I never took exception to your philosophy, just your facts about the church's role in history. It did more preserving than destroying. There were no "dark ages." Eavery age is a battle between dogma and ignorance, and free inquiry and learning. I'm all for live and let live when it come to the eternal verities. Just keep in mind that the Western World would probably not have recovered literacy and science without the church, and it also would probably not have cast off hereditary political supermacy without the church.
It is very hard to label an entire institution "evil" or "good" and preserve one's duty the the truth.
While I agree with you that it would be mistake to seek ethical guidance from a single set of dogmatic beliefs, I must tell you that I am tired of hearing this rather poor understanding of the Christian church's role in medieval history repeated as though it were fact.
The Catholic Church is almost singlehandedly responsible for preserving literacy and social order following the collapse of the Roman Empire. (BTW, I am not a Catholic, merely a humble student of history). The "Dark Ages" is a myth.
The scholars in the monasteries copied and preserved much ancient knowledge. Some of them (notably in Ireland and England) even made use of the knowledge. Read up an Alcuin of York.
And if you really want to thank someone for progress, thank the Arabs, especially those in Andalusia in what is today southern Spain. They made great strides in astronomy, navigation, and mathematics and did an even better job of preserving the knowledge of the ancient world than did the northern European monastics.
By the 12th century, western mathematics was well beyond anything that had been accomplished in ancient Rome.
Bigotry and dogma are even-present in human communities. The repressive role of the church came up at two critical points. The first was at the rise of Universities (read about the early years of the University of Paris and the Church's ban on Aristotle), and the other was the Protestant Reformation. In both of those cases, their actions were the actions of a temporal institution faced with a direct challenge to thier power and authority. Their wicked and opressive responses were because they were humans with threatened power, not because they were Christians.
Christianity is an evangelical religeon. This makes it very different from many world religions. This evangelical nature builds in a duty to convert people to the faith. It is an agressive ideology. You will get "shit" from the odd overzealous Christian because that person believes that you are in trouble and he wishes to save you. You may not wish to be saved (because you do not believe in the peril), but at least be aware that it is a desire to do good that motivates the "shit giver."
As for "sanctity of life," well, I think that even if you are an atheist, you should have a little awe at the prospect that we humans may create a life form. Surely this capabilityis an awesome prospect and not to be done lightly.
Christianity is not some intellectual void, nor is it the source of ignorance and bigotry. Some Christians have little intellect, and there are ignorant and bigoted Christians, but I beleieve these words are not synonomous with "Chirstian."
John Milton in "Paradise Lost" has Adam confront God with a terrible challenge: "Did I ask thee, God, to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?" What more human question is there? Why am I here? I did not ask to be made, so why I am I here? Why do I live? Why must I know love and then loss?
Before we create a life form, we should ask ourselves Adam's question. Will our "children" millions of years hence, turn to us, not knowing who we were, and ask why they are here?
Parents should ask this before they have children. Why should we not ask it before we create life?
You know, I'm not a market expert either, but I don't think the bursting of the tech bubble will have serious economic consequences, except for individual investors who go out and buy yachts and multi-million dollar homes on the basis of all this paper profit. Yes, VA Linux has an $11 billion market capitalization. That will, at some point, collapse back to a reasonable $500 million - $1 billion market cap. That won't hurt VA systems, it won't hurt the overall economy (much) as it is a miniscule fraction of the GDP, even the whole speculative tech sector (.com's and linux specs) is but a small part of GDP. The people who will be burned is those who have thrown any significant part of their own assets into these. Unless you're on margin, you can't lose more than you bet. If you bet the farm on VALinux and don't have most of your money in a diverse portfolio of stocks, bonds, real-estate, and cash, then you will lose the farm. And you'll deserve it too.
I have the utmost respect for your technical acumen, your lucid writing, and your vast contributions to the perl community (of which I proudly claim membership, I love writing perl code). Perhaps by starting from that premise, that I am a respectful and intelligent person who is seeking to understand your viewpoint, you can avoid some of the sturm und drang flying around this issue and give a direct, fact-based argument to back the following assertion (please feel free to correct my paraphrasing):
You claim:
The GPL prevents me profiting (presumably financially) from my code.
Please explain. Red Hat is making money on GPL'd code. Alan Cox is getting paid to write GPL'd code. That's profit. I'm about to start flaming you here, so if you are not interested is hearing someone else tell you how wrong you are, stop here. I am, however, honestly interested in an unassailable argument backing up your thesis.
My flames and counterarguments:
What you appear to mean is that you cannot use compilation as a form of encryption to prevent someone else from seeing how you did what you did and, by hiding that information, prevent others from creating a competing and possibly superior product that would instantly destroy your product's inherent value. I think this argument shows the poverty of the entire closed source model.
The closed source model hold that software has some inherent intrinsic value. I disagree. Software has no inherent value whatsoever. Its value lies solely in relation to an existing problem that must be solved. If the software fits your problem, it has value. If it does not, it has none. The price of software is being made articifially high because compilation is tantamount to encryption, which creates an artifical shortage of technique.
Open Source reverses this. Open source creates a world where technique is open, and infinitely extensible. Software has no value in such a world, but SKILLED PEOPLE who can write and modify software, THEY have value! Not only that, but the omnipresence of open technique increases the skills and power of each programmer.
The Artisitic License is fine, for what it is, but it does not prevent someone taking the whole body of code and closing it. That's the problem. Not selling it. The GPL lets you sell it. You just can't take away the right the redistribute it, nor can you take away the source code.
Nobody is forcing you to use GPL'd code. If you find yourself wanting to do so, you must either open your own code (GPL it), or you'll have to write your own. You claim that the GPL advocates are "passing moral judgement" and are "full of pushy self-righteousness...telling others what to do." It seems to me that you are guilty of precisely the same in the very same paragraph! Don't like the GPL? DON'T USE IT! But don't use your pushy self-righteousness to pass moral judgment on those of us who choose to do so! If you can't see the blatant hypocrisy in your statement, well, I might have to take back my statement of respect.
