Just because I said "floating point" doesn't mean I use IEEE floating point formats. I'm using BCD. Not that it matters. You can most certainly keep all floting point noise below your precision, even when using IEEE floating point numbers. The problem comes up only when poor programmers who are unaware of rounding error perform iterative calculations without accomodating the imprecision. It is certainly NOT wrong to use floating point for financials. You just have to know what you are doing. In this sense, it is like all other programming. Ignorance makes errors.
If you wish to use only those programming tools which do not permit the programmer to produce an error, you will never write a line of code. Guess what? You can get it wrong using only integers. Perhaps we should do all calculation on paper with pencils? Wait, do you mean you can have errors there too? I guess we should simply never do arithmetic. We should just use random numbers. That will at least produce errors that are statistically equal on either side of correct. Yes, based on your view, that would be the best solution.
Yes, FORTRAN is still alive, and many important scientific applications are still written in it and maintained in it.
Alas, for the rest of the question, I'm not a mathematician/number cruncher. The only floating point numbers I deal with are currency...
Which one fosters more economic productivity?
on
Linux Sales Down, But...
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· Score: 5, Informative
As many have already pointed out, this is a useless piece of information. I work for a company that can only afford to do what it is doing because GNU/Linux exists. How does the revenue of my company get counted in this "revenue" figure? How many other companies are able to do more for less because they are starting to use GNU/Linux and Free/OpenBSD and Apache and on and on?
The revenue of companies that manufacture goods, while not insignificant, is less important than the network effects on the economy of infrastructure products like operating systems. These "second order" effects are often much greater than the first order revenue. Especially when we are talking about productivity tools (as opposed to pure consumer products like toothbrushes and deodorant).
Yes, assuming you live in the USA (I don't know about resources in other countries).
There is good solar radiation data at:
http://sol.crest.org/solrad
This will give you a lot of good data on how much solar energy you get where you live. This info is web-based and free. As for wind power, I was able to get vast amounts of historical wind data from the National Climate Data Center. At the time, you had to buy the data (it was cheap) and ftp it. I think they offer quite a bit of it free via the web now. They are at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
I'm not sure what this means in the context of this debate.
Software is an expression of a process. A process is a creation of the mind. A creation of the mind is an idea. You clearly believe that the only value a piece of software has is its final binary function. This is a narrow view. A clever process has use in millions of other cases. What would the state of software be if the original creator of the linked-list was able to patent or copyright in such a way that no one could use it without paying him or her? We would have virtually no software at all. This is not hyperbole. There are hundreds of algorithms that are used without payment or royalty to the their creators every single day. If this were not so, the simpliest piece of software would be either impossible to make or too expensive to use.
Software is the expression of an idea in language. It is, in a fundamental way, speech.
Copyright protects the specific expression of an idea. It does not protect the idea itself (that is done by patent -- and there's a reason patents expire in much shorter times than copyrights -- more on that in a moment). When I read a book, I can use the ideas in that book in any way I choose, short of directly copying the precise expression in that book.
The software industry uses the fact the compilation is tantamount to encryption to create a bizarre product: A copyrighted, encrypted book.
Unlike Stallman, I do not believe that there is no right to do this. I believe a free market will ultimately favor Free Software, because of the greater value to all parties. You are, of course, free to disagree with this. But keep in mind that "intellectual property" is a state-granted monopoly. It exists solely through the power of the state. There is no "natural right" of itellectual property. Why? Becuase all other property is distinguished by one thing. Two people cannot possess it at the same time. This is not true of "intellectual property." The whole thing is a state construct. States construct intellectual property for good reason: A thriving intellectual commons is necessary for the advance of civilzation and economies. This is also why all intellectual property laws are constitutionally required to expire. (Obviously, I'm talking about US law here -- I don't know about other nations).
The relevant part of the US Constitution is Article I, Section 8, clause 8, which gives Congress the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
There is nothing in this that requires that text be human unreadable to qualify. Even if the government forced the code open, it would still enjoy this protection, and stealing it if the author wanted payment would still be illegal and actionable under law.
So you don't like Stallman? Let's try a radical like Thomas Jefferson:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an indivdual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possess the less, because every other possess the whole of it... That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
So, a commie like Thomas Jefferson thinks this way. Scandalous!
Note that he said "in nature." Here we sit with ideas protected in law. Why? To give that profit motive. But don;t you see that it is the merest mathematical accident that binary programs are not easily reconstructed? The machine code is a language created by humans to be understood by machines. The law ought to protect me reading that binary and using the ideas, and in fact the law does allow me to do this unless I waive those rights by contract which is what EULAs are all about.
Now, as to why I can't read the source code, this again is a mathematical accident. Compilers lose information. It is provable (although the proof is lengthy). There are ideas and information in source code that disappear by a one-way function into the binary code. This is what encryption does (yes, I am oversimplfying a bit, but not much). If compilers did not lose information, the binary would be the source and we wouldn't be having this debate at all.
So feel free to disagree with Stallman, but his views are not so irrational as you claim, nor is your position that software is "an inanimate object" correct or relevant.
Um, just a moment. I would like some citations of RMS's "irrational appeal to emotion." It seems to me that his writing and his rhetoric have been remarkably consistent. I recently wrote a book which was published by Addison-Wesley. Upon its publication I received a vicious screed attacking my use of "Linux" in the title of my book instead of "GNU/Linux." The missive went on to accuse me of "profiteering" on Free Software, and that I ought to donate all profits from my book to the Free Software Foundation. The e-mail purported to come from Richard Stallman.
