Humans are completely reasonable beings--but only if you fully understand their assumptions. If you assume that, say, traffic laws are wrong and you'll never get caught, it's perfectly reasonable to speed.
In a like vein, most mental disorders and dangerous creeds, and other "irrational" beavhior are rooted not on faulty reason, but rather on faulty assumptions.
An AI given faulty data or conflicting commandments would be likewise errant.
Corproations are a necessary evil--just like money, free will, loss of free will, social welfare, and the stock market. In an ideal world, we'd all be perfect people who work together for a common good, and harness our base instincts of self-preservation and social-personal improvement into something really cool. Of course, no one's perfect, and some people are quite far from even being mediocre...
That said, not everyone in today's society is related to someone who's higher up on the scale. My mother-in-law technically owns a "business"... but it's a sole proprietorship cleaning business with no other employees--or do you count an Amway distributorship as a "business?" Her family never made a lot of money--both her parents are still working low-paying jobs despite raising three children--and while she's seen friends who are comparatively rich, none of them would help her family fiscally the way they would a relation.
In any case, our society still works via corporations because no one has concieved and then implemented a better system--not because corporations are, of themselves, necessary to our society. In fact, they are rather anti-democratic in that they give certain citizens (or non-citizens, for multinationals) an extra vote simply because they're wealthy.
Corporations recieve such bad press because, unlike the government and its various (possibly ineffecitve) agencies, their immediate goal is enriching their stockholders--not serving the public good. This means that they are legally driven to make deicisions that can be bad for everyone else, so far as they turn a profit.
The only checks on this behavior are the twin courts of public opinion and government regulation. Unless you prefer to see more of the later, I suggest you not decry those who exercise even a herd-mentality expression of the former.
Like has been said before, the GPL forces a software company that uses it to sell its services, rather than its software. No one in their right mind buys software that they can get, legally, for free.
Sure, MS could still make a profit by selling more open software--but if they had to allow you to redistribute freely their billion-dollar code forever in any supply, in any form you want, their profits would tumble.
With any luck, though, time will win out and easily usable free software will exist for everything the PC does--thus forcing companies like MS to push the envelope and really innovate if they want to survive.
The United States of America is a single country that is, in every measure that matters, the size of Eurpope. The Federal Government is one with teeth to keep this country with one law, and has to deal with the differences of ALL of the various subcultures that come here and grow here.
If the EU had as much power and responsibiilty as the USA's federal gov't, Europe would have just as many problems. (Yugoslavia, anyone? WWII? Hmm... when was the last time there was a war in the USA...)
No, they are just looking. If they find a flaw they can exploit, and then make the attempt to exploit it, THEN they are trying to break in. Certainly cruising a neighborhood casing the houses is suspicious, but its not illegal (in general, depending on where you are. Some communities have such rules).
Actually, it is. If you decide to rob someone, and then go out looking for someone to rob, you're guilty of conspiracy (assuming that there's more than one of you, though I wouldn't doubt there's some similar prohibition against individuals.)
Just because they can't catch you for it doesn't mean it isn't illegal. If you go to a cop and tell them that you and a friend were thinking of robbing a house, and then checked to see if the door's locked, you and/or your friend could be facing criminal prosecution.
Tieing IE to Windows means, quite simply, that when the web browser crashes so does the major UI interface.
It also wastes resoruces if, for *any* reason, I need to use a non-IE browser. (Why would I? Oh, I don't know... maybe I'm compatability testing a web site. Maybe I'm browsing something else. Maybe I just can't stand IE... maybe I want to turn off the web browser.)
The other times MS has tied a product into the OS (Compression, networking) it's something that the user doesn't *want* to deal with, and happens more or less transparantly.
But with IE, nothing really changed. Oh, I can have web pages show up on my desktop--if I load a clunky system setting, slow down perforamnce, and I *still* have to open up a new window (program) to open a web site.
IE bundling was a mistake, and I hope that, if nothing else, MS is required to let users turn it off!
I didn't think Slashdot would fall for this. Bad HTML, pseduo-science that doesn't even begin to follow the scientific method...
If I didn't see the link from slashdot myself, I would have ignored this site just like I do any other half-baked philosiphy site. But with a Slashdot link... now I'm worried.
My point is that there is no "fundamental shrine" which is untouchable, unlike religion.)
Not quite. The "fundamental shrines" of science are "the simpliest explination that fits all the facts is correct" and "all the universe operates on the same laws."
Events which challnege these are tanamount to the appearance of prophets--things so profound that they change almost the entirety of the belief system.