I know a gentleman who founded a small electronics engineering company. He sold it and made himself rather well-to-do. The company's name was something like "Applied Electronics, Inc." or some such. Something bland, but descriptive of what they did. When the company was sold, they hired a naming consultant to rename the company. It is now known as "Zetaco." This acquantance of mine didn't like that much. He's a rather literally minded gentleman (as electrical engineers often are) and he still occasionally asks the rhetorical question, "Just what the hell is a 'Zetaco?'"
Of course, the reason for all the goofy names is to try to come up with something than can be trademarked and hasn't been used before. Its impossible to search every state for every trademark, so you don't bother with real words -- any useful real word has probably been used. Hence things as goofy as "Athlon" and, let's face it, "Pentium."
something else will take away Microsoft's monopoly. It's happenned before (IBM)
What you fail to mention is that a big part of the reason IBM lost its monopoly was a decade-long anti-trust investigation by the DoJ. IBM became a more conservative and careful company during this time, giving a number of competitiors considerably wider freedom of action.
I cannot understand how it came to be that the notion of "free markets" (meaning, apparently, comeplete lack of legal and government oversight) came to be enshrined as a faith. And make no mistake, it is a faith. There is no evidence to support the notion that a completely laissez-faire approach to economics produces anything resembling a just and equitable society. What it does produce is violent boom-bust cycles and a small class of plutocrats.
If you compare the present, highly regulated American economy to the American economy of any period prior to and including the Great Depression I think you will find a much wealthier populace, with a greater proportion of the population in the so-called "middle class." Of course there is still tremendous concentration of wealth. That's because wealth is power, and power will act to coerce the system to their interests. Of course there is considerable poverty, but much of this is due to failures of other social institutions, notably education. It is exacerbated by mental illness and drug abuse. I don't claim to understand the nature of these social ills. I have been lucky enough never to have been poor, so I don't pretend that I understand what it means, or why people find themselves there, but I do know that if we educated everybody and made a commitment to take care of those who truly cannot take care of themselves, things would be better than they are now.
Sorry, I've drifted rather far afield. I guess what I'm saying is, when you hear the blanket assertion that "free market: GOOD, government regulation: BAD," question it. I don't think it is really so. If you believe it, ask yourself why.
There is such a thing as a totally unregulated, unfettered, free-market business. We call it the mob. Ask youself if you want to live in a country where a business can do ANYTHING that is economically expedient, from dumping toxic wastes in rivers to assisinating rivals and then ask if regulation is all bad.
I don't like socialism or communism. I do not believe in state ownership of industry or in the elimination of private property. I believe in the profit motive, and in the connection between entrpreneurship and wealth. I believe that a rising tide raises all boats. But I also believe that there are larger social interests than amassing wealth for one's stockholders, and that part of the role of government is to be responsive to those social needs and thus to act as a check on the power of privately held money. That's why your vote is so important. Your vote is the only other currency out there besides the dollars. Sure, dollars largely control elections, but they still have to have your vote. Don't think for moment that monied interests aren't glad that voter turnout keeps falling. That weakens the vote currency and strenthens the cash currency.
Um, I don't think so. There are a great many communities in the US where Catholics are held in relatively low regard. Consider John F. Kennedy's race for President -- there were several public grumblings about whether he would be loyal to the United States or to the Pope.
Questioning Catholicism is a popular American sport. Now, questioning the Baptists or Lutherans...
Have you looked at Koffice? Even in its present state it is pretty good. Whether it will meet and surpass StarOffice is only a question of Sun's commitment. Koffice has gone from nothing to most of the features one would want in less than 18 months. Perhaps when you say "GNU" you are right, since GNU may be narrowly interpreted as "a project of the Free Software Foundation." In that case, I'd hold up the Gimp as an example of what the FSF can do. If you read it broadly as "software released under the GPL," I would add the Linux kernel to the list. And if you read it even more broadly to refer to so-called "open source" software, then I would hold up Apache, Samba, Linux, the Gimp, KDE, Gnome, and many others as examples of very high quality software.
I thought even AC's had grown past such flamebait.
NONE of this would be an issue if Sun would just go truly open source. I use StarOffice because it is the best I can get right now, but I sincerely hope it takes no steam from KOffice or from the GNOME office suite folks. Choice is good. Open source choice is better. Two solid free (in the GPL sense) office suites and one solid commercial one (StarOffice, for open-source shy commercial users) that interoperate at least at the file-format level would kick some serious heiney.
There'd be PPC and Alpha versions of StarOffice in short order if it were tuly free and not Sun's "Community Source" license. The SCSL keeps it all their property. They can take it away any time and while you can modify, those modifications become the property of Sun. There really is a difference in open-source licenses. There's room for all of them, but caveat emptor...
Not so. You are missing an important point. The law does not go into effect until two years after it is enacted. That's next year. Any circumvention you do this year by legal reverse engineering is a-ok. Next year you would have to go through the exception process described in the law I quoted.
Actually, you are wrong (up to a point). Here is the relevant section of Chapter 12, Title 17 (which was added to Title 17 by the Digital Millenium Copyright act of 1998):
(Warning: The following was cut-and-pasted from a PDF file and is correcpondingly unreadable). The two relevant facts are that DeCSS comes in under the grandfathering 2-year period documented below, and that anyone seeking to do what DeCSS does should apply to the librarian of Congress and the Register of Copyrights that lack of client software for Linux constitutes an adverse effect on their ability to make non-infringing use. Seems like perfectly good law to me.
The section below is quoted from the text of the relevant law, and IA (still) NAL.
