I don't think that a majority of companies are going to stop using MS Office in the near future. But I do think that anyone with experience with one of the other products you cited should be able to figure out the major features of Office with no training whatsoever.
Sure, there are going to be some managers/HR-bots who fail to recognize this. But we're not in the business of saving people from their own stupidity.:) Anyways, as the alternatives get more popular, such people are going to be less and less common.
My advice to a job seeker would be to first point out that OO.o is your primary office suite at home, and if the dude looks at you funny, just tell them that you also have experience with MS Office. Whether it's technically true or not, it may as well be.
Actually, it wasn't the pro-drink forces that got Prohibition overturned. The violence and danger surrounding the bootlegging community were a bigger factor for most people. One of the big watershed events in the history of Prohibition was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, where fourteen mobsters were lined up and executed by a rival gang.
In a similar way, I think the file sharing community isn't nearly as politically powerful as we'd like to believe. But when college students get trucked off to the clink for "unauthorized distribution" of MegaCorp's t00n5, a lot of people are going to join in on the side of the little fellas.
I'm starting to feel like a stalker, but you keep making the points I want to respond to.
As far as learning more about Europa goes, I would agree that robotic probes would probably be more cost-effective (though perhaps not, since any problems encountered by an Earth-controlled vehicle would take hours to learn about, and hours more to correct).
Again, you're missing the point of manned exploration to all these unique and exotic locales: Each target represents a new set of difficulties to overcome. In overcoming those difficulties, we gain expertise in overcoming the problems of living in space.
You keep saying you would like to see manned space exploration when the technology is in place. But without trial runs, the technology will never develop.
The problem is, without the "exploring spirit," there never would have been a "Europe." There would only be small, autonomous tribal units. Without a desire to explore for exploration's sake, the only motivation left to increase your knowledge of the world is conquest and resource exploitation.
Also, it's difficult to separate the desire to explore new places from the desire to explore new ideas and new ways of organizing a society. My fear is that, by squashing one, we would have a profoundly negative effect on the other two.
Finally, I would argue that goals of long-term, manned space exploration are useful in getting ordinary people to start looking beyond the present. That's something that doesn't happen enough these days. Like you said, people don't even want to think about why curbing their childbearing activities might be beneficial in the long term. Politicians and economic planners don't want to think about asking people to consume more efficiently. But asking people to think about the big questions brought up by space exploration--say, how much terraforming they'd like to see on Mars over the next five centuries--is a good way to get them thinking beyond the here and now.
I think your fears of escapism are unfounded. Not many people are going to start believing that we can all just go live on the Moon if we screw things up here. But we do need an outlet for the most restless among us.
I agree that space exploration is no quick fix, and that people need to be focused on the problems of the world. But I fear the sort of society that has lost the driving urge "to boldly go where no one has gone before." [*]
[*] Note: I have been averaging approximately two episodes of Star Trek per year for the last five years. I'm not a geek! I'm not!
Multi-cellular life has only been around for about a billion years. Unless you can show me another species that has ever come as close to utilizing the full resources of planet Earth as humanity, then your point is wholly without merit.
The US isn't autonomous, but it could be, if we were just willing to take on the economic burden of doing it ourselves. We would end up with a lower quality of life, but it could be done.
Similarly, a colony wouldn't need to be able to provide everything our global culture does in order to be self-sustaining. Check off a few human needs (food, water, air, basic medical care, education, and Playboy Magazine) and give a colony the ability to create the equipment needed to provide those things, and they're well on their way to being self-sustaining.
Though this technology is closer than you seem to think, it's not there yet, and under your proposal, it never will be. What you're saying is "let's wait until the technology is developed before we develop the technology." Despite the impression you may have gotten over the last couple hundred years, technology doesn't just pop into existence. People won't start looking for ways to run an independent, self-sustaining colony in space until the current state of the art would indicate that such a goal can be fulfilled. That means practice runs, like the ISS.
The parent poster was right. We do need to start working on an escape hatch in case things go all wahooni-shaped down here. By your reasoning, ocean liners shouldn't carry lifeboats, because they might encourage reckless behavior on the part of the captain.