(BTW, I think that the ascension of science is the best thing that ever happened to religion; it provides a solid base to encourage questioning, and thus reduces the chance for corruption.)
Back in the late 1980s my father worked at the HQ for NASP--the "National Aero Space Plane", in Wright-Patt, AFB, Ohio. He brought home some press releases that were -*gasp*- identical in concept and rough design to the X-33.
Saying they can use it for a weapon is just a good way to get funding--and, really, the X-33 design of the NASP has enough problems it needed to get scrappd. I can't wait to see if they can finish what was started 15 years ago.
The reason for extending copyright after its holder's death is really simple: Most people who are holding copyrights when they die have a spouse, or children, or other beneficiaries. Extending the copyright lets them continue to benefit for a few years.
(Of course, this could just be written into the law, as well...)
IANAL, but, as I reacall, copyright of 70 years + author's life is only for works that are held by a natural person--so Microsoft's copyright on Windows won't last until 70 years after Bill Gate's death.
> The other problem with the holodeck was that it
> was a technology so incongruous with everything
> else that it was "indistinguishable from magic"
> and totally destroyed the show's believability.
OK, so you can accept space-warp to break the speed of light barrier, and "transporters", "replicators", "tractor beams" "force shields", but you can't accept "a magic holographic box", despite the fact that they have a rationale for what happens there?
Sufficnently advanced technology IS equivalent to magic--but only if you don't know how it works.
> And it was not simply the visual and physical
> issues. Why was it that the computer, normally
> barely smart enough to open lift doors on
> command, could suddenly create completely
> believable, intelligent, human characters in the
> holodeck? They could be brilliant scientists
> and could solve ship problems, but ask that same
> computer on the bridge to solve the problem and
> you'd get the equivalent of "that does not
> compute."
How come my computer, which can sometimes show me very fun games, or send a message across the world, or play very engrossing movies, cannot get me a sandwhich?
It is really incredible that those church people thinks they can decide what EVERYBODY should do, should see etc. That they can decide what is good or bad for the people that share their religion, this I can understand, but why oh why do they try to enforce their rules to all the other???
There is only one reality. If you accept that there is a God and that the Church is his will (as the Catholic Church evidently does) then you should attempt to spreak that word to everyone else.
There's no more reason for a religous person to have "respect" for someone who "thinks differently" than there is for you to respect someone who thinks that your name is Snuffleupagus.
I wonder. Will the MS app development company really be interested in competing in open standards-based application arenas?
It doesn't matter. They'll have to compete with their proprietary system against an open system, in a noninterested environment. If Open Software can't beat them then, it doesn't deserve even one tenth the hype it's gotten.
I'm sure that the MS OS company would have no interest whatsoever in supporting open standards in application interfaces, except perhaps for show.
"Open", no. "Accessable to all developers equally," well, that's part of the breakup. MS OS won't want Linux to suddenly have its API... but that doens't matter, because Linux (et al) will be able to out-perform MS OS and woo all of the APP developers, including MS APP. (See the same comment about equal competition above.)
The information monopolies and their conjoined interests require new thinking, not just the "we'll break them up and let the market take care of it..." that worked with Standard Oil over a hundred years ago.
I disagree. If you are the best fisherman in the village, and everyone else gets out of buisness and you become the *only* fisherman, the village council shouldn't try and find a new fisherman just to break your monopoly. You'd have to jack up your prices tenfold and they buy all the docks in the village--and then the village council would force you to let someone else try and out-fish you, thus eliminating your abusive monopoly.
I'll have to think about the article's proposals before I come to a decision. Government setting standards in certain areas can be a good thing, but there are risks of course.
Now that I think about it, the government shouldn't worry about the software standards. They should worry about the Buisness Model standards--like forcing equal competition, reasonable copy-protection, intelligent and non-abusive EULAs...
There should be a new government agency for software and the internet. Why?
Because it will keep all of the other agencies one more step removed. If the government decides that there should be standards, it would be through Congress, and a new angency would be made (or an old agency would be expanded.)
Of course we don't want the government to define software standards--if we did that, politics would get in the way, inevitably. What we want in software standards is exactly what we have in accounting standards--enforced by the government, but defined by the industry.
The government decided that there had to be standards after the 1920s fall, AND they do it intelligently--they have the various people in the market get together and agree on the standards, and then they enforce them.
And in software, we wouldn't be choosing the best method, we'd be choosing the standard method. If you have a better method, use that and convice people to switch.
