It does seem like a conflict, doesn't it? The same people who rave about individual rights and the evils of government are the ones toiling in a collective to create software for the greater good (without monetary gain). How do we reconcile these two facets? How can you be a libertarian and a collectivist?
My answer is that I don't like people telling me what to do. I don't like the government taking my money and telling me how I'm going to spend it. I don't like policeman that give you a ticket for speeding, and then raise or lower the ticket depending on how polite you are to them. I don't like pornography, but I don't like the government telling me what I can read even more. This is why I am a libertarian.
I also wouldn't like someone telling me I had to write software for free. But I do it because I want to. The free software movement is about the good parts of collectivism but not the bad. People can spontaneously work together for a common good, and no-one has to be forced to do anything. There really isn't a conflict with being an Open Source Libertarian. People are free to leave or join any project they want; you can't give much more power to the individual than that.
Re:Why do you guys make such a big deal about this
on
Mozilla M17 Is Out
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· Score: 1
You'd get abused for posting stories about new releases of IE because 90% of Slashdot readers can't even use IE. Why would readers care about software that not everyone can use? Mozilla is at least usable by people.
I guarantee that if HP includes good sound output on their new calculator, it will be used 99.9999% of the time to play games. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Someone should make an anonymizer that strips out banner ads ala Junkbuster. That would be cool, since Slashdot could link to any article it wanted through the anonymizer. Better yet, maybe Slashdot could implement it... (get out that Perl)
Remind me again why having free memory is a good thing? You pay lots of money for fast RAM, then... don't use it? The reason you have memory is so you can do things with it. It's the sign of a good operating system to use all the resources available. Using spare memory to cache graphics objects (which I'm guessing KDE does) is a good use of free memory. Bloat is different than resource usage.
Get a clue and read the Home Recording Act. It is legal to give your friend a copy of the music you bought. It isn't legal to sell him one. Music sharing is awesome, and specifically made legal by congress. Profiting off copied music is not legal. This is why I don't support Napster, because they are trying to profit off of music sharing. It Napster gets shut down, it will be a good thing.
I predict that the judge will rule that sharing music over the internet (even copyrighted music) is legal, but profiting from it is not. So if you put up a page advertising MP3s, you can't have any banner ads or commercial advertising. If you're Napster or some other corporation, you're SOL. This will not stop the music revolution.
I like that idea, that MP3 and CD burners are the printing press of digital music. It is very true. The cool thing is that we live in an age when almost everyone can own a printing press for words and pictures (web pages) and music (mp3s). It is going to take decades for us to come to terms with what this means. The printing press transformed civilization, changed power structures, accelerated the exchange of ideas, etc. The internet is doing the same.
The more I think about it, the more this guy's hypocrisy annoys me. He's willing to spend time and effort writing this book about the evils of intellectual property, but then he's not willing to stand up for his beliefs and release his book for free. That is so wrong.
The reason I admire the free software movement is precisely because they put their money where their mouths are: they release their software (an incredible amount of work!) under free licenses. You can blather on all you want about intellectual property, but until you actually start to contribute I'm not going to take you seriously. This guy says that if you want to copy his chapter or his book, you have to get permission. How is this any better than any other book publisher?
This guy is no better than the arm-chair environmentalists who write essays about why we shouldn't use so much oil then drive to work every day in their SUVs. I say put up or shut up.
When compressing files, I usually like to make them as small as possible. The bz2 format is the smallest, so I use that. Zip and gzip don't even come close.
Put your ear up to the monitor, ok, now listen closely. Baaaaaaa baaaaaaaaa. Sound familiar? It's the sound of other zip users.
What's wrong with HTML docs? Everybody knows HTML (at least a little), and everybody can view HTML. Plus it's pretty easy to automatically generate shell pages from code. HTML will be around far longer than any version of Word's.doc format.
Concentration of drugs in the body over time is calculated using the Michaelis-Menten differential equation. Let y(t) be the amount of drug in the body (grams) at time t (seconds). Then:
y'(t)=-k y(t)/(A+y(t))
where A and k are constants that depend on the drug.
Drugs like cocaine have y(t) very small relative to A, so the concentration can be approximated with an exponential decay. This is where the concept of half-life of drugs comes in. The concentration decreases by a half for every half-life of time that goes by. So if the half-life is 1 hr, after 3 hours there is 1/8 the initial amount of drug in the body.
For drugs like alcohol, y(t) is large relative to A, which makes the decay more linear and less exponential. One serving of alcohol takes about an hour to pass out of the body. So after half an hour, half the initial alcohol is in the blood.
To model the level of caffeine in your body without complicated medical tests, you would have to find the right constants for caffeine from medical literature. Then carefully record every source of caffeine you intake to the model. Since caffeine passes through the body relatively quickly, it would be pretty much impossible to keep a constant concentration in the blood. It would be possible to keep the concentration between an upper and lower limit.
That is an interesting idea. The average business person probably sees Linux as a new fad caused by the antitrust trial. If they saw IBM Linux for sale on the shelves, they might reconsider...