Right now, there are no lifeboats, and we're still gleefully doing things to this planet without knowing the full consequences of our actions. If you believe that NASA's budget is being funneled to useless projects, fine. You might be able to convince me. But if you believe that manned space flight is automatically pointless, or that 14 billion (NASA'S 2001 budget--less than.1% of our GDP) is too much to spend on space exploration, then you have a severe case of cluelessness.
You say "my tax dollars," but when we give them to the government, they really become "our tax dollars." In theory, at least, we partition them out according to some form of consensus. Despite the shenanigans* that usually accompany the political process, the effect is still the same: everybody ends up paying for something or other that they dislike.
You don't want to fund manned space exploration. Many right-wingers don't want government funding of abortions, while many left-wingers didn't want to fund the war in Iraq. Until the IRS starts sending out itemized tax forms asking us which programs we want funded with our tax dollars, your personal distaste for NASA "thrill-riders" is basically irrelevant.
Even if someone like yourself wants to keep all of human experience safely below 100,000 feet, it's never going to happen. Astronauts who spend their whole lives training and working towards their own personal "thrill ride" are just the extreme tail of the curve. Hundreds of millions of us dream about getting off this rock, and we love manned space exploration for its own sake.
The article is right: The link between scientific research and manned exploration needs to be cut. The experiments being done on the ISS generally don't warrant the expense and risk of a manned presence. Instead, we should be putting that expense and risk towards a worthy goal, such as colonization of the Moon or a manned mission to Mars.
* I can't believe this word has become popular. We owe South Park an enormous cultural debt.
I think that the Potter books have a cute, warm-fuzziness about them that Jordan, Brooks, Feist, Tolkein, etc., weren't even trying for.
Trying to compare Harry Potter to "The Wheel of Time" is like trying to compare Dave Barry's "Big Trouble" to "The Godfather." Jordan arguably wrote superior fantasy, but Rowlings wrote a fantasy world that would appeal to people who weren't usually inclined to read fantasy novels.
I liked both, and I'm a bit insulted that you would imply that Harry Potter fans cannot recognize or appreciate "real fantasy."
"You can hate JK Rowling for being rich and blocking these books, but you at least have to credit her for caring about the books, the people the article is defending are pure commercial opportunists."
And how do you know this? How do you know that the man writing the "Grotter" was thinking "slam out a crappy knock-off and cash in on the Rowlings gravy train?" Perhaps he was thinking, hey, kids really enjoy the "kids doing magic" genre. I'd like to do something in that style, but in a Russian setting.
Maybe the guy is just out for a quick buck. The point is, neither of us have actually read any of the books in question. More important, we've never read them while being Russian pre-teens. To automatically that the books lack artistic value is silly.
Your overall analysis of the article is wrong. You're assuming the author is trying to justify the knockoffs in light of current copyright law. In fact, he is justifying them on the grounds that current copyright law is wrong. His admission that the knockoffs aren't parodies, therefore, does nothing to weaken his argument.
Under the current system, the copyright holder has total control over any "derivative works." But how different would things be if "character theft" were a right, rather than a felony? As long as there is some well-understood way to distinguish between an official, Rowlings-approved book and someone else's take, I don't see a problem.
Hey, maybe Rowling will strike back and incorporate the grenade launcher into book six. That's something I would pay to read.
In Rowling's defense, I read about the first twenty pages of Stouffer's "Muggles" book. Complete, utter crap; probably among the worst books I've ever had the misfortune of coming across. Those trees which died to manufacture the books died in vain.
The claim that Rowling stole "substantial portions" of the book is also utter crap. A few names and a couple of descriptive terms is nothing; Stouffer's book and Rowling's series are set in totally different worlds and have completely different plots--to wit, Rowling's books actually have plots.
However, that's the only point where I disagree with you. So long as a derivative work doesn't try and trick people into thinking it's an "official" sequel to the original, and shows originality, the law shouldn't be able to touch it.
