a) You dont have to work to get into heaven, just accept my free gift of salvation
b) You can be sure of going to heaven (see rule a)
WHAT? You still don't believe I am Lord? Why not? What is that you say? You need proof? I have no proof, just believe, have faith that I am Lord. What? You still don't buy it? Whoa! You are capable of rational thought? Congratulations. Now go back and explain to me how you bought into somebody else's book of mythology.
I would like to see RedHat take on this one.. hell, its a good use of investor $$$. Put up a CVS repository, hire 1000 laywers, and let the seige begin.
Are you listening Redhat? Here's a good way for you to use all that dough. While you are at it, throw a couple mil towards lobbying against the truely bletcherous Digital Millenium Bug^H^H^H Act, which is going to single handedly cripple software innovation for decades.
You do trade money for man hours... its usually in the form of a salary.
More software gets written in house or by contract by far than for retail sales, btw.
The only reason you never see this much of this code is due to copyright restrictions, or the worry that somebody might try to take the code and resell it.
The rest you do see, and its typically GPL'ed or PD or floats around the industry aimlessly.
My point is, there is no good need for retail software sales. There are much better models for making sure programmers get paid what they are worth than what you see on the surface.
As the market matures, you are sure to see more than a few gain dominance, since retail software is really showing its age. Sooner or later it will be completely non-competitive, and other forms will take over. Look at it this way: I'd rather be in the business of changing tires than changing horseshoes. Where will you be working in ten years?
They could auction off all remaining seats, or allow people into museums that arent to capacity (assuming there isn't more impact by having a larger crowd).
The music center in Los Angeles does this even. They have super discouted (even free) sometimes seats just before show time to fill the house.
Usually the reasons not to are technical, not economic. Any body with a brain can see that selling all remaining seats for $.01 is better than having them be empty with no ticket purchasers.
Finally, do you have any idea why airlines overbook?
If you don't see how this is related, don't bother replying.
Do you pay for movie and concert tickets, or always sneak in?
There is limited seating. Taking a seat for free would deprive another paying customer of a seat.
Do you break into museums, just to see the exhibits for free?
Museums have a limited capacity. Go over them and 1) its a fire hazard and 2) you deprive another of a chance to go to the museum.
Do you believe everybody deserves everything they want, for free?
No. Material goods are limited. Taking them w/o payment is called stealing.
Before you come up with any more lame analogies, try to comprehend the difference between a limited good and information.
Licences and copyrights and patents are a hack to make information products look like limited goods. Too bad its becoming increasingly obvious this is a bad thing.
Patents last too long, esp. software patents. 17 years? Please. Plus, check out that 60 minutes report on genes being patented, preventing people for screening for things like Alzheimers.
Software licenses are a joke. The idea is to allow corporations to recoup investment costs via per-unit sales. This concept is fundamentally flawed due to short sightedness. This is no solution. Information is way too easy to exchange to make this a viable means to amortize R&D expenses.
Get it straight, they are government enforced means to generate monopolies, and are not "rights". I recommend a career change to service/integration or programming contracting. Retail software authoring is a rapidly dwindling industry. Expect this species to become extinct in the next few decades.
Patents were supposed to inspire innovation. All they do now is to provide large corporations (not you) with bargaining chips in the event of a lawsuit.
Look at it this way. This whole "Internet" thing? Accomplished with open standards, not patented APIs. But I assume you think all that networking code should be copyrighted and routing methods patented, and the Internet would have been developed more rapidly and efficiently? I think not.
No one can be told what an OS is, you have to see it for yourself.
If you have ever written (or ported) an OS, you know exactly what it is. You just know it in your gut when you finally get all the bits and pieces working and all your API/syscalls/exception-handlers are good and happy and clean and consistent, and you get to the point where you can write apps and do other development. Yes this means smaller "apps" like ls and cp and rm and a rudimentary "app" downloader is part of the OS itself, but again, if you wrote the OS you know exactly the moment when your baby becomes useful.
To the rest of you who have never done this, you will always be able to make a guess, but trust me, until you've done it yourself you can't possibly know what it means. As long as you are an luser you will never know. Oh, and far as Microsoft as a reliable source goes... when was the last time you saw anything from an actual developer in the form of a press release? Marketing droids are OS designers now? Chuckle. Please.
It sounds elitist, but every OS designer/developer I know has a good feeling for where the line is (it may not be precise, but it is good enough), and everybody else likes to wave their arms about and make crap up while their stinking pie hole blathers on and on about shifting paradigms and niche filling.
