No problem; we'll totally forget all our technology and even basic agriculture (how many people these days know how to farm?), so it'll only be another 8,000 years before we have a society that resembles ancient Rome technologically and socially.
Exactly; in the future, we'll still have horseshoe crabs, sharks, and cockroaches. No mammals (including humans), though.
I do think one of our last acts as a species should be to build a giant monument on the Moon (where it won't be eroded by the weather) to explain what happened to us, in case any aliens come by, so they can see how we did ourselves in with our stupidity.
The problem with this idea is that H1B is a temporary visa, and allows companies to use these workers as indentured servants; it's hard for an H1B to move between jobs because the company that sponsored him still has strings attached.
If the government were giving these supposedly high-skilled workers green cards instead, that would be different: then they'd be able to stay and plant roots here if they wanted, not to mention be able to easily change jobs (which keeps salaries high due to competition). *That's* how you do a brain drain: you bring over smart people and entice them to stay.
I'm not saying the US was totally non-industrial before WWI, but the change in the level of industrialization before and after WWII was enormous. Britain and Germany were probably both quite a bit more industrialized than the US before WWII; afterwards, they never caught up.
The military capability of the US was also not that great before WWII (and much less before WWI); it was really outclassed by the European powers. Afterwards, again they never caught up.
All that is correct, but you're also forgetting WWI and WWII: before this, the US still wasn't that industrialized, though it certainly had become somewhat industrialized during the Gilded Age and Industrial Revolution. After WWII, it was the last industrialized power left standing without any significant major wartime damage, and had massively industrialized itself for the war effort. After the dust settled, American industry got extremely rich helping to rebuild everyone else. It's taken decades for that to finally wear off.
Huh? One of the ions used in the electrolyte in a battery is probably not a majority of the battery's weight. And aluminum is one of the least-dense metals there is.
That doesn't sound right. If everyone were just using Linux, that would make sense, but they're not, they're also using QNX and VxWorks and some other RTOSes. Manufacturers are not giving anyone reference designs with proprietary RTOSes, so any company choosing those is doing so for a specific reason (probably they want lower resource-usage than Linux can achieve). If so many companies can do this, some would also be choosing BSD. But that doesn't seem to be happening, so I would think this is probably because BSD can't compete at all with the RTOSes in terms of resource usage, and doesn't offer enough over Linux to bother with it.
The big difference here is the DMCA, which makes it illegal to crack the licensing mechanism like this; this makes the action in your scenario a crime.
Violating the GPL is not (AFAIK) a crime, it's a tort, just like any normal copyright violation. The party harmed has to sue for damages.
Higher-end networking gear has serious CPU horsepower compared to your average Belkin or Linksys consumer-grade router, enough horsepower to rival a high-end PC probably, if not more.
How often do you see BSD used on any small embedded device with an ARM or MIPS CPU? I can't say I've ever even heard of this. It's always either Linux or something proprietary like QNX or VxWorks.
The problem with this "it's probably not malice" idea is that, usually, whenever a public GPL project complains about some company violating the GPL, they've already contacted the company through official channels, seeking to rectify the situation, because they have the exact same idea: that this is just a misunderstanding, the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, etc. Most of the time, this is most likely the problem, and the company, after consulting with their lawyer, realizes its mistake and fixes it, and we never see a story like this with the title "ABC Corp is violating the GPL!!!". However, when the company refuses to comply, then we get what we're seeing now. Occasionally, some dumb company even gets dragged into court over it, and loses: this happened not too long ago in Germany I believe.
I'm not trying to be rude, but this isn't some kind of secret, nor some obscure "small text" in the GPL license, it's the entire reason for the GPL. If you use GPL code at all, it's good to understand the license at a very basic level; furthermore, the GPL license itself is very simple as far as licenses go, and was intentionally designed that way because it's meant for developers and users, not lawyers to argue in courtrooms for $$$/hour. It's simple: if you're given access to GPL code by its copyright owner, you're allowed to distribute that to others, with the one condition that you must also give those people access to the source code for any changes you make that are in the binary you give them. Since almost all GPL code is freely-available on the internet, that just means it's free to use and modify, but if you do modify it and give that to someone, you have to give them the source too. That way, you can't make critical changes, keep them secret, and profit from that secrecy (or just make people's life harder by them not being able to see how it works). The whole idea is to promote sharing and discourage secrecy.
