam to Razor, and discard the rejected spam to my mailing lists much better. And, it is getting painful.
I see a lot of people saying that "you'll never convince the crackpots anyway, so why bother?".
It is not about the crackpots. It is not even about moon landings. It is about teaching reasonable folks about critical thinking and evaluating evidence.
There are many people who believe what they see on Fox, because there are no easily accessible sources that give them the other side. These people also vote at elections, and one of their votes count as much as your vote (at least theoretically...:-) ). They shape policy as much as you do, and really, democracy can't work unless you have a well-educated public who can tell when they are being lied to.
That's why NASA, and every well-educated person has to spend time teaching everyone about evaluating evidence, not because of the moon landings, but because you can't have a working democracy without.
Re:I'm not that bad off
on
ISP Chief on Spam
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Because I don't want to hide away, and I don't want spammers to dictate what I can do. I want to communicate with people all over the world, if there's something they're curious about, something I wrote on my web pages, then I'd like them to contact me. That is how the world gets smaller and a better place to live.
Spammers are about to destroy all this. Because they're posting to mailing lists that are there with the same philosophy, the effort it takes to keep those mailing lists up and running is huge. They are destroying the very fora we use to communicate, they are, as I see it, the greatest threat to the free flow of opinions we are seeing today.
Can anything be done to make web-based ads more palatable?
Not really. Give me micropayments, so I can pay a little amount directly. Give me reasonable subscription mechanisms, so I can eat as much as I want for some time. Advertising, die, just die.
Instead, give me a distributed database of products that contain objective listings of product capabilites, third-party benchmarks as well as anyone's subjective reviews. When I want something, I would query the database and make my purchase decision.
Advertising as we know it really doesn't have any place in my world.
It seems rather hard to give dates for these things: Do you quote when ideas happened, or people started to take notice. One example that we all appreciate is that TimBL started working on the web in 1989, whereas it was first working in 1991, which is the year they use. It is OK.
Similarly, I've heard, but I can't find a reference now (I think it may have been on a history of science list or something), that many physics labs had working microwave ovens as early as 1935, and while cooking wasn't what it was supposed to be used for, it was...:-)
The LASER was indeed not realized before the 1950-ties, but you can find many folks who worked on early LASERs that will tell you that Einstein really did most of the work a lot earlier. It was his ideas.
Yeah, well not completely worthless, because if one starts to see a pattern, it may be possible to set up experiments. It is just that these things are awfully hard...:-)
Re:Not that I believe aliens are buzzing Earth, bu
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, I don't think people should be so anxious about telling these kinds of things. I'm a card-carrying skeptic, but I and most people I know will listen with interest to such stories.
My reaction to your story isn't "Nah, that's impossible, BS" it is just "OK, but it is hard to see how this could be used in an investigation". You can't get a better answer than "I don't know".
Also note that the Condon Report which is still looked upon by most skeptics as the most comprehensive report on UFOs have a case which remains unexplained, and conclude that there is evidence for an extraordinary object (this is the single case they come to that conclusion for).
Those claiming to have a better explanation than "I don't know" will raise some eyebrows and if they offer a ahem, exotic explanation, they may see some ridicule, but I don't think any real skeptic will look at you as a kook for telling this story.
I don't see how this contradicts anything I said... If there are 100000 trained monkeys each want their pet suspect followed, and only 10000 gorillas who can do the following, you've gotta have a bunch of baboons deciding who to follow, and those baboons will be wrong now and then. Tough.:-)
But, the main point is that no amount of increased surveillance will make this fundamental problem go away.
I'm Norwegian, so perhaps I should shut up, but frankly
cover up the fact that they could have caught the terrorists that committed this attack.
I don't think they could. Sure, they can tell in hinsight that they detected communication that indicated something was going on. But, realizing beforehand what is significant and what is not, not even 100000 trained monkeys could do that.
The problem is "too much information". The problem isn't getting the information, the problem is realizing what is important and what is not. Of course, going big-brother is going to help sooo much on the information overload...:-P
Well, actually, I was the student's representative in the computing committee of the physics department of my university. I realized quite early that Linux was a lot better than Windows for most things physics students would want to use it for. Before I got into the committee, the committee held the opinion that Windows was what the students was familiar with, so they would want to use that. First, I persuaded them to start using dual-boot, but eventually we realized that becuase of the sheer time it takes to reboot, most machines would never be rebooted, people would use the OS there was. And for most of the time, that was Linux. So, I argued that it was better to have a small number of Windows-only boxes, and a bigger number of Linux-only boxes. Eventually, people would stop using the Windows boxes, so when I quit the committee, there were only Linux boxes there.
Nowadays, they have a bigger room that is shared with students from other parts of the campus, so the number of windows machines have gone up. But the physics students stick to Linux.