I find it somewhat unlikely that a huge pocket of hydrogen might be underneath the surface, but there's a simple way to check. Just crash a probe into the planet. If Mars ruptures and starts lurching around the solar system like an untied balloon, the theory might have some merit.
This avenue of research should be explored as soon as possible. This is in keeping with my conviction that our scientific dollars should be spent in the most entertaining ways possible.
I disagree. I mean, sure he's using the opportunity to stump for the GNU/Linux moniker (no big surprise there), but I think he has some valid points in doing so. While the GNU/ vs. Linux war is usually a pointless sideshow, SCO does seem to have capitalized on the distinction to muddy the waters, confusing everyone as to the precise nature of their claims.
If true, the fact that a "Linux" box could run on a BSD or Hurd kernel is important: It's important to get the word out that, even if everything SCO says about the Linux kernel is true--hell, even if Linus "wrote" the kernel by walking into SCO HQ with a backup tape, we still have a fallback plan that does not involve users giving SCO money.
On a side note, I'm surprised that more hasn't been made of the GPL's distribution requirements. In order to distribute something under the GPL, you have to give unlimited, royalty-free redistribution rights to those to whom you license the software. So even if SCO wins the case against IBM (it won't), the solution would *not* be for Linux distributors to pay SCO a per-kernel distribution fee. That would violate the GPL.
In order to do so, they would have to get all the kernel hackers to agree to modify the licensing terms to allow for SCO royalties. This will *never* happen. So the only solution is to remove any code that is actually found to be infringing.
Note to SCO execs: The days of "free Linux" are *not* over. If you think that, you need to read the GPL a bit closer.
As someone who spends about 2 hours in his car every day, I hear you. I've never been in an accident, but I've had some very close calls and my reflexes kind of suck. For example, one time a duck landed on the highway right in front of me, and I nearly creamed an Oldsmobile trying to dodge it. Stupid, yes, but that was the decision my brain made. I'm trying to deprogram myself by occasionally whispering "death to all lower life forms" as I drive. Next time, the duck is roadkill, but I still believe that the highways would be safer if my judgments were removed from the equation.
The fact is, even the best driver among us as moments of inattention, bad judgments, irrational desires to gun it and chase down the bastard who swerved in front of you, and incomplete situational awareness.
The system would be difficult to implement on a car-by-car basis. Whatever problem the computer has to solve, it would be infinitely simpler if each car knew what the car next to it was about to do, and could warn neighboring cars about the drastic measures it expected to be taking. Networking would also have advantages because it would enable a higher degree of coordination: routing traffic away from potential jams, allowing groups of cars to drive "in formation," and clearing the road for emergency vehicles.
But that would take a massive investment, and I don't see any easy way to switch over. But a non-networked system might be useful. Even a mediocre system would be useful as a punishment for chronically bad drivers, or for people who aren't capable of driving themselves.
Another thing that's been bothering me: Traffic lights. Even with sensors, they're painfully stupid at times. An ideal system would not only sense the single car idling at the red light, but also the pack of fifteen cars heading towards it on the cross street. That way, the system might wait until after the pack has driven through to switch the light. A vision system to implement this wouldn't have to be very sophisticated, and it would speed up the commute, use less gas, and save wear and tear on brakes.
Eventually, I'm sure cars will drive themselves. We'll all be nervous at first, but I don't think a system would be allowed on the road until it was at least as safe as a better-than-average driver. But even if switching fully over would lead to the same 50,000+ deaths that we're racking up now, we would be better off.
This brings up an interesting question: If you decide to rewrite your coding project to enable multithreading, are you suddenly in violation of export regulations? I mean, you need to have this "illegal SMP technology" in order to take full advantage of multithreaded apps.
We see where this is going: All well-written apps are now SMP paraphernalia.
The thing is, Linux went SMP before IBM stepped in. Also, this is the first I've ever heard of SMP technology being a "restricted export." According to this article:
"Any non-encryption software that is made available for free (or at a price that does not exceed the cost of reproduction and distribution) to any interested party without restriction is defined by the EAR to be "publicly available" and not subject to any export controls. Thus, for example, if all of the software on a WWW page is freeware or shareware available for downloading by any party for free, there are no export compliance restrictions applicable to the software and there need not be any compliance procedures for such activities."