There's nothing wrong with a monopoly. the problem is when that monopoly is used against the public good (say, raising prices to an unreasonable extent, or leveraging the monopoly to a different market sector--both of which MS has done.)
Splitting up MS will divorce the interest in the different markets--thus eliminating the abuse that the government has found. "Windows, Inc." can be a monopoly all it wants--but it can't use its justly owned monopoly in an abusive manner. After all, they can't help it if no one can compete. *grin*
Nowhere in the article did I see mention of the early Industrial Revolution, or the guild system that preceded it. A "monopoly" has some very good points (like unity and standardization, just like a guild; or letting someone reap the benefits of their innovation, like a "trade secret" monopoly) but it isn't as important as standards.
The article's abstract is simply wrong; "proprietary information" dates back hundreds of years, and predates the age of Robber Barons by several centuries at the very least.
...I move to a new apartment. I set up my new phone service. By default, my name, address, and phone number are pimped out to whoever has the money to buy them, aka the phone book...
You just highlighted the biggest reason that "privacy" is an over-rated fanaticism on the internet. Of course your location should be public knowledge--anyone who cares to should be able to track you down, unless you take cares to hide yourself. For a moment, take "privacy" to the physical world--you meet someone, but refuse to let them see your face because it violates your "privacy."
Of course, you should definitly have the option of being prviate--you can hide your face, or close the blinds on your house.
Getting back on topic, this (medical privacy) is a Very Good Thing. When you go to a doctor you're not in public, you're expecting privacy--just like in your marriage bed, or when you go to talk to an attourney about that odd smell in your basement and those weird, violent nightmares...
Candiates vie for office. The outcome is in doubt, so they go to court for recounts. The courts deny that. Loser concedes. Winner gets stuck with the job.
All *exactly* as it was supposed to happen. If you don't like it, rally for electoral reform... but *whatever* you do, don't call it an undemocratic coup.
The coup we just had was *very* democratic, just like the ones we've had six and eight years ago--oh, and that first one 224 years ago last summer.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah. Yawheh, God, & Allah are all the same dude, who just happens to act differently with different folks.
Humans are completely reasonable beings--but only if you fully understand their assumptions. If you assume that, say, traffic laws are wrong and you'll never get caught, it's perfectly reasonable to speed.
In a like vein, most mental disorders and dangerous creeds, and other "irrational" beavhior are rooted not on faulty reason, but rather on faulty assumptions.
An AI given faulty data or conflicting commandments would be likewise errant.
Corproations are a necessary evil--just like money, free will, loss of free will, social welfare, and the stock market. In an ideal world, we'd all be perfect people who work together for a common good, and harness our base instincts of self-preservation and social-personal improvement into something really cool. Of course, no one's perfect, and some people are quite far from even being mediocre...
That said, not everyone in today's society is related to someone who's higher up on the scale. My mother-in-law technically owns a "business"... but it's a sole proprietorship cleaning business with no other employees--or do you count an Amway distributorship as a "business?" Her family never made a lot of money--both her parents are still working low-paying jobs despite raising three children--and while she's seen friends who are comparatively rich, none of them would help her family fiscally the way they would a relation.
In any case, our society still works via corporations because no one has concieved and then implemented a better system--not because corporations are, of themselves, necessary to our society. In fact, they are rather anti-democratic in that they give certain citizens (or non-citizens, for multinationals) an extra vote simply because they're wealthy.
Corporations recieve such bad press because, unlike the government and its various (possibly ineffecitve) agencies, their immediate goal is enriching their stockholders--not serving the public good. This means that they are legally driven to make deicisions that can be bad for everyone else, so far as they turn a profit.
The only checks on this behavior are the twin courts of public opinion and government regulation. Unless you prefer to see more of the later, I suggest you not decry those who exercise even a herd-mentality expression of the former.
Like has been said before, the GPL forces a software company that uses it to sell its services, rather than its software. No one in their right mind buys software that they can get, legally, for free.
Sure, MS could still make a profit by selling more open software--but if they had to allow you to redistribute freely their billion-dollar code forever in any supply, in any form you want, their profits would tumble.
With any luck, though, time will win out and easily usable free software will exist for everything the PC does--thus forcing companies like MS to push the envelope and really innovate if they want to survive.
The United States of America is a single country that is, in every measure that matters, the size of Eurpope. The Federal Government is one with teeth to keep this country with one law, and has to deal with the differences of ALL of the various subcultures that come here and grow here.
If the EU had as much power and responsibiilty as the USA's federal gov't, Europe would have just as many problems. (Yugoslavia, anyone? WWII? Hmm... when was the last time there was a war in the USA...)
