Soldier: I've finally forgotten why I joined the French Foreign Legion!
Captain: [clicks a couple of keys on his computer] According to our records, you joined because you were bored with Computer Science, and because of a girl named Samantha.
Soldier: Sigh. I'll go patrol the hills again, shall I?
Easy. You simply program them both in, and let the Stormtroopers blow the elves back to Kingdom Come.
Seriously, though. The main point of WF is to create the infrastructure that someone can build any game they want on top of. The games that WF puts out are, as I understand it, meant to be proofs of concept and testbeds for testing and improving the underlying architecture.
Once the foundation is up and running, it can be used for the basis of an MMORPG western, feudal Japan, dystopian future, or "run around with a mallet bopping other players on the head" game. A cool game coming out of this will simply be icing on the cake.
This brings back memories of playing with water bottle rockets as a kid. You'd take a 2-liter bottle, fill it half way with water, mount it on a thingamajigger, and pump it up. If it didn't explode, you could launch it fifty feet in the air. Hours of fun for the whole family.
I ended up drawing a picture of it and using it for the science fair. It's amazing how low your standards go when you've put it off until 10:30 the night before it's due.
Ideally, the design for this vehicle would keep the water relatively high, for added pressure, and keep the nozzle fairly small, to increase the velocity at which the water leaves. Balsa wood might also be involved.
Finally, this post was actually a clever ploy to hype my new sig. Try it. It's pretty cool.
I have a question regarding a problem I've had with every release since I first downloaded 0.9.1 (Win32)*. I'm a 14m3r who relies heavily on Yahoo! Mail. But whenever I hit the "Send" button to fire off an email via Mozilla/NS6, the browser simply hangs there, doing nothing. It doesn't even have the courtesy to time out. I end up having to fire up NS 4.7 or (shudder) IE.
I haven't been able to find anything about this on Bugzilla, even though it's something that would surely garner some notice. I'm afraid to submit it to Bugzilla myself, since it's possible that I either have some setting wrong or Yahoo! is using some non-compliant tricks that break their form. Either way, there's nothing Mozilla could do about it.
So, is anyone else here having this problem, and 14m3 enough to admit to having a Yahoo account? More important, does anyone know why? (I've sent this question to the Yahoo people, but haven't gotten a response).
I have a, erm, friend who has Britney Spears' "Oops, I did it again" running through my brain right now. I have not, I mean, he has not paid for access to said Intellectual Property(TM). Please remove it immediately. And while you're there, wipe out "A Horse With No Name" and anything by Neil Diamond. And that one Carpenters song I can only remember the chorus to.
Could you please tell us which interview questions you never, ever, ever want to hear again as long as you live, and no you don't care one bit if the person asking it is cute, or has offered sexual favors, you're sick of answering that question and you're not going to do it, okay?
Need I point out that, when Wesley Crusher(TM) left us, he was well on his way to godhood? Time and space are merely useful abstractions to the WesleyGod. All the WesleyGod must do is ponder the possibility of travelling backwards in time, and it shall be so.
Another possibility would be to write him in as his own ancestor. ST has stooped to doing that on a couple of occasions before.
Twelve karma points for the first person to write a Perl script that scrolls a Jon Katz article onto this thing. What better way to teach those MIT geeks that there are some places the Internet just doesn't belong?
A few people have complained that the process outlined is going to give horrible results. They'd probably be good enough for me, as I have a tin ear. Then again, it is the Backstreet Boys, so the resulting MP3s would still be painful.
Yes, yes. I well remember being a little eight year old kid, and reading that commercial fusion was "only a decade away." This was in books available at my elementary school library, some of which had been written way back in the 1960s. So I probably won't really believe it until it's powering my AMD 12GHz workstation -- which, by the way, doubles as my water heater, and still runs like a dog thanks to the Windows XXXP operating system.
But this is valuable research, especially in an era when energy is quickly becoming more expensive. I hope Bush's energy plan threw at least a few billion in that direction.
Fossil fuels have to be transported all over, and are expensive to the environment. There are only so many sites where we can build wind farms, and there are already too many birds flying in circles due to head injuries. Fission, as has already been pointed out, has undesirable byproducts which need to be carefully controlled. So economical fusion would be a great boon to everyone.
I look forward to the day when your AI cyborg clone can lean back in his Baracalounger and turn on a 72" Plasma TV that's powered by cheap, clean fusion. And watch home movies, because the SSSCA won't let him view anything else.