Linux seems to fall under that category.
Now, let me see if I follow this RCU thing: Sequent (a company which appears not to be SCO) developed the technology in the early nineties, and put it into their version of Unix. Later, IBM (a company which also appears not to be SCO) bought Sequent, and recently let the kernel hackers add it in. But since it was originally added to UNIX, and SCO owns UNIX, SCO now owns RCU.
Was Microsoft aware of this "viral" interpretation of SCO IP when they signed their contract?
Hmm... $50,000 for a printout of all the RFCs--the very keys to the Internet--in a handsome binder? Sounds like a great deal! Where do I send my check?
Your reasoning sounds much like the "broken windows" theory of economic stimulus. It's the misguided idea that I can stimulate the economy by going around smashing windows, drumming up business for window repairmen.
The flaw is, the money used to repair the windows isn't created from the aether. It's money that the window owner would have used to buy new equipment for a business, or spent on electronics.
By the same reasoning, if a developer has to spend his time reinventing the wheel because all the other wheels are restricted, then the opportunity to spend that same time creating something new and innovative has been lost.
If OSS can really deliver solutions more efficiently than proprietary methods (which you appear to be conceding), then there's really no use arguing in favor of the less efficient method, even if it does provide you job security. Buggy whips and whatnot.
So, when it is profitable to do so, Wal-Mart will do things that are in the interests of consumers? As an ethical justification, that's pretty flaky. I find it hard to trust.
Let's say Wal-Mart gains certain advantages from using the RFIDs, but incurs certain costs when the public starts thinking that the tags are an invasion of privacy. Now, Wal-Mart can alleviate those costs in two ways: by dumping the tags, by deactivating the tags during the sale, or by churning out PR telling everyone that the tags aren't a big deal.
Since they're trying to maximize their profitability, it's very unlikely that they'll go for option #1. The PR road is probably cheaper than actually disabling the tags, but they might go for disabling to avoid legal liabilities.
As a matter of general principle, I don't trust businesses that make decisions this way. Of course, they want happy families shopping there, but they also want the rewards they can reap by gaming the system. For example, they know that most of their customers wouldn't be happy to know that their clothing was made with child/sweatshop labor. But they would also be unhappy to pay the high prices that come from higher labor costs. The solution, unfortunately, is to keep the consumer ignorant.
I would disagree. So long as Linux is being widely deployed, those who understand its innards and know how to improve upon it will be in high demand. If a business depends on a piece of software, and needs it extended, then they'd better be willing to pay to have it improved. Given the choice between a business spending its dollars on licenses to use software vs. consultants to tweak and improve it, it would be rational to do the latter.
Or you could mean that, when free software does everything everyone needs, then the market for programming skills will bottom out. Perhaps. I doubt that will ever happen, but if it did then what is left for programmers to do?
The difference between communism and "Communism" is an important one, but is often overlooked. Mostly this is because all the fully communistic states have also been brutal, repressive regimes.
Little 'c' communism just means that wealth is redistributed in a supposedly rational manner, so that everyone has enough and nobody has too much. It is theoretically possible to implement such a system within a democratic nation with strong protections for minority rights. Perhaps heavily socialized countries like Sweden could serve as evidence that such a system is possible.
On the other hand, one could argue that it's impossible to implement communism without giving the government an unconscionable amount of control over everyday life.
Any political system that doesn't respect the individual's right to dissent is ultimately worthless. That, in my mind, is why Communism so thoroughly sucked.
Slashdot Mirror
Add verses, mix and rearrange to taste. These crappy lyrics are hereby placed in the public domain:
----
She had a fast machine
she kept her modem clean
she was the best damned hacker
I had ever seen.
She knew the best exploits
Defacing major web [soites???]
0wn1ng IP addys
both left and [roite???]
She got a password prized
just by battin' her eyes.
She was social engineering like my oh my.