Its sorta like asking a layman to tell you when the plane somebody else just built has just enough functionality to fly... if I were you I'd ask the engineer if he'd climb aboard himself.
Fill in ad-infinitum with the trademark of your choice and send the resulting url to any lawyer who is giving you a hard time, and tell them to shut down that site first.
... is whats fundamentally fucked up about our hype-saturated, abstract, image oriented, mass marketed, focus-group obsessive, bottom-line worshipping corporate culture.
Ok, so we should dress up the red-headed step child and make him LOOK respectable and cuddly? What a total waste of time. Any corporation that is incapable of judging something like linux on its own merits simply doesn't deserve it.
Screw it. Don't demean linux or any other good technology with a pretty box with shiny bits just to impress PHBs. I'm sick of pandering to their power-point presentation dulled pea-sized minds.
Eventually, companies like Microsoft will rip off any good idea anybody has (ok, well, maybe 20 years later), claim they invented it, and do all the icky marketing lies^H^H^H^Hwork for you (badly). The aforementioned PHB will buy it because the glossies and paperclip/wizard thingies give him the warm fuzzies. But you will have the last laugh every time you hear him have to reboot his machine. That is, assuming he actually uses it for something other than checking his yahoo email...
Shit. On second thought, you're right. We are all screwed.
BRING IN THE FOCUS GROUPS! THIS PRODUCT NEEDS A CONCEPT! A NICHE TO FILL! A PARADIGM TO SHIFT! A NEAT, 4 NOTE JINGLE (bum bee bum bim)! PENGUINS IN REFLECTIVE BLUE JUMPSUITS! A SUPERBOWL TIE IN!
It is obvious that law needs a better language, and English is NOT it. Lawyers like to pretend that their "years" of training allow them to interpret what a law or legal document says perfectly, but its clear that English is just too vague.
The problem is, lawyers, as a bunch, don't seem bright enough to be able to come up with a good, strict, "law" language and grammar that could be standardized and learned by anybody with the time, talent, and patience (just you would a programming language).
You could argue that they are NOT stupid, but that makes them willfully negligent (which is worse). That means they really don't want just anybody learning the "language" of law from a standards document and giving them competition.
So much of law is hacking English to make it "rigid" that the whole system is becoming a joke.
"Ask Bill why function code 6 [in QDOS and still in MS-DOS, 15 years later] ends in a dollar sign. No one in the world knows that but me." - Gary Killdall, author of CP/M
Mr. Gates, three questions:
When you told the Altair hobbiests to cease and desist with experimenting with "your" BASIC interpreter code because it was "stealing", did you realize you were inventing a whole new way of a) making a ton of money b) stifling innovation c) giving a reason for things like the GPL to exist
Secondly, how much code have you actually written, and if its not a token amount, do you prefer coding under a *nix or Windows based environment?
Finally, does Paul Allen resent you because you have no programming talent whatsoever and you're richer than him?
The "fair use" garbage in copyright law is just that. Garbage. It's a loophole that ultimately means nothing, least of all in an IP context. It is vague, imprecise, ill-defined, and wrought with legal wrangling if you try to use it in court (to back either side, I may add).
And yes, I am "republishing" your website to everybody who cares to come into my house and use my browser, or anybody who cares to copy off my netscape cache folder onto a zip disk. If I was lazy and didn't give a crap about security, I might even NFS export it without the proper permissions. Now what? Who's responsible now? Somebody who deep links my NFS exported drive, or me? And what does fair use have to do with any of it?
As far as depending on IP goes.. your only arguments seem to be that of my "companies" trademark, and their "reputations". That has nothing to do with the technology we create to use in our products, or other peoples technology we use when we farm out work. That load of legal dung is part of the whole "trademark" "branding" scam, which is basically to give free reign to our marketing droids to delude the public into thinking a name means something.
The only reason any of this IP/copyright junk exists at all is to prevent them from copyrighting it themselves and reselling it (which implies they are preventing OTHERS from reselling it).
And while we're on the subject, how do you feel about software patents?
The point is, the people making policy have no idea how any of this technology works. They have this picture in their pea-brains of a guy copying a book with a photocopier.
Also, what is "entirety"? 1 byte short? 2 bytes short? 50%? 50%-1 byte? 50%-epsilon?
DAMN! I just cached your entire website with netscape. The whole thing. Its all here! I can read it w/o wasting my netconnection's bandwidth (and yours, btw). Now what?
Its not a right. Its a kludge to make information look like a limited good. At best its a government enforced monopoly, at worst its outright welfare for the rich.