I signed the Open Letter long ago, not because I agreed with every point, but because it was good to see something stir up some noise. I also licensed my thesis under the PLoS license, not because I think it has much legal value (it confuses "public domain" with RMS' concept of copyleft), but because I think that if anybody wants to copy that thesis, it can only help me, and besides the fuzz you created was great! As it turns out, all of those of my childhood friends who have become scientists have independently signed the Open Letter!:-)
One of my main beefs with the PLoS is the insistence of a centralized archive. True, it may be easier to build something good on the top of for example the existing Arxiv.org (I'm an astrophysicist), but decentralization is one of the fundamental principles of the web. It is wise to learn as much as possible from these architectural principles, and make use of them as fast as possible.
I have for long wanted to write an article with the many thoughts I have in my head, but time has not allowed me to. The future of scientific publishing is perhaps the topic that I would most like to work with.
I noted in the Nature debate (which I submitted a link to some time ago), that some of the non-profit publishers wouldn't let go of their published articles because they couldn't ensure the integrity of the articles. This has a rather obvious technical solution to most people here on Slashdot, in the form of signatures. Now that XML Signature is a W3C Recommendation, I think it is just a matter of implementing it, the problem is really solved.
As for finance (now comes the excuse for posting in this thread), it is a problem that needs addressing for the whole Internet community. Many different modes should be available, for example, a nice, printed journal set by a professional typographer will not seize to be attractive although the article is available on the web. Some may well find a steady income there. Also, micropayments is something that is worth checking out.
I would personally like to work on those solutions, so if anybody is hiring...:-)
If it takes off at all, it would be for the benefit of amateurs only, but then, what's the point?
My How to use a compass will be available under a CC lisence (Attribute-ShareAlike) or FDL or something similar.
I got an e-mail from a guy who was about to quit is job and go into teaching outdoor skills full-time. He needed good instruction materials, and so he wondered if he could use my material professionally. I said yes, and told him about copyleft and Creative Commons. He thought it was brilliant. When I release this stuff, this means that there will be at least one professional using and contributing back to the project, a big win for everyone.
It's not about amateurs. It is about basing economy on common goods.
The Creative Commons Licenses are not intended for code, they are intended for artistic works mostly. In the GNU world, it is not the GPL you might want to replace with a CC license, it is the FDL. I'll probably do just that with my How to use a compass-project.
That being said, I'd like to elaborate on the choice of software licenses, though. Rather than thinking about the code, think about what you want to achieve with your code:
If you want to promote Free Software, choose GPL.
If you want to promote a specific application or technology, choose BSD/MIT/that kind of stuff.
If you just want to contribute to mankind and don't care about fame, fortune, who gets to cash in, politics or anything, release it to the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? I've read that book a couple of years ago, and I can't remember any such discussion... I don't have it here, but anyway, all I remember is that TimBL wanted to release everything to the public domain from the start, and he emphasizes strongly that this was what made it take off. I may be totally off now, I admit...
Also, W3C needs to be a bit careful, as it does run the risk of getting run over by the big patent-holders. Those have a lot of power in the market place. Probably, we should be happy with what we've achieved, W3C is currently pretty much the only big industry consortium that doesn't have a RAND policy. For off-web applications, it seems Linus' position of ignoring the patents is the only viable route.
And, BTW, just to make sure people hear this: W3C is not a standards body. It is an industry consortium and has never claimed to be a standards body.
BTW2, it has been posted before but has apparently now been made worthy of the front page.
5-kiloton or smaller bombs are a lot harder to build. In fact, they are talking about it now, because a bunch of rather moronic US politicians want to use nukes as regular battlefield weapons. They are referred to as mini-nukes.
If this explosion was about 2-5 kilotons, I find it hard to believe it was a nuke. That's simply too small.
Anonymous reader, yeah sure! I mean, posting this job advert on slashdot, what would that cost? I'm telling you, this is Bill posting job adverts disguising them as "new features"! :-)
What I fail to see is how is this bad...
To some extent, everything is politics, but the scientists of the ESA-SPC have generally been well focused on scientific merits, and on consensus within the scientific community.
Who gets what contracts is on a different level, and I have no idea how that happens.
Well, my spam count is about 120 spams a day now. I think I can deal with too, SpamAssassin does a good job. Yet, that is a significant amount of bandwidth, and I could have spent the time I spend setting up SA, submit spam to Razor, and discard the rejected spam to my mailing lists much better. And, it is getting painful.
It is not about the crackpots. It is not even about moon landings. It is about teaching reasonable folks about critical thinking and evaluating evidence.
There are many people who believe what they see on Fox, because there are no easily accessible sources that give them the other side. These people also vote at elections, and one of their votes count as much as your vote (at least theoretically... :-) ). They shape policy as much as you do, and really, democracy can't work unless you have a well-educated public who can tell when they are being lied to.
That's why NASA, and every well-educated person has to spend time teaching everyone about evaluating evidence, not because of the moon landings, but because you can't have a working democracy without.