Now my hard drive's shakin,
the network's quakin'
For caffeine I'm achin'
and she's still breakin' in and you
Hacked me all night long.
She DOS'ed me to a crawl
Broke through my firewall
she set me up the bomb
and then I took the fall.
Circ and Nimbda too
But she still wasn't through,
she launched Anna Kournikova
and "I love you!"
Now my hard drive's shakin,
the network's quakin'
For caffeine I'm achin'
and she's still breakin' in and you
Hacked me all night long.
[repeat as necessary]
I don't think that a majority of companies are going to stop using MS Office in the near future. But I do think that anyone with experience with one of the other products you cited should be able to figure out the major features of Office with no training whatsoever.
:) Anyways, as the alternatives get more popular, such people are going to be less and less common.
Sure, there are going to be some managers/HR-bots who fail to recognize this. But we're not in the business of saving people from their own stupidity.
My advice to a job seeker would be to first point out that OO.o is your primary office suite at home, and if the dude looks at you funny, just tell them that you also have experience with MS Office. Whether it's technically true or not, it may as well be.
Actually, the Boy Scouts accept a lot of public funding. More details here.
Actually, it wasn't the pro-drink forces that got Prohibition overturned. The violence and danger surrounding the bootlegging community were a bigger factor for most people. One of the big watershed events in the history of Prohibition was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, where fourteen mobsters were lined up and executed by a rival gang.
In a similar way, I think the file sharing community isn't nearly as politically powerful as we'd like to believe. But when college students get trucked off to the clink for "unauthorized distribution" of MegaCorp's t00n5, a lot of people are going to join in on the side of the little fellas.
My sig.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I see what you're getting at, and wholeheartedly agree.
I'm starting to feel like a stalker, but you keep making the points I want to respond to.
As far as learning more about Europa goes, I would agree that robotic probes would probably be more cost-effective (though perhaps not, since any problems encountered by an Earth-controlled vehicle would take hours to learn about, and hours more to correct).
Again, you're missing the point of manned exploration to all these unique and exotic locales: Each target represents a new set of difficulties to overcome. In overcoming those difficulties, we gain expertise in overcoming the problems of living in space.
You keep saying you would like to see manned space exploration when the technology is in place. But without trial runs, the technology will never develop.
The problem is, without the "exploring spirit," there never would have been a "Europe." There would only be small, autonomous tribal units. Without a desire to explore for exploration's sake, the only motivation left to increase your knowledge of the world is conquest and resource exploitation.
Also, it's difficult to separate the desire to explore new places from the desire to explore new ideas and new ways of organizing a society. My fear is that, by squashing one, we would have a profoundly negative effect on the other two.
Finally, I would argue that goals of long-term, manned space exploration are useful in getting ordinary people to start looking beyond the present. That's something that doesn't happen enough these days. Like you said, people don't even want to think about why curbing their childbearing activities might be beneficial in the long term. Politicians and economic planners don't want to think about asking people to consume more efficiently. But asking people to think about the big questions brought up by space exploration--say, how much terraforming they'd like to see on Mars over the next five centuries--is a good way to get them thinking beyond the here and now.
I think your fears of escapism are unfounded. Not many people are going to start believing that we can all just go live on the Moon if we screw things up here. But we do need an outlet for the most restless among us.
I agree that space exploration is no quick fix, and that people need to be focused on the problems of the world. But I fear the sort of society that has lost the driving urge "to boldly go where no one has gone before." [*]
[*] Note: I have been averaging approximately two episodes of Star Trek per year for the last five years. I'm not a geek! I'm not!
Multi-cellular life has only been around for about a billion years. Unless you can show me another species that has ever come as close to utilizing the full resources of planet Earth as humanity, then your point is wholly without merit.
.1% of our GDP) is too much to spend on space exploration, then you have a severe case of cluelessness.
The US isn't autonomous, but it could be, if we were just willing to take on the economic burden of doing it ourselves. We would end up with a lower quality of life, but it could be done.