They're violating the license agreement. That code is copyrighted, and is only provided to you under the conditions stated in the GPL license, which govern how that code is distributed, and in a nutshell requires you to make the source code available to any changes you distribute to anyone in binary form (i.e., in products you sell which use that code). If you refuse to follow the terms of that license, then you automatically have no right to use the code at all, and are now in violation of copyright. If you don't like the terms of this license, you're free to not use the software, and find an alternative or make your own.
I've never actually heard of any BSD derivative used in a small, embedded system. Usually the choice is between Linux (on ARM or MIPS or maybe ppc) and a proprietary RTOS like VxWorks or QNX. There's probably a reason for this.
There's ways around the NDA problem: put that code in a separate place where it interfaces with GPL code, but does not require actually modifying the GPL code with anything NDA-tainted, for instance. If you can't figure out how to do that, then you really have no business working with this stuff. Or just use a proprietary OS like VxWorks.
The problem with this "maybe it's just a mistake" line of thought is that, usually, whenever these GPL violation issues come up publicly, it's because the accusers have already contacted the alleged infringer and sought to rectify the situation, and it didn't go over well.
I have a brand new Frigidaire dishwasher. It's most efficient cycle, using air drying and "eco mode", uses 22 litres of water, takes 99 minutes to complete, and something like 2 to 3 kWh of power. That is in addition to the gas water heater that supplied the hot water.
Your dishwasher is likely using most of its power to heat the water it uses beyond the temperature it's getting it from the water heater. Boiling-hot water works wonders in cleaning dishes.
Did you actually measure your dishwasher's power usage in this cycle with a power meter?
Also, I completely doubt that you can clean the dishes nearly as well by hand. There's even been studies on this and the effect on children's immune systems; hand-washed dishes just aren't very clean (which actually helps the kids on average, but for older people or anyone with a compromised immune system isn't a good thing).
It makes you look dumb when you pull this crap out of your ass. EVs are so much more efficient than gas cars that even if they're ultimately powered by fossil-fuel power plants, today's fossil fuel plants are so much more efficient than gas engines that you'd still use less energy and generate less pollution.
Modern washing machines (esp. horizontal-axis ones) are so water and energy efficient it's just idiotic to bother washing clothes by hand. It's just like modern dishwashers; they're far more efficient (both water and energy, since you need hot water to wash dishes well, and it takes a lot of energy to heat water) than washing dishes by hand.
Dryers are different, since they do use a lot of power (just look at the electric cord on them): you can dry things in the air outside. However this requires you to have decently warm outside temperatures, no rain, and low enough humidity. These conditions may not reliably exist for you.
Heating and cooling the buildings that house billions of people, and doing things like farming and treating/transporting water and other important things are hugely more polluting than cars.
Wrong. Most of those things (particularly HVAC) can be done with electricity, so it's at least highly feasible to move that to non-fossil-fuel energy sources.
Electric cars are just going to move the pollution to another place.
Wrong, they allow you to use non-fossil-fuel energy sources. They're also far more efficient than small ICE engines, so even if your energy source is fossil fuel it's still more efficient.
That won't help until aging hippie hand-wringers stop getting their panties in a twist, and get out of the way of us building a lot more modern nuclear power plants. Nothing else will even put a dent in it.
Wrong again. As I said above, EVs are so much more efficient that even if you stuck with fossil fuel power plants it'd be more efficient than millions of shitty, poorly maintained, inefficient gas engines. And solar power is being used more and more; Germany gets a huge amount of power from solar, and that's not a particularly sunny place unlike much of the US. Wind is also supplying a lot of power these days.
The 70s called and want you back. In every developed nation, we've reached zero population growth, except for immigration. Every time people get to a high enough state of wealth, they stop having lots of kids (except for a few wackos like the Duggars). All the other nations are developing pretty rapidly at this point; China has a huge and growing middle class, and labor rates have grown so much that they're going to be looking at outsourcing stuff to cheaper countries before long. Eventually, we're going to have to figure out how to get along in our societies without ever-increasing populations.
Don't be stupid. We're fucking up our planet because of our addiction to fossil fuels. If this actually pans out, then it'll make electric vehicles very economical, and will completely obsolete gasoline-powered cars, which is easily the biggest source of our carbon pollution. We'll need more electric generation capacity of course, but that can be done with lots of different sources, including carbon-free ones such as solar, wind, tidal, and nuclear.