No, they are just looking. If they find a flaw they can exploit, and then make the attempt to exploit it, THEN they are trying to break in. Certainly cruising a neighborhood casing the houses is suspicious, but its not illegal (in general, depending on where you are. Some communities have such rules).
Actually, it is. If you decide to rob someone, and then go out looking for someone to rob, you're guilty of conspiracy (assuming that there's more than one of you, though I wouldn't doubt there's some similar prohibition against individuals.)
Just because they can't catch you for it doesn't mean it isn't illegal. If you go to a cop and tell them that you and a friend were thinking of robbing a house, and then checked to see if the door's locked, you and/or your friend could be facing criminal prosecution.
:) Ah, the wonders of introductory law courses.
If I take a public Domain work (oh, let's say a work of Shakesphere) and make a derivitive work, I don't have to make my work public domain.
If I were to take a GPL's copy of King's work, I would have to use the GPL.
Or in other words, *you trade the ability to not use the GPL in your work when you utilize GPL code in your project!*
Tieing IE to Windows means, quite simply, that when the web browser crashes so does the major UI interface.
It also wastes resoruces if, for *any* reason, I need to use a non-IE browser. (Why would I? Oh, I don't know... maybe I'm compatability testing a web site. Maybe I'm browsing something else. Maybe I just can't stand IE... maybe I want to turn off the web browser.)
The other times MS has tied a product into the OS (Compression, networking) it's something that the user doesn't *want* to deal with, and happens more or less transparantly.
But with IE, nothing really changed. Oh, I can have web pages show up on my desktop--if I load a clunky system setting, slow down perforamnce, and I *still* have to open up a new window (program) to open a web site.
IE bundling was a mistake, and I hope that, if nothing else, MS is required to let users turn it off!
At random, take some GPL'd code from a poor shmuck and "steal" it for your project. You, of course, want the GPL to fail.
:)
Then the rest of us sue you for violation of the GPL, and if we win we decide to let you off easy because we're nice--or not.
Now see why the GPL still hasn't been tested in court?
I didn't think Slashdot would fall for this. Bad HTML, pseduo-science that doesn't even begin to follow the scientific method...
If I didn't see the link from slashdot myself, I would have ignored this site just like I do any other half-baked philosiphy site. But with a Slashdot link... now I'm worried.
Wow... my natural life expectancy? Woo hoo! I'm instantly middle-aged!
Technology has, so far, done more good than harm to us. Good points about the evils of corporate domination... but aside from that, it's just a troll.
My point is that there is no "fundamental shrine" which is untouchable, unlike religion.)
Not quite. The "fundamental shrines" of science are "the simpliest explination that fits all the facts is correct" and "all the universe operates on the same laws."
Events which challnege these are tanamount to the appearance of prophets--things so profound that they change almost the entirety of the belief system.
(BTW, I think that the ascension of science is the best thing that ever happened to religion; it provides a solid base to encourage questioning, and thus reduces the chance for corruption.)
Back in the late 1980s my father worked at the HQ for NASP--the "National Aero Space Plane", in Wright-Patt, AFB, Ohio. He brought home some press releases that were -*gasp*- identical in concept and rough design to the X-33.
Saying they can use it for a weapon is just a good way to get funding--and, really, the X-33 design of the NASP has enough problems it needed to get scrappd. I can't wait to see if they can finish what was started 15 years ago.
The reason for extending copyright after its holder's death is really simple: Most people who are holding copyrights when they die have a spouse, or children, or other beneficiaries. Extending the copyright lets them continue to benefit for a few years.
(Of course, this could just be written into the law, as well...)
IANAL, but, as I reacall, copyright of 70 years + author's life is only for works that are held by a natural person--so Microsoft's copyright on Windows won't last until 70 years after Bill Gate's death.
> The other problem with the holodeck was that it
> was a technology so incongruous with everything
> else that it was "indistinguishable from magic"
> and totally destroyed the show's believability.
OK, so you can accept space-warp to break the speed of light barrier, and "transporters", "replicators", "tractor beams" "force shields", but you can't accept "a magic holographic box", despite the fact that they have a rationale for what happens there?
Sufficnently advanced technology IS equivalent to magic--but only if you don't know how it works.
> And it was not simply the visual and physical
> issues. Why was it that the computer, normally
> barely smart enough to open lift doors on
> command, could suddenly create completely
> believable, intelligent, human characters in the
> holodeck? They could be brilliant scientists
> and could solve ship problems, but ask that same
> computer on the bridge to solve the problem and
> you'd get the equivalent of "that does not
> compute."