'' 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems ''(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNO-LOGICAL MEASURES.Ð(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a techno-logical measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter. ''(B) The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that par-ticular class of works under this title, as determined under subpara-graph (C). ''(C) During the 2-year period described in subparagraph (A), and during each succeeding 3-year period, the Librarian of Con-gress, upon the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, who shall consult with the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information of the Department of Commerce and report and com-ment on his or her views in making such recommendation, shall make the determination in a rulemaking proceeding on the record for purposes of subparagraph (B) of whether persons who are users of a copyrighted work are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3- year period, adversely affected by the prohibition under subpara-graph (A) in their ability to make noninfringing uses under this title of a particular class of copyrighted works. In conducting such rule-making, the Librarian shall examineÐ ''(i) the availability for use of copyrighted works; ''(ii) the availability for use of works for nonprofit archival, preservation, and educational purposes; ''(iii) the impact that the prohibition on the circumvention of technological measures applied to copyrighted works has on criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or re-search; ''(iv) the effect of circumvention of technological measures on the market for or value of copyrighted works; and ''(v) such other factors as the Librarian considers appro-priate.
Nmap has a feature that puts its "stealth" scans in tiny, highly fragmented IP datagrams (such that only a few bytes of each TCP segment are in each datagram). That can have no legitimate use except to evade detection.
But I can justify it. It is there so that network admins can test to see if their intrusion detection systems can recognize an attack that uses tiny, highly fragmented IP datagrams.
By the same token, one might cogently argue that certain small, automatic handguns have only one purpose -- killing or maiming human beings. But one can also argue that they are used for competitive target shooting (which is so), so shall a gun manufacturer be held criminally responsible when one of these guns is used to kill someone?
The lawsuits at present pending against gunmakers and tobacco companies are all based on civil notions of product liability. I think that is quite appropriate. Tobacco companies have a legal problem primarily because they conspired to hide evidence of health risks associated with use of their product. I'm not so sure gun makers are vulnerable on this score. If it can be shown that gun makers have deliberately sought to suppress technologies that would make guns safer and colluded with one another to do so, then I think they are in more trouble.
I guess I'm wondering if a chainsaw company is civilly or criminally liable when someone attacks someone else with a chainsaw? I don't think so. The device was operating well within its capabilities. There is no reasonable way to prevent its misuse in this manner that would not also make it useless for its intended purpose.
Your point is precisely my point. I was saying that the authors of nmap, queso, pgp, and gpg are NOT liable for deliberate misuse of their products.
I would not, however, be surprised to see warning labels on software. I'm sitting here drinking a Diet Dr. Pepper. On the bottle is the following legend: WARNING Contents under pressure. Cap may blow off causing eye or other serious injury. Point away from face and people, especially when opening. I would expect to see labelling on software that can be used to do dangerous or illegal things that are the equivalent of that warning.
I don't want to pick nits, but the DeCSS folks are not in the USA, and what they did is not illegal under US law. If they use what they did to illegally copy a movie, then they would be in violation of US copyright law.
I think the law has to treat the person who uses a product for illegal means as the "guilty" party. The person who makes it bears no automatic culpability.
This is my general take. Gun manufacturers are not responsible for murders committed with guns. Now, I'm not a gun nut, but I think this is legally right.
The same should hold true for the authors of nmap and queso (to name a couple tools that system crackers might use) and the authors of pgp and gpg (to name a couple tools that criminals or terrorists might use).
Now, if it is a question of ethics, you've opened an entirely different can of worms. Ethically, I think several guns need a closer look. I think teflon tips are something that raise ethical questions. I think nmap has a few grey areas (what legitimate use requires the micro-fragmentation feature? That's there just to avoid string scanning intrusion detection.), but in each of these cases (except maybe those teflon tips) I think the law has to protect the author/maker and hold the user accountable.
If we hold that the maker/author is responsible for all of the ways in which their product/idea is used, then we should have locked up Darwin because his ideas contributed to holocaust. We should lock up the inventor of the circular saw because it has maimed and killed. And so on...
Ethics lies behind law, but the cliched figure of justice that adorns so many government buildings (at least so many American ones) wields a scale, a sword, and she is blindfolded. The sword is two edged as well. It may be a cliche, but it is an apt one. The law is not ethics. The law is the minimum interference to maintain the social order. While many conservatives in this country will argue with me about the law being minimal, it is certainly not the opposite. You can write and buy a book about how to crack safes. That's legal. Crack somebody else's safe, and you've broken the law. It seems absurd, but it isn't. To write a book on how to crack safes (so long as you believe in the idea of private property) is unethical, but I for one would not want to see it made illegal.
I cannot comprehend how some can argue that hate crimes are no different from all other crimes.
Do you really want someone this mentally unflexible as president? Do you really want someone who is willing to prosecute you for what you think to be president?
Well, I certainly don't want someone who can't tell the difference between a hate crime and free speech. The creation of hate crime law was, in my opinion, a reasonable legal response to make a particularly pernicious form of threat and intimidation that would otherwise be misdemeanor vandalism or property damage into a more serious crime with a more serious punishment.
Go ahead, publish all the hate literature you want. March in public. Hold rallies. That's your right. That's free speech. But when you burn crosses on a black family's lawn or spray paint swastikas on a Korean church, then you have moved beyond free speech into a form of harassment and intimidation that is far more pernicious than mere vandalism. If you can't see that difference, then, sir, I weep for you if your skin color or religious belief are ever in the minority.
As for the rest, I say again, I've never been a big fan of Mr. Gore. But I hardly think he's who we need to worry about when it comes to the erosion of constitutional liberties. I'm a bit more worried about things like product defamation laws. When agricultural goods have more protection than citizens, I think we're in trouble. I'd worry more about that than I'd worry about some "jack-booted government thug" coming to take away my 12-guage.
We all get so het-up about who's President when Congress is the one doing the meddling with liberty...
All Real numbers are not Integers, but all Integers are Real. While we're being pedantic, this should read "Not all Real numbers are Integers," or better, "Not all real numbers are integers." The way you phrased it seems to say that none of the real numbers are also integers, which is the opposite of your point.
"All people are not dead" is very different from "Not all people are dead."
Sorry, but with all this fine logical niggling going on, I couldn't help myself.
Of course, that should read, "I find his policy priorities tend to intersect with mine." It would be strange indeed if my policy priorities did not... Preview doesn't help when you read what you meant to say...