With the obvious problems with our environment at this time, it's my opinion that replacing gas cars with EVs ASAP is a screaming emergency.
I think I've addressed most of your points elsewhere here, in a reply to someone else.
Note that feature phone used to have cameras too. Feature phone introduced camera before even smartphone where started.
Yes, but they were beyond useless, with terrible resolution and color. Today's smartphones' cameras actually take really good photos.
Same goes for a lot of other things you mention (email, games, alarm clock, calculator, etc.)
Again, many of these were useless. Email isn't usable on such a small screen, with no keyboard to type replies. The calculators were shitty 4-function calculators; mine works the same as an HP RPN calculator. A Gameboy (the original) was better for games than the shitty games those phones had.
Partially solved by several techniques. For example, one available backthen on the a fore mentionned
There's no way I'm messing around with wacky key combinations. Instead, I just won't use the phone for typing at all; it isn't worth it. With my smartphone, there's an on-screen keyboard which is simple and works well.
As soon as MP3 player stared being popular, phone started offering the function
It wasn't usable because they didn't have enough storage. Now it's common to have 32GB or more of flash storage on a phone, which is plenty for a good-size music library.
Can you actually think of a phone that DOESN'T have a lit up screen? People have been using it as improvised sources of light for as long as I can remember.
Too dim to be of any use except in an emergency. Modern phones use the ultra-bright flash LEDs for the flashlight function, and they actually produce a lot of light, comparable to small flashlights.
Yes, I get your point: all these things existed in feature phones. MY point is that in feature phones, all these things sucked so bad that they were completely and utterly unusable. Now with modern smartphones, they're not only usable, they frequently work extremely well. It's like the difference between a Model T and any 2015MY car. The camera is a great example here: on my old feature phone, it had a camera, but the pictures were so low-res and lousy that there just wasn't any point in bothering, so I never did. Now with my smartphone, I use it all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
No problem; we'll totally forget all our technology and even basic agriculture (how many people these days know how to farm?), so it'll only be another 8,000 years before we have a society that resembles ancient Rome technologically and socially.
Exactly; in the future, we'll still have horseshoe crabs, sharks, and cockroaches. No mammals (including humans), though.
I do think one of our last acts as a species should be to build a giant monument on the Moon (where it won't be eroded by the weather) to explain what happened to us, in case any aliens come by, so they can see how we did ourselves in with our stupidity.
The problem with this idea is that H1B is a temporary visa, and allows companies to use these workers as indentured servants; it's hard for an H1B to move between jobs because the company that sponsored him still has strings attached.
If the government were giving these supposedly high-skilled workers green cards instead, that would be different: then they'd be able to stay and plant roots here if they wanted, not to mention be able to easily change jobs (which keeps salaries high due to competition). *That's* how you do a brain drain: you bring over smart people and entice them to stay.
3/4 of STEM workers flee the field due to substandard pay and working conditions compared to other jobs they can get.
So what other fields are they going into (meaning experienced STEM workers, not college kids who still have time to change majors)?
I'm not saying the US was totally non-industrial before WWI, but the change in the level of industrialization before and after WWII was enormous. Britain and Germany were probably both quite a bit more industrialized than the US before WWII; afterwards, they never caught up.
The military capability of the US was also not that great before WWII (and much less before WWI); it was really outclassed by the European powers. Afterwards, again they never caught up.
All that is correct, but you're also forgetting WWI and WWII: before this, the US still wasn't that industrialized, though it certainly had become somewhat industrialized during the Gilded Age and Industrial Revolution. After WWII, it was the last industrialized power left standing without any significant major wartime damage, and had massively industrialized itself for the war effort. After the dust settled, American industry got extremely rich helping to rebuild everyone else. It's taken decades for that to finally wear off.
Basically, the US won the lottery.
Huh? One of the ions used in the electrolyte in a battery is probably not a majority of the battery's weight. And aluminum is one of the least-dense metals there is.
That doesn't sound right. If everyone were just using Linux, that would make sense, but they're not, they're also using QNX and VxWorks and some other RTOSes. Manufacturers are not giving anyone reference designs with proprietary RTOSes, so any company choosing those is doing so for a specific reason (probably they want lower resource-usage than Linux can achieve). If so many companies can do this, some would also be choosing BSD. But that doesn't seem to be happening, so I would think this is probably because BSD can't compete at all with the RTOSes in terms of resource usage, and doesn't offer enough over Linux to bother with it.