Similarly, a colony wouldn't need to be able to provide everything our global culture does in order to be self-sustaining. Check off a few human needs (food, water, air, basic medical care, education, and Playboy Magazine) and give a colony the ability to create the equipment needed to provide those things, and they're well on their way to being self-sustaining.
Though this technology is closer than you seem to think, it's not there yet, and under your proposal, it never will be. What you're saying is "let's wait until the technology is developed before we develop the technology." Despite the impression you may have gotten over the last couple hundred years, technology doesn't just pop into existence. People won't start looking for ways to run an independent, self-sustaining colony in space until the current state of the art would indicate that such a goal can be fulfilled. That means practice runs, like the ISS.
The parent poster was right. We do need to start working on an escape hatch in case things go all wahooni-shaped down here. By your reasoning, ocean liners shouldn't carry lifeboats, because they might encourage reckless behavior on the part of the captain.
Right now, there are no lifeboats, and we're still gleefully doing things to this planet without knowing the full consequences of our actions. If you believe that NASA's budget is being funneled to useless projects, fine. You might be able to convince me. But if you believe that manned space flight is automatically pointless, or that 14 billion (NASA'S 2001 budget--less than
You say "my tax dollars," but when we give them to the government, they really become "our tax dollars." In theory, at least, we partition them out according to some form of consensus. Despite the shenanigans* that usually accompany the political process, the effect is still the same: everybody ends up paying for something or other that they dislike.
You don't want to fund manned space exploration. Many right-wingers don't want government funding of abortions, while many left-wingers didn't want to fund the war in Iraq. Until the IRS starts sending out itemized tax forms asking us which programs we want funded with our tax dollars, your personal distaste for NASA "thrill-riders" is basically irrelevant.
Even if someone like yourself wants to keep all of human experience safely below 100,000 feet, it's never going to happen. Astronauts who spend their whole lives training and working towards their own personal "thrill ride" are just the extreme tail of the curve. Hundreds of millions of us dream about getting off this rock, and we love manned space exploration for its own sake.
The article is right: The link between scientific research and manned exploration needs to be cut. The experiments being done on the ISS generally don't warrant the expense and risk of a manned presence. Instead, we should be putting that expense and risk towards a worthy goal, such as colonization of the Moon or a manned mission to Mars.
* I can't believe this word has become popular. We owe South Park an enormous cultural debt.
Erm, how do you get .536 of a hit? It found a website that contained the word "Goo?"
I am not impressed with this "Google machine," at least until it is mentioned on at least ten web pages.
[yeah yeah, European notation and whatnot]
I think that the Potter books have a cute, warm-fuzziness about them that Jordan, Brooks, Feist, Tolkein, etc., weren't even trying for.
Trying to compare Harry Potter to "The Wheel of Time" is like trying to compare Dave Barry's "Big Trouble" to "The Godfather." Jordan arguably wrote superior fantasy, but Rowlings wrote a fantasy world that would appeal to people who weren't usually inclined to read fantasy novels.
I liked both, and I'm a bit insulted that you would imply that Harry Potter fans cannot recognize or appreciate "real fantasy."
Maybe the guy is just out for a quick buck. The point is, neither of us have actually read any of the books in question. More important, we've never read them while being Russian pre-teens. To automatically that the books lack artistic value is silly.
Your overall analysis of the article is wrong. You're assuming the author is trying to justify the knockoffs in light of current copyright law. In fact, he is justifying them on the grounds that current copyright law is wrong. His admission that the knockoffs aren't parodies, therefore, does nothing to weaken his argument.
Under the current system, the copyright holder has total control over any "derivative works." But how different would things be if "character theft" were a right, rather than a felony? As long as there is some well-understood way to distinguish between an official, Rowlings-approved book and someone else's take, I don't see a problem.
Hey, maybe Rowling will strike back and incorporate the grenade launcher into book six. That's something I would pay to read.
In Rowling's defense, I read about the first twenty pages of Stouffer's "Muggles" book. Complete, utter crap; probably among the worst books I've ever had the misfortune of coming across. Those trees which died to manufacture the books died in vain.