Let me put it this way. I have a tendency towards liberalism (which is not, despite a concerted effort, a dirty word). Of the field of serious candidates, I have a lukewarm interest in Mr. Bradley.
I find my policy priorities tend to intersect with mine. He seems (note seems) interested in actually debating policy and staking out positions that do not necessarily fit entirely with polls.
The truth is, American politics of late has, to steal a famous Shakespearean line, been "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Alas, there is a party apparatus that will rally quite heavily behind Mr. Gore. As for the Republican party, well, they've been too far away from me for nearly twenty years.
Truth be told, I think the last President this country had that impressed me very much held office well before I was born. Harry S. Truman. And the last Republican for whom I have had any particular admiration would be Theodore Roosevelt (who was smarter than he seemed).
Aside: When I titled my post "I hope he comes through" I meant to make a comment about hoping he would do a Slashdot interview...
I listened to a speech and Q&A he gave before Microsoft employees. He wouldn't comment on the case, but he said that he believed that "anti-trust law [was] good," and that "protecting the marketplace from dominance by a single player [is] an American value." I do not believe he's a Microsoft lapdog.
BTW, I am not even remotely endorsing Gore. I assure you that he is not my personal choice. Neither is Mr. Bush. I'm not saying who my choice is, but neither of these gentlemen is it.
I posted my original remark because I have read comments on/. dismissing him comepletely because of his boneheades remark about "taking the lead in creating the Internet."
My interest was in encouraging people to look deeper, not in encouraging people to support a particular candidate!
I know a lot of geeks are going to hate Gore for his constant use of the term "Information Superhighway" and his more recent comments that as a United States Senator he "took the lead in creating the Internet," but whatever you politics, I urge you not to be hasty. Don't reject Gore because of his occasionally boneheaded remarks. I think he actually has a relatively good grasp of technology issues (certainly more so than Mr. Bush).
I'm sure there are a host of sound reasons not to vote for Mr. Gore, but please don't let offhand remarks be the reason. Dig in before you decide!
Paid for by the by the Tweedledee for Ratcatcher Committee. All rights reserved. Some restrictions apply. Offer void in California, Rhode Island, and the Domincan Republic...
I seem to recall that Hugh Laurie (of Blackadder and A Bit of Fry & Laurie fame) was in a satirical play about a company that decided to market air. The play was called "Gasping" and it was written by Ben Elton, who co-wrote three seasons of Blackadder, and a some number of seasons of Mr. Bean.
They call air "Wonder-Whiffs" and try to corner the market...
The funny thing is, I don't really think of him as a science fiction author. He's kind of a word poet; he has more image than narrative in many of his works.
I can and will never foget stories like "The Pedestrian," "The Murderer," and of course, "Farenheit 451," all of which speak much more strongly to the world of today than to the world in which they were written.
"A Sound of Thunder," "Here be Tygers," the list goes on and on. But what about stories that have little or no fanstasy elements such as "One for His Lordship and One for the Road?"
One of the wonder of Bradbury's work is how thoroughly he is a writer of books. His work, while it has been translated to film, doesn't hold up well in the process. It's because people don't really talk the way he writes. His dialogue, if you read it aloud, comes across bombastic and grandiloquent, but when you read it on the page, it is a marvel. Honeyed phrases, sweeter in memory than on the tongue.
He writes the way we all wish we could talk if weren't constantly filled with the fear of sounding foolish. He writes the way we would talk if we could access the wonder of our frozen hearts. He writes the way we all would talk if we felt the pulse in our veins and knew that it was a clock counting the seconds to our death. He writes the way we would talk if we were fully alive.
I hope he recovers. And I hope even more that his work will remain read and vital, so he doesn't suffer the fate of "The Exiles."
BTW, I remember a longish short story (short novella?) of his, about a man risen from the dead trying to bring fear to a cleansed and scientific modern world. It begins something like "He came out of the earth, hating." and it ends with him shoved into a crematorium. I'd like to find the story, I read it over twenty years ago, but it still hangs with me. Anyone remember the title and/or which anthology it is in?
I don't think mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations are inherently evil. My problems with Microsoft are not (entirely) becuase they are big and successful (of course I do have a certain amount of animosity towards their success, everyone likes an underdog, nobody likes the top dog, but I try not to let that cloud my thinking). Microsoft's evil arises from their abuse of their OS market dominance. Because they "control the desktop," their give-away of IE with the OS that one needs to have (or at least most people think they need to have) was nothing but a blatant attempt to use their market power to crush Netscape, which did pose a real threat to MS's dominance.
RedHat has not (up to this point) behaved like that. While they have become the big boy on the Linux block, they have steadfastly held to their open source roots. Everything they've done has been GPL'd back for anyone to use. Look at all the RPM-based distros, for example.
I happen to use Debian because I'm a bit of a free software purist, so I'm leery of RedHat because it contains some licensed commercial code. Still, so long as RedHat continues to contribute open code, then more power to them.
The measure of RedHat's "evilness" will come with what they do as they buy these other guys (hey, what happened with the "rename cygnus server giveaway," BTW?). If they leave Cygnus' stuff closed and bundle it with RedHat, well, that will be sad, because they will have missed an opportunity to "raise all boats."
If they give away the code, then the buyout was a win for us all.
Also, again, while I spurn RedHat personally for selling some non-free code with their product, you have to give them credit for being a leading light for good. IIRC, Alan Cox is paid handsomely by RedHat. Next to Linus himself, Alan is probably the most important person in Linux kernel development, and, as the principal maintainer of the stable kernel series, he is one of the biggest contibutors to the success of ALL of Linux.
Alan's not the only one on RedHat's payroll either. We all benefit when hackers of all stripes are able to make a living writing free code. As long as RedHat keeps doing these right things, they should be respected and appreciated. Note I don't mean they shouldn't be criticized! RedHat has to expect some of that as the price of openness. But until RedHat starts openly acting against the interest of free software (which is different from bundling non-free code; I guess I see Debian-style DFSG as pure good, RedHat style GPL'ing of their own development while bundling other people's commercial stuff as impure good, and closed development as evil), I think they are doing just fine.
