The average person just isn't aware of the issues. I see that 44% of the respondents answered NOT AT ALL when asked how closely they had been following the Microsoft trial. I would say these people have disqualified themselves from giving any meaningful comment on the issues surrounding the trial.
Wasn't that "Mazes and Monsters"? Its about a group of RPG players in college, one of whom mysteriously disappears. It turns out that he's gone mad and retreated into the fantasy world of the game. Based on an urban legend from the early days of D&D.
I don't remember Tom Hanks being in it. I do remember him being in "Bachelor Party" so I guess he made other films he isn't proud of.
The book... speaks about the apocalypse in a pretty funny way.
So just before the year 2000 we get portentious movies about the end of the world like "Deep Impact", "Armageddon" and "End of Days". After year 2000 we get funny movies about the apocalypse. Strange.
It makes no sense to me either, and I raised precisely this point in an earlier discussion of the Caldera lawsuit. Sadly I can't find this earlier discussion.
The legal answer has something to do with the "statute of limitations", which I don't understand, not being American. But the straight answer is no, it doesn't make sense.
I really don't understand the question. If by "survival of the fittest" you mean a philosophy that states that all "defective" people should be eliminated for the good of the species, then no "we" don't believe that at all. That is just fascism, and trying to justify it in terms of evolution involves a great deal of fallacious reasoning.
In the sense of evolution, "fitness" is a term applied to a species, not an individual. It is a question of a species being adapted to its environment, and is not a question of being stronger, faster, smarter, tougher etc. The notion that fitness can be measured on some absolute scale, is intimately connected with the assumption that evolution is heading towards some ultimate goal (teleology). It isn't.
Genetic diversity is an important component of "fitness". Indeed genetic "purity" is the contrary of fitness. A species in which all the individuals are supremely well adapted to the current environment, but not to a slightly different one is heading for extinction.
Now, back to human beings. The notion of being adapted to our environment makes no sense for us since we have learned to adapt the environment to our own needs. Furthermore we are reasoning animals, capable of acting according to values that are meaningless to all other species. Trying to justify some kind of barbaric social model in terms of what happens in the rest of nature ignores everything that makes us human.
This paradoxical situation was satirised in the Ealing comedy "The mouse that roared", starring Peter Sellars. In the film, a small European principality which is on the verge of bankruptcy decides to declare a war on the USA with the specific intention of losing and then claiming Marshall aid. As I recall, their "invasion" of the USA goes unnoticed because when the the invasion force - a handful of men - arrives in NY, the whole city is hiding in the cellar from a threatened nuclear attack.
Your disagreement with RMS is an example of a fundamental philosophical disagreement about the nature of freedom. I don't expect this disagreement to be resolved here on Slashdot, but it might help to point out what the implicit assumptions are.
You are clearly believe only in negative freedom: the notion that freedom consists only of the absence of constraints on the individual. This is an attractive notion and seems to be particularly popular on Slashdot. Most supporters of this principle will supplement w it with the extra condition that "your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose", but that is about as far as they will go.
There is however, a completely different concept of freedom called, not surpringly, positive freedom, which emphasises the freedom to achieve appropriate goals. Positive freedom requires the establishment of whatever rules or regular behaviours are necessary to achieve those goals. A simple example is the convention that we all drive on the right hand side of the road (or on the left in some countries). This helps us all to get from A to B quickly and in one piece, and therefore increases our freedom.
In this context, the GPL appears to be founded on the principles of positive freedom. The goal is to spread the use of free software. The rule that you are not allowed to take another person's free software and make it non-free is simply there to defend that goal. To criticize the GPL for restricting the actions of developers is to deny the validity of positive freedom.
"Major breakthrough in research" can often be translated as "Give me more money". Generating publicity for your research won't help if you are going to the traditional funding bodies for your money, since they still rely on peer review, but if you want to attract venture capital for your biotechnology company then hype certainly helps.
This explains why you read about the "magic bullet" that will cure cancer so often. Unfortunately the speculative nature of the research is not properly communicated to the reader, and this inevitably leads to disappointmnent when the promised results are not delivered.