One time I posted a comment to Slashdot that contained a link to one of my professor's pages. The comment was only moderated at 1, but my professor noticed a spike in his web page statistics and investigated. Now he reads Slashdot...
oops, the sun produces electron neutrinos, and SNO can detect and distinguish between electron neutrinos and the other two flavors, muon and tau neutrinos.
This detector is designed to answer the "solar neutrino problem", namely that we keep detecting half as many neutrinos as we should be from the sun. Where did the other half go? One theory is that neutrinos oscillate between types. I.e. a muon neutrino oscillates into a tau neutrino as it travels to the earth. The new form of neutrino is then not detected because the original detectors only detected muon neutrinos. SNO will be able to detect both types and distinguish between them, so it should be able to convincingly answer the question of the missing neutrinos.
You're right, we will never run out of oil, only cheap oil. The environmental problem is that by taking stuff out of the ground and putting it in the sky, we are changing the earth's climate. That is dangerous, because we depend on a stable climate to grow our crops and keep ourselves fed. Decades from now our children will curse us for choosing temporary convenience over keeping the earth habitable if we don't get our act together.
One of the points of adding TLDs is to alleviate the name scarcity that currently exists. If you only allow names registered under.com,.net etc to be registered in the corresponding new TLDs, you haven't dealt with the problem.
There should be a short time period where only the owner of yahoo.com can get yahoo.shop, but after that short period everything should be up for grabs.
For all of the predictable complaints about functional languages having too many parentheses, here's a link to an applet that interprets a scaled down version of LISP that doesn't need as many parentheses. It was designed by Chaitin to illustrate program complexity ideas.
I love functional languages. If you think about the problem you are trying to solve in the right way, often times you can find a simple three line functional program that does the job. That's the kicker though: you have think in a functional way. Simple recursion is about the deepest functional abstraction most programmers can wrap their minds around.
What examples are you thinking of? I would be very interested to hear of companies on the RBL that have never had spam complaints filed against them, and do not allow spam through their network.
I would suggest that there be an upper limit of trust/popularity, such that almost everyone on the Napster network gets the highest trust. The only reason trust would go down is if something screwy was going on. That way the record companies and lawyers can't concentrate their fire any more than they do now. Of course there will always be the problem of l4m3rs who have a grudge. But what's the worst that can happen? People stop downloading from you and your internet connection speeds up. Oh no.
If things like this proliferate, I predict that the Napster community will move to a "popularity/trust" model. Sort of like Ebay, where you leave positive and negative feedback. So if someone downloads a song they have been looking for, and it turns out to be the wrong song or a low-quality encoding, they can leave negative feedback on the person who served the song. All Napster has to do is publish each person's rating next to the songs they provide, and this tactic will die a quick death. Low quality encodings, and encodings with ads (if they ever appear) would also fall by the wayside.
One thing the Net has taught us: peer review and "egoboo" are powerful forces. (Yes, I read about egoboo in Wired, so sue me.)
In the first article there is a link to a sample Makefile for cube.c. I'm using RedHat 6.2 and the only tweak I had to make was to replace the initial spaces on line 12 of the Makefile with a tab.
I'm not sure that "honey pots" aren't entrapment. The police aren't just setting up files that can be downloaded. They are actively putting them on a file-sharing system. That seems more similar to an undercover police officer posing as a drug dealer who advertises that he has cocaine available.
Slashdot Mirror
My answer is that I don't like people telling me what to do. I don't like the government taking my money and telling me how I'm going to spend it. I don't like policeman that give you a ticket for speeding, and then raise or lower the ticket depending on how polite you are to them. I don't like pornography, but I don't like the government telling me what I can read even more. This is why I am a libertarian.
I also wouldn't like someone telling me I had to write software for free. But I do it because I want to. The free software movement is about the good parts of collectivism but not the bad. People can spontaneously work together for a common good, and no-one has to be forced to do anything. There really isn't a conflict with being an Open Source Libertarian. People are free to leave or join any project they want; you can't give much more power to the individual than that.
You'd get abused for posting stories about new releases of IE because 90% of Slashdot readers can't even use IE. Why would readers care about software that not everyone can use? Mozilla is at least usable by people.
I guarantee that if HP includes good sound output on their new calculator, it will be used 99.9999% of the time to play games. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Someone should make an anonymizer that strips out banner ads ala Junkbuster. That would be cool, since Slashdot could link to any article it wanted through the anonymizer. Better yet, maybe Slashdot could implement it... (get out that Perl)
Actually I don't use KDE and don't particularly like it. If I'm biased, I am biased against it.
Remind me again why having free memory is a good thing? You pay lots of money for fast RAM, then... don't use it? The reason you have memory is so you can do things with it. It's the sign of a good operating system to use all the resources available. Using spare memory to cache graphics objects (which I'm guessing KDE does) is a good use of free memory. Bloat is different than resource usage.
I predict that the judge will rule that sharing music over the internet (even copyrighted music) is legal, but profiting from it is not. So if you put up a page advertising MP3s, you can't have any banner ads or commercial advertising. If you're Napster or some other corporation, you're SOL. This will not stop the music revolution.
I like that idea, that MP3 and CD burners are the printing press of digital music. It is very true. The cool thing is that we live in an age when almost everyone can own a printing press for words and pictures (web pages) and music (mp3s). It is going to take decades for us to come to terms with what this means. The printing press transformed civilization, changed power structures, accelerated the exchange of ideas, etc. The internet is doing the same.
The reason I admire the free software movement is precisely because they put their money where their mouths are: they release their software (an incredible amount of work!) under free licenses. You can blather on all you want about intellectual property, but until you actually start to contribute I'm not going to take you seriously. This guy says that if you want to copy his chapter or his book, you have to get permission. How is this any better than any other book publisher?
This guy is no better than the arm-chair environmentalists who write essays about why we shouldn't use so much oil then drive to work every day in their SUVs. I say put up or shut up.
Put your ear up to the monitor, ok, now listen closely. Baaaaaaa baaaaaaaaa. Sound familiar? It's the sound of other zip users.
What's wrong with HTML docs? Everybody knows HTML (at least a little), and everybody can view HTML. Plus it's pretty easy to automatically generate shell pages from code. HTML will be around far longer than any version of Word's .doc format.
y'(t)=-k y(t)/(A+y(t))
where A and k are constants that depend on the drug.
Drugs like cocaine have y(t) very small relative to A, so the concentration can be approximated with an exponential decay. This is where the concept of half-life of drugs comes in. The concentration decreases by a half for every half-life of time that goes by. So if the half-life is 1 hr, after 3 hours there is 1/8 the initial amount of drug in the body.
For drugs like alcohol, y(t) is large relative to A, which makes the decay more linear and less exponential. One serving of alcohol takes about an hour to pass out of the body. So after half an hour, half the initial alcohol is in the blood.
To model the level of caffeine in your body without complicated medical tests, you would have to find the right constants for caffeine from medical literature. Then carefully record every source of caffeine you intake to the model. Since caffeine passes through the body relatively quickly, it would be pretty much impossible to keep a constant concentration in the blood. It would be possible to keep the concentration between an upper and lower limit.
That is an interesting idea. The average business person probably sees Linux as a new fad caused by the antitrust trial. If they saw IBM Linux for sale on the shelves, they might reconsider...
One time I posted a comment to Slashdot that contained a link to one of my professor's pages. The comment was only moderated at 1, but my professor noticed a spike in his web page statistics and investigated. Now he reads Slashdot...
oops, the sun produces electron neutrinos, and SNO can detect and distinguish between electron neutrinos and the other two flavors, muon and tau neutrinos.
Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
This detector is designed to answer the "solar neutrino problem", namely that we keep detecting half as many neutrinos as we should be from the sun. Where did the other half go? One theory is that neutrinos oscillate between types. I.e. a muon neutrino oscillates into a tau neutrino as it travels to the earth. The new form of neutrino is then not detected because the original detectors only detected muon neutrinos. SNO will be able to detect both types and distinguish between them, so it should be able to convincingly answer the question of the missing neutrinos.
nojw
You're right, we will never run out of oil, only cheap oil. The environmental problem is that by taking stuff out of the ground and putting it in the sky, we are changing the earth's climate. That is dangerous, because we depend on a stable climate to grow our crops and keep ourselves fed. Decades from now our children will curse us for choosing temporary convenience over keeping the earth habitable if we don't get our act together.
There should be a short time period where only the owner of yahoo.com can get yahoo.shop, but after that short period everything should be up for grabs.
LISP Interpreter
I love functional languages. If you think about the problem you are trying to solve in the right way, often times you can find a simple three line functional program that does the job. That's the kicker though: you have think in a functional way. Simple recursion is about the deepest functional abstraction most programmers can wrap their minds around.
nojw
What examples are you thinking of? I would be very interested to hear of companies on the RBL that have never had spam complaints filed against them, and do not allow spam through their network.
I would suggest that there be an upper limit of trust/popularity, such that almost everyone on the Napster network gets the highest trust. The only reason trust would go down is if something screwy was going on. That way the record companies and lawyers can't concentrate their fire any more than they do now. Of course there will always be the problem of l4m3rs who have a grudge. But what's the worst that can happen? People stop downloading from you and your internet connection speeds up. Oh no.
One thing the Net has taught us: peer review and "egoboo" are powerful forces. (Yes, I read about egoboo in Wired, so sue me.)
nojw
There's no such word as paleocracy (I looked it up even). I think you mean gerontocracy (government by old people).
In the first article there is a link to a sample Makefile for cube.c. I'm using RedHat 6.2 and the only tweak I had to make was to replace the initial spaces on line 12 of the Makefile with a tab.
I'm not sure that "honey pots" aren't entrapment. The police aren't just setting up files that can be downloaded. They are actively putting them on a file-sharing system. That seems more similar to an undercover police officer posing as a drug dealer who advertises that he has cocaine available.