It didn't.
Someone was posing as Stallman (it came from yahoo.com; that struck me as unlikely, although one of my co-authors assumed it came from him). I followed up by contacting the REAL Stallman. His response was reasonable, rational, and in direct disagreement with the fake Stallman (bizzaro Stallman?). Let me offer a few choice quotes:
His comment on the tone of the fake:
That sounds quite harsh. I hope I don't sound that way when asking a stranger to make a big change.
Here's a quote from the fake and his response (fake in bold:
To make matters worse, you have leveraged Free Software to your advantage in an unethical way. Surely the authors of the software who licensed their code using the GNU Public License did not intend for people to profit on their work through writing a book.
This is definitely not my view. The free software movement does not say it is wrong to make a profit. We say that profit (or the lack of it) is not the main issue. Whoever makes a profit while respecting others' freedom, more power to him.
As for donating profits to the FSF:
That is not at all what I would say, because doing that would not do the job. We appreciate donations of money, of course, but what really matters is freedom for the public. Giving the proceeds to charity (the FSF or some other charity of your choice) would be laudable, but would not give the public the freedom to share and change this book.
Yes, Stallman is somewhat radical in that he thinks virtually all expression should be reusable without legal constraint. His focus is on computing devices. He reasons for this are political. You do not have to agree with his politics. But I would strongly suggest reading Lawrence Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" and "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World" before you write off Stallman's position. I don't think Lessig, a law professor, would fully share Stallman's politics either, but he will persuade you that there are real and pressing issues of liberty here and that is what politics are about.
Neither ad hominem attacks nor ad hominem advocacy is of much use. I'd like to see some of these irrational appeals to emotion, because I have yet to see them.
I also offer my anecdote about my little "brush with Stallman" because not only is he often misquoted and misunderstood, apparently he is often impersonated and things are said in his name that are simply not his beliefs.
For the record, I happen to agree with him about the value of Free Software, and why it is the right way to make and use software. Unlike him, I believe that people do have a right to choose which kind of license to release code under, provided consumers have a choice about which to use (which is my whole problem with MS's OEM licensing, and my concern with cryptographic digital rights management schemes). He has offered a Free Documentation License. I'm not at all persuaded that traditional copyright (on texts anyways) restrict freedom in any meaningful way. You cannot copyright an idea, only an expression. I can use the ideas in your book any time and in any way except duplicating your text. That seems fine to me (although read your Lessig -- he suggests ways technology can take away all of our "fair use" rights and how EULA's and "Click-wrap" can make it legal to do so).
There are genuine issues of intellectual freedom at stake. Stallman is a pole in a polarized debate. He will always be somewhat controversial. But he's also a force for stimulating the debate, and democracy depends on the free interplay of ideas.
Finally, you assert that your posts are in constant danger of being moderated into nothingness. It seems this is not so, since your post has been modded up several times. If I never see another post suggesting how its author expects to be treated at the hands of moderators, it will be too soon.
I never suggested that I ought to be able to move C:\WINDOWS. But I ought to be able to move the folder I installed a word processor in. Try it with your Windows box. I dares ya!
Also, try moving my/bin dir without being logged in as root.
Now try moving C:\WINDOWS. Maybe on NT family versions installed on NTFS you can't do this unless you are Administrator, but I'm not prepared to bet on it. I know you can do it anytime on any FAT partition, and I know you can do it anytime on any Wintendo (ME, 98, 95) system.
The question isn't whether it is possible to mess up a system. The question is whether doing something one might reasonably expect to be able to do should mess up the system.
In Windows, moving an application folder from one drive to another drive can render the system more or less completely unusable. In *nix this is not so, although the app itself may fail because, like the registry, config files are not self updating.
Oddly, the only system I know that got this right (and I don't know every OS, maybe BeOS and/or QNX do this too) was OS/2, which would update configuration files for any filesystem change. Of course, we all know what happened to OS/2.
My big gripe with the registry is that it is, in effect, a meta-filesystem, but the commands and procedures that affect the filesystem do not modify or update the meta-filesystem.
The registry was not invented for programmers, it was invented to hide configuration from users. Users started to complain about big, ugly, hard to figure out INI files. Was the solution to make configuration files easier? No! It was to more or less remove them from the user's field of view.
Microsoft doesn't want people to know what is on their computers or how computers work. Someone who knows these things who does not work for Microsoft is a potential competitor, and we simply cannot have that! (Okay, I admit this last paragraph went right over the brink... But I stand by the rest of it...)
I find the notion that one may libel a corporation or a product bizarre. I think the founders of our republic would as well. Obviously, legislatures and courts don't see it my way, so here we sit in a world where we have to watch what we say about a laundry detergent. Free Speech...
"I believe the [existence] of women is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
From this I deduce that you have a relatively small experience of women. Not that men are a source of constant joy to womankind either, mind. If the existence of sex proves anything about God, it is that he(?) has a rather cruel sense of humor.
Benjamin Franklin said this originally, only he was talking about beer, which, I think, is a statement much closer to the truth.
Please feel free to moderate this as offtopic, since it certainly is, but some sigs must be answered. I posted without the bonus...