The claim that Rowling stole "substantial portions" of the book is also utter crap. A few names and a couple of descriptive terms is nothing; Stouffer's book and Rowling's series are set in totally different worlds and have completely different plots--to wit, Rowling's books actually have plots.
However, that's the only point where I disagree with you. So long as a derivative work doesn't try and trick people into thinking it's an "official" sequel to the original, and shows originality, the law shouldn't be able to touch it.
I find it somewhat unlikely that a huge pocket of hydrogen might be underneath the surface, but there's a simple way to check. Just crash a probe into the planet. If Mars ruptures and starts lurching around the solar system like an untied balloon, the theory might have some merit.
This avenue of research should be explored as soon as possible. This is in keeping with my conviction that our scientific dollars should be spent in the most entertaining ways possible.
I disagree. I mean, sure he's using the opportunity to stump for the GNU/Linux moniker (no big surprise there), but I think he has some valid points in doing so. While the GNU/ vs. Linux war is usually a pointless sideshow, SCO does seem to have capitalized on the distinction to muddy the waters, confusing everyone as to the precise nature of their claims.
If true, the fact that a "Linux" box could run on a BSD or Hurd kernel is important: It's important to get the word out that, even if everything SCO says about the Linux kernel is true--hell, even if Linus "wrote" the kernel by walking into SCO HQ with a backup tape, we still have a fallback plan that does not involve users giving SCO money.
On a side note, I'm surprised that more hasn't been made of the GPL's distribution requirements. In order to distribute something under the GPL, you have to give unlimited, royalty-free redistribution rights to those to whom you license the software. So even if SCO wins the case against IBM (it won't), the solution would *not* be for Linux distributors to pay SCO a per-kernel distribution fee. That would violate the GPL.
In order to do so, they would have to get all the kernel hackers to agree to modify the licensing terms to allow for SCO royalties. This will *never* happen. So the only solution is to remove any code that is actually found to be infringing.
Note to SCO execs: The days of "free Linux" are *not* over. If you think that, you need to read the GPL a bit closer.
As someone who spends about 2 hours in his car every day, I hear you. I've never been in an accident, but I've had some very close calls and my reflexes kind of suck. For example, one time a duck landed on the highway right in front of me, and I nearly creamed an Oldsmobile trying to dodge it. Stupid, yes, but that was the decision my brain made. I'm trying to deprogram myself by occasionally whispering "death to all lower life forms" as I drive. Next time, the duck is roadkill, but I still believe that the highways would be safer if my judgments were removed from the equation.
The fact is, even the best driver among us as moments of inattention, bad judgments, irrational desires to gun it and chase down the bastard who swerved in front of you, and incomplete situational awareness.
The system would be difficult to implement on a car-by-car basis. Whatever problem the computer has to solve, it would be infinitely simpler if each car knew what the car next to it was about to do, and could warn neighboring cars about the drastic measures it expected to be taking. Networking would also have advantages because it would enable a higher degree of coordination: routing traffic away from potential jams, allowing groups of cars to drive "in formation," and clearing the road for emergency vehicles.
But that would take a massive investment, and I don't see any easy way to switch over. But a non-networked system might be useful. Even a mediocre system would be useful as a punishment for chronically bad drivers, or for people who aren't capable of driving themselves.
Another thing that's been bothering me: Traffic lights. Even with sensors, they're painfully stupid at times. An ideal system would not only sense the single car idling at the red light, but also the pack of fifteen cars heading towards it on the cross street. That way, the system might wait until after the pack has driven through to switch the light. A vision system to implement this wouldn't have to be very sophisticated, and it would speed up the commute, use less gas, and save wear and tear on brakes.
Eventually, I'm sure cars will drive themselves. We'll all be nervous at first, but I don't think a system would be allowed on the road until it was at least as safe as a better-than-average driver. But even if switching fully over would lead to the same 50,000+ deaths that we're racking up now, we would be better off.
This brings up an interesting question: If you decide to rewrite your coding project to enable multithreading, are you suddenly in violation of export regulations? I mean, you need to have this "illegal SMP technology" in order to take full advantage of multithreaded apps.