Its a bad kludge because:
It doesn't encourage innovation anymore, it stifles it. This trend is going to continue to get worse. It may have worked in the 1800s but its not working anymore. IP is a total joke, trademark law is becoming mildly humorous (e.g. the PEZ meta tag fiasco), and copyrights are next. It can't possibly sustain itself for much longer and unless the rocket scientists in the amazingly astute US legislature come up with a solution that doesn't suck we are all screwed.
If you happen to be fortunate enough to not live in the US, your still screwed because your government no doubt will do anything the UN says.
Finally you have no clue where my paycheck comes from. Hint: it doesn't depend on IP (ours or anyone elses) and it doesn't depend on copyrights (ours or anyone elses) and it doesn't depend on trademarks (ours or anyone elses).
GPL exists solely to keep people like YOU from copyrighting somebody elses stuff, attempting to sell it and then preventing somebody else from giving it away.
If there were no copyrights, there would be no need for the GPL.
BTW. Depending on copyrights isn't a good idea given the progress of information technology. Sooner or later the whole system is going to collapse and bring people like you with it. Hopefully you have other plans - maybe you can get a good job flipping burgers.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a word for the situation that the author seemed to intentionally avoid:
detente
Ok, so its French AND I'm probably missing some funky "'"s or something, but the meaning is there.
Also, the author isn't being schizophrenic, he's being clever.
To understand why you may be confusing the two, read Douglas Hofstadter
Finally, to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
No no no no! My religion does this too!
According to my religion,
a) You dont have to work to get into heaven, just accept my free gift of salvation
b) You can be sure of going to heaven (see rule a)
WHAT? You still don't believe I am Lord? Why not? What is that you say? You need proof? I have no proof, just believe, have faith that I am Lord. What? You still don't buy it? Whoa! You are capable of rational thought? Congratulations. Now go back and explain to me how you bought into somebody else's book of mythology.
I would like to see RedHat take on this one.. hell, its a good use of investor $$$. Put up a CVS repository, hire 1000 laywers, and let the seige begin.
Are you listening Redhat? Here's a good way for you to use all that dough. While you are at it, throw a couple mil towards lobbying against the truely bletcherous Digital Millenium Bug^H^H^H Act, which is going to single handedly cripple software innovation for decades.
You do trade money for man hours... its usually in the form of a salary.
More software gets written in house or by contract by far than for retail sales, btw.
The only reason you never see this much of this code is due to copyright restrictions, or the worry that somebody might try to take the code and resell it.
The rest you do see, and its typically GPL'ed or PD or floats around the industry aimlessly.
My point is, there is no good need for retail software sales. There are much better models for making sure programmers get paid what they are worth than what you see on the surface.
As the market matures, you are sure to see more than a few gain dominance, since retail software is really showing its age. Sooner or later it will be completely non-competitive, and other forms will take over. Look at it this way: I'd rather be in the business of changing tires than changing horseshoes. Where will you be working in ten years?
Maybe they should.
They could auction off all remaining seats, or allow people into museums that arent to capacity (assuming there isn't more impact by having a larger crowd).
The music center in Los Angeles does this even.
They have super discouted (even free) sometimes seats just before show time to fill the house.
Usually the reasons not to are technical, not economic. Any body with a brain can see that selling all remaining seats for $.01 is better than having them be empty with no ticket purchasers.
Finally, do you have any idea why airlines overbook?
If you don't see how this is related, don't bother replying.
Do you pay for movie and concert tickets, or always sneak in?
There is limited seating. Taking a seat for free would deprive another paying customer of a seat.
Do you break into museums, just to see the exhibits for free?
Museums have a limited capacity. Go over them and 1) its a fire hazard and 2) you deprive another of a chance to go to the museum.
Do you believe everybody deserves everything they want, for free?
No. Material goods are limited. Taking them w/o payment is called stealing.
Before you come up with any more lame analogies, try to comprehend the difference between a limited good and information.
Licences and copyrights and patents are a hack to make information products look like limited goods. Too bad its becoming increasingly obvious this is a bad thing.
Patents last too long, esp. software patents. 17 years? Please. Plus, check out that 60 minutes report on genes being patented, preventing people for screening for things like Alzheimers.
Software licenses are a joke. The idea is to allow corporations to recoup investment costs via per-unit sales. This concept is fundamentally flawed due to short sightedness. This is no solution. Information is way too easy to exchange to make this a viable means to amortize R&D expenses.
Get it straight, they are government enforced means to generate monopolies, and are not "rights". I recommend a career change to service/integration or programming contracting. Retail software authoring is a rapidly dwindling industry. Expect this species to become extinct in the next few decades.