Actually, there are quite a lot of these. The US economy (and don't forget, there are very large economies outside the US) is surprisingly huge. Trillions of dollars. The total worth of US companies is vastly larger than Microsoft's available cash AND capital. MS, as rich as it is, couldn't buy very many companies before it was out of liquidity and leveraged to the hilt. Sure, they might be able to buy out the odd company, but they are nowhere near as big economically as people seem to intuit. Their market power is very large. This comes from their monopoly on OS distribution. Take that away and they are just another software company. Very successful, but with no "magical powers."
As much as I like to bash Microsoft (and believe me, I do), they are just another economic actor. They are not out of all proportion with the other giant US companies. (As to whether most of the wealth of the world should run through less than a hundred gigantic corporations, well, that is another question).
Just saying "wrong" isn't an argument. The fact is that it is a mathematical accident that compilation results in code that it is difficult for a third party to understand. This results in an artificial shortage of technique. This drives the price up. I used the word "Free" as distinct from "free" where the former means free in the FSF/GPL sense and the latter means "gratis." At no point was I arguing that developing software was without cost or risk, rather I was arguing that the price is out of line with the cost and the risk because we (developers) are not able to reuse one another's work. Just imagine if medicine worked this way. There would be exactly one surgeon who would know how to do a heart bypass and he (or she) would charge millions for each procedure. This is the way software works now and the sole reason for this is the combination of intellectual property law and the fact the compilation is tanatmount to encryption.
You seem to understand this at only the shallowest possible level. There is more to the utility of code, a great deal more, than its final binary function.
This is what amazes me. Free Software still has value. The problem with the proprietary model is that it is artificialy scarce. Compilation is tantamount to encryption. People think software, protected by copyright, is like a book. It isn't. It is like an encrypted book. Would you pay for a book that was encrypted? Free Software *may be sold*. People pay money for Free Software all the time.
There is no economic reason for software to be closed and expensive. The money is NOT supporting developers (except for a small part of the profits). Mostly it is supporting software companies that are essentially cartels.
Should the law attack these cartels? To the extent that they excecise monopoly powers, perhaps. For the most part, however, I expect the free market to consign them to oblivion as Free Software that does the same job as proprietary software becomes available. If there really is some software that cannot be developed under a Free model, then the market will function and the business will thrive.
I have no objection to buying closed software and making it Free. It is simply the market in action. Free Software just equalizes the consumer with the producer. It brings the price back into reason. The whole proprietary model depends on the combination of intellectual property law and the effective encryption that is compilation. Free Software just depends on intellectual property, which strikes me as a natural right (to steal a bit of Locke's philosophy).
Free Software is about consumers choosing Freedom, not about destroying profit. Whatever method the market finds to compensate developers, from the payment-in-kind promised by the GPL, to the services model offered by RedHat and the like, to support by donation, to buying and Freeing closed code are all fine with me. The critical thing is to educate consumers on the value of Freedom in software, and the market will take care of the rest.
Laying people off is not folding. I'm hard pressed to think of any company that hasn't gone through at least one round of layoffs in its history. BTW, as an AC it is hard for us to know who you are and just where to find your "new years(sic) forecast."
The world is bit more complicated than you seem to think. If you think blue collar workers are inherently stupid you have a great deal to learn. You also are obviously ignorant of history. It was not so very long ago when people were being beat to death by police for daring to strike in order to get a wage that would feed a family and factory conditions that would not sever a worker's limb every few days. Intelligence is more evenly distributed than opportunity.
As for your second paragraph, you complain about the insularity and self-involvement of your fellow human and your conclusion that the solution is for you to be insular and self-involved is both amusing and proof of my point. Yes, we are in a cycle of toxic selfishness. You are helping it along. What do you think the driver of that SUV is thinking about you? Perhaps he is thinking that he wouldn't urinate on you if you were dying of thirst. As for me, I would give him water. I would give him my own canteen.
As for the third paragraph, ah, yes. The big bad gubbermint. Well, I hate to tell you, but technology is not on "our side." Technology simply is. Believe me it is possible for technology to become a perfect instrument of control. Yes, government can pass laws that force technology to become that perfect instrument of control. They will do it at the behest of commerce. The only things will stop them is for us to act responsibly and for us to engage in civil soceity. WE are the big, bad gubbermint. But we are too busy getting angry with each other on the highway and ripping CDs and assuming that freedom is ours to realize that we are throwing all of our liberty away. And we don't even seem to care.
For those who see the problem, the counsel is usually despair. The problems are too big for an individual to confront. But they aren't. The problems all begin, and this is my point, the problems ALL come from that toxic self-involvement. If we develop an awareness of responsibility, of community, of the fact that our actions have consequences, then things will get better.
We are NOT all criminals. I suspect that you do not know every single person in the country. I further suspect that you don't know all that much about the law. Thus I suspect you have no sound basis for your assertion. But we are all in it together. Life is fatal. All we have are the choices about how our life will be. We can choose between hatred, fear, mistrust, contempt, and love, compassion, trust and respect. That is all we have. The choice. And everything that happens in the human world is a direct result of this choice. It isn't money or power or the force of history, it is single individual people making choices. All of these macro effects arise from the micro phenomenon of individual choice. Government is a human thing. It does what we want it to for our reasons. A change of heart is all that it requires to change the world.
Thanks. Now I'll rant just a little bit more. People developed little things like civility and ethics because it actually makes it easier for us to live with one another. We invented laws, courts, and prisions because not everyone buys into the civility and ethics thing.
But what starts to happen when the majority of people are rude theives? You give more and more power to the law, the courts, and the prisons. If I have one complaint about the "average" person in my home country (the US of A) it is this self-involvment: the disconnect bteween individual action and the social state. These bad laws and scary technologies are being pushed for a reason. I'm not trying to tell anyone what to do. I'm just asking people to think about the fact that your little choices have a societal consequence. That, to misquote Kierkegaard, when you choose an action, you endorse it for all humanity.
No one lives in a tiny little moral vacuum. You are a stich in the social fabric. When you pull one way, the whole cloth moves a little.
I'm also not trying to defend the industry that buys IP from artists, pays them a pittance, and then goes off and gets rich because IP law creates instant and profitable monopolies. I favor the law for its original intent; fostering the production of creative works. The new technologies for production, duplication, and distribution will inevitably change the status quo. But read your Lessig: they can be architectures of freedom or architectures of control. Every stolen song, movie, and piece of computer software is another point in the control camp's favor. Your actions have consequences. Just think about it. That's all I ask.
I'd say doing it for "a quick infusion of cash" pretty much defines "short-sighted." The fact that it was forcibly short-sighted doesn't make not short-sighted...
I guess I must be the one exception. I do not steal. I think dishonesty spreads when you make blanket statements like that. Many people do not steal. And it is time those of us who do not say so.
I will admit that temptation is way down for me now that I can get virtually all of the software I need in the form of Free Software. But even before then, I had legal copies of every package.
I do not download songs or movies where I do not have a legal right to do so, and I don't think anyone should. All of that said, I just contributed for the first time to the Electronic Frontier Foundation because the damned entertainment industry shares your low opinion of the human race and is seeking to control my computer and my behavior when I have not and will not EVER steal a damned thing!
We bitch and moan here on/. about the evil corporations while some of us simultaneously steal their stuff. These corporations are using these thefts as an excuse to extend copyright to ridculous lengths of time, to force Digital Rights Management down our throats, and, in general, to abuse a provision of law that was never intended to give corporate ownership of IP, but rather to give impetus to individual creativity.
The industry is having exactly the wrong reaction. Instead of giving the market what it wants (cheap, downloadable media), they are trying to regulate practices that have many perfectly legal applications.
But YOU decide whether or not to be a thief. And I don't think you have a leg to stand on to complain about corporate criminals if you are stealing music and movies at the same time. Moral superiority is highly undervalued these days. You can be self-righteous, and it can be a powerful tool. What strength do you arguments have if you are stealing too?
So don't tar me with your broad brush. I do not steal.
Not only is it uppauling, it is also appalling. I'm not sure you should have been flagged "offtopic," since the question of responsibility is there in the "hacking" issue. We have in our torts system the concept of contributory negligence. The person who robs your house is always criminally guilty, but his liability in a civil action might be lessened if you left your door wide open and left the country for six months.
The hacker is (and should be) criminally liable for any criminal acts, but what about the contributory negligence of the software and hardware makers? Of course, this is what all the liability disclaimers are for. (By using this software, you agree to the following...).
As a developer of software myself, I much prefer the caveat emptor system we currently use. I couldn't afford to write software if I might be liable for its flaws or misuse. Software is the only product I can think of with a specific disclaimer of merchantability or fitness. And yet we can get patents on it? Weird world...
Surface area determines the "charge" (which you measure in coulombs) a capacitor can hold. The maximum voltage (which is the difference in energy between the electrons on one plate and the other plate) is a function of the dielectric between the plates (how good an insulator it is -- ceramic is better than vacuum which is better than air, etc.)
How big a spark you get is a function of the latter. How long that spark might last is a function of the former. The voltage you get out of a capacitor is always the voltage you put in (minus resistance losses). Capacitors are voltage rated because a high enough voltage will break down the dielectric and spark inside the capcitor. Some chemical capacitors, like many electrolytic capacitors, will break down with a rewarding explosion. Some, like ceramics, will maybe make a bit of a "pop" and then either become shorts or open.
I'm no virologist (or biologist for that matter), but it seems to me that there is nothing to fear here. Why would a bioterrorist "do it the hard way" when there are plenty of naturally ocurring and lethal pathogens out there? In fact, this kind of biotechnology is our best hope of a real defense against such weapons.
Biological warefare was practiced in ancient times. Even though they had no real disease theory, they know that hurling diseased corpses into walled fortifications would spread disease. They new that fouling water upstream of a city would spread disease. They did all this with no scientific knowledge of biology or pathology whatever.
Bombs are easier than bugs. Planes are easier than missiles. Radiation and disease are only probable attacks because of the primal fear they create. Biotechnology offers the best hope of defense against the latter (and maybe even a cure for the effects of the former). We need to know much more, sooner, not later.
I know there are several tiny GNU/Linux distros around (muLinux, etc.), but of the "big" distros, the one that I use on really low-end equipment (I recently dragged an old AMD-486 machine with 16M of RAM back into service) is Slackware. RedHat and SuSE won't install themselves on a machine as small as the one I dragged back into service.
Slackware did.
I think the key to "Linux on the Desktop" is to break Microsoft's monopoly control of the OEM channel. Linux already configured for your specific hardware is the easy way to go.
Re:Give me a break
on
High Score
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The sad thing is that I didn't mean my post as a joke. The notion that video games are "cultured" is depressing and sad. Culture is not the impractical production of a civilization, it is that part of the production of a civilization that tries to tell the unobvious truth. It tries to expose and illuminate the real state of the society, it tries to point the way through hipocrisy, injustice, indifference, and prejudice to honesty, authenticity, justice, and compassion. It does this through any number of means including pathos, satire, tragedy, etc.