I'm starting to understand how you feel. Not everything out there insults my intelligence. But as the IP Gestapo starts using more and more insidious legal and technological mechanisms to control what we see and hear, I've seriously started going out of my way to be insulted.
Soon the book publishers will realize what a great racket this is, and the library as we know it will be history. Then we "conscientious objectors" of the American economy will get to be *really* pretentious. I'll miss Tom Clancy, but I've always wanted an excuse to reread "The Red Badge of Courage."
I like your idea of a class that teaches history from a physicists point of view. My physics teacher took very nearly the opposite tack. In preparing to discuss any principle, he would give a short explanation of who discovered it and the story behind the discovery. Somehow, this really worked for us.
I don't think any of his students thought of it as extraneous information. Why not? As high level physics students, they should have been incensed that the instructor was throwing in such irrelevant information. I don't think we liked it because the instructor explained in detail how the method of discovery clarified the principles itself. As physics students, we were smart enough to draw out that understanding for ourselves.
I think choosing physics as your example was a bit of a mistake. I know few people who would take such classes who can't work up an interest in totally unrelated intellectual fields. For the other students I met, learning for the sake of learning was already an integral part of their lives.
I can't tell if this is a troll or not, but there are some good ideas in here. There are a lot of kids who do come to college eager to learn (or at least I assume that there are). To the extent that they're exposed to the utter silliness that is deconstructionism, these kids are being cheated out of a real education.
I agree with this poster's belief that there's very little intellectual rigor outside of the science classes. Perhaps in history, where students have to be study subjects in depth and defend their conclusions. But I could list any number of majors that I could have simply slept through.
But that's what students are asking for: a dumbed down curriculum. Too often, when it came time to fill out teacher evaluations, the main sentiment was, "He grades too tough," or "blah blah blah. . . How can she expect us to know THAT?"
I am aware that some Slashdot readers have defied the odds and managed to breed. To those individuals, I implore you to raise your kids not to expect things to come easy. Show them that learning is worthwhile. Don't let them think that education should always be as easy as watching Sesame Street. And above all, get them to ask questions by answering the ones they do have as well as you can.
(Note: If your kid already has a poster of Stephen Jay Gould on their bedroom wall instead of Ricky Martin, you may have gone a bit overboard.)
I think that you miss two important points. First, as valuable as a modern education is to somebody who learns from it, not everyone has the intelligence or personality to benefit from it.
I do see some merit to this argument, even though it smacks of elitism. I'm a bit of an elitist myself. "Unfortunately," most Slashdot readers live in democracies. Through the use of the vote, every adult is allowed a say on a variety of issues, ranging from different tax schemes to pornography laws to the environment. Unless we're going to deny the uninformed the right to vote, we simply don't have the luxury of saying that some people just aren't worth the trouble of educating.
Having an alternative system so that people who don't fit in to the modern educational system are able to learn something and become productive members of society is very valuable.
You don't have to be terribly bright to get a lot out of a comparative religion or Western history class, if you're interested in the material. I think that if every American had taken courses like these, we would be in a much better political position for responding to the September 11th attacks. As things stand now, people who don't know Islam from Buddhism are writing their conresspeople to voice their support for bombing "that one country I can't seem to find on the map. Aftaliban, I think they called it."
Second, that system still does exist and is actually quite strong still. Vocational education and even straight apprenticeship programs still exist; many union jobs, for
instance, follow more that approach more or less closely. Also, much as it pains me to point it out, graduate school is much, much closer to a traditional apprenticeship program than most academics are willing to admit.
I'd be interested in some clarification on the last comment. It's plausible, but I think that there are some fundamental differences. For example, since the instructor of a graduate can assume something about their students' prior education, they can use analogies and explanations that could never be used on an apprentice (and since the instructor went through a similar education, she should have such analogies available).
When it comes right down to it, education is about making connections. If you don't have a broad overview of things before starting your "real" education, you'll have no way to hook between the things you're learning for job X and anything outside that specialized function. You'll know certain things very well, but you'll often end up very lost when asked to move beyond what you already know.
I think it's safe to say that this is a temporary measure. If it lasts more than a month, I'd be very surprised.
This is a bit like a situation my employer ran into. Prior to September 11, they sent out some promotional materials, which had a picture of an NHL goalie standing godzilla-like between two skyscrapers. We got a notice soon after the accident that we were supposed to apologize to anyone who called in to complain.