Patents were supposed to inspire innovation. All they do now is to provide large corporations (not you) with bargaining chips in the event of a lawsuit.
Look at it this way. This whole "Internet" thing? Accomplished with open standards, not patented APIs. But I assume you think all that networking code should be copyrighted and routing methods patented, and the Internet would have been developed more rapidly and efficiently? I think not.
No one can be told what an OS is, you have to see it for yourself.
If you have ever written (or ported) an OS, you know exactly what it is. You just know it in your gut when you finally get all the bits and pieces working and all your API/syscalls/exception-handlers are good and happy and clean and consistent, and you get to the point where you can write apps and do other development. Yes this means smaller "apps" like ls and cp and rm and a rudimentary "app" downloader is part of the OS itself, but again, if you wrote the OS you know exactly the moment when your baby becomes useful.
To the rest of you who have never done this, you will always be able to make a guess, but trust me, until you've done it yourself you can't possibly know what it means. As long as you are an luser you will never know. Oh, and far as Microsoft as a reliable source goes... when was the last time you saw anything from an actual developer in the form of a press release? Marketing droids are OS designers now? Chuckle. Please.
It sounds elitist, but every OS designer/developer I know has a good feeling for where the line is (it may not be precise, but it is good enough), and everybody else likes to wave their arms about and make crap up while their stinking pie hole blathers on and on about shifting paradigms and niche filling.
Its sorta like asking a layman to tell you when the plane somebody else just built has just enough functionality to fly... if I were you I'd ask the engineer if he'd climb aboard himself.
Please add the following words to your spell checker:
"than"
"affected"
"nerds'"
"perhaps"
Thank you, please drive through.
Hey, I did, but I don't think it was intentional.
Metalab does a bang up job, especially since they require an LSM submission for stuff that goes in /pub/linux
They are a buisness after all, they need to make the money or they'll sink
What part of the Capitalist manifesto did you read that makes you come to THIS fine conclusion?
"Sorry if we forgot to pay taxes, but my company IS a business after all, and we needed the extra money or it will sink!"
Wake up: Patents are welfare at best. Take your bleeding heart and bleed over something worthwhile. 17 years is WAY too long in this day and age.
Point idg to
this or maybe this or quite possibly this.
You get the picture.
Fill in ad-infinitum with the trademark of your choice and send the resulting url to any lawyer who is giving you a hard time, and tell them to shut down that site first.
Allow me to illustrate your stupidity with a simple hypothetical situation.
Suppose I am your dentist.
Suppose I fuck you in the ass (against your will, of course) instead of filling your cavity.
If i'm doing it for profit it is just fine, and you aren't allowed to complain.
However, if i'm doing it free of charge you do get to complain.
I see now the difference between communism and capitalism. Thank you for clarifing my confusion on this matter.
... is whats fundamentally fucked up about our hype-saturated, abstract, image oriented, mass marketed, focus-group obsessive, bottom-line worshipping corporate culture.
Ok, so we should dress up the red-headed step child and make him LOOK respectable and cuddly? What a total waste of time. Any corporation that is incapable of judging something like linux on its own merits simply doesn't deserve it.
Screw it. Don't demean linux or any other good technology with a pretty box with shiny bits just to impress PHBs. I'm sick of pandering to their power-point presentation dulled pea-sized minds.
Eventually, companies like Microsoft will rip off any good idea anybody has (ok, well, maybe 20 years later), claim they invented it, and do all the icky marketing lies^H^H^H^Hwork for you (badly). The aforementioned PHB will buy it because the glossies and paperclip/wizard thingies give him the warm fuzzies. But you will have the last laugh every time you hear him have to reboot his machine. That is, assuming he actually uses it for something other than checking his yahoo email...
Shit. On second thought, you're right. We are all screwed.
BRING IN THE FOCUS GROUPS! THIS PRODUCT NEEDS A CONCEPT! A NICHE TO FILL! A PARADIGM TO SHIFT! A NEAT, 4 NOTE JINGLE (bum bee bum bim)! PENGUINS IN REFLECTIVE BLUE JUMPSUITS! A SUPERBOWL TIE IN!
No, no, no, you meant:
"Please to be waiting, until you seeing source!"
Click with good feeling!
It is obvious that law needs a better language, and English is NOT it. Lawyers like to pretend
that their "years" of training allow them to interpret what a law or legal document says perfectly, but its clear that English is just too vague.
The problem is, lawyers, as a bunch, don't seem bright enough to be able to come up with a good, strict, "law" language and grammar that could be standardized and learned by anybody with the time, talent, and patience (just you would a programming language).