We see where this is going: All well-written apps are now SMP paraphernalia.
Now, let me see if I follow this RCU thing: Sequent (a company which appears not to be SCO) developed the technology in the early nineties, and put it into their version of Unix. Later, IBM (a company which also appears not to be SCO) bought Sequent, and recently let the kernel hackers add it in. But since it was originally added to UNIX, and SCO owns UNIX, SCO now owns RCU.
Was Microsoft aware of this "viral" interpretation of SCO IP when they signed their contract?
Hmm... $50,000 for a printout of all the RFCs--the very keys to the Internet--in a handsome binder? Sounds like a great deal! Where do I send my check?
I know, I know. Preview first.
#include <smp.c>
#include <failover.c>
#include <scalable.c>
#include <fs_journal.c>
#include <reliablity.c>
#include <decades_of_hard_work.c>
#include <other_miscellanious_sco_ip.c>
#include <oh_and_some_stuff_from_microsoft.c>
#define IBM SCO
/* Drunk. Fix later. */
#include
/* Drunk. Fix later. */
#include
#include
#include
#include
#include
#include
#define IBM SCO
Your reasoning sounds much like the "broken windows" theory of economic stimulus. It's the misguided idea that I can stimulate the economy by going around smashing windows, drumming up business for window repairmen.
The flaw is, the money used to repair the windows isn't created from the aether. It's money that the window owner would have used to buy new equipment for a business, or spent on electronics.
By the same reasoning, if a developer has to spend his time reinventing the wheel because all the other wheels are restricted, then the opportunity to spend that same time creating something new and innovative has been lost.
If OSS can really deliver solutions more efficiently than proprietary methods (which you appear to be conceding), then there's really no use arguing in favor of the less efficient method, even if it does provide you job security. Buggy whips and whatnot.
So, when it is profitable to do so, Wal-Mart will do things that are in the interests of consumers? As an ethical justification, that's pretty flaky. I find it hard to trust.
Let's say Wal-Mart gains certain advantages from using the RFIDs, but incurs certain costs when the public starts thinking that the tags are an invasion of privacy. Now, Wal-Mart can alleviate those costs in two ways: by dumping the tags, by deactivating the tags during the sale, or by churning out PR telling everyone that the tags aren't a big deal.
Since they're trying to maximize their profitability, it's very unlikely that they'll go for option #1. The PR road is probably cheaper than actually disabling the tags, but they might go for disabling to avoid legal liabilities.
As a matter of general principle, I don't trust businesses that make decisions this way. Of course, they want happy families shopping there, but they also want the rewards they can reap by gaming the system. For example, they know that most of their customers wouldn't be happy to know that their clothing was made with child/sweatshop labor. But they would also be unhappy to pay the high prices that come from higher labor costs. The solution, unfortunately, is to keep the consumer ignorant.
I would disagree. So long as Linux is being widely deployed, those who understand its innards and know how to improve upon it will be in high demand. If a business depends on a piece of software, and needs it extended, then they'd better be willing to pay to have it improved. Given the choice between a business spending its dollars on licenses to use software vs. consultants to tweak and improve it, it would be rational to do the latter.
Or you could mean that, when free software does everything everyone needs, then the market for programming skills will bottom out. Perhaps. I doubt that will ever happen, but if it did then what is left for programmers to do?
The difference between communism and "Communism" is an important one, but is often overlooked. Mostly this is because all the fully communistic states have also been brutal, repressive regimes.
Little 'c' communism just means that wealth is redistributed in a supposedly rational manner, so that everyone has enough and nobody has too much. It is theoretically possible to implement such a system within a democratic nation with strong protections for minority rights. Perhaps heavily socialized countries like Sweden could serve as evidence that such a system is possible.
On the other hand, one could argue that it's impossible to implement communism without giving the government an unconscionable amount of control over everyday life.
Any political system that doesn't respect the individual's right to dissent is ultimately worthless. That, in my mind, is why Communism so thoroughly sucked.