Video games rarely come anywhere near these things (I can't say they never do -- I haven't played all video games). They divert, they amuse. They un-bore. They move us several hours closer to death with only stimulation in return. Your life (and mine) are slipping away by inches. I would hate to think that I will die with my contribution to civilization being a high score in Halo.
None of this is meant to attack the games themsevles or the people who play them, but rather to point out Katz's hyperbole in grandly elevating video games to a cultural watershed.
I thought closed, proprietary systems under rigid intellectual property control were evil (I think they are)? Apparently not when it involves shooting things, blowing things up, side-scrolling, or texture-mapping.
We have to remember that it is all related. The "values" of the video game industry are the same as those of the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because I said "floating point" doesn't mean I use IEEE floating point formats. I'm using BCD. Not that it matters. You can most certainly keep all floting point noise below your precision, even when using IEEE floating point numbers. The problem comes up only when poor programmers who are unaware of rounding error perform iterative calculations without accomodating the imprecision. It is certainly NOT wrong to use floating point for financials. You just have to know what you are doing. In this sense, it is like all other programming. Ignorance makes errors.
If you wish to use only those programming tools which do not permit the programmer to produce an error, you will never write a line of code. Guess what? You can get it wrong using only integers. Perhaps we should do all calculation on paper with pencils? Wait, do you mean you can have errors there too? I guess we should simply never do arithmetic. We should just use random numbers. That will at least produce errors that are statistically equal on either side of correct. Yes, based on your view, that would be the best solution.
Grow up, get real (pun intended).
Yes, FORTRAN is still alive, and many important scientific applications are still written in it and maintained in it.
Alas, for the rest of the question, I'm not a mathematician/number cruncher. The only floating point numbers I deal with are currency...
As many have already pointed out, this is a useless piece of information. I work for a company that can only afford to do what it is doing because GNU/Linux exists. How does the revenue of my company get counted in this "revenue" figure? How many other companies are able to do more for less because they are starting to use GNU/Linux and Free/OpenBSD and Apache and on and on?
The revenue of companies that manufacture goods, while not insignificant, is less important than the network effects on the economy of infrastructure products like operating systems. These "second order" effects are often much greater than the first order revenue. Especially when we are talking about productivity tools (as opposed to pure consumer products like toothbrushes and deodorant).
Yes, assuming you live in the USA (I don't know about resources in other countries).
There is good solar radiation data at:
http://sol.crest.org/solrad
This will give you a lot of good data on how much solar energy you get where you live. This info is web-based and free. As for wind power, I was able to get vast amounts of historical wind data from the National Climate Data Center. At the time, you had to buy the data (it was cheap) and ftp it. I think they offer quite a bit of it free via the web now. They are at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
I hope this helps!
I'm not sure what this means in the context of this debate.
Software is an expression of a process. A process is a creation of the mind. A creation of the mind is an idea. You clearly believe that the only value a piece of software has is its final binary function. This is a narrow view. A clever process has use in millions of other cases. What would the state of software be if the original creator of the linked-list was able to patent or copyright in such a way that no one could use it without paying him or her? We would have virtually no software at all. This is not hyperbole. There are hundreds of algorithms that are used without payment or royalty to the their creators every single day. If this were not so, the simpliest piece of software would be either impossible to make or too expensive to use.
Software is the expression of an idea in language. It is, in a fundamental way, speech.
Copyright protects the specific expression of an idea. It does not protect the idea itself (that is done by patent -- and there's a reason patents expire in much shorter times than copyrights -- more on that in a moment). When I read a book, I can use the ideas in that book in any way I choose, short of directly copying the precise expression in that book.
The software industry uses the fact the compilation is tantamount to encryption to create a bizarre product: A copyrighted, encrypted book.
Unlike Stallman, I do not believe that there is no right to do this. I believe a free market will ultimately favor Free Software, because of the greater value to all parties. You are, of course, free to disagree with this. But keep in mind that "intellectual property" is a state-granted monopoly. It exists solely through the power of the state. There is no "natural right" of itellectual property. Why? Becuase all other property is distinguished by one thing. Two people cannot possess it at the same time. This is not true of "intellectual property." The whole thing is a state construct. States construct intellectual property for good reason: A thriving intellectual commons is necessary for the advance of civilzation and economies. This is also why all intellectual property laws are constitutionally required to expire . (Obviously, I'm talking about US law here -- I don't know about other nations).
The relevant part of the US Constitution is Article I, Section 8, clause 8, which gives Congress the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
There is nothing in this that requires that text be human unreadable to qualify. Even if the government forced the code open, it would still enjoy this protection, and stealing it if the author wanted payment would still be illegal and actionable under law.
So you don't like Stallman? Let's try a radical like Thomas Jefferson: So, a commie like Thomas Jefferson thinks this way. Scandalous!
Note that he said "in nature." Here we sit with ideas protected in law. Why? To give that profit motive. But don;t you see that it is the merest mathematical accident that binary programs are not easily reconstructed? The machine code is a language created by humans to be understood by machines. The law ought to protect me reading that binary and using the ideas, and in fact the law does allow me to do this unless I waive those rights by contract which is what EULAs are all about.
Now, as to why I can't read the source code, this again is a mathematical accident. Compilers lose information. It is provable (although the proof is lengthy). There are ideas and information in source code that disappear by a one-way function into the binary code. This is what encryption does (yes, I am oversimplfying a bit, but not much). If compilers did not lose information, the binary would be the source and we wouldn't be having this debate at all.