You could argue that they are NOT stupid, but that makes them willfully negligent (which is worse). That means they really don't want just anybody learning the "language" of law from a standards document and giving them competition.
So much of law is hacking English to make it "rigid" that the whole system is becoming a joke.
"Ask Bill why function code 6 [in QDOS and still in MS-DOS, 15 years later] ends in a dollar sign. No one in the world knows that but me."
- Gary Killdall, author of CP/M
Mr. Gates, three questions:
When you told the Altair hobbiests to cease and desist with experimenting with "your" BASIC interpreter code because it was "stealing", did you realize you were inventing a whole new way of
a) making a ton of money
b) stifling innovation
c) giving a reason for things like the GPL to exist
Secondly, how much code have you actually written, and if its not a token amount, do you prefer coding under a *nix or Windows based environment?
Finally, does Paul Allen resent you because you have no programming talent whatsoever and you're richer than him?
The "fair use" garbage in copyright law is just that. Garbage. It's a loophole that ultimately means nothing, least of all in an IP context. It is vague, imprecise, ill-defined, and wrought with legal wrangling if you try to use it in court (to back either side, I may add).
And yes, I am "republishing" your website to everybody who cares to come into my house and use my browser, or anybody who cares to copy off my netscape cache folder onto a zip disk. If I was lazy and didn't give a crap about security, I might even NFS export it without the proper permissions. Now what? Who's responsible now? Somebody who deep links my NFS exported drive, or me? And what does fair use have to do with any of it?
As far as depending on IP goes.. your only arguments seem to be that of my "companies" trademark, and their "reputations". That has nothing to do with the technology we create to use in our products, or other peoples technology we use when we farm out work. That load of legal dung is part of the whole "trademark" "branding" scam, which is basically to give free reign to our marketing droids to delude the public into thinking a name means something.
The only reason any of this IP/copyright junk exists at all is to prevent them from copyrighting it themselves and reselling it (which implies they are preventing OTHERS from reselling it).
And while we're on the subject, how do you feel about software patents?
The point is, the people making policy have no idea how any of this technology works. They have this picture in their pea-brains of a guy copying a book with a photocopier.
Also, what is "entirety"? 1 byte short? 2 bytes short? 50%? 50%-1 byte? 50%-epsilon?
What if I have a photographic memory?
DAMN! I just cached your entire website with netscape. The whole thing. Its all here! I can read it w/o wasting my netconnection's bandwidth (and yours, btw). Now what?
Its not a right. Its a kludge to make information look like a limited good. At best its a government enforced monopoly, at worst its outright welfare for the rich.
Its a bad kludge because:
It doesn't encourage innovation anymore, it stifles it. This trend is going to continue to get worse. It may have worked in the 1800s but its not working anymore. IP is a total joke, trademark law is becoming mildly humorous (e.g. the PEZ meta tag fiasco), and copyrights are next. It can't possibly sustain itself for much longer and unless the rocket scientists in the amazingly astute US legislature come up with a solution that doesn't suck we are all screwed.
If you happen to be fortunate enough to not live in the US, your still screwed because your government no doubt will do anything the UN says.
Finally you have no clue where my paycheck comes from. Hint: it doesn't depend on IP (ours or anyone elses) and it doesn't depend on copyrights (ours or anyone elses) and it doesn't depend on trademarks (ours or anyone elses).
try insert your favorite trademarked term here.really.fuckingsucks.net.
eg:
this.really.fuckingsucks.net and pez.really.fuckingsucks.net
Note that it is all dynamic content... no trademarked terms actually exist on this site.
or pez in hex ascii?
or pez in octal ascii?
or pez encryped, like "the"
unicode pez?
pez in klingon, again in unicode?
Gimme a break. The world has gone completely insane.
GPL exists solely to keep people like YOU from copyrighting somebody elses stuff, attempting to sell it and then preventing somebody else from giving it away.
If there were no copyrights, there would be no need for the GPL.
BTW. Depending on copyrights isn't a good idea given the progress of information technology. Sooner or later the whole system is going to collapse and bring people like you with it. Hopefully you have other plans - maybe you can get a good job flipping burgers.
Hey, guess what? I have a page of yours cached in my brain.
omg! there goes a copy of your page through the air in the form of photons from my monitor!
OH NO! your pages temporarily exist in my router in the form of ethernet frames!
HELLS BELLS! Your pages exist in the RAM of my computer where netscape renders html!
What the hell is wrong with you?
Tell me, where do you intend to get your clue by four? It doesn't look like you have extra clues to spare.