I think the real question is, as an open-source developer, why wouldn't you choose GPLv3 over v2? Because you want some company to use your program and then sue you because you made use of their patents? If your program existed before their patents, then the patents are invalid. That's what "prior art" means. If not, then it doesn't matter what license you use, they can still sue you. Sucks, doesn't it?
Or you want your software to make DRM devices cheaper to create? The license doesn't prevent you from creating linux-powered baby-mulchers. Or linux-powered atom bombs. Quick, someone hurry up and use software licenses to enforce our morality!
Or you want your license to be worded in a way that is ambiguous in some regions? The GPLv3 is far, far more ambiguous.
I wonder why Linus wants linux to be licensed without patent protections, with ambiguous language, and in a way that supports DRM? I wonder why you can't think for youself on this issue.
The problem with the GPLv3 is that it makes a lot of demands on how end-users should be able to use the software.
For one thing, it demands that the end-users be able to modify the software. A lot of hardware manufacturers don't even have programmable firmware. Are they going to go out of their way, and increase the cost of the product, to give this capability? And what about the liability concerns that this opens up. If they provide a formally supported mechanism to change the software on the device-- which they must, according to the ideals expressed in the GPLv3-- they may be liable for when someone changes this software.
All of these issues are very vague. Is the company acting in bad faith if it ships its embedded Linux with just exactly enough hard disk space to run the software it ships with, but no more? Is the company acting in bad faith if the product needs to interact with another, closed source product in order to usefully function? What if the closed source product isn't even under their control, or contains DRM? What if the product can operating in a degraded mode without DRM, but needs DRM to get full performance?
The whole area is a legal minefield, as Linus and other kernel developers have pointed out time and time again. A lot of these legal issues are more complex than you think. In some cases, new law is being made even as we speak. It's very foolish to claim that any issue related to the GPLv3 is settled until a judge has made a ruling. And even then, that ruling only applies in the relevant country.
On the whole, the whole GPLv3 effort is just a very complicated political game trying to achieve something that can't be achieved by a software license-- the rollback of DRM and the service-based internet economy. It will fragment the open source community and scare away business investment. Linus understands this and is coming out against it. Good for him.
Linus made it very clear that he chose the GPLv2 because he liked the license, not because he's drinking RMS's kool-aid. And yet, people still insist on whining when he doesn't agree with RMS' every pronouncement. Get over it! Linux is not "a GNU project," it's Linus' project.
The problem is, RMS is a megalomaniac. You can see this clearly in the way he tries to name projects after himself, and in the way he tries to micromanage projects that he has really very little involvement with! I can't believe that you sneer at Linus' successful, pragmatic approach, but sing the praises of the same project manager who gave us HURD, the decade-long vaporware disaster.
RMS probably believes that he, himself, is solely responsible for the success of open source software. In reality, the rise of cheap PCs and the Internet (which allowed developers to collaborate cheaply) are the real driving forces. Let's also not forget the companies that have lent their support. IBM has probably done more to keep open-source UNIXes viable than any open source leader. No other organization had the budget to fight SCO!
In their blindness, RMS' zealots cannot see this. They can't see that corporate partnerships are not only desirable, but necessary, to keep free software alive in a world of patents, lawyers, and DRM. They can't see that changing the GPL will not stop DRM. DRM is a political problem, not a technological one. It can't be solved by imposing vague, onerous end-user license clauses on developers and users.
I can't believe that you say that the depression of 1987 was worse than that of 1929. Were children starving in the streets? Were families burning furniture for heat? I call bullshit. I was a kid in 1987, and I barely noticed what the economy was doing. None of the people I know would even react to the phrase "depression of 1987" with anything other than a blank stare.
I have highlighted where you have gone wrong. There is no such thing as a permanent monopoly. It is simply impossible to have one. Using your example of Microsoft: a counter-culture arose which undercut even MS, free and open source software.
Whether or not monopolies are permanent is kind of beside the point. The point is, an unfettered, "laissez-faire" market inevitably concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a very few. Certain socialist policies, like subsidized education, free libraries for the people, etc., are need to offset the anti-democratic tendencies of capitalism itself.
Don't get me wrong-- I am for smaller government. But what we need is not small government per se, but good government-- something which is a lot harder to define.
Have you ever programmed with X? I mean, not with QT, or GTK, or some toolkit, but actually with X?
It takes ~200 lines of code just to get a reasonable hello world program. Some X functions take like a 9 or 10 arguments, all of which are crusty old structs where you might only care about one or two values-- at most. That should be your first clue that something is wrong.
Some more clues will occur to you when you realize the amazing amount of useless stuff that was put in back when color displays were exotic rarities. Things like 8-bit b&w bitmaps for dithering. The bizzaro font and rendering models. The lack of useful drawing primitives.
Seriously, someone should redo X with a more modern focus. And then write some backends for all the toolkits. Really, what you want for something like X is an object-oriented language like C++. (Of course, there should definitely be some kind of plain-old-C interface exported.) More likey, though, people will continue to evolve the code we already have.
You CAN set the disk cache to 0 in Firefox. So why are you babbling on and on about hard disks and "finding everywhere I've been"?
I also don't understand your comment about the government getting your information from search engines. Do you understand that "anonymous surfing" makes that impossible?
There are still a bunch of ways someone can trace you, but those two don't always work.
> > Unfortunately, free markets lead to concentration of wealth. [...] > Which has not been demonstrated.
It was demonstrated by the laissez-faire economies of the late 19th century. Read your history.
> > Free markets invariably become unfree because of a runaway feedback loop. > Many people say this, yet are short on evidence or thorough argumentation supporting this conclusion.
Nelson Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Bill Gates and Microsoft. Still feel short on evidence?
> Funny, because many people view democracy as a degenerate free market in which voting > priviledges are not fully distributed (as money), but centralized (one vote per person > on any given issue, or further centralized in a "representative" in a republic).
No doubt politics has some market-like aspects. It would be nice to see some new ideas about how to organize a republic that were based more on economic insights, and less on emotion and flawed arguments.
Unfortunately, most people just can't accept the fact that money will always dominate politics in a capitalist nation. Instead, they try to live in a fantasy world (c.f. campaign finance reform.)
> > Where are the checks and balances within a free market that will work to keep it free? there are none.
Exactly. If you are Joe Q. Capitalist, your deepest desire is to corner the market and establish a permanent monopoly. And once you have done that, the free market is over, and progress tends to grind to a halt.
It's hard to do this, but in practice you can come pretty damn close, using bundling, kickbacks, and bribes to government officials.
Of course, bribery is illegal-- it's called "lobbying" now. And bundling is illegal for monopolies, except that the law is seldom enforced. It's also easy to come up with kickbacks that don't involve money directly, or are confusing and hard to trace, so the laws against that don't have teeth either.
Overall, we're fucked. But at least you can go to Wal*Mart and stuff your face with a valu-burger, so it can't be ALL bad.
It's not only "people who have something to hide" who should secure their wireless networks. Anyone whose local LAN is compromised by insecure wireless access can be hacked, with all the bad consequences that result from that-- badware installed on your local system, credit card numbers stolen, etc. Anyone who offers free wireless access to strangers can be used as an impromptu proxy for people you would prefer not to think about.
All of this because you didn't care enough to upgrade from WEP to WPA (or something even more secure?) Come on.
Some (not all) chemicals cause measurable, physical changes in your brain and in your body, such that sudden withdrawal can be dangerous or even fatal. This is called "chemical dependence" or "chemical addiction." I'm sorry, but that is just a scientific fact, regardless of how you feel about it.
Whether or not the person was stupid or immoral for taking the chemically addictive substance in the first place is a completely different question-- a philosophical and moral question rather than a scientific one. And it's not a simple question either.
It's not only leet haxors that can crack WEP. I told my roomate about the vulnerability in WEP. Within 15 minutes he had downloaded a program called AirSniff and cracked our neighbors' WEP-protected network.
You wouldn't let strangers make phone calls from your phone. Why do you think it's ok to let strangers use your internet connection? What is to stop them from using your connection to launch attacks on web sites, or downloading child pornography? Never forget that in the eyes of your ISP, all the traffic coming from your IP address is YOU.
Also, local area networks implemented with ethernet and wireless ethernet were never designed to be secure. Once someone has access to your LAN, it's pretty much game over as far as security goes. For example, they can poison your ARP cache and redirect your traffic as they choose. So trust me. Having your wireless network cracked is a Bad Thing.
This post is so wrong, I don't even know where to begin.
You touch all the bases, from "OMG, think of the children," to blatant ludditism ("only the rich will ever use the internet!") Also, if you had read the article, you would know that it is a private, capitalist company that is funding the network, not the evil LIE-beral county government. You also seem to be confused about the technology here. There are some standards; they are called 802.11b, 802.11g, and WiMax.
The only thing I can possibly say is this: if you think internet access is not useful for the general public, get off the internet already! Donate the money you would have paid for your internet access to that trailer you were talking about.
But, I do think that people who believ in the concept of personal responsiblity deserve to get punched in the mouth repeatedly until they get some sense of compassion.
LOL. In related news, I'm a million times humbler than thou.
I know you're busy wallowing in righteous self-pity, but if you ever have time, you should read Nietzsche's critique of Christianity. I don't agree with all the points that he makes, but there's something to it. He raged against what he saw as the glorification of sickness over health, the permanent debt of guilt and misery ("original sin"), and the general failure to accept (let along effectively analyze) the world.
I was specifically refering to collaboration in spreadsheets. For the vast majority it is enough to simply have a spreadsheet on a file server available ot everyone to read. But if you need more, I hear Microsoft has realtime collaboriation as an optional part of MS Office.
Here's an example of where it is useful: keeping track of debts between people. For that, everyone needs read and write access.
I don't own any MS Office licenses, by the way, and I don't have Office installed. Neither do my roomates. It's expensive and buggy.
Personally, I think that Google spreadsheet is a great idea, and something that's likely to be used a lot.
I see a continued expansion of self-publishing (blogs, wikis, etc), email, ecommerce, etc. I see NEW applications opening up that can only effectively be done within a browser. What I don't see are traditional desktop applications moving into the browser. I certainly don't see the whole desktop moving into the browser ala WebOS.
The great thing about web browsers is that they're cross platform, and everyone has one. If you can't see the potential in that, it's probably futile to keep arguing with you. You're like that guy who can't understand why anyone would ever need or want a credit card.
Politics has a lot to do with technology, even though most people don't like to think about it.
When the U.S. was founded back in 1777, it was a Libertarian paradise. No welfare state, no standing army, no EPA, no income taxes-- and a whole lot of decentralization. This kind of government worked well for that period of time.
But times have changed. Technology has advanced.
War, which used to be fought slowly over the course of months, by commanders who might not have even heard from their commanding officers in weeks, became a lightning-fast test of brinksmanship. The next world war might be over in the course of a few hours if nuclear missiles are involved. Thus, we need a standing army of some kind, and some kind of defense establishment.
Industry, which used to be a bunch of artisans sitting in their homes plying their craft, became a massive, centralized, mechanized undertaking. Pollution became a serious problem, not only because of the lives it takes directly, but because of its long-term fatalities and effects on the landscape. Some chemicals do not naturally biodegrade-- for example, PCBs. So there needed to be an Environmental Protection Agency of some kind. Another problem was that since the consumers were now remote from the actual site of production, they began to have less and less idea of what they were consuming. To stop unscrupulous factory owners from selling tainted products, the Food and Drug Administration was formed.
These are only a few examples. Now, you can argue that these parts of the government have not done their job as well as they could. Or you could propose something to replace them. But you must first show that whatever would replace them would be better.
For example, if the Food and Drug Administration was replaced by a cartel of private businesses that refused to do business with anyone outside of the cartel, would this really be a fairer solution than the FDA as it is now? Government agencies are at least theoretically accountable to the public, whereas a cartel would not be. And to be considered a success, a cartel would have to have at least as much coercive power over producers as the FDA has now. So I do not believe there would be any advantage to this arrangement.
Too often, political philosophies ignore the real and concrete issues of the day, and I'm afraid Libertarianism has been no exception.
I believe that nearly _ALL_ chemicals can cause harm to fetuses.
Well, you're wrong about that.
DDT should be a community-selected issue. If you're dealing with massive mosquito-borne diseases, there is a CBA that should be performed to see if the benefits outweigh the costs.
DDT use cannot be a community-selected issue because the environment is common to all. Water runoff from one community flows into another community, seeps into aquifers that feed wells, drains into the ocean.
This seems to be a typical blind spot for "libertarians," even the smarter ones. The. Environment. Can't. Be. Privatized.
The issue is a lot more complicated than either of us can debate in this forum, but I believe the issues must be brought back up.
The issues have been brought up. Well, all of them except for the issue of how this chemical ravages the natural world. I brought that up in another post, but I doubt anyone will address it, because there's so many other reasons why using DDT is a manifestly stupid idea.
If you wanted to bring up the issue of environmentalism vs. utilitarianism, you could have easily picked a better issue. For example, is it moral for governments to drain swamps, and destroy the indiginous creatures living there, in order to reduce fatalities from malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases? Instead, you picked an issue where the harm to the public is obvious.
Yet we can't use DDT in much of the world, and I believe that is a bigger problem that was created by fiat and mandate than by research and reality.
Yes, I'm so sad that the government banned a chemical that was wiping out entire species of birds, causing retardation, and contaminating the groundwater. Private industry and selfishness would have solved the problem so much better. "More of this terrible gibberish," to borrow a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson. Man, I wonder what would have happened if he had been locked in a room with Ann Coulter for a few hours. I guess the world will never know.
1. Breed DDT-resistant mosquitos 2. Contaminate the groundwater for generations, leading to
3. Retarded children and children with other developmental disabilities
4. Massive environmental damage, especially massive bird die-off
It's amazing how many great ideas you can have when you stop believing those so-called "scientists" and "researchers"
I like Red Hat. They've done a lot for linux, and a lot for the community. They invented RPM, and many distros are based off of Red Hat.
They've also done a lot to make linux less scary to companies. Companies like dealing with an organization like Red Hat, because it gives them some reassurances. I'm not knocking the volunteer stuff-- but if linux was entirely a volunteer endeavor, I don't think you would see companies like IBM interested in it. Having organizations like Red Hat helps give the community the critical mass it needs to stay self-sustaining and free.
I use Fedora at home, and also at work. If you don't like the distro, don't use it. Simple as that. No need to spread FUD.
I agree that it does seem like an inversion of the social order to have service workers making so much more than they are "really worth." Before you call me a capitalist pig, think of this:
In other countries with more relaxed minimum wage and labor laws, it's easy to get things repaired on the cheap. Radio is busted? Have someone fix it for you. Broken bicycle? Same thing. Talk to anyone from Mexico. Many middle-class households there have maids.
In the States, it's impossible to get a car mechanic to even look at you sideways for less than $50. And if any appliance valued less than $100 breaks, you might as well buy a new one, because it's cheaper than paying the repairman. This leads to a lot of waste, obviously. It also tends to inflate the cost of living here, so that people making $50,000/year in the States are not "really" making as much as similarly paid people in India or elsewhere in the world.
Peronsally, I think that, on the whole, the tradeoff is worth it. I don't really want to go back to the bad old days where employers could pay whatever they wanted to, and give no benefits at all. I'm just trying to play devil's advocate.
Unfortunately, employers are starting to move more and more towards automation and robotics to solve their wage problems. Think of how automated your average, garden-variety McDonald's is, for example. Half of the machinery in the back of the store is just there to save manpower... like the automated fry baskets. To return to the example of janitors, companies like Roomba are already starting to create automated vacuuming robots. In a few decades, it may well be more economical to have robots doing most of the janitorial work, supported by a small staff of humans who catch the inevitable screwups and do some touch-up work on places that robots have a hard time with.
So really, so-called "service sector" jobs are not the fortresses of security that many people would like to believe. They are also under assault in this era of technology-- it's just that they are being eliminated by robotics and automation rather than outsourcing and deskilling. So what will we do with all of the former service workers in the future? I don't know, but it will probably involve yet more expansion of the government.
Of course, we all know who funds academia, for the most part. Government grants and subsidies. Assuming you have tenure, Professor, I think you have nothing to complain about.
Books don't fail to boot. Books don't require batteries. Ok, this is true.
Books are often more compact than their electronic equivalent. Maybe in 1975. Nowadays, we have these things called "CD ROMs," "Hard Drives," and "flash memory" which can fit hundreds, if not thousands of books in a tiny space.
Books can withstand massive g-forces and falls from great heights. Not really. Try dropping a hardcover physics textbook off of the top of a building. At the very least, you have ruined the binding, and lost a lot of pages. I think CD-ROMs win here, because they have no loose moving parts, unlike books. Anyway, why would "can withstand a fall from a very great height" be something I think about when making purchases? I'm not Indiana Jones.
Properly cared for books can last hundreds to thousands of years. The books that last for thousands of years are books that have been printed on good quality acid-free paper or vellum, with the proper inks, and stored in the correct humidity, probably away from sunlight. Very few home libraries fall into this category. I doubt most of the paperbacks printed during this century will see the next few centuries, just because of how cheaply they were made.
I think computer technology has the potential to preserve books pretty effectively. Check out project Gutenberg for an example of how people scanned in some of the classics, and are now distributing them for free on the internet.
I agree there are a lot of practical reasons why books will stick around. The one you didn't mention, but which is important to me, is readability! I still find it easier on my eyes to read paper books. Hopefully this will be fixed eventually. The other problematic issues are copyright issues.
Hell, I read books to get a break from computers. I think if I had that many books I'd donate most of them to the local library. I know I don't have time to reread 3,500 books - there's millions more out there I haven't read yet!
The fact that you can go to the library and get a book doesn't make home book collections worthless. Sometimes, it's really nice to read for an hour, without having to worry about due dates or dealing with librarians. My parents always had a lot of books in their house, and I ended up reading a lot of them at various times. I think that, on the whole, it was much more helpful than living next to a library would have been.
Some people have been mentioning e-books. Well, it's still a lot more comfortable to read a physical book than to stare at a screen. Until the technology catches up, books are still the best.
Laissez-faire capitalism has been tried before in the 19th century. It failed then, before any legal restrictions or minimum wage laws were in place. People were stuffing sausages with sawdust and adulterating milk with formaldhyde because there was no FDA. Markets went through boom and bust cycles that left millions unemployed. The Great Depression is the best-known one, but by no means the only one. Boom and bust cycles are the natural consequence of an unregulated free market.
Read some history-- I mean real history, not the kind that says the Jews started World War II or that aliens invented the automobile. Your local library might be a good place to start-- see what textbooks they have for high school history classes.
If I post the links, will you bother reading them?
Maybe, but I will read them in the knowledge that they are NOT the work of real, mainstream economists, but rather that of racist political kooks. One step above the "time cube" guy. One very small step. When I told you to put down the Ayn Rand, this is not what I meant.
>> You can, in theory, prove that a particular sandbox running on a particular OS is secure.
> Cantor's diagonal argument doesn't reduce the problem to a proof-by-divine-intervention. > Humans do not have a magical exemption from the halting problem, just that we currently > have better hardware for solving certain classes of "hard" problems. We can make better > (meta^x)schemas than today's computers can. But problems still exist that we not only > cannot solve, but we can't tell if we can ever solve them...
Don't confuse the halting problem with the statement that "proving code correct is impossible." There's a large amount of code that has been proven correct. There's even a project at Carnegie Mellon to construct a provably correct TCP/IP stack...
Also, as developers move away from older languages like C and C++, and towards more abstract languages like Java and C#, certain classes of careless errors become impossible to make. Buffer overflows and other memory corruptions are the most high-profile, but there's a lot of more obscure errors like failing to include a virtual destructor in a virtual class in C++.
There is also a growing acknowledgement of the importance of having a good security model. There's been a lot of research in the field of operating systems on this topic. The basic idea is that the operating system should use "capabilities" rather than "permissions." With "permissions," a given user runs code, and the code gets to do whatever actions that user has permission to do. So if he is root, or Administrator, he can wipe the hard disk, send emails, etc. With "capabilities," the user chooses which abilities to give to the code he runs. Then, this code can call other code with either the same or reduced permissions, etc.
The basic idea is to have separation of power. For example, a rogue email application may be able to send out rogue emails, but it shouldn't be able to modify the hard disk. Since that is not required for its normal operation, it should never get that capability in the first place. In fact, it may not even be aware of whether there is a hard disk or not. Information and abilities should be on a "need to know" basis.
Unfortunately, to a large extent, the current model is that you are either the "super user"-- in which case you can do anything-- or else you are a regular user, and you have all the regular user permissions. Think of how coarse