They may become the more conservative, stodgy, "tux in a suit" distro as they grow, but so what? As long as it's still free, you can take it and make as cutting-edge and rebellious a distro as you like.
I don't see a big, even a huge, Redmond-ready RedHat as a threat, unless they start closing the source (some of which they can't thanks to the GPL -- Why do people hate the GPL? -- Never mind, let's not go there today).
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I never took exception to your philosophy, just your facts about the church's role in history. It did more preserving than destroying. There were no "dark ages." Eavery age is a battle between dogma and ignorance, and free inquiry and learning. I'm all for live and let live when it come to the eternal verities. Just keep in mind that the Western World would probably not have recovered literacy and science without the church, and it also would probably not have cast off hereditary political supermacy without the church.
It is very hard to label an entire institution "evil" or "good" and preserve one's duty the the truth.
While I agree with you that it would be mistake to seek ethical guidance from a single set of dogmatic beliefs, I must tell you that I am tired of hearing this rather poor understanding of the Christian church's role in medieval history repeated as though it were fact.
The Catholic Church is almost singlehandedly responsible for preserving literacy and social order following the collapse of the Roman Empire. (BTW, I am not a Catholic, merely a humble student of history). The "Dark Ages" is a myth.
The scholars in the monasteries copied and preserved much ancient knowledge. Some of them (notably in Ireland and England) even made use of the knowledge. Read up an Alcuin of York.
And if you really want to thank someone for progress, thank the Arabs, especially those in Andalusia in what is today southern Spain. They made great strides in astronomy, navigation, and mathematics and did an even better job of preserving the knowledge of the ancient world than did the northern European monastics.
By the 12th century, western mathematics was well beyond anything that had been accomplished in ancient Rome.
Bigotry and dogma are even-present in human communities. The repressive role of the church came up at two critical points. The first was at the rise of Universities (read about the early years of the University of Paris and the Church's ban on Aristotle), and the other was the Protestant Reformation. In both of those cases, their actions were the actions of a temporal institution faced with a direct challenge to thier power and authority. Their wicked and opressive responses were because they were humans with threatened power, not because they were Christians.
Christianity is an evangelical religeon. This makes it very different from many world religions. This evangelical nature builds in a duty to convert people to the faith. It is an agressive ideology. You will get "shit" from the odd overzealous Christian because that person believes that you are in trouble and he wishes to save you. You may not wish to be saved (because you do not believe in the peril), but at least be aware that it is a desire to do good that motivates the "shit giver."
As for "sanctity of life," well, I think that even if you are an atheist, you should have a little awe at the prospect that we humans may create a life form. Surely this capabilityis an awesome prospect and not to be done lightly.
Christianity is not some intellectual void, nor is it the source of ignorance and bigotry. Some Christians have little intellect, and there are ignorant and bigoted Christians, but I beleieve these words are not synonomous with "Chirstian."
John Milton in "Paradise Lost" has Adam confront God with a terrible challenge: "Did I ask thee, God, to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?" What more human question is there? Why am I here? I did not ask to be made, so why I am I here? Why do I live? Why must I know love and then loss?
Before we create a life form, we should ask ourselves Adam's question. Will our "children" millions of years hence, turn to us, not knowing who we were, and ask why they are here?
Parents should ask this before they have children. Why should we not ask it before we create life?
You know, I'm not a market expert either, but I don't think the bursting of the tech bubble will have serious economic consequences, except for individual investors who go out and buy yachts and multi-million dollar homes on the basis of all this paper profit. Yes, VA Linux has an $11 billion market capitalization. That will, at some point, collapse back to a reasonable $500 million - $1 billion market cap. That won't hurt VA systems, it won't hurt the overall economy (much) as it is a miniscule fraction of the GDP, even the whole speculative tech sector (.com's and linux specs) is but a small part of GDP. The people who will be burned is those who have thrown any significant part of their own assets into these. Unless you're on margin, you can't lose more than you bet. If you bet the farm on VALinux and don't have most of your money in a diverse portfolio of stocks, bonds, real-estate, and cash, then you will lose the farm. And you'll deserve it too.
Mr. Christiansen:
I have the utmost respect for your technical acumen, your lucid writing, and your vast contributions to the perl community (of which I proudly claim membership, I love writing perl code). Perhaps by starting from that premise, that I am a respectful and intelligent person who is seeking to understand your viewpoint, you can avoid some of the sturm und drang flying around this issue and give a direct, fact-based argument to back the following assertion (please feel free to correct my paraphrasing):
You claim:
The GPL prevents me profiting (presumably financially) from my code.
Please explain. Red Hat is making money on GPL'd code. Alan Cox is getting paid to write GPL'd code. That's profit. I'm about to start flaming you here, so if you are not interested is hearing someone else tell you how wrong you are, stop here. I am, however, honestly interested in an unassailable argument backing up your thesis.
My flames and counterarguments:
What you appear to mean is that you cannot use compilation as a form of encryption to prevent someone else from seeing how you did what you did and, by hiding that information, prevent others from creating a competing and possibly superior product that would instantly destroy your product's inherent value. I think this argument shows the poverty of the entire closed source model.
The closed source model hold that software has some inherent intrinsic value. I disagree. Software has no inherent value whatsoever. Its value lies solely in relation to an existing problem that must be solved. If the software fits your problem, it has value. If it does not, it has none. The price of software is being made articifially high because compilation is tantamount to encryption, which creates an artifical shortage of technique.
Open Source reverses this. Open source creates a world where technique is open, and infinitely extensible. Software has no value in such a world, but SKILLED PEOPLE who can write and modify software, THEY have value! Not only that, but the omnipresence of open technique increases the skills and power of each programmer.
The Artisitic License is fine, for what it is, but it does not prevent someone taking the whole body of code and closing it. That's the problem. Not selling it. The GPL lets you sell it. You just can't take away the right the redistribute it, nor can you take away the source code.