So feel free to disagree with Stallman, but his views are not so irrational as you claim, nor is your position that software is "an inanimate object" correct or relevant.
It didn't.
Someone was posing as Stallman (it came from yahoo.com; that struck me as unlikely, although one of my co-authors assumed it came from him). I followed up by contacting the REAL Stallman. His response was reasonable, rational, and in direct disagreement with the fake Stallman (bizzaro Stallman?). Let me offer a few choice quotes:
His comment on the tone of the fake: Here's a quote from the fake and his response (fake in bold: As for donating profits to the FSF: Yes, Stallman is somewhat radical in that he thinks virtually all expression should be reusable without legal constraint. His focus is on computing devices. He reasons for this are political. You do not have to agree with his politics. But I would strongly suggest reading Lawrence Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" and "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World" before you write off Stallman's position. I don't think Lessig, a law professor, would fully share Stallman's politics either, but he will persuade you that there are real and pressing issues of liberty here and that is what politics are about.
Neither ad hominem attacks nor ad hominem advocacy is of much use. I'd like to see some of these irrational appeals to emotion, because I have yet to see them.
I also offer my anecdote about my little "brush with Stallman" because not only is he often misquoted and misunderstood, apparently he is often impersonated and things are said in his name that are simply not his beliefs.
For the record, I happen to agree with him about the value of Free Software, and why it is the right way to make and use software. Unlike him, I believe that people do have a right to choose which kind of license to release code under, provided consumers have a choice about which to use (which is my whole problem with MS's OEM licensing, and my concern with cryptographic digital rights management schemes). He has offered a Free Documentation License. I'm not at all persuaded that traditional copyright (on texts anyways) restrict freedom in any meaningful way. You cannot copyright an idea, only an expression. I can use the ideas in your book any time and in any way except duplicating your text. That seems fine to me (although read your Lessig -- he suggests ways technology can take away all of our "fair use" rights and how EULA's and "Click-wrap" can make it legal to do so).
There are genuine issues of intellectual freedom at stake. Stallman is a pole in a polarized debate. He will always be somewhat controversial. But he's also a force for stimulating the debate, and democracy depends on the free interplay of ideas.
Finally, you assert that your posts are in constant danger of being moderated into nothingness. It seems this is not so, since your post has been modded up several times. If I never see another post suggesting how its author expects to be treated at the hands of moderators, it will be too soon.
Sure. Move Office.
/bin dir without being logged in as root.
I never suggested that I ought to be able to move C:\WINDOWS. But I ought to be able to move the folder I installed a word processor in. Try it with your Windows box. I dares ya!
Also, try moving my
Now try moving C:\WINDOWS. Maybe on NT family versions installed on NTFS you can't do this unless you are Administrator, but I'm not prepared to bet on it. I know you can do it anytime on any FAT partition, and I know you can do it anytime on any Wintendo (ME, 98, 95) system.
The question isn't whether it is possible to mess up a system. The question is whether doing something one might reasonably expect to be able to do should mess up the system.
In Windows, moving an application folder from one drive to another drive can render the system more or less completely unusable. In *nix this is not so, although the app itself may fail because, like the registry, config files are not self updating.
Oddly, the only system I know that got this right (and I don't know every OS, maybe BeOS and/or QNX do this too) was OS/2, which would update configuration files for any filesystem change. Of course, we all know what happened to OS/2.
My big gripe with the registry is that it is, in effect, a meta-filesystem, but the commands and procedures that affect the filesystem do not modify or update the meta-filesystem.
The registry was not invented for programmers, it was invented to hide configuration from users. Users started to complain about big, ugly, hard to figure out INI files. Was the solution to make configuration files easier? No! It was to more or less remove them from the user's field of view.
Microsoft doesn't want people to know what is on their computers or how computers work. Someone who knows these things who does not work for Microsoft is a potential competitor, and we simply cannot have that! (Okay, I admit this last paragraph went right over the brink... But I stand by the rest of it...)
I find the notion that one may libel a corporation or a product bizarre. I think the founders of our republic would as well. Obviously, legislatures and courts don't see it my way, so here we sit in a world where we have to watch what we say about a laundry detergent. Free Speech...
Benjamin Franklin said this originally, only he was talking about beer, which, I think, is a statement much closer to the truth.
Please feel free to moderate this as offtopic, since it certainly is, but some sigs must be answered. I posted without the bonus...
Actually, there are quite a lot of these. The US economy (and don't forget, there are very large economies outside the US) is surprisingly huge. Trillions of dollars. The total worth of US companies is vastly larger than Microsoft's available cash AND capital. MS, as rich as it is, couldn't buy very many companies before it was out of liquidity and leveraged to the hilt. Sure, they might be able to buy out the odd company, but they are nowhere near as big economically as people seem to intuit. Their market power is very large. This comes from their monopoly on OS distribution. Take that away and they are just another software company. Very successful, but with no "magical powers."
As much as I like to bash Microsoft (and believe me, I do), they are just another economic actor. They are not out of all proportion with the other giant US companies. (As to whether most of the wealth of the world should run through less than a hundred gigantic corporations, well, that is another question).