The big difference here is the DMCA, which makes it illegal to crack the licensing mechanism like this; this makes the action in your scenario a crime.
Violating the GPL is not (AFAIK) a crime, it's a tort, just like any normal copyright violation. The party harmed has to sue for damages.
Higher-end networking gear has serious CPU horsepower compared to your average Belkin or Linksys consumer-grade router, enough horsepower to rival a high-end PC probably, if not more.
How often do you see BSD used on any small embedded device with an ARM or MIPS CPU? I can't say I've ever even heard of this. It's always either Linux or something proprietary like QNX or VxWorks.
The problem with this "it's probably not malice" idea is that, usually, whenever a public GPL project complains about some company violating the GPL, they've already contacted the company through official channels, seeking to rectify the situation, because they have the exact same idea: that this is just a misunderstanding, the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, etc. Most of the time, this is most likely the problem, and the company, after consulting with their lawyer, realizes its mistake and fixes it, and we never see a story like this with the title "ABC Corp is violating the GPL!!!". However, when the company refuses to comply, then we get what we're seeing now. Occasionally, some dumb company even gets dragged into court over it, and loses: this happened not too long ago in Germany I believe.
I'm not trying to be rude, but this isn't some kind of secret, nor some obscure "small text" in the GPL license, it's the entire reason for the GPL. If you use GPL code at all, it's good to understand the license at a very basic level; furthermore, the GPL license itself is very simple as far as licenses go, and was intentionally designed that way because it's meant for developers and users, not lawyers to argue in courtrooms for $$$/hour. It's simple: if you're given access to GPL code by its copyright owner, you're allowed to distribute that to others, with the one condition that you must also give those people access to the source code for any changes you make that are in the binary you give them. Since almost all GPL code is freely-available on the internet, that just means it's free to use and modify, but if you do modify it and give that to someone, you have to give them the source too. That way, you can't make critical changes, keep them secret, and profit from that secrecy (or just make people's life harder by them not being able to see how it works). The whole idea is to promote sharing and discourage secrecy.
They're violating the license agreement. That code is copyrighted, and is only provided to you under the conditions stated in the GPL license, which govern how that code is distributed, and in a nutshell requires you to make the source code available to any changes you distribute to anyone in binary form (i.e., in products you sell which use that code). If you refuse to follow the terms of that license, then you automatically have no right to use the code at all, and are now in violation of copyright. If you don't like the terms of this license, you're free to not use the software, and find an alternative or make your own.
I've never actually heard of any BSD derivative used in a small, embedded system. Usually the choice is between Linux (on ARM or MIPS or maybe ppc) and a proprietary RTOS like VxWorks or QNX. There's probably a reason for this.
There's ways around the NDA problem: put that code in a separate place where it interfaces with GPL code, but does not require actually modifying the GPL code with anything NDA-tainted, for instance. If you can't figure out how to do that, then you really have no business working with this stuff. Or just use a proprietary OS like VxWorks.
The problem with this "maybe it's just a mistake" line of thought is that, usually, whenever these GPL violation issues come up publicly, it's because the accusers have already contacted the alleged infringer and sought to rectify the situation, and it didn't go over well.
What the hell is a "lid"? You mean like those old flip-phones which people used 15 years ago?
It's 2015 now. No one uses flip-phones. Smartphones are all "slate" style. You have to press a button on them to activate them.
Those are excellent points. Geothermal HVAC is extremely efficient, unfortunately its initial cost is higher so it's not used that much.
I have a brand new Frigidaire dishwasher. It's most efficient cycle, using air drying and "eco mode", uses 22 litres of water, takes 99 minutes to complete, and something like 2 to 3 kWh of power. That is in addition to the gas water heater that supplied the hot water.
Your dishwasher is likely using most of its power to heat the water it uses beyond the temperature it's getting it from the water heater. Boiling-hot water works wonders in cleaning dishes.
Did you actually measure your dishwasher's power usage in this cycle with a power meter?
Also, I completely doubt that you can clean the dishes nearly as well by hand. There's even been studies on this and the effect on children's immune systems; hand-washed dishes just aren't very clean (which actually helps the kids on average, but for older people or anyone with a compromised immune system isn't a good thing).