How come my computer, which can sometimes show me very fun games, or send a message across the world, or play very engrossing movies, cannot get me a sandwhich?
DM
Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean that the church doesn't. Organized religion is all about "spreading the truth of the universe."
Controlling the people is a means to an end for them, not an end to itself.
There is only one reality. If you accept that there is a God and that the Church is his will (as the Catholic Church evidently does) then you should attempt to spreak that word to everyone else.
There's no more reason for a religous person to have "respect" for someone who "thinks differently" than there is for you to respect someone who thinks that your name is Snuffleupagus.
It doesn't matter. They'll have to compete with their proprietary system against an open system, in a noninterested environment. If Open Software can't beat them then, it doesn't deserve even one tenth the hype it's gotten.
I'm sure that the MS OS company would have no interest whatsoever in supporting open standards in application interfaces, except perhaps for show.
"Open", no. "Accessable to all developers equally," well, that's part of the breakup. MS OS won't want Linux to suddenly have its API... but that doens't matter, because Linux (et al) will be able to out-perform MS OS and woo all of the APP developers, including MS APP. (See the same comment about equal competition above.)
The information monopolies and their conjoined interests require new thinking, not just the "we'll break them up and let the market take care of it..." that worked with Standard Oil over a hundred years ago.
I disagree. If you are the best fisherman in the village, and everyone else gets out of buisness and you become the *only* fisherman, the village council shouldn't try and find a new fisherman just to break your monopoly. You'd have to jack up your prices tenfold and they buy all the docks in the village--and then the village council would force you to let someone else try and out-fish you, thus eliminating your abusive monopoly.
I'll have to think about the article's proposals before I come to a decision. Government setting standards in certain areas can be a good thing, but there are risks of course.
Now that I think about it, the government shouldn't worry about the software standards. They should worry about the Buisness Model standards--like forcing equal competition, reasonable copy-protection, intelligent and non-abusive EULAs...
Nah. Britian would go to war to protect their trade. Guilds would hire mercinaries to rough up those who tried to work despite them.
All told, I'd rather the @#$ use the courts than the street toughs.
There should be a new government agency for software and the internet. Why?
Because it will keep all of the other agencies one more step removed. If the government decides that there should be standards, it would be through Congress, and a new angency would be made (or an old agency would be expanded.)
The government decided that there had to be standards after the 1920s fall, AND they do it intelligently--they have the various people in the market get together and agree on the standards, and then they enforce them.
And in software, we wouldn't be choosing the best method, we'd be choosing the standard method. If you have a better method, use that and convice people to switch.
There's nothing wrong with a monopoly. the problem is when that monopoly is used against the public good (say, raising prices to an unreasonable extent, or leveraging the monopoly to a different market sector--both of which MS has done.)
Splitting up MS will divorce the interest in the different markets--thus eliminating the abuse that the government has found. "Windows, Inc." can be a monopoly all it wants--but it can't use its justly owned monopoly in an abusive manner. After all, they can't help it if no one can compete. *grin*
Nowhere in the article did I see mention of the early Industrial Revolution, or the guild system that preceded it. A "monopoly" has some very good points (like unity and standardization, just like a guild; or letting someone reap the benefits of their innovation, like a "trade secret" monopoly) but it isn't as important as standards.
The article's abstract is simply wrong; "proprietary information" dates back hundreds of years, and predates the age of Robber Barons by several centuries at the very least.
You just highlighted the biggest reason that "privacy" is an over-rated fanaticism on the internet. Of course your location should be public knowledge--anyone who cares to should be able to track you down, unless you take cares to hide yourself. For a moment, take "privacy" to the physical world--you meet someone, but refuse to let them see your face because it violates your "privacy."
Of course, you should definitly have the option of being prviate--you can hide your face, or close the blinds on your house.
Getting back on topic, this (medical privacy) is a Very Good Thing. When you go to a doctor you're not in public, you're expecting privacy--just like in your marriage bed, or when you go to talk to an attourney about that odd smell in your basement and those weird, violent nightmares...
Honestly...
Candiates vie for office. The outcome is in doubt, so they go to court for recounts. The courts deny that. Loser concedes. Winner gets stuck with the job.
All *exactly* as it was supposed to happen. If you don't like it, rally for electoral reform... but *whatever* you do, don't call it an undemocratic coup.
The coup we just had was *very* democratic, just like the ones we've had six and eight years ago--oh, and that first one 224 years ago last summer.