Just saying "wrong" isn't an argument. The fact is that it is a mathematical accident that compilation results in code that it is difficult for a third party to understand. This results in an artificial shortage of technique. This drives the price up. I used the word "Free" as distinct from "free" where the former means free in the FSF/GPL sense and the latter means "gratis." At no point was I arguing that developing software was without cost or risk, rather I was arguing that the price is out of line with the cost and the risk because we (developers) are not able to reuse one another's work. Just imagine if medicine worked this way. There would be exactly one surgeon who would know how to do a heart bypass and he (or she) would charge millions for each procedure. This is the way software works now and the sole reason for this is the combination of intellectual property law and the fact the compilation is tanatmount to encryption.
You seem to understand this at only the shallowest possible level. There is more to the utility of code, a great deal more, than its final binary function.
This is what amazes me. Free Software still has value. The problem with the proprietary model is that it is artificialy scarce. Compilation is tantamount to encryption. People think software, protected by copyright, is like a book. It isn't. It is like an encrypted book. Would you pay for a book that was encrypted? Free Software *may be sold*. People pay money for Free Software all the time.
There is no economic reason for software to be closed and expensive. The money is NOT supporting developers (except for a small part of the profits). Mostly it is supporting software companies that are essentially cartels.
Should the law attack these cartels? To the extent that they excecise monopoly powers, perhaps. For the most part, however, I expect the free market to consign them to oblivion as Free Software that does the same job as proprietary software becomes available. If there really is some software that cannot be developed under a Free model, then the market will function and the business will thrive.
I have no objection to buying closed software and making it Free. It is simply the market in action. Free Software just equalizes the consumer with the producer. It brings the price back into reason. The whole proprietary model depends on the combination of intellectual property law and the effective encryption that is compilation. Free Software just depends on intellectual property, which strikes me as a natural right (to steal a bit of Locke's philosophy).
Free Software is about consumers choosing Freedom, not about destroying profit. Whatever method the market finds to compensate developers, from the payment-in-kind promised by the GPL, to the services model offered by RedHat and the like, to support by donation, to buying and Freeing closed code are all fine with me. The critical thing is to educate consumers on the value of Freedom in software, and the market will take care of the rest.
Laying people off is not folding. I'm hard pressed to think of any company that hasn't gone through at least one round of layoffs in its history. BTW, as an AC it is hard for us to know who you are and just where to find your "new years(sic) forecast."
The world is bit more complicated than you seem to think. If you think blue collar workers are inherently stupid you have a great deal to learn. You also are obviously ignorant of history. It was not so very long ago when people were being beat to death by police for daring to strike in order to get a wage that would feed a family and factory conditions that would not sever a worker's limb every few days. Intelligence is more evenly distributed than opportunity.
As for your second paragraph, you complain about the insularity and self-involvement of your fellow human and your conclusion that the solution is for you to be insular and self-involved is both amusing and proof of my point. Yes, we are in a cycle of toxic selfishness. You are helping it along. What do you think the driver of that SUV is thinking about you? Perhaps he is thinking that he wouldn't urinate on you if you were dying of thirst. As for me, I would give him water. I would give him my own canteen.
As for the third paragraph, ah, yes. The big bad gubbermint. Well, I hate to tell you, but technology is not on "our side." Technology simply is. Believe me it is possible for technology to become a perfect instrument of control. Yes, government can pass laws that force technology to become that perfect instrument of control. They will do it at the behest of commerce. The only things will stop them is for us to act responsibly and for us to engage in civil soceity. WE are the big, bad gubbermint. But we are too busy getting angry with each other on the highway and ripping CDs and assuming that freedom is ours to realize that we are throwing all of our liberty away. And we don't even seem to care.
For those who see the problem, the counsel is usually despair. The problems are too big for an individual to confront. But they aren't. The problems all begin, and this is my point, the problems ALL come from that toxic self-involvement. If we develop an awareness of responsibility, of community, of the fact that our actions have consequences, then things will get better.
We are NOT all criminals. I suspect that you do not know every single person in the country. I further suspect that you don't know all that much about the law. Thus I suspect you have no sound basis for your assertion. But we are all in it together. Life is fatal. All we have are the choices about how our life will be. We can choose between hatred, fear, mistrust, contempt, and love, compassion, trust and respect. That is all we have. The choice. And everything that happens in the human world is a direct result of this choice. It isn't money or power or the force of history, it is single individual people making choices. All of these macro effects arise from the micro phenomenon of individual choice. Government is a human thing. It does what we want it to for our reasons. A change of heart is all that it requires to change the world.
Thanks. Now I'll rant just a little bit more. People developed little things like civility and ethics because it actually makes it easier for us to live with one another. We invented laws, courts, and prisions because not everyone buys into the civility and ethics thing.
But what starts to happen when the majority of people are rude theives? You give more and more power to the law, the courts, and the prisons. If I have one complaint about the "average" person in my home country (the US of A) it is this self-involvment: the disconnect bteween individual action and the social state. These bad laws and scary technologies are being pushed for a reason. I'm not trying to tell anyone what to do. I'm just asking people to think about the fact that your little choices have a societal consequence. That, to misquote Kierkegaard, when you choose an action, you endorse it for all humanity.
No one lives in a tiny little moral vacuum. You are a stich in the social fabric. When you pull one way, the whole cloth moves a little.
I'm also not trying to defend the industry that buys IP from artists, pays them a pittance, and then goes off and gets rich because IP law creates instant and profitable monopolies. I favor the law for its original intent; fostering the production of creative works. The new technologies for production, duplication, and distribution will inevitably change the status quo. But read your Lessig: they can be architectures of freedom or architectures of control. Every stolen song, movie, and piece of computer software is another point in the control camp's favor. Your actions have consequences. Just think about it. That's all I ask.