It makes you look dumb when you pull this crap out of your ass. EVs are so much more efficient than gas cars that even if they're ultimately powered by fossil-fuel power plants, today's fossil fuel plants are so much more efficient than gas engines that you'd still use less energy and generate less pollution.
Modern washing machines (esp. horizontal-axis ones) are so water and energy efficient it's just idiotic to bother washing clothes by hand. It's just like modern dishwashers; they're far more efficient (both water and energy, since you need hot water to wash dishes well, and it takes a lot of energy to heat water) than washing dishes by hand.
Dryers are different, since they do use a lot of power (just look at the electric cord on them): you can dry things in the air outside. However this requires you to have decently warm outside temperatures, no rain, and low enough humidity. These conditions may not reliably exist for you.
Heating and cooling the buildings that house billions of people, and doing things like farming and treating/transporting water and other important things are hugely more polluting than cars.
Wrong. Most of those things (particularly HVAC) can be done with electricity, so it's at least highly feasible to move that to non-fossil-fuel energy sources.
Electric cars are just going to move the pollution to another place.
Wrong, they allow you to use non-fossil-fuel energy sources. They're also far more efficient than small ICE engines, so even if your energy source is fossil fuel it's still more efficient.
That won't help until aging hippie hand-wringers stop getting their panties in a twist, and get out of the way of us building a lot more modern nuclear power plants. Nothing else will even put a dent in it.
Wrong again. As I said above, EVs are so much more efficient that even if you stuck with fossil fuel power plants it'd be more efficient than millions of shitty, poorly maintained, inefficient gas engines. And solar power is being used more and more; Germany gets a huge amount of power from solar, and that's not a particularly sunny place unlike much of the US. Wind is also supplying a lot of power these days.
The 70s called and want you back. In every developed nation, we've reached zero population growth, except for immigration. Every time people get to a high enough state of wealth, they stop having lots of kids (except for a few wackos like the Duggars). All the other nations are developing pretty rapidly at this point; China has a huge and growing middle class, and labor rates have grown so much that they're going to be looking at outsourcing stuff to cheaper countries before long. Eventually, we're going to have to figure out how to get along in our societies without ever-increasing populations.
Don't be stupid. We're fucking up our planet because of our addiction to fossil fuels. If this actually pans out, then it'll make electric vehicles very economical, and will completely obsolete gasoline-powered cars, which is easily the biggest source of our carbon pollution. We'll need more electric generation capacity of course, but that can be done with lots of different sources, including carbon-free ones such as solar, wind, tidal, and nuclear.
With the obvious problems with our environment at this time, it's my opinion that replacing gas cars with EVs ASAP is a screaming emergency.
I think I've addressed most of your points elsewhere here, in a reply to someone else.
Note that feature phone used to have cameras too. Feature phone introduced camera before even smartphone where started.
Yes, but they were beyond useless, with terrible resolution and color. Today's smartphones' cameras actually take really good photos.
Same goes for a lot of other things you mention (email, games, alarm clock, calculator, etc.)
Again, many of these were useless. Email isn't usable on such a small screen, with no keyboard to type replies. The calculators were shitty 4-function calculators; mine works the same as an HP RPN calculator. A Gameboy (the original) was better for games than the shitty games those phones had.
Partially solved by several techniques. For example, one available backthen on the a fore mentionned
There's no way I'm messing around with wacky key combinations. Instead, I just won't use the phone for typing at all; it isn't worth it. With my smartphone, there's an on-screen keyboard which is simple and works well.
As soon as MP3 player stared being popular, phone started offering the function
It wasn't usable because they didn't have enough storage. Now it's common to have 32GB or more of flash storage on a phone, which is plenty for a good-size music library.
Can you actually think of a phone that DOESN'T have a lit up screen? People have been using it as improvised sources of light for as long as I can remember.
Too dim to be of any use except in an emergency. Modern phones use the ultra-bright flash LEDs for the flashlight function, and they actually produce a lot of light, comparable to small flashlights.
Yes, I get your point: all these things existed in feature phones. MY point is that in feature phones, all these things sucked so bad that they were completely and utterly unusable. Now with modern smartphones, they're not only usable, they frequently work extremely well. It's like the difference between a Model T and any 2015MY car. The camera is a great example here: on my old feature phone, it had a camera, but the pictures were so low-res and lousy that there just wasn't any point in bothering, so I never did. Now with my smartphone, I use it all the time.