Of course we all want to read about the magic bullet too because we want easy answers. The reality is rather more complicated. Cancer is not a single disease but a collection of diseases which, despite common the common characteristic of uncontrolled cellular growth have widely differing causes, as well as different incidence and survival rates. Working on finding and removing these causes may be more effective than looking for the magic bullet.
Oh please. I actually work for the World Health Organization, and the reason I give no email address or homepage is because my employer does not allow me to use my work address to express private opinions. I don't like the way Bill Gates amassed his fortune either, but I can't criticize him for spending it on good causes.
Do I lose karma for being mistaken for a Microsoft PR?
Cancer research is much misunderstood by the general public. The general aim is to understand how cancer occurs and then to stop it before it starts. This not only saves lives, but removes an enormous burden of morbidity from the population. New high-tech treatments for cancer are, of course, welcome but are only one part of a general cancer control strategy. Unfortunately, they receive undue publicity from the mainstream media.
For example, consider the role of Human Papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted virus which is mentioned in the article. HPV has now been established as a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of cervical cancer. In other words, eliminate the virus and you eliminate cervical cancer, preventing about 500,000 cancers worldwide every year. HPV vaccines are currently under development and will bring enormous benefit to future generations.
In the mean time, some other approaches are necessary in order to prevent cervical cancer, particularly in developing countries which won't have access to new expensive treatments. The Gates Foundation recently provided funding for a trial of low cost screening programs. This research will have a much higher impact on public health than the speculative ideas mentioned in the article.
This sounds like an idea that Robert X. Cringely talked about in his January 1999 column. He later admitted that the idea was inspired by the awesome rendering power of the Sony Playstation 2, which he got a sneak preview of.
There is a flaw in your reasoning. Linux installations don't breed like rabbits. What happens is that linux is installed in place of another OS. So the important figure is the number of non-linux installations left at a given time. A simple model says that this number will *halve* in a specific time period as more people convert to Linux.
It's easy for linux installations to double when it has small market share, but the rate at which non-linux installations are halving is much slower, and this is the figure you need to look at.
Oh dear. I see an implicit attitude here of "New technology will stop me from having to think and be responsible." There are two glaring examples.
Take the idea that children will be programmed to be resistant to cholesterol. This would only seem natural to someone who thinks that the Western diet is normal. It ain't so. Much better to improve your own nutrition - eat less fat, less refined food, less sugar, more fresh fruit and vegetables, take more exercise - than to provide this kind of quick fix. Still, we already have Olestra, which shows that this kind of thinking is current.
Another example: super smart children who can be taught by downloading information - such as a foreign language - directly into a chip implanted in their brains. Language skills are an important part of cognitive development. They improve naturally as the child discovers more about the world through exploration and play, and is better able to formulate concepts and communicate effectively with other people. The idea that all of this can be bypassed at the age of 3 misses this point. Not to mention that an important part of educating your child is teaching them what to do with their innate gifts. This actually gets harder when children are highly gifted. Some of the most intelligent people I known have suffered from a sort of existential boredom which stops them from achieving anything.
I agree with you, but the sort of problems you are talking about are software problems, not hardware problems (*). I can't understand why Ellison is obsessing on cheap hardware. Why doesn't he just develop a low-cost easy to administer software platform and let the customer run it on a normal PC?
(*) Even the "no local storage" idea can be done with software. I think you do want a hard disk to cache files from the network, but you don't want the user to be aware of it.
I have to agree with you here. I come to Slashdot for informed comment on technical news issues. Slashdot usually delivers the goods because 1) There are a small number of people with real insight into the issue. 2) The valuable contributions are quickly recognized by the moderators and made more visible to the rest of us.
I can't see that happening here. But this isn't really surprising. Ethics just isn't our field. Certainly everyone has an opinion, but that's not the same thing as an _informed_ opinion.
I should also point out that this debate is really bad press. Read the top rated contributions and think about what kind of image this projects of the geek "community". It certainly scares me.
If you start off with the notion that human life is not more valuable than animal life, then you are bound to come to some crazy conclusions. It seems clear, from this brief description, that Singer is trying to build a morally consistent world view based on this rather odd premise. Unfortunately people who aim for total consistency are rather difficult to argue with, unless you have an equally consistent opposing viewpoint, and often frighteningly persuasive. I would say rms is one such person, although I wouldn't say he is as crazy as Singer.