Spammers are about to destroy all this. Because they're posting to mailing lists that are there with the same philosophy, the effort it takes to keep those mailing lists up and running is huge. They are destroying the very fora we use to communicate, they are, as I see it, the greatest threat to the free flow of opinions we are seeing today.
Not really. Give me micropayments, so I can pay a little amount directly. Give me reasonable subscription mechanisms, so I can eat as much as I want for some time. Advertising, die, just die.
Instead, give me a distributed database of products that contain objective listings of product capabilites, third-party benchmarks as well as anyone's subjective reviews. When I want something, I would query the database and make my purchase decision.
Advertising as we know it really doesn't have any place in my world.
There are quite few payphones left in the Nordic countries now, now that the cell-phones are becoming so widespread.
Similarly, I've heard, but I can't find a reference now (I think it may have been on a history of science list or something), that many physics labs had working microwave ovens as early as 1935, and while cooking wasn't what it was supposed to be used for, it was... :-)
The LASER was indeed not realized before the 1950-ties, but you can find many folks who worked on early LASERs that will tell you that Einstein really did most of the work a lot earlier. It was his ideas.
Yeah, well not completely worthless, because if one starts to see a pattern, it may be possible to set up experiments. It is just that these things are awfully hard... :-)
My reaction to your story isn't "Nah, that's impossible, BS" it is just "OK, but it is hard to see how this could be used in an investigation". You can't get a better answer than "I don't know".
Also note that the Condon Report which is still looked upon by most skeptics as the most comprehensive report on UFOs have a case which remains unexplained, and conclude that there is evidence for an extraordinary object (this is the single case they come to that conclusion for).
Those claiming to have a better explanation than "I don't know" will raise some eyebrows and if they offer a ahem, exotic explanation, they may see some ridicule, but I don't think any real skeptic will look at you as a kook for telling this story.
Wow. I think that is the best example I've ever seen of how power corrupts....
But, the main point is that no amount of increased surveillance will make this fundamental problem go away.
Oh, I thought I RTFA. Oh, I guess not... :-)
I don't think they could. Sure, they can tell in hinsight that they detected communication that indicated something was going on. But, realizing beforehand what is significant and what is not, not even 100000 trained monkeys could do that.
The problem is "too much information". The problem isn't getting the information, the problem is realizing what is important and what is not. Of course, going big-brother is going to help sooo much on the information overload... :-P
Guess that may be the case. But then, this guy might have the number of the Jag in one of his images, if he hasn't posted full-res images.
Perhaps this is what we need to get a reform in the patent system?
Nowadays, they have a bigger room that is shared with students from other parts of the campus, so the number of windows machines have gone up. But the physics students stick to Linux.
I signed the Open Letter long ago, not because I agreed with every point, but because it was good to see something stir up some noise. I also licensed my thesis under the PLoS license, not because I think it has much legal value (it confuses "public domain" with RMS' concept of copyleft), but because I think that if anybody wants to copy that thesis, it can only help me, and besides the fuzz you created was great! As it turns out, all of those of my childhood friends who have become scientists have independently signed the Open Letter! :-)
One of my main beefs with the PLoS is the insistence of a centralized archive. True, it may be easier to build something good on the top of for example the existing Arxiv.org (I'm an astrophysicist), but decentralization is one of the fundamental principles of the web. It is wise to learn as much as possible from these architectural principles, and make use of them as fast as possible.
I have for long wanted to write an article with the many thoughts I have in my head, but time has not allowed me to. The future of scientific publishing is perhaps the topic that I would most like to work with.
I noted in the Nature debate (which I submitted a link to some time ago), that some of the non-profit publishers wouldn't let go of their published articles because they couldn't ensure the integrity of the articles. This has a rather obvious technical solution to most people here on Slashdot, in the form of signatures. Now that XML Signature is a W3C Recommendation, I think it is just a matter of implementing it, the problem is really solved.
As for finance (now comes the excuse for posting in this thread), it is a problem that needs addressing for the whole Internet community. Many different modes should be available, for example, a nice, printed journal set by a professional typographer will not seize to be attractive although the article is available on the web. Some may well find a steady income there. Also, micropayments is something that is worth checking out.
I would personally like to work on those solutions, so if anybody is hiring... :-)
If it takes off at all, it would be for the benefit of amateurs only, but then, what's the point?
My How to use a compass will be available under a CC lisence (Attribute-ShareAlike) or FDL or something similar.
I got an e-mail from a guy who was about to quit is job and go into teaching outdoor skills full-time. He needed good instruction materials, and so he wondered if he could use my material professionally. I said yes, and told him about copyleft and Creative Commons. He thought it was brilliant. When I release this stuff, this means that there will be at least one professional using and contributing back to the project, a big win for everyone.
It's not about amateurs. It is about basing economy on common goods.
Because Customer may know where you are... :-)
That being said, I'd like to elaborate on the choice of software licenses, though. Rather than thinking about the code, think about what you want to achieve with your code: