And your point is? So what? Real altruism has to start somewhere and it doesn't start with the GPL. Forced altruism is not altruism.
I don't care if their altruism is forced or freely given. Earlier this year, I spent about 200 hours trying to reverse engineer the SCSI/MMC commands. I used the BSD license on my code and released it. I was e-mailed by another developer who tried to describe a more efficient method of constructing SCSI command packets. He said he already coded the improvement in his own product, but he wouldn't give it to me because he had relicensed it. If I had originally licensed this under the GPL, he wouldn't have that option(unless he wasn't distributing it). That also is completely ignoring the fact that he could steal my code and put it in his product without me knowing, but that is a whole other can of worms.
That is a good example of why the BSD license can suck. I have since made other improvements in my library and have relicensed it under the GPL.
I think what you are saying is my statement is irrelevant, since officially no grants were being issued specifically to embryonic stem cell research.
That's not to say it wasn't possible, or that any money was indirectly supporting it. Take for example a university lab. It would receive federal grants for doing certain types of research. That grant money goes towards supporting the entire lab and it's supplies. Now, that lab is not allowed to do any embryonic stem cell research *at all* because the federal money is going into it and that would be indirectly funding the research. The hard line stance, all-or-nothing approach to limiting embryonic stem cell research for new stem cell lines means labs that receive any federal grant money cannot do any new-line embryonic stem cell research, even if it is being funded separately.
No, but they have repeatedly used their patents in an attempt to prevent competitors from creating compatible software.
ASX WMV FAT fs
You are correct. As they became more popular, their power and thus by extension their ability to force vendors and OEMs into using their software increased. The larger they got, the larger this influence became. Due to the necessity for interoperability, an OS monoculture was the easiest to maintain and consumers saw no problems with using only Microsoft OS's. If only they knew in the early nineties what we know now.
His plan is the first federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
I call bullshit. Before he signed into effect the limitation that federal funding cannot be used to persue research in or aid new embryonic stem cell lines, there was no limitation on which types of research the money could go into. His new rules doesn't enable researchers to do anything they couldn't do before, it limits them on what they can do in the future.
it will cause them to start loosing processors You cannot possible have meant this. A women can be loose. A bolt can be loose. The only way to be 'loosing a processor' is by pulling the ZIF socket bar. I think you were intending to use the verb 'losing' instead. Please be sure to use the correct word next time or there will be strict penalties for you.
p.s. If you feel you must construct a sentence with 4 or more commas, it is almost assuredly a run-on sentence.
You both brought up good points. Yes, it would be very difficult. I'm not saying any persons life is worth more than any other persons. All human life is valuable equally. The only way to judge the value of human life against other human life is purely by numbers. One life will always be less important than ten lives, and that again even less important than one hundred lives. There is no 'judging' who's life is more important or valuable. On a personal level, I could easily make the decision to end one random person's life to save millions for a cure for cancer, but if the person were in front of me and I was told killing THIS person means saving millions, I would have a very difficult time making the choice.
BTW, I have a cat also. I love my cat dearly. However, my cat is less important to me than any human life. If I saw a stranger and my cat both standing in front of a moving bus and I had the chance to save only one of them, I would always grab the person first, regardless of whether I knew them or not.
There is also the argument of the scientist where if he had the choice to kill one innoncent person to find a cure for cancer, would he do it? The answer is most likely no.
You have reached an illogical conclusion. If you were sure that killing one innocent person would bring a cure for cancer, doing it would be of much greater societal benefit in the long run than saving one persons life. The only way to measure the value of a human life is the value of another human life. Nothing else in the world(including money, sex, power and fame) can compare to the value of a single life. In a case like this, where the loss of one life could save millions of lives per year, millions of lives will always be worth more than the benefit of keeping a single person around.
Does it sound cold? I think saving millions is far more compassionate than saying this one person is worth more than millions.
Hey, I live in Vancouver about 10 miles north of Portland. I gotta say, our population density is pretty freakin high in some areas. Portland is much the same. Due to urban growth boundaries and strict zoning, the population density changes very abruptly in Vancouver. Determining where WiFi deployment should stop and start should be very clear and I would absolutely *love* city provided net access. I currently pay Comcast $50 and change for net access. While the service seems great and download speeds are acceptable(about 4Mb on average), I think city provided net access could be far cheaper than Comcast can provide.
I wasn't referring to software patents, I was referring to business methods. Now, I have never gone through the process of getting a patent, but I have read a lot of patents online. I've seen some really broad and stupid patents, issued by the USPTO. I'm assuming it was because they didn't understand it or they didn't put the time into researching it.
I call bullshit. Amazon has done this many times. Basically, the USPTO just doesn't have enough manpower to do a proper investigation, and patents are truly becoming 'rubber stamped'.
It's all relative. I work for a multinational company, and I can tell you one thing. I make 32K in the states. My job in Tokyo pays 41K(USD). My job in Bangalore pays 19K(USD). And you know what? All of us do ok, because our buying power is determined by the local economy. So if I make like $32k and I'm happy, and they guy over in India makes $19k and we both have roughly the same spending power, who is to say that I make more than him? Maybe in absolute dollars, but certainly not in quality of life or buying power. By any measure of financial success, we are equals regardless of the fact that I make 75% more than the him.
I hate to burst anybody's bubble here, but you've got it all wrong. The ToS of 99% of online games say you do not own anything. The game, the service, and all digital content therein is owned by the company itself. It may have been a loss to this guy to lose his prized sword, but he merely lost something he didn't own in the first place. This is a plain case of murder and it has nothing to do with the game itself.
Only if the aluminum slug accelerates linearly, which is almost surely not the case. Like any other inductor, the rails will need time to build up their magnetic field. This hysteresis combined with the potentially non-linear response from the capacitor bank they are likely using to power this thing, I'd imagine you could be off by just a hair.
Hah. You are funny. Did you know that the entire US economy is meticulously managed by our government? Of course, they cannot stop broad sweeping trends, but they are always fanagling in the back trying to keep us spending lots of money, creating more debt, throwing money at multi-national corporations, and giving out tax breaks to be sure our own companies are 'competitive'.
Whatever dude, I think it's time to take off your blinderes.
If everyone did this, the newest kernels would never get tested. I think it is important that we have a diverse range of users using new, almost new, and older but well tested kernels.
US Government Thats a dumb idea. Considering the federal goverment's propensity for fucking things up, I don't want them anywhere near my kernel. I don't mind the NSA, but if Homeland Security tried to 'enhance' my kernel, I would stop using linux.
I don't. The problem is with the other 94% of the people out there. They have unknowingly allowed unsecured software to remain on their computer. A computer is similar to a car in the sense that improper use of one can have negative consequences on more than just yourself. In my case, I'm tired of the spam barage which is due in large part to unpatched computers taking part in so-called 'zombie nets'. So for every new user Microsoft reels in, there is a direct and negative effect on the internet, and that effects me.
Any comments that this is obscene is pure jealousy.
I am jealous of the money they have. I do not make a lot of money, like a lot of people, and would really love to be at least a little better off. It is not the money itself that is obscene, but the way in which it was made. You state that their richness is a sign of the 'fine job they did'...
I disagree. It may be like that with some consumers, but they have systematically rigged it so they cannot be toppled and you are required to purchase their products with every computer you buy. In a business sense, that is a 'job well done', but if thats what it takes to be rich, I'll pass.
For each company you list, I can list a hundred that are trying to help humanity by making the world a better place.
I don't need to list a hundred, but to support your case: I work for Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. I get to make the world a safer place and have a cool job. How many private companies can you think of that make that big of a difference in the world? Not very many, I assure you.
Net go down? Call your representative. Can't get newsgroups on your pc? Better call the mayor. Geesh. That's JUST the ticket, sure. Next up, the politicians will be running on IT issues --"Vote for me, I promise OV-3 connectivity in every home!" Seriously. If a traffic signal goes down, do you call the mayor? No. I guarantee you, politicians will not be campaigning their promises of 'internet connectivity' for quite a while. They are still too busy lying to us about taxes and gerrymandering.
Putting the system in charge of net connectivity would truly be the work of an idiot.
Try substituting 'net connectivity' with 'traffic signaling' or 'road maintenance'.
Putting the system in charge of traffic signaling would truly be the work of an idiot.
Putting the system in charge of road maintenance would truly be the work of an idiot.
Who sounds like an idiot now? You wanna know something? I pay over $50 a month for Comcast cable internet. Why? They want to make a profit, and they are charging me to provide media services I do not use. I don't want a friggin ISP! I don't want the 'value-adding services', I just want a gateway to the internet. Thats it. Do I have a choice? No. DSL is not offered in my neighborhood yet and Comcast is the only way to get high-speed internet(excluding Satellite, which sucks if you play games needing low latency). If my county or city goverment said 'Hey, want 10Mb up/down for $25?', me and all of my neighbors would pounce on it.
Since the software has no way of knowing what state it's being installed in, this is like if your town council tried to regulate, or ban, the internet.
Not true. It is possible for software to determine it's own locality if it is connected to the internet, which is how most spyware gets installed in the first place. Although it is not 100% accurate, it is close enough that they could say they made every effort.
A person charged under this bill could sue the county/city where he was charged, for violating his civil rights to commerce.
So the bill may just be a bluff.
I don't know where you got that but that is just plain wrong. The bill does not contain any language excluding or preferring any State's software over another. This bill does not care where the software came from, but it does apply to computers in this state. In general, you cannot sue one locality for the laws in another locality, you must sue the locality you are claiming has done you harm. It is called 'jurisdiction'. For them to even come close, they would have to sue the state of Washington itself and claim the burden this places on their business is greater than the burden it places on a company in this state. BTW, that is highly unlikely to happen.
And, to your last question: Yes, there is some broad language in it that might cause problems for shady companies selling legitimate software with adverse/unintended side effects. I think overall, this new law really comes closer to anything I expected to come out my home state.
This is why truly free as in speech software will 'win'. It cannot be purchased, corrupted, or taken away and is indeed driven only by that which is needed. The only way to destroy FOSS is by destroying the base on which it stands, namely 'copyright'. Patents can be worked around and I have enough faith(possibly naively) that the patent system in the end will balance itself out if only for the self-interest of the country. Eventually, even the polititicians will realise that the attempts by our IT industry to rule itself with an iron fist over our lawmakers will leave the US in the dust as other truly democratic countries pick up where we left off.
Over time, Adam Smith's assumptions over the market may prove to be true with respect to software, I think it will simply take more time than we are used to.
Ummm. That is not always the case. I've read the Wealth of Nations several times(although not in the last couple of years). Adam Smith had a lot of insight into how a free market can always choose the best outcome automatically. Unfortunately, this was based on several assumptions, not the least of which is that a free market must exist for the best possible outcome to ensue.
In this case(as the FTA mentioned), Microsoft initially supplied the best product. This does not mean the supplied a superior product in a technical sense, but as a product, it excelled in the factors that meant the most at the time. After their MSDOS and later Windows became entirely ubiquitous, they had a base to leverage their power over the market. This position allowed them to force the market, and thusly the entire IT industry, to use their products over product that were truly superior.
Adam Smith was only correct with the assumption that consumers are free to choose their suppliers based on the factors that make them a good supplier. With MS's power, in many cases(especially businesses), the market is *not* free to choose other options. This has now, and will continue into the future, stagnated the industry. They are now trapped by the installed base of inferior products, upon which their ubiquity is actually what prevents them from changing suppliers to actually move to the better supplier.
Adam Smith wasn't wrong, he just assumed too much.
Slashdot Mirror
And your point is? So what? Real altruism has to start somewhere and it doesn't start with the GPL. Forced altruism is not altruism.
I don't care if their altruism is forced or freely given. Earlier this year, I spent about 200 hours trying to reverse engineer the SCSI/MMC commands. I used the BSD license on my code and released it. I was e-mailed by another developer who tried to describe a more efficient method of constructing SCSI command packets. He said he already coded the improvement in his own product, but he wouldn't give it to me because he had relicensed it. If I had originally licensed this under the GPL, he wouldn't have that option(unless he wasn't distributing it). That also is completely ignoring the fact that he could steal my code and put it in his product without me knowing, but that is a whole other can of worms.
That is a good example of why the BSD license can suck. I have since made other improvements in my library and have relicensed it under the GPL.
Low UID?
I win.
I think what you are saying is my statement is irrelevant, since officially no grants were being issued specifically to embryonic stem cell research.
That's not to say it wasn't possible, or that any money was indirectly supporting it. Take for example a university lab. It would receive federal grants for doing certain types of research. That grant money goes towards supporting the entire lab and it's supplies. Now, that lab is not allowed to do any embryonic stem cell research *at all* because the federal money is going into it and that would be indirectly funding the research. The hard line stance, all-or-nothing approach to limiting embryonic stem cell research for new stem cell lines means labs that receive any federal grant money cannot do any new-line embryonic stem cell research, even if it is being funded separately.
No, but they have repeatedly used their patents in an attempt to prevent competitors from creating compatible software.
ASX
WMV
FAT fs
You are correct. As they became more popular, their power and thus by extension their ability to force vendors and OEMs into using their software increased. The larger they got, the larger this influence became. Due to the necessity for interoperability, an OS monoculture was the easiest to maintain and consumers saw no problems with using only Microsoft OS's. If only they knew in the early nineties what we know now.
His plan is the first federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
I call bullshit. Before he signed into effect the limitation that federal funding cannot be used to persue research in or aid new embryonic stem cell lines, there was no limitation on which types of research the money could go into. His new rules doesn't enable researchers to do anything they couldn't do before, it limits them on what they can do in the future.
it will cause them to start loosing processors
You cannot possible have meant this. A women can be loose. A bolt can be loose. The only way to be 'loosing a processor' is by pulling the ZIF socket bar. I think you were intending to use the verb 'losing' instead. Please be sure to use the correct word next time or there will be strict penalties for you.
p.s. If you feel you must construct a sentence with 4 or more commas, it is almost assuredly a run-on sentence.
You both brought up good points. Yes, it would be very difficult. I'm not saying any persons life is worth more than any other persons. All human life is valuable equally. The only way to judge the value of human life against other human life is purely by numbers. One life will always be less important than ten lives, and that again even less important than one hundred lives. There is no 'judging' who's life is more important or valuable. On a personal level, I could easily make the decision to end one random person's life to save millions for a cure for cancer, but if the person were in front of me and I was told killing THIS person means saving millions, I would have a very difficult time making the choice.
BTW, I have a cat also. I love my cat dearly. However, my cat is less important to me than any human life. If I saw a stranger and my cat both standing in front of a moving bus and I had the chance to save only one of them, I would always grab the person first, regardless of whether I knew them or not.
There is also the argument of the scientist where if he had the choice to kill one innoncent person to find a cure for cancer, would he do it? The answer is most likely no.
You have reached an illogical conclusion. If you were sure that killing one innocent person would bring a cure for cancer, doing it would be of much greater societal benefit in the long run than saving one persons life. The only way to measure the value of a human life is the value of another human life. Nothing else in the world(including money, sex, power and fame) can compare to the value of a single life. In a case like this, where the loss of one life could save millions of lives per year, millions of lives will always be worth more than the benefit of keeping a single person around.
Does it sound cold? I think saving millions is far more compassionate than saying this one person is worth more than millions.