I'd say doing it for "a quick infusion of cash" pretty much defines "short-sighted." The fact that it was forcibly short-sighted doesn't make not short-sighted...
Yeah. Bleedin' sea bird flavor!
I guess I must be the one exception. I do not steal. I think dishonesty spreads when you make blanket statements like that. Many people do not steal. And it is time those of us who do not say so.
/. about the evil corporations while some of us simultaneously steal their stuff. These corporations are using these thefts as an excuse to extend copyright to ridculous lengths of time, to force Digital Rights Management down our throats, and, in general, to abuse a provision of law that was never intended to give corporate ownership of IP, but rather to give impetus to individual creativity.
I will admit that temptation is way down for me now that I can get virtually all of the software I need in the form of Free Software. But even before then, I had legal copies of every package.
I do not download songs or movies where I do not have a legal right to do so, and I don't think anyone should. All of that said, I just contributed for the first time to the Electronic Frontier Foundation because the damned entertainment industry shares your low opinion of the human race and is seeking to control my computer and my behavior when I have not and will not EVER steal a damned thing!
We bitch and moan here on
The industry is having exactly the wrong reaction. Instead of giving the market what it wants (cheap, downloadable media), they are trying to regulate practices that have many perfectly legal applications.
But YOU decide whether or not to be a thief. And I don't think you have a leg to stand on to complain about corporate criminals if you are stealing music and movies at the same time. Moral superiority is highly undervalued these days. You can be self-righteous, and it can be a powerful tool. What strength do you arguments have if you are stealing too?
So don't tar me with your broad brush. I do not steal.
Not only is it uppauling, it is also appalling. I'm not sure you should have been flagged "offtopic," since the question of responsibility is there in the "hacking" issue. We have in our torts system the concept of contributory negligence. The person who robs your house is always criminally guilty, but his liability in a civil action might be lessened if you left your door wide open and left the country for six months.
The hacker is (and should be) criminally liable for any criminal acts, but what about the contributory negligence of the software and hardware makers? Of course, this is what all the liability disclaimers are for. (By using this software, you agree to the following...).
As a developer of software myself, I much prefer the caveat emptor system we currently use. I couldn't afford to write software if I might be liable for its flaws or misuse. Software is the only product I can think of with a specific disclaimer of merchantability or fitness. And yet we can get patents on it? Weird world...
Surface area determines the "charge" (which you measure in coulombs) a capacitor can hold. The maximum voltage (which is the difference in energy between the electrons on one plate and the other plate) is a function of the dielectric between the plates (how good an insulator it is -- ceramic is better than vacuum which is better than air, etc.)
How big a spark you get is a function of the latter. How long that spark might last is a function of the former. The voltage you get out of a capacitor is always the voltage you put in (minus resistance losses). Capacitors are voltage rated because a high enough voltage will break down the dielectric and spark inside the capcitor. Some chemical capacitors, like many electrolytic capacitors, will break down with a rewarding explosion. Some, like ceramics, will maybe make a bit of a "pop" and then either become shorts or open.
I've probably made things clear as mud...
I'm no virologist (or biologist for that matter), but it seems to me that there is nothing to fear here. Why would a bioterrorist "do it the hard way" when there are plenty of naturally ocurring and lethal pathogens out there? In fact, this kind of biotechnology is our best hope of a real defense against such weapons.
Biological warefare was practiced in ancient times. Even though they had no real disease theory, they know that hurling diseased corpses into walled fortifications would spread disease. They new that fouling water upstream of a city would spread disease. They did all this with no scientific knowledge of biology or pathology whatever.
Bombs are easier than bugs. Planes are easier than missiles. Radiation and disease are only probable attacks because of the primal fear they create. Biotechnology offers the best hope of defense against the latter (and maybe even a cure for the effects of the former). We need to know much more, sooner, not later.
I know there are several tiny GNU/Linux distros around (muLinux, etc.), but of the "big" distros, the one that I use on really low-end equipment (I recently dragged an old AMD-486 machine with 16M of RAM back into service) is Slackware. RedHat and SuSE won't install themselves on a machine as small as the one I dragged back into service.
Slackware did.
I think the key to "Linux on the Desktop" is to break Microsoft's monopoly control of the OEM channel. Linux already configured for your specific hardware is the easy way to go.
The sad thing is that I didn't mean my post as a joke. The notion that video games are "cultured" is depressing and sad. Culture is not the impractical production of a civilization, it is that part of the production of a civilization that tries to tell the unobvious truth. It tries to expose and illuminate the real state of the society, it tries to point the way through hipocrisy, injustice, indifference, and prejudice to honesty, authenticity, justice, and compassion. It does this through any number of means including pathos, satire, tragedy, etc.
Video games rarely come anywhere near these things (I can't say they never do -- I haven't played all video games). They divert, they amuse. They un-bore. They move us several hours closer to death with only stimulation in return. Your life (and mine) are slipping away by inches. I would hate to think that I will die with my contribution to civilization being a high score in Halo.
None of this is meant to attack the games themsevles or the people who play them, but rather to point out Katz's hyperbole in grandly elevating video games to a cultural watershed.
I thought closed, proprietary systems under rigid intellectual property control were evil (I think they are)? Apparently not when it involves shooting things, blowing things up, side-scrolling, or texture-mapping.
We have to remember that it is all related. The "values" of the video game industry are the same as those of the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft.