I suspect his point is not that GPLed products shouldn't be used by the military. Rather he was hoping that his efforts could be focused on tools which are simultaneously useful for improving the human condition and useless for harming it. He doesn't want the military to avoid the fruits of his labor because he says so; he wants them to avoid it because they see no value in it.
It's difficult to find things like that, but they do exist, if only philosophically (e.g. Civil Disobedience is great for promoting humanitarian causes, but has no military applications).
One possible reason for the red-yellow-green sequence is that in many European jurisdictions, drivers are required to take their manual transmission completely out of gear, rather than simply keeping the clutch in. The yellow light warns them to get the car in gear so they'll be ready to go when it's green. Not as relevant in these days of cheap automatic transmissions, but it's the sort of thing that's tough to just get rid of.
From what I've read, I'm not sure anyone would want his/her favorite hardware/software to be associated with this film. An excerpt:
Where Starship Troopers 1 had mindblowing special effects the sequel takes a very smart turn: In order to save money... the producers of Starship Troopers 2 just used the special effects of the first movie again. Yep, you're right. Same images.
If you want to see more than a few exterior shots, try this PDF from the manufacturer. Page 6 has some nice deck by deck diagrams with lots of info if you zoom in real close. The helo storage bay is a nice touch.
And now begins the lengthy foot-dragging and political manipulations to elect someone(s) who will direct the competition commission to decide MS has suffered enough and we should all go back to our Windows desktops.
...I wish they hadn't gone for putting RS up on the stand...
I think we're pretty far off from having anyone on the stand in court. My guess is that this is just harrassing discovery motions.
Re:Is this book really neccessary??
on
Software Exorcism
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Is this really the "corporate landscape" for many software engineers?... Granted, I've not been out of school that long
I have been out of school a long time, and I can tell you that this does not happen in large software development organizations at any level likely to affect a new-hire. When there's a billion dollar contract on the line, the customers look for organizational maturity and established processes which protect the mission.
I haven't read the book or worked in small organizations, but perhaps that's where all these tactics are useful. I searched desperately through this review for the tongue in cheek, but I couldn't find it. Maybe Burroughs is a true believer.
Perhaps medical transcription companies should take the SETI@Home approach: digitize all the data to be transcribed, slice it into overlapping chunks of about 20 seconds each, and distribute the work as widely and randomly as possible. In the process of transcription, workers mark fragments as partially or completely unintelligible/incomprehensible so that new larger fragments can be sent out for only those sections which really need more context or the same fragments can be sent to workers who are more likely to understand a heavily accented speaker. Unlike SETI@Home, however, this is a money-making enterprise, so some sort of micro-payment scheme would need to be established.
No one person would likely have enough information to be dangerous, as long as the (automated) process of assembling the results is done in a trusted (and prosecutable) environment.
Of course, this is just an automater's dream... it would in the end be vastly more expensive than simply managing the subcontractor problem as-is.
Are you worried about Big Brother? Worry about Forbes:
Joseph Alsop [PersonId=142453], chief executive of Progress...
Apparently they give everyone a PersonID. Guess they slipped up revealing it this time. I actually subscribe to the magazine; I wonder what my PersonID is.
Ralph Yarro, chief executive of the Canopy Group: "The question is: 'How can we fix this issue and move forward?' " he said. "I'd like to see Linux survive."
How about specifying the violations so they can be corrected in all Linux distributions?
I own a 2002 Prius and the biggest difference between it and the Civic Hybrid lies in its planetary gearing system (which the Civic lacks). In the Prius, the on-board computer can decide what combination of gasoline engine, electric motor, and electric generator (they're separate) to connect to the drivetrain, depending on conditions. In the Civic, the gasoline engine is permanently connected to the drivetrain, so it's always turning, even if it's not being used. There are two main consequences of this difference:
The planetary gearing system seems to add about 1000 pounds to the vehicle curb weight.
The Prius can take the gasoline engine off the drivetrain any time it needs to.
A friend who owns the Civic Hybrid complained that in city driving, the gasoline engine will turn off it you stop at a light, but if you advance even a few feet, it will turn the engine on again and not turn it off until the vehicle has gone up to about 10mph and then back to zero.
My Prius can use the electric motor alone at any speed, as long as the load is low enough, and the only "unnecessary" use of the gasoline engine is when the A/C is running (this is fixed in the 2004 model) or if the engine hasn't yet gotten to optimum running temperature.
eRServer gives us one of the 'top five' components that the PostgreSQL database has needed in order to compete with commercial enterprise databases such as Oracle and DB2 on equal terms
Does anyone know what the other four components are and whether they're already here?
It doesn't have to be this way, of course, even in the US. The US Government regularly pays contractors to write software which does not belong to the contractor when the work is done. The final product is, I believe, in the public domain. However, this does drive up the cost since the US is essentially paying to write a new product and cannot share the burden by selling it to anyone else.
how about creating an open source alternative
Of course, such a product would only be one part of an entire system which a real (paid for) vendor would have to specify, supply, and maintain. The most important pieces which an open source project probably could not include are:
the specific hardware used to meet customer needs
the details of incorporating the procedures for using the system into the voting processes of the customer
The open source project could include a document which speaks to those topics, but there are too many State and County voting jurisdictions to reasonably account for them all at the outset.
A closer look at the webcast rates shows that it charges.07 cents per song per listener. For the math challenged, if you have 100,000 listeners, you pay 70 cents per song.
Unfortunately, the author is math challenged to the tune of 100x: that's actually 70 dollars per song.
Of course, you should be warned that Huber's bias may run counter to that of the posted article: his book Galileo's Revenge is argued to lie at the heart of the Daubert ruling.
I don't know how much the "power of the people" had to do with this. I suspect it was simply one form of corporate greed fighting off another. The people are bystanders as usual, but this time the piñata threw some candy our way, too.
As ever, Unisys misses the point of PNG's (presumed) success:
"We haven't evaluated the new recommendation for PNG, and it remains to be seen whether the new version will have an effect on the use of GIF images," said Unisys representative Kristine Grow. "If so, the patent situation will have achieved its purpose, which is to advance technological innovation. So we applaud that."
Patents motivate advancement of technological innovation by promising dollars. The inventors of LZW/GIF got those dollars by selling the patent to Unisys (who no doubt valued it based on their expected ability to license it). The inventors of PNG didn't use the patent system, so its success over GIF would at best fail to demonstrate anything at all about "the patent situation." At worst, it would show patent-based motivation is inferior to gift-based motivation when it comes to infrastructure like communication formats.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect his point is not that GPLed products shouldn't be used by the military. Rather he was hoping that his efforts could be focused on tools which are simultaneously useful for improving the human condition and useless for harming it. He doesn't want the military to avoid the fruits of his labor because he says so; he wants them to avoid it because they see no value in it.
It's difficult to find things like that, but they do exist, if only philosophically (e.g. Civil Disobedience is great for promoting humanitarian causes, but has no military applications).
One possible reason for the red-yellow-green sequence is that in many European jurisdictions, drivers are required to take their manual transmission completely out of gear, rather than simply keeping the clutch in. The yellow light warns them to get the car in gear so they'll be ready to go when it's green. Not as relevant in these days of cheap automatic transmissions, but it's the sort of thing that's tough to just get rid of.
From what I've read, I'm not sure anyone would want his/her favorite hardware/software to be associated with this film. An excerpt:
If you want to see more than a few exterior shots, try this PDF from the manufacturer. Page 6 has some nice deck by deck diagrams with lots of info if you zoom in real close. The helo storage bay is a nice touch.
Apparently it's perfect for mounting on cats.
And now begins the lengthy foot-dragging and political manipulations to elect someone(s) who will direct the competition commission to decide MS has suffered enough and we should all go back to our Windows desktops.
The same as all other unsolicited commercial email: canned spiced ham aroma.
Scientific progress goes 'BOINC'?
I haven't read the book or worked in small organizations, but perhaps that's where all these tactics are useful. I searched desperately through this review for the tongue in cheek, but I couldn't find it. Maybe Burroughs is a true believer.