Hey, I live in Vancouver about 10 miles north of Portland. I gotta say, our population density is pretty freakin high in some areas. Portland is much the same. Due to urban growth boundaries and strict zoning, the population density changes very abruptly in Vancouver. Determining where WiFi deployment should stop and start should be very clear and I would absolutely *love* city provided net access. I currently pay Comcast $50 and change for net access. While the service seems great and download speeds are acceptable(about 4Mb on average), I think city provided net access could be far cheaper than Comcast can provide.
I wasn't referring to software patents, I was referring to business methods. Now, I have never gone through the process of getting a patent, but I have read a lot of patents online. I've seen some really broad and stupid patents, issued by the USPTO. I'm assuming it was because they didn't understand it or they didn't put the time into researching it.
I call bullshit. Amazon has done this many times. Basically, the USPTO just doesn't have enough manpower to do a proper investigation, and patents are truly becoming 'rubber stamped'.
Actually, I'm not in IT. For what I do, I make really good money(4.5% above market rate). My job is incredibly easy, albeit a little stressful.
It's all relative. I work for a multinational company, and I can tell you one thing. I make 32K in the states. My job in Tokyo pays 41K(USD). My job in Bangalore pays 19K(USD). And you know what? All of us do ok, because our buying power is determined by the local economy. So if I make like $32k and I'm happy, and they guy over in India makes $19k and we both have roughly the same spending power, who is to say that I make more than him? Maybe in absolute dollars, but certainly not in quality of life or buying power. By any measure of financial success, we are equals regardless of the fact that I make 75% more than the him.
You have to take that into consideration.
I know the feeling.
I hate to burst anybody's bubble here, but you've got it all wrong. The ToS of 99% of online games say you do not own anything. The game, the service, and all digital content therein is owned by the company itself. It may have been a loss to this guy to lose his prized sword, but he merely lost something he didn't own in the first place. This is a plain case of murder and it has nothing to do with the game itself.
Only if the aluminum slug accelerates linearly, which is almost surely not the case. Like any other inductor, the rails will need time to build up their magnetic field. This hysteresis combined with the potentially non-linear response from the capacitor bank they are likely using to power this thing, I'd imagine you could be off by just a hair.
Hah. You are funny. Did you know that the entire US economy is meticulously managed by our government? Of course, they cannot stop broad sweeping trends, but they are always fanagling in the back trying to keep us spending lots of money, creating more debt, throwing money at multi-national corporations, and giving out tax breaks to be sure our own companies are 'competitive'.
Whatever dude, I think it's time to take off your blinderes.
Ummm...
If everyone did this, the newest kernels would never get tested. I think it is important that we have a diverse range of users using new, almost new, and older but well tested kernels.
US Government
Thats a dumb idea. Considering the federal goverment's propensity for fucking things up, I don't want them anywhere near my kernel. I don't mind the NSA, but if Homeland Security tried to 'enhance' my kernel, I would stop using linux.
Got it?
I don't. The problem is with the other 94% of the people out there. They have unknowingly allowed unsecured software to remain on their computer. A computer is similar to a car in the sense that improper use of one can have negative consequences on more than just yourself. In my case, I'm tired of the spam barage which is due in large part to unpatched computers taking part in so-called 'zombie nets'. So for every new user Microsoft reels in, there is a direct and negative effect on the internet, and that effects me.
Any comments that this is obscene is pure jealousy.
I am jealous of the money they have. I do not make a lot of money, like a lot of people, and would really love to be at least a little better off. It is not the money itself that is obscene, but the way in which it was made. You state that their richness is a sign of the 'fine job they did'...
I disagree. It may be like that with some consumers, but they have systematically rigged it so they cannot be toppled and you are required to purchase their products with every computer you buy. In a business sense, that is a 'job well done', but if thats what it takes to be rich, I'll pass.
For each company you list, I can list a hundred that are trying to help humanity by making the world a better place.
I don't need to list a hundred, but to support your case: I work for Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. I get to make the world a safer place and have a cool job. How many private companies can you think of that make that big of a difference in the world? Not very many, I assure you.
Net go down? Call your representative. Can't get newsgroups on your pc? Better call the mayor. Geesh. That's JUST the ticket, sure. Next up, the politicians will be running on IT issues --"Vote for me, I promise OV-3 connectivity in every home!"
Seriously. If a traffic signal goes down, do you call the mayor? No. I guarantee you, politicians will not be campaigning their promises of 'internet connectivity' for quite a while. They are still too busy lying to us about taxes and gerrymandering.
Putting the system in charge of net connectivity would truly be the work of an idiot.
Try substituting 'net connectivity' with 'traffic signaling' or 'road maintenance'.
Putting the system in charge of traffic signaling would truly be the work of an idiot.
Putting the system in charge of road maintenance would truly be the work of an idiot.
Who sounds like an idiot now? You wanna know something? I pay over $50 a month for Comcast cable internet. Why? They want to make a profit, and they are charging me to provide media services I do not use. I don't want a friggin ISP! I don't want the 'value-adding services', I just want a gateway to the internet. Thats it. Do I have a choice? No. DSL is not offered in my neighborhood yet and Comcast is the only way to get high-speed internet(excluding Satellite, which sucks if you play games needing low latency). If my county or city goverment said 'Hey, want 10Mb up/down for $25?', me and all of my neighbors would pounce on it.
Since the software has no way of knowing what state it's being installed in, this is like if your town council tried to regulate, or ban, the internet.
Not true. It is possible for software to determine it's own locality if it is connected to the internet, which is how most spyware gets installed in the first place. Although it is not 100% accurate, it is close enough that they could say they made every effort.
A person charged under this bill could sue the county/city where he was charged, for violating his civil rights to commerce. So the bill may just be a bluff.
I don't know where you got that but that is just plain wrong. The bill does not contain any language excluding or preferring any State's software over another. This bill does not care where the software came from, but it does apply to computers in this state. In general, you cannot sue one locality for the laws in another locality, you must sue the locality you are claiming has done you harm. It is called 'jurisdiction'. For them to even come close, they would have to sue the state of Washington itself and claim the burden this places on their business is greater than the burden it places on a company in this state. BTW, that is highly unlikely to happen.
And, to your last question: Yes, there is some broad language in it that might cause problems for shady companies selling legitimate software with adverse/unintended side effects. I think overall, this new law really comes closer to anything I expected to come out my home state.
This is why truly free as in speech software will 'win'. It cannot be purchased, corrupted, or taken away and is indeed driven only by that which is needed. The only way to destroy FOSS is by destroying the base on which it stands, namely 'copyright'. Patents can be worked around and I have enough faith(possibly naively) that the patent system in the end will balance itself out if only for the self-interest of the country. Eventually, even the polititicians will realise that the attempts by our IT industry to rule itself with an iron fist over our lawmakers will leave the US in the dust as other truly democratic countries pick up where we left off.
Over time, Adam Smith's assumptions over the market may prove to be true with respect to software, I think it will simply take more time than we are used to.
Ummm. That is not always the case. I've read the Wealth of Nations several times(although not in the last couple of years). Adam Smith had a lot of insight into how a free market can always choose the best outcome automatically. Unfortunately, this was based on several assumptions, not the least of which is that a free market must exist for the best possible outcome to ensue.
In this case(as the FTA mentioned), Microsoft initially supplied the best product. This does not mean the supplied a superior product in a technical sense, but as a product, it excelled in the factors that meant the most at the time. After their MSDOS and later Windows became entirely ubiquitous, they had a base to leverage their power over the market. This position allowed them to force the market, and thusly the entire IT industry, to use their products over product that were truly superior.
Adam Smith was only correct with the assumption that consumers are free to choose their suppliers based on the factors that make them a good supplier. With MS's power, in many cases(especially businesses), the market is *not* free to choose other options. This has now, and will continue into the future, stagnated the industry. They are now trapped by the installed base of inferior products, upon which their ubiquity is actually what prevents them from changing suppliers to actually move to the better supplier.
Adam Smith wasn't wrong, he just assumed too much.
MikeD