Nobody is forcing you to use GPL'd code. If you find yourself wanting to do so, you must either open your own code (GPL it), or you'll have to write your own. You claim that the GPL advocates are "passing moral judgement" and are "full of pushy self-righteousness...telling others what to do." It seems to me that you are guilty of precisely the same in the very same paragraph! Don't like the GPL? DON'T USE IT! But don't use your pushy self-righteousness to pass moral judgment on those of us who choose to do so! If you can't see the blatant hypocrisy in your statement, well, I might have to take back my statement of respect.
I know a gentleman who founded a small electronics engineering company. He sold it and made himself rather well-to-do. The company's name was something like "Applied Electronics, Inc." or some such. Something bland, but descriptive of what they did. When the company was sold, they hired a naming consultant to rename the company. It is now known as "Zetaco." This acquantance of mine didn't like that much. He's a rather literally minded gentleman (as electrical engineers often are) and he still occasionally asks the rhetorical question, "Just what the hell is a 'Zetaco?'"
Of course, the reason for all the goofy names is to try to come up with something than can be trademarked and hasn't been used before. Its impossible to search every state for every trademark, so you don't bother with real words -- any useful real word has probably been used. Hence things as goofy as "Athlon" and, let's face it, "Pentium."
Pentium III? Fiveium three?
And I meant assassinating. I'm not sure what assisinating means... Must... get... coffee... Cannot... spell... without... caffiene... ;-)
What you fail to mention is that a big part of the reason IBM lost its monopoly was a decade-long anti-trust investigation by the DoJ. IBM became a more conservative and careful company during this time, giving a number of competitiors considerably wider freedom of action.
I cannot understand how it came to be that the notion of "free markets" (meaning, apparently, comeplete lack of legal and government oversight) came to be enshrined as a faith. And make no mistake, it is a faith. There is no evidence to support the notion that a completely laissez-faire approach to economics produces anything resembling a just and equitable society. What it does produce is violent boom-bust cycles and a small class of plutocrats.
If you compare the present, highly regulated American economy to the American economy of any period prior to and including the Great Depression I think you will find a much wealthier populace, with a greater proportion of the population in the so-called "middle class." Of course there is still tremendous concentration of wealth. That's because wealth is power, and power will act to coerce the system to their interests. Of course there is considerable poverty, but much of this is due to failures of other social institutions, notably education. It is exacerbated by mental illness and drug abuse. I don't claim to understand the nature of these social ills. I have been lucky enough never to have been poor, so I don't pretend that I understand what it means, or why people find themselves there, but I do know that if we educated everybody and made a commitment to take care of those who truly cannot take care of themselves, things would be better than they are now.
Sorry, I've drifted rather far afield. I guess what I'm saying is, when you hear the blanket assertion that "free market: GOOD, government regulation: BAD," question it. I don't think it is really so. If you believe it, ask yourself why.
There is such a thing as a totally unregulated, unfettered, free-market business. We call it the mob. Ask youself if you want to live in a country where a business can do ANYTHING that is economically expedient, from dumping toxic wastes in rivers to assisinating rivals and then ask if regulation is all bad.
I don't like socialism or communism. I do not believe in state ownership of industry or in the elimination of private property. I believe in the profit motive, and in the connection between entrpreneurship and wealth. I believe that a rising tide raises all boats. But I also believe that there are larger social interests than amassing wealth for one's stockholders, and that part of the role of government is to be responsive to those social needs and thus to act as a check on the power of privately held money. That's why your vote is so important. Your vote is the only other currency out there besides the dollars. Sure, dollars largely control elections, but they still have to have your vote. Don't think for moment that monied interests aren't glad that voter turnout keeps falling. That weakens the vote currency and strenthens the cash currency.
It's all interrelated... Think...
Um, I don't think so. There are a great many communities in the US where Catholics are held in relatively low regard. Consider John F. Kennedy's race for President -- there were several public grumblings about whether he would be loyal to the United States or to the Pope.
Questioning Catholicism is a popular American sport. Now, questioning the Baptists or Lutherans...
Have you looked at Koffice? Even in its present state it is pretty good. Whether it will meet and surpass StarOffice is only a question of Sun's commitment. Koffice has gone from nothing to most of the features one would want in less than 18 months. Perhaps when you say "GNU" you are right, since GNU may be narrowly interpreted as "a project of the Free Software Foundation." In that case, I'd hold up the Gimp as an example of what the FSF can do. If you read it broadly as "software released under the GPL," I would add the Linux kernel to the list. And if you read it even more broadly to refer to so-called "open source" software, then I would hold up Apache, Samba, Linux, the Gimp, KDE, Gnome, and many others as examples of very high quality software.
I thought even AC's had grown past such flamebait.
NONE of this would be an issue if Sun would just go truly open source. I use StarOffice because it is the best I can get right now, but I sincerely hope it takes no steam from KOffice or from the GNOME office suite folks. Choice is good. Open source choice is better. Two solid free (in the GPL sense) office suites and one solid commercial one (StarOffice, for open-source shy commercial users) that interoperate at least at the file-format level would kick some serious heiney.
There'd be PPC and Alpha versions of StarOffice in short order if it were tuly free and not Sun's "Community Source" license. The SCSL keeps it all their property. They can take it away any time and while you can modify, those modifications become the property of Sun. There really is a difference in open-source licenses. There's room for all of them, but caveat emptor...
Not so. You are missing an important point. The law does not go into effect until two years after it is enacted. That's next year. Any circumvention you do this year by legal reverse engineering is a-ok. Next year you would have to go through the exception process described in the law I quoted.
They are grandfathered right now. Period.
(Warning: The following was cut-and-pasted from a PDF file and is correcpondingly unreadable). The two relevant facts are that DeCSS comes in under the grandfathering 2-year period documented below, and that anyone seeking to do what DeCSS does should apply to the librarian of Congress and the Register of Copyrights that lack of client software for Linux constitutes an adverse effect on their ability to make non-infringing use. Seems like perfectly good law to me.
The section below is quoted from the text of the relevant law, and IA (still) NAL.
Nmap has a feature that puts its "stealth" scans in tiny, highly fragmented IP datagrams (such that only a few bytes of each TCP segment are in each datagram). That can have no legitimate use except to evade detection.
But I can justify it. It is there so that network admins can test to see if their intrusion detection systems can recognize an attack that uses tiny, highly fragmented IP datagrams.
By the same token, one might cogently argue that certain small, automatic handguns have only one purpose -- killing or maiming human beings. But one can also argue that they are used for competitive target shooting (which is so), so shall a gun manufacturer be held criminally responsible when one of these guns is used to kill someone?
The lawsuits at present pending against gunmakers and tobacco companies are all based on civil notions of product liability. I think that is quite appropriate. Tobacco companies have a legal problem primarily because they conspired to hide evidence of health risks associated with use of their product. I'm not so sure gun makers are vulnerable on this score. If it can be shown that gun makers have deliberately sought to suppress technologies that would make guns safer and colluded with one another to do so, then I think they are in more trouble.
I guess I'm wondering if a chainsaw company is civilly or criminally liable when someone attacks someone else with a chainsaw? I don't think so. The device was operating well within its capabilities. There is no reasonable way to prevent its misuse in this manner that would not also make it useless for its intended purpose.
Your point is precisely my point. I was saying that the authors of nmap, queso, pgp, and gpg are NOT liable for deliberate misuse of their products.
I would not, however, be surprised to see warning labels on software. I'm sitting here drinking a Diet Dr. Pepper. On the bottle is the following legend: WARNING Contents under pressure. Cap may blow off causing eye or other serious injury. Point away from face and people, especially when opening. I would expect to see labelling on software that can be used to do dangerous or illegal things that are the equivalent of that warning.
I don't want to pick nits, but the DeCSS folks are not in the USA, and what they did is not illegal under US law. If they use what they did to illegally copy a movie, then they would be in violation of US copyright law.
IANAL.
I think the law has to treat the person who uses a product for illegal means as the "guilty" party. The person who makes it bears no automatic culpability.
This is my general take. Gun manufacturers are not responsible for murders committed with guns. Now, I'm not a gun nut, but I think this is legally right.
The same should hold true for the authors of nmap and queso (to name a couple tools that system crackers might use) and the authors of pgp and gpg (to name a couple tools that criminals or terrorists might use).
Now, if it is a question of ethics, you've opened an entirely different can of worms. Ethically, I think several guns need a closer look. I think teflon tips are something that raise ethical questions. I think nmap has a few grey areas (what legitimate use requires the micro-fragmentation feature? That's there just to avoid string scanning intrusion detection.), but in each of these cases (except maybe those teflon tips) I think the law has to protect the author/maker and hold the user accountable.
If we hold that the maker/author is responsible for all of the ways in which their product/idea is used, then we should have locked up Darwin because his ideas contributed to holocaust. We should lock up the inventor of the circular saw because it has maimed and killed. And so on...
Ethics lies behind law, but the cliched figure of justice that adorns so many government buildings (at least so many American ones) wields a scale, a sword, and she is blindfolded. The sword is two edged as well. It may be a cliche, but it is an apt one. The law is not ethics. The law is the minimum interference to maintain the social order. While many conservatives in this country will argue with me about the law being minimal, it is certainly not the opposite. You can write and buy a book about how to crack safes. That's legal. Crack somebody else's safe, and you've broken the law. It seems absurd, but it isn't. To write a book on how to crack safes (so long as you believe in the idea of private property) is unethical, but I for one would not want to see it made illegal.
Well, I certainly don't want someone who can't tell the difference between a hate crime and free speech. The creation of hate crime law was, in my opinion, a reasonable legal response to make a particularly pernicious form of threat and intimidation that would otherwise be misdemeanor vandalism or property damage into a more serious crime with a more serious punishment.
Go ahead, publish all the hate literature you want. March in public. Hold rallies. That's your right. That's free speech. But when you burn crosses on a black family's lawn or spray paint swastikas on a Korean church, then you have moved beyond free speech into a form of harassment and intimidation that is far more pernicious than mere vandalism. If you can't see that difference, then, sir, I weep for you if your skin color or religious belief are ever in the minority.
As for the rest, I say again, I've never been a big fan of Mr. Gore. But I hardly think he's who we need to worry about when it comes to the erosion of constitutional liberties. I'm a bit more worried about things like product defamation laws. When agricultural goods have more protection than citizens, I think we're in trouble. I'd worry more about that than I'd worry about some "jack-booted government thug" coming to take away my 12-guage.
We all get so het-up about who's President when Congress is the one doing the meddling with liberty...
I realy like a sig. I like that one. And you know what? I'd bet it is...
All Real numbers are not Integers, but all Integers are Real.
While we're being pedantic, this should read "Not all Real numbers are Integers," or better, "Not all real numbers are integers." The way you phrased it seems to say that none of the real numbers are also integers, which is the opposite of your point.
"All people are not dead" is very different from "Not all people are dead."
Sorry, but with all this fine logical niggling going on, I couldn't help myself.
Of course, that should read, "I find his policy priorities tend to intersect with mine." It would be strange indeed if my policy priorities did not... Preview doesn't help when you read what you meant to say...
Let me put it this way. I have a tendency towards liberalism (which is not, despite a concerted effort, a dirty word). Of the field of serious candidates, I have a lukewarm interest in Mr. Bradley.
I find my policy priorities tend to intersect with mine. He seems (note seems) interested in actually debating policy and staking out positions that do not necessarily fit entirely with polls.
The truth is, American politics of late has, to steal a famous Shakespearean line, been "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Alas, there is a party apparatus that will rally quite heavily behind Mr. Gore. As for the Republican party, well, they've been too far away from me for nearly twenty years.
Truth be told, I think the last President this country had that impressed me very much held office well before I was born. Harry S. Truman. And the last Republican for whom I have had any particular admiration would be Theodore Roosevelt (who was smarter than he seemed).
The rest of the field leaves me cold.
Aside: When I titled my post "I hope he comes through" I meant to make a comment about hoping he would do a Slashdot interview...
/. dismissing him comepletely because of his boneheades remark about "taking the lead in creating the Internet."
I listened to a speech and Q&A he gave before Microsoft employees. He wouldn't comment on the case, but he said that he believed that "anti-trust law [was] good," and that "protecting the marketplace from dominance by a single player [is] an American value." I do not believe he's a Microsoft lapdog.
BTW, I am not even remotely endorsing Gore. I assure you that he is not my personal choice. Neither is Mr. Bush. I'm not saying who my choice is, but neither of these gentlemen is it.
I posted my original remark because I have read comments on
My interest was in encouraging people to look deeper, not in encouraging people to support a particular candidate!
Anyways, please carry on...
I know a lot of geeks are going to hate Gore for his constant use of the term "Information Superhighway" and his more recent comments that as a United States Senator he "took the lead in creating the Internet," but whatever you politics, I urge you not to be hasty. Don't reject Gore because of his occasionally boneheaded remarks. I think he actually has a relatively good grasp of technology issues (certainly more so than Mr. Bush).
I'm sure there are a host of sound reasons not to vote for Mr. Gore, but please don't let offhand remarks be the reason. Dig in before you decide!
Paid for by the by the Tweedledee for Ratcatcher Committee. All rights reserved. Some restrictions apply. Offer void in California, Rhode Island, and the Domincan Republic...
I seem to recall that Hugh Laurie (of Blackadder and A Bit of Fry & Laurie fame) was in a satirical play about a company that decided to market air. The play was called "Gasping" and it was written by Ben Elton, who co-wrote three seasons of Blackadder, and a some number of seasons of Mr. Bean.
They call air "Wonder-Whiffs" and try to corner the market...
I hope he recovers.
The funny thing is, I don't really think of him as a science fiction author. He's kind of a word poet; he has more image than narrative in many of his works.
I can and will never foget stories like "The Pedestrian," "The Murderer," and of course, "Farenheit 451," all of which speak much more strongly to the world of today than to the world in which they were written.
"A Sound of Thunder," "Here be Tygers," the list goes on and on. But what about stories that have little or no fanstasy elements such as "One for His Lordship and One for the Road?"
One of the wonder of Bradbury's work is how thoroughly he is a writer of books. His work, while it has been translated to film, doesn't hold up well in the process. It's because people don't really talk the way he writes. His dialogue, if you read it aloud, comes across bombastic and grandiloquent, but when you read it on the page, it is a marvel. Honeyed phrases, sweeter in memory than on the tongue.
He writes the way we all wish we could talk if weren't constantly filled with the fear of sounding foolish. He writes the way we would talk if we could access the wonder of our frozen hearts. He writes the way we all would talk if we felt the pulse in our veins and knew that it was a clock counting the seconds to our death. He writes the way we would talk if we were fully alive.
I hope he recovers. And I hope even more that his work will remain read and vital, so he doesn't suffer the fate of "The Exiles."
BTW, I remember a longish short story (short novella?) of his, about a man risen from the dead trying to bring fear to a cleansed and scientific modern world. It begins something like "He came out of the earth, hating." and it ends with him shoved into a crematorium. I'd like to find the story, I read it over twenty years ago, but it still hangs with me. Anyone remember the title and/or which anthology it is in?
Get well, Mr. Bradbury.
I don't think mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations are inherently evil. My problems with Microsoft are not (entirely) becuase they are big and successful (of course I do have a certain amount of animosity towards their success, everyone likes an underdog, nobody likes the top dog, but I try not to let that cloud my thinking). Microsoft's evil arises from their abuse of their OS market dominance. Because they "control the desktop," their give-away of IE with the OS that one needs to have (or at least most people think they need to have) was nothing but a blatant attempt to use their market power to crush Netscape, which did pose a real threat to MS's dominance.
RedHat has not (up to this point) behaved like that. While they have become the big boy on the Linux block, they have steadfastly held to their open source roots. Everything they've done has been GPL'd back for anyone to use. Look at all the RPM-based distros, for example.
I happen to use Debian because I'm a bit of a free software purist, so I'm leery of RedHat because it contains some licensed commercial code. Still, so long as RedHat continues to contribute open code, then more power to them.
The measure of RedHat's "evilness" will come with what they do as they buy these other guys (hey, what happened with the "rename cygnus server giveaway," BTW?). If they leave Cygnus' stuff closed and bundle it with RedHat, well, that will be sad, because they will have missed an opportunity to "raise all boats."
If they give away the code, then the buyout was a win for us all.
Also, again, while I spurn RedHat personally for selling some non-free code with their product, you have to give them credit for being a leading light for good. IIRC, Alan Cox is paid handsomely by RedHat. Next to Linus himself, Alan is probably the most important person in Linux kernel development, and, as the principal maintainer of the stable kernel series, he is one of the biggest contibutors to the success of ALL of Linux.
Alan's not the only one on RedHat's payroll either. We all benefit when hackers of all stripes are able to make a living writing free code. As long as RedHat keeps doing these right things, they should be respected and appreciated. Note I don't mean they shouldn't be criticized! RedHat has to expect some of that as the price of openness. But until RedHat starts openly acting against the interest of free software (which is different from bundling non-free code; I guess I see Debian-style DFSG as pure good, RedHat style GPL'ing of their own development while bundling other people's commercial stuff as impure good, and closed development as evil), I think they are doing just fine.
They may become the more conservative, stodgy, "tux in a suit" distro as they grow, but so what? As long as it's still free, you can take it and make as cutting-edge and rebellious a distro as you like.
I don't see a big, even a huge, Redmond-ready RedHat as a threat, unless they start closing the source (some of which they can't thanks to the GPL -- Why do people hate the GPL? -- Never mind, let's not go there today).