Perhaps medical transcription companies should take the SETI@Home approach: digitize all the data to be transcribed, slice it into overlapping chunks of about 20 seconds each, and distribute the work as widely and randomly as possible. In the process of transcription, workers mark fragments as partially or completely unintelligible/incomprehensible so that new larger fragments can be sent out for only those sections which really need more context or the same fragments can be sent to workers who are more likely to understand a heavily accented speaker. Unlike SETI@Home, however, this is a money-making enterprise, so some sort of micro-payment scheme would need to be established.
No one person would likely have enough information to be dangerous, as long as the (automated) process of assembling the results is done in a trusted (and prosecutable) environment.
Of course, this is just an automater's dream... it would in the end be vastly more expensive than simply managing the subcontractor problem as-is.
Are you worried about Big Brother? Worry about Forbes:
Apparently they give everyone a PersonID. Guess they slipped up revealing it this time. I actually subscribe to the magazine; I wonder what my PersonID is.How about specifying the violations so they can be corrected in all Linux distributions?
I own a 2002 Prius and the biggest difference between it and the Civic Hybrid lies in its planetary gearing system (which the Civic lacks). In the Prius, the on-board computer can decide what combination of gasoline engine, electric motor, and electric generator (they're separate) to connect to the drivetrain, depending on conditions. In the Civic, the gasoline engine is permanently connected to the drivetrain, so it's always turning, even if it's not being used. There are two main consequences of this difference:
- The planetary gearing system seems to add about 1000 pounds to the vehicle curb weight.
- The Prius can take the gasoline engine off the drivetrain any time it needs to.
A friend who owns the Civic Hybrid complained that in city driving, the gasoline engine will turn off it you stop at a light, but if you advance even a few feet, it will turn the engine on again and not turn it off until the vehicle has gone up to about 10mph and then back to zero.My Prius can use the electric motor alone at any speed, as long as the load is low enough, and the only "unnecessary" use of the gasoline engine is when the A/C is running (this is fixed in the 2004 model) or if the engine hasn't yet gotten to optimum running temperature.
Of course, YMMV :-)
From the press release:
Does anyone know what the other four components are and whether they're already here?From the listed specs, it appears that this device is almost exactly the size, shape, and weight of two boxes of paperclips side-by-side.
Was that your sig or just a way to sum up?
It doesn't have to be this way, of course, even in the US. The US Government regularly pays contractors to write software which does not belong to the contractor when the work is done. The final product is, I believe, in the public domain. However, this does drive up the cost since the US is essentially paying to write a new product and cannot share the burden by selling it to anyone else.
Of course, such a product would only be one part of an entire system which a real (paid for) vendor would have to specify, supply, and maintain. The most important pieces which an open source project probably could not include are:
- the specific hardware used to meet customer needs
- the details of incorporating the procedures for using the system into the voting processes of the customer
The open source project could include a document which speaks to those topics, but there are too many State and County voting jurisdictions to reasonably account for them all at the outset.To paraphrase Starship Troopers:
Unfortunately, the author is math challenged to the tune of 100x: that's actually 70 dollars per song.
I don't know why, but I read the headline as White Basketball Robot, and all I thought was, "That's silly... everyone knows White Robots Can't Jump."
Of course, you should be warned that Huber's bias may run counter to that of the posted article: his book Galileo's Revenge is argued to lie at the heart of the Daubert ruling.
I don't know how much the "power of the people" had to do with this. I suspect it was simply one form of corporate greed fighting off another. The people are bystanders as usual, but this time the piñata threw some candy our way, too.
As ever, Unisys misses the point of PNG's (presumed) success:
Patents motivate advancement of technological innovation by promising dollars. The inventors of LZW/GIF got those dollars by selling the patent to Unisys (who no doubt valued it based on their expected ability to license it). The inventors of PNG didn't use the patent system, so its success over GIF would at best fail to demonstrate anything at all about "the patent situation." At worst, it would show patent-based motivation is inferior to gift-based motivation when it comes to infrastructure like communication formats.