The point (if there was indeed a point to that anecdote) is that the bombing is still in recent memory, and Clear Channel probably just doesn't want to alienate its customers. Once things settle down, the ban will be lifted, and Kansas will again sing "Dust in the Wind." Nevertheless, I think it's a pointless and self-defeating gesture, and the fools^H^H^H^H^H corporate types who came up with it should be punished by hang^H^H^H^H a boycott for the duration.
One of the few projects I've actually tried to get involved in is called Worldforge. It's a good-sized and really ambitious project for creating the framework for building a variety of MMORPGs. I found them to be very helpful and very patient with me, even though I quite frankly couldn't find a pointer with both hands. I don't know what would happen if you submitted a patch out of the blue, but I did get the impression that the entire group is very willing to take new ideas seriously.
With Linux struggling in the gaming department, I think this has the potential for being an invaluable project. I'm not contributing to the project right now, but I think anyone who wants to dig in will find that the old timers will value your contributions.
A major problem with AI research, I think, is that it's hard to push a lot of computing power outside the lab. It might speed things along to give the computers a richer environment than the laboratory can provide. A mobile Lego setup with some simple sensors, a digital camcorder, and a wireless connection back to the mainframe would be just the ticket. It would be as if you or I had a floating eyeball that we could send anywhere. Except there, you pervert.
The entire mobile platform would simply be a sensor array that beamed back information. If it became conscious, it would have no idea where its consciousness really resided. But the important thing is that the researchers could expose the computer to rich sensory input, without risking much expensive equipment to that environment.
In regard to a previous story about neuron/silicon connections, it would be interesting -- if unethical -- to try giving dolphins hands. Just simple mechanical actuators that floated around, and took their directions from the dolphin's neurons. Maybe there would even be a simple feedback mechanism so that they could "feel" when their remote limb was holding something. I would imagine that young dolphins would have a much easier time adjusting to their new limbs. I also imagine that the dolphins wouldn't be so friendly and playful if they had the ability to smack each other upside the head.
Okay, I have a confession to make. I'm really Stephen Hawking in disguise. I'm just having trouble waiting for the day when I can control my deadly super-robot using only the power of my mind. Be warned, my Nobel-laureate colleagues, for your fate is sealed.
You're absolutely right. Instead of paying $20-$50 every time their media gets scratched, those blasted freeloaders are making backup copies. What incentive do corporations have for creating and marketing their fine products in such an unfriendly, anti-business environment?
"Marketing people are slime, they should all be forced to spend large amounts of time with John Tesh."
You fool! How do you think marketers got that way in the first place? John Tesh has already destroyed so many of their brain cells that further exposure wouldn't affect them one whit.
However, exposure to Barry Manilow at high volumes may be able to vaporize the last few brain cells that are still holding on. We can only hope that this treatment will finally render them harmless.
When you're watching television, and something lame and boring comes on, do you change the channel? Or do you sit there and gripe about how awful it is that they'd show something so completely unworthy of your attention?
Personally, I go with the second option. Especially when a WNBA game is on. Not only do I get to feel smug and superior, but some of those female athletes have very nice legs. . . But that doesn't make it right!
"If all software were free then all programmers would need a second job for money to live on."
I fully agree with most of your post, and I don't have a problem with Borland charging for software. But I have to disagree with this one statement.
First, it's arguing the drawbacks of a situation that we're not going to see for a very long time, if ever. In that way, it's similar to the "If everyone warezed the software they needed, programmers would be sleeping in the streets."
Second, if the statement were true, it would be much like complaining that the prevalence of automobiles was driving the buggy whip industry into the ground.* Sure, it's a downside, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be outweighed by the advantages.
Third, and finally, the GPL doesn't end the demand for new and improved software. Only blowing up every computer on the planet could do that. So if a company decides that what's already out there isn't serving them, it would be a smart investment for them to pay someone to write new software that fit their needs. Once the corporations wrap their skulls around this new business model, I think they'll be more than willing to pay real money to get their software improved. Some of them may even release those improvements back to the Open Source community. Or perhaps I'm a hopeless idealist.
Now, it would make sense to argue that, if the GPL "pac-man virus" gobbles up the world, there will be a lot less work for programmers to do. Instead of starting from scratch on a project, a programmer would instead grab whatever tools already existed. This sort of high-level tweaking isn't nearly as programming-intensive, so there would be a lot less work for developers to do. But there would still be some work out there, and there's always the gaming world, where new stuff is always at a premium. But this is a natural effect in a world where work is done once, instead of a hundred times on a hundred different projects.