The obvious counter argument to Singer's euthanazia proposal is that you should not eliminate suffering by eliminating the person. Evidently he believes that a one month old baby is not a person, but as the father of a four month old baby I would have to profoundly disagree with him.
The notion of whether or not the infant has rights or not, is however, irrelevant. This is where a lot of the arguments about animal rights miss their point. Let's simplify the argument by talking about animals.
It is possible to believe that it is wrong for humans to cause suffering in animals without according animals "rights". Why? Because it is dehumanizing to cause suffering in another living thing without good cause. The wrong lies not in the fact that the animal suffers (remember, animals hunt, kill and eat each other every day) but in the fact that you as a person are diminished by such an act, and more broadly so is the society you live in. If you accept this principle, then the question posed by Singer is easier to resolve. A society which does not respect its weaker members, which eliminates them out of convenience, is a sick society.
Now, I'm in trouble because, starting from my premise I'm going to come to a rather strange conclusion. If you apply my argument to highly realistic computer simulations of immoral acts (murder, torture, rape) then my argument says that these are also immoral (not _as_ bad obviously, but still quite wrong), and should not be tolerated. This opens up a whole new can of worms about video game censorship, so I'm going to stop here before I start an off-topic flame war.
Maybe CMR and ACC should collaborate on reverse engineering alien sanitation technology. If they're thousands of years ahead of us, they must have worked out how to clean a toilet by now.
Being the maintainer of an OSS project is not a coding job. It's a management job. The two main tasks are 1) To determine the strategic direction of the software project. 2) To manage the personnel in your team. The amount of code contributed by the project leader isn't so important. If people trust you to do these two tasks then you should be OK.
What has happened here is a crisis which is probably symptomatic of some underlying management problems. Here are some diagnostic questions:
1) How "Open" was the source?
Was there a cvs tree which could be accessed by others(not necessarly anonymous)? Did you encourage submission of and discussion of feature requests by the users? Was there a list of tasks to be performed for the next version that could be picked up by any keen developer? If someone is unhappy with the pace of development, all you need to do is point to this list.
2) How well managed was the list?
Was intemperate or rude language tolerated on the list, or was it gently discouraged? (I was once told off, privately, for using the word "crap". I am not kidding.) How was conflict resolved on the list: by trying to reach consensus or by decree? Did the users trust you to make the technically correct decision?
Tolerance is the hallmark of liberal democracy. While I agree that you should be free to go and see this movie - and nobody is stopping you - I think that slashdot readers should be more tolerant to that section of the community whose deeply held beliefs are mocked by this film.
The number one rule of a Hollywood movie is that the lead character must go through some personal growth experience. Since Neo is now the messiah, (which leaves little room for personal growth) this rules him out as the main character for sequels.
Also, the central conceit of Matrix (which comes straight out Buddhist philosophy via Philip K Dick) is that the world the characters are living in is not the "real" world. This revelation cannot be repeated without becoming repetitive, which also tends to rule out a sequel.
The (pr/s)equels should have some philosophical content too. It would be interesting to go back and see the robot's first attempt at the matrix, which was supposed to be utopia, and why it didn't work.
Didn't Caldera buy DR-DOS after most, if not all, of the damage had been done? If so, then how can they sue for lost earnings? If it was obvious that DR-DOS had been closed out of the OS market when they bought it, then logically they should have been able to buy it comparatively cheaply, but then they should be unable to pursue Microsoft in the courts.
I totally agree: OSS is a powerful corrective force to an inefficient software market. I am tired of reading about "software communism" and wish that this kind of market-forces argument was advanced more often.
To see the economic problem, you only have to compare the market for computer hardware (rapid commoditization, plunging prices, profits only possible at the cutting edge of innovation) with software (lock-in to proprietary standards, stable prices, cash-cow applications like MS Office which can be milked for years without any serious innovation). OSS will push the software market in the same direction as the hardware market, and the consumer will ultimately benefit. There may be other solutions to the imbalance (e.g component software) and I hope that as the software market matures we shall see them.
Slashdot Mirror
The average person just isn't aware of the issues. I see that 44% of the respondents answered NOT AT ALL when asked how closely they had been following the Microsoft trial. I would say these people have disqualified themselves from giving any meaningful comment on the issues surrounding the trial.
So we're expected to believe an "expert" analysis that is not only unattributed, but is posted anonymously? I think not.
Wasn't that "Mazes and Monsters"? Its about a group of RPG players in college, one of whom mysteriously disappears. It turns out that he's gone mad and retreated into the fantasy world of the game. Based on an urban legend from the early days of D&D.
I don't remember Tom Hanks being in it. I do remember him being in "Bachelor Party" so I guess he made other films he isn't proud of.
The book ... speaks about the apocalypse in a pretty funny way.
So just before the year 2000 we get portentious movies about the end of the world like "Deep Impact", "Armageddon" and "End of Days". After year 2000 we get funny movies about the apocalypse. Strange.
It makes no sense to me either, and I raised precisely this point in an earlier discussion of the Caldera lawsuit. Sadly I can't find this earlier discussion.
The legal answer has something to do with the "statute of limitations", which I don't understand, not being American. But the straight answer is no, it doesn't make sense.
I really don't understand the question. If by "survival of the fittest" you mean a philosophy that states that all "defective" people should be eliminated for the good of the species, then no "we" don't believe that at all. That is just fascism, and trying to justify it in terms of evolution involves a great deal of fallacious reasoning.
In the sense of evolution, "fitness" is a term applied to a species, not an individual. It is a question of a species being adapted to its environment, and is not a question of being stronger, faster, smarter, tougher etc. The notion that fitness can be measured on some absolute scale, is intimately connected with the assumption that evolution is heading towards some ultimate goal (teleology). It isn't.
Genetic diversity is an important component of "fitness". Indeed genetic "purity" is the contrary of fitness. A species in which all the individuals are supremely well adapted to the current environment, but not to a slightly different one is heading for extinction.
Now, back to human beings. The notion of being adapted to our environment makes no sense for us since we have learned to adapt the environment to our own needs. Furthermore we are reasoning animals, capable of acting according to values that are meaningless to all other species. Trying to justify some kind of barbaric social model in terms of what happens in the rest of nature ignores everything that makes us human.
This paradoxical situation was satirised in the Ealing comedy "The mouse that roared", starring Peter Sellars. In the film, a small European principality which is on the verge of bankruptcy decides to declare a war on the USA with the specific intention of losing and then claiming Marshall aid. As I recall, their "invasion" of the USA goes unnoticed because when the the invasion force - a handful of men - arrives in NY, the whole city is hiding in the cellar from a threatened nuclear attack.
Your disagreement with RMS is an example of a fundamental philosophical disagreement about the nature of freedom. I don't expect this disagreement to be resolved here on Slashdot, but it might help to point out what the implicit assumptions are.
You are clearly believe only in negative freedom: the notion that freedom consists only of the absence of constraints on the individual. This is an attractive notion and seems to be particularly popular on Slashdot. Most supporters of this principle will supplement w it with the extra condition that "your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose", but that is about as far as they will go.
There is however, a completely different concept of freedom called, not surpringly, positive freedom, which emphasises the freedom to achieve appropriate goals. Positive freedom requires the establishment of whatever rules or regular behaviours are necessary to achieve those goals. A simple example is the convention that we all drive on the right hand side of the road (or on the left in some countries). This helps us all to get from A to B quickly and in one piece, and therefore increases our freedom.
In this context, the GPL appears to be founded on the principles of positive freedom. The goal is to spread the use of free software. The rule that you are not allowed to take another person's free software and make it non-free is simply there to defend that goal. To criticize the GPL for restricting the actions of developers is to deny the validity of positive freedom.
It should have been called Highlander II: The Sickening.
"Major breakthrough in research" can often be translated as "Give me more money". Generating publicity for your research won't help if you are going to the traditional funding bodies for your money, since they still rely on peer review, but if you want to attract venture capital for your biotechnology company then hype certainly helps.
This explains why you read about the "magic bullet" that will cure cancer so often. Unfortunately the speculative nature of the research is not properly communicated to the reader, and this inevitably leads to disappointmnent when the promised results are not delivered.
Of course we all want to read about the magic bullet too because we want easy answers. The reality is rather more complicated. Cancer is not a single disease but a collection of diseases which, despite common the common characteristic of uncontrolled cellular growth have widely differing causes, as well as different incidence and survival rates. Working on finding and removing these causes may be more effective than looking for the magic bullet.
Oh please. I actually work for the World Health Organization, and the reason I give no email address or homepage is because my employer does not allow me to use my work address to express private opinions. I don't like the way Bill Gates amassed his fortune either, but I can't criticize him for spending it on good causes.
Do I lose karma for being mistaken for a Microsoft PR?
Cancer research is much misunderstood by the general public. The general aim is to understand how cancer occurs and then to stop it before it starts. This not only saves lives, but removes an enormous burden of morbidity from the population. New high-tech treatments for cancer are, of course, welcome but are only one part of a general cancer control strategy. Unfortunately, they receive undue publicity from the mainstream media.
For example, consider the role of Human Papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted virus which is mentioned in the article. HPV has now been established as a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of cervical cancer. In other words, eliminate the virus and you eliminate cervical cancer, preventing about 500,000 cancers worldwide every year. HPV vaccines are currently under development and will bring enormous benefit to future generations.
In the mean time, some other approaches are necessary in order to prevent cervical cancer, particularly in developing countries which won't have access to new expensive treatments. The Gates Foundation recently provided funding for a trial of low cost screening programs. This research will have a much higher impact on public health than the speculative ideas mentioned in the article.
This sounds like an idea that Robert X. Cringely talked about in his January 1999 column. He later admitted that the idea was inspired by the awesome rendering power of the Sony Playstation 2, which he got a sneak preview of.
There is a flaw in your reasoning. Linux installations don't breed like rabbits. What happens is that linux is installed in place of another OS. So the important figure is the number of non-linux installations left at a given time. A simple model says that this number will *halve* in a specific time period as more people convert to Linux.
It's easy for linux installations to double when it has small market share, but the rate at which non-linux installations are halving is much slower, and this is the figure you need to look at.
Oh dear. I see an implicit attitude here of "New technology will stop me from having to think and be responsible." There are two glaring examples.
Take the idea that children will be programmed to be resistant to cholesterol. This would only seem natural to someone who thinks that the Western diet is normal. It ain't so. Much better to improve your own nutrition - eat less fat, less refined food, less sugar, more fresh fruit and vegetables, take more exercise - than to provide this kind of quick fix. Still, we already have Olestra, which shows that this kind of thinking is current.
Another example: super smart children who can be taught by downloading information - such as a foreign language - directly into a chip implanted in their brains. Language skills are an important part of cognitive development. They improve naturally as the child discovers more about the world through exploration and play, and is better able to formulate concepts and communicate effectively with other people. The idea that all of this can be bypassed at the age of 3 misses this point. Not to mention that an important part of educating your child is teaching them what to do with their innate gifts. This actually gets harder when children are highly gifted. Some of the most intelligent people I known have suffered from a sort of existential boredom which stops them from achieving anything.
I agree with you, but the sort of problems you are talking about are software problems, not hardware problems (*). I can't understand why Ellison is obsessing on cheap hardware. Why doesn't he just develop a low-cost easy to administer software platform and let the customer run it on a normal PC?
(*) Even the "no local storage" idea can be done with software. I think you do want a hard disk to cache files from the network, but you don't want the user to be aware of it.
I have to agree with you here. I come to Slashdot for informed comment on technical news issues. Slashdot usually delivers the goods because
1) There are a small number of people with real
insight into the issue.
2) The valuable contributions are quickly
recognized by the moderators and made more
visible to the rest of us.
I can't see that happening here. But this isn't really surprising. Ethics just isn't our field. Certainly everyone has an opinion, but that's not the same thing as an _informed_ opinion.
I should also point out that this debate is really bad press. Read the top rated contributions and think about what kind of image this projects of the geek "community". It certainly scares me.
If you start off with the notion that human life is not more valuable than animal life, then you are bound to come to some crazy conclusions. It seems clear, from this brief description, that Singer is trying to build a morally consistent world view based on this rather odd premise. Unfortunately people who aim for total consistency are rather difficult to argue with, unless you have an equally consistent opposing viewpoint, and often frighteningly persuasive. I would say rms is one such person, although I wouldn't say he is as crazy as Singer.
The obvious counter argument to Singer's euthanazia proposal is that you should not eliminate suffering by eliminating the person. Evidently he believes that a one month old baby is not a person, but as the father of a four month old baby I would have to profoundly disagree with him.
The notion of whether or not the infant has rights or not, is however, irrelevant. This is where a lot of the arguments about animal rights miss their point. Let's simplify the argument by talking about animals.
It is possible to believe that it is wrong for humans to cause suffering in animals without according animals "rights". Why? Because it is dehumanizing to cause suffering in another living thing without good cause. The wrong lies not in the fact that the animal suffers (remember, animals hunt, kill and eat each other every day) but in the fact that you as a person are diminished by such an act, and more broadly so is the society you live in. If you accept this principle, then the question posed by Singer is easier to resolve. A society which does not respect its weaker members, which eliminates them out of convenience, is a sick society.
Now, I'm in trouble because, starting from my premise I'm going to come to a rather strange conclusion. If you apply my argument to highly realistic computer simulations of immoral acts (murder, torture, rape) then my argument says that these are also immoral (not _as_ bad obviously, but still quite wrong), and should not be tolerated. This opens up a whole new can of worms about video game censorship, so I'm going to stop here before I start an off-topic flame war.
>What does all of this mean? I have no idea.
It means you have way too much free time.
This reminded me of our old friends the American Computer Company who have been known to make similarly ambitious announcements.
Maybe CMR and ACC should collaborate on reverse engineering alien sanitation technology. If they're thousands of years ahead of us, they must have worked out how to clean a toilet by now.
Being the maintainer of an OSS project is not a coding job. It's a management job. The two main tasks are
1) To determine the strategic direction of the software project.
2) To manage the personnel in your team.
The amount of code contributed by the project leader isn't so important. If people trust you to do these two tasks then you should be OK.
What has happened here is a crisis which is probably symptomatic of some underlying management problems. Here are some diagnostic questions:
1) How "Open" was the source?
Was there a cvs tree which could be accessed by others(not necessarly anonymous)?
Did you encourage submission of and discussion of feature requests by the users?
Was there a list of tasks to be performed for the next version that could be picked up by any keen developer? If someone is unhappy with the pace of development, all you need to do is point to this list.
2) How well managed was the list?
Was intemperate or rude language tolerated on the list, or was it gently discouraged? (I was once told off, privately, for using the word "crap". I am not kidding.)
How was conflict resolved on the list: by trying to reach consensus or by decree?
Did the users trust you to make the technically correct decision?
Tolerance is the hallmark of liberal democracy. While I agree that you should be free to go and see this movie - and nobody is stopping you - I think that slashdot readers should be more tolerant to that section of the community whose deeply held beliefs are mocked by this film.
The number one rule of a Hollywood movie is that the lead character must go through some personal growth experience. Since Neo is now the messiah, (which leaves little room for personal growth) this rules him out as the main character for sequels.
Also, the central conceit of Matrix (which comes straight out Buddhist philosophy via Philip K Dick) is that the world the characters are living in is not the "real" world. This revelation cannot be repeated without becoming repetitive, which also tends to rule out a sequel.
The (pr/s)equels should have some philosophical content too. It would be interesting to go back and see the robot's first attempt at the matrix, which was supposed to be utopia, and why it didn't work.
Didn't Caldera buy DR-DOS after most, if not all, of the damage had been done? If so, then how can they sue for lost earnings? If it was obvious that DR-DOS had been closed out of the OS market when they bought it, then logically they should have been able to buy it comparatively cheaply, but then they should be unable to pursue Microsoft in the courts.
I totally agree: OSS is a powerful corrective force to an inefficient software market. I am
tired of reading about "software communism" and wish that this kind of market-forces argument was advanced more often.
To see the economic problem, you only have to compare the market for computer hardware (rapid commoditization, plunging prices, profits only possible at the cutting edge of innovation) with software (lock-in to proprietary standards, stable prices, cash-cow applications like MS Office which can be milked for years without any serious innovation). OSS will push the software market in the same direction as the hardware market, and the consumer will ultimately benefit. There may be other solutions to the imbalance (e.g component software) and I hope that as the software market matures we shall see them.