* I don't know how buggy whip manufacturing became a modern icon for providers of obsolete technology, but there you have it.
Slashdot Mirror
Soldier: Sir! Sir! I've done it!
Captain: Done what, Corporal?
Soldier: I've finally forgotten why I joined the French Foreign Legion!
Captain: [clicks a couple of keys on his computer] According to our records, you joined because you were bored with Computer Science, and because of a girl named Samantha.
Soldier: Sigh. I'll go patrol the hills again, shall I?
Easy. You simply program them both in, and let the Stormtroopers blow the elves back to Kingdom Come.
Seriously, though. The main point of WF is to create the infrastructure that someone can build any game they want on top of. The games that WF puts out are, as I understand it, meant to be proofs of concept and testbeds for testing and improving the underlying architecture.
Once the foundation is up and running, it can be used for the basis of an MMORPG western, feudal Japan, dystopian future, or "run around with a mallet bopping other players on the head" game. A cool game coming out of this will simply be icing on the cake.
I'm hainging out on the Worldforge IRC right now, and I'd like to point out that nobody there has the slightest idea what this guy's babbling about.
We'll take it. Once I've hooked it up to my 56K modem, our problems should be. . . um. . . Can I get back to you on this?
This brings back memories of playing with water bottle rockets as a kid. You'd take a 2-liter bottle, fill it half way with water, mount it on a thingamajigger, and pump it up. If it didn't explode, you could launch it fifty feet in the air. Hours of fun for the whole family.
I ended up drawing a picture of it and using it for the science fair. It's amazing how low your standards go when you've put it off until 10:30 the night before it's due.
Ideally, the design for this vehicle would keep the water relatively high, for added pressure, and keep the nozzle fairly small, to increase the velocity at which the water leaves. Balsa wood might also be involved.
Finally, this post was actually a clever ploy to hype my new sig. Try it. It's pretty cool.
I have a question regarding a problem I've had with every release since I first downloaded 0.9.1 (Win32)*. I'm a 14m3r who relies heavily on Yahoo! Mail. But whenever I hit the "Send" button to fire off an email via Mozilla/NS6, the browser simply hangs there, doing nothing. It doesn't even have the courtesy to time out. I end up having to fire up NS 4.7 or (shudder) IE.
I haven't been able to find anything about this on Bugzilla, even though it's something that would surely garner some notice. I'm afraid to submit it to Bugzilla myself, since it's possible that I either have some setting wrong or Yahoo! is using some non-compliant tricks that break their form. Either way, there's nothing Mozilla could do about it.
So, is anyone else here having this problem, and 14m3 enough to admit to having a Yahoo account? More important, does anyone know why? (I've sent this question to the Yahoo people, but haven't gotten a response).
* Sorry.
RIAA,
I have a, erm, friend who has Britney Spears' "Oops, I did it again" running through my brain right now. I have not, I mean, he has not paid for access to said Intellectual Property(TM). Please remove it immediately. And while you're there, wipe out "A Horse With No Name" and anything by Neil Diamond. And that one Carpenters song I can only remember the chorus to.
Thank you,
Anonymous Informant
Curse you, Slashdot. Curse you.
Could you please tell us which interview questions you never, ever, ever want to hear again as long as you live, and no you don't care one bit if the person asking it is cute, or has offered sexual favors, you're sick of answering that question and you're not going to do it, okay?
Need I point out that, when Wesley Crusher(TM) left us, he was well on his way to godhood? Time and space are merely useful abstractions to the WesleyGod. All the WesleyGod must do is ponder the possibility of travelling backwards in time, and it shall be so.
Another possibility would be to write him in as his own ancestor. ST has stooped to doing that on a couple of occasions before.
Come back, Wil! The galaxy needs you!
Twelve karma points for the first person to write a Perl script that scrolls a Jon Katz article onto this thing. What better way to teach those MIT geeks that there are some places the Internet just doesn't belong?
Don't forget the 20 char limit.
According to http://www.heroinewarrior.com/bcast2000.php3, Broadcast 2000 is no longer available from the publishers. But you can still get it at Tucows.
A few people have complained that the process outlined is going to give horrible results. They'd probably be good enough for me, as I have a tin ear. Then again, it is the Backstreet Boys, so the resulting MP3s would still be painful.
Yes, yes. I well remember being a little eight year old kid, and reading that commercial fusion was "only a decade away." This was in books available at my elementary school library, some of which had been written way back in the 1960s. So I probably won't really believe it until it's powering my AMD 12GHz workstation -- which, by the way, doubles as my water heater, and still runs like a dog thanks to the Windows XXXP operating system.
::
But this is valuable research, especially in an era when energy is quickly becoming more expensive. I hope Bush's energy plan threw at least a few billion in that direction.
Fossil fuels have to be transported all over, and are expensive to the environment. There are only so many sites where we can build wind farms, and there are already too many birds flying in circles due to head injuries. Fission, as has already been pointed out, has undesirable byproducts which need to be carefully controlled. So economical fusion would be a great boon to everyone.
I look forward to the day when your AI cyborg clone can lean back in his Baracalounger and turn on a 72" Plasma TV that's powered by cheap, clean fusion. And watch home movies, because the SSSCA won't let him view anything else.
:: Ducks and runs like hell
I'm starting to understand how you feel. Not everything out there insults my intelligence. But as the IP Gestapo starts using more and more insidious legal and technological mechanisms to control what we see and hear, I've seriously started going out of my way to be insulted.
Soon the book publishers will realize what a great racket this is, and the library as we know it will be history. Then we "conscientious objectors" of the American economy will get to be *really* pretentious. I'll miss Tom Clancy, but I've always wanted an excuse to reread "The Red Badge of Courage."
I like your idea of a class that teaches history from a physicists point of view. My physics teacher took very nearly the opposite tack. In preparing to discuss any principle, he would give a short explanation of who discovered it and the story behind the discovery. Somehow, this really worked for us.
I don't think any of his students thought of it as extraneous information. Why not? As high level physics students, they should have been incensed that the instructor was throwing in such irrelevant information. I don't think we liked it because the instructor explained in detail how the method of discovery clarified the principles itself. As physics students, we were smart enough to draw out that understanding for ourselves.
I think choosing physics as your example was a bit of a mistake. I know few people who would take such classes who can't work up an interest in totally unrelated intellectual fields. For the other students I met, learning for the sake of learning was already an integral part of their lives.
I can't tell if this is a troll or not, but there are some good ideas in here. There are a lot of kids who do come to college eager to learn (or at least I assume that there are). To the extent that they're exposed to the utter silliness that is deconstructionism, these kids are being cheated out of a real education.
I agree with this poster's belief that there's very little intellectual rigor outside of the science classes. Perhaps in history, where students have to be study subjects in depth and defend their conclusions. But I could list any number of majors that I could have simply slept through.
But that's what students are asking for: a dumbed down curriculum. Too often, when it came time to fill out teacher evaluations, the main sentiment was, "He grades too tough," or "blah blah blah. . . How can she expect us to know THAT?"
I am aware that some Slashdot readers have defied the odds and managed to breed. To those individuals, I implore you to raise your kids not to expect things to come easy. Show them that learning is worthwhile. Don't let them think that education should always be as easy as watching Sesame Street. And above all, get them to ask questions by answering the ones they do have as well as you can.
(Note: If your kid already has a poster of Stephen Jay Gould on their bedroom wall instead of Ricky Martin, you may have gone a bit overboard.)
You don't have to be terribly bright to get a lot out of a comparative religion or Western history class, if you're interested in the material. I think that if every American had taken courses like these, we would be in a much better political position for responding to the September 11th attacks. As things stand now, people who don't know Islam from Buddhism are writing their conresspeople to voice their support for bombing "that one country I can't seem to find on the map. Aftaliban, I think they called it."
I'd be interested in some clarification on the last comment. It's plausible, but I think that there are some fundamental differences. For example, since the instructor of a graduate can assume something about their students' prior education, they can use analogies and explanations that could never be used on an apprentice (and since the instructor went through a similar education, she should have such analogies available).
When it comes right down to it, education is about making connections. If you don't have a broad overview of things before starting your "real" education, you'll have no way to hook between the things you're learning for job X and anything outside that specialized function. You'll know certain things very well, but you'll often end up very lost when asked to move beyond what you already know.
1) They're spinning madly away in the NSA's basement.
2) They're being boxed into Lego Mindstorm kits.
3) Or perhaps they're the driving force behind my own computer. No wonder my Seti@Home blocks take eight months each.*
4) Scattered amidst the spare parts behind a defunct Yugo factory.
* Consumer tip: Never buy a Celeron out of the back of a truck.
Call it "Godel's Public License" (GPL) and it could become very popular among the already confused.
I think it's safe to say that this is a temporary measure. If it lasts more than a month, I'd be very surprised.
This is a bit like a situation my employer ran into. Prior to September 11, they sent out some promotional materials, which had a picture of an NHL goalie standing godzilla-like between two skyscrapers. We got a notice soon after the accident that we were supposed to apologize to anyone who called in to complain.
The point (if there was indeed a point to that anecdote) is that the bombing is still in recent memory, and Clear Channel probably just doesn't want to alienate its customers. Once things settle down, the ban will be lifted, and Kansas will again sing "Dust in the Wind." Nevertheless, I think it's a pointless and self-defeating gesture, and the fools^H^H^H^H^H corporate types who came up with it should be punished by hang^H^H^H^H a boycott for the duration.
One of the few projects I've actually tried to get involved in is called Worldforge. It's a good-sized and really ambitious project for creating the framework for building a variety of MMORPGs. I found them to be very helpful and very patient with me, even though I quite frankly couldn't find a pointer with both hands. I don't know what would happen if you submitted a patch out of the blue, but I did get the impression that the entire group is very willing to take new ideas seriously.
With Linux struggling in the gaming department, I think this has the potential for being an invaluable project. I'm not contributing to the project right now, but I think anyone who wants to dig in will find that the old timers will value your contributions.
The entire mobile platform would simply be a sensor array that beamed back information. If it became conscious, it would have no idea where its consciousness really resided. But the important thing is that the researchers could expose the computer to rich sensory input, without risking much expensive equipment to that environment.
In regard to a previous story about neuron/silicon connections, it would be interesting -- if unethical -- to try giving dolphins hands. Just simple mechanical actuators that floated around, and took their directions from the dolphin's neurons. Maybe there would even be a simple feedback mechanism so that they could "feel" when their remote limb was holding something. I would imagine that young dolphins would have a much easier time adjusting to their new limbs. I also imagine that the dolphins wouldn't be so friendly and playful if they had the ability to smack each other upside the head.
Okay, I have a confession to make. I'm really Stephen Hawking in disguise. I'm just having trouble waiting for the day when I can control my deadly super-robot using only the power of my mind. Be warned, my Nobel-laureate colleagues, for your fate is sealed.
You're absolutely right. Instead of paying $20-$50 every time their media gets scratched, those blasted freeloaders are making backup copies. What incentive do corporations have for creating and marketing their fine products in such an unfriendly, anti-business environment?
You fool! How do you think marketers got that way in the first place? John Tesh has already destroyed so many of their brain cells that further exposure wouldn't affect them one whit.
However, exposure to Barry Manilow at high volumes may be able to vaporize the last few brain cells that are still holding on. We can only hope that this treatment will finally render them harmless.
Personally, I go with the second option. Especially when a WNBA game is on. Not only do I get to feel smug and superior, but some of those female athletes have very nice legs. . . But that doesn't make it right!
First, it's arguing the drawbacks of a situation that we're not going to see for a very long time, if ever. In that way, it's similar to the "If everyone warezed the software they needed, programmers would be sleeping in the streets."
Second, if the statement were true, it would be much like complaining that the prevalence of automobiles was driving the buggy whip industry into the ground.* Sure, it's a downside, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be outweighed by the advantages.
Third, and finally, the GPL doesn't end the demand for new and improved software. Only blowing up every computer on the planet could do that. So if a company decides that what's already out there isn't serving them, it would be a smart investment for them to pay someone to write new software that fit their needs. Once the corporations wrap their skulls around this new business model, I think they'll be more than willing to pay real money to get their software improved. Some of them may even release those improvements back to the Open Source community. Or perhaps I'm a hopeless idealist.
Now, it would make sense to argue that, if the GPL "pac-man virus" gobbles up the world, there will be a lot less work for programmers to do. Instead of starting from scratch on a project, a programmer would instead grab whatever tools already existed. This sort of high-level tweaking isn't nearly as programming-intensive, so there would be a lot less work for developers to do. But there would still be some work out there, and there's always the gaming world, where new stuff is always at a premium. But this is a natural effect in a world where work is done once, instead of a hundred times on a hundred different projects.
* I don't know how buggy whip manufacturing became a modern icon for providers of obsolete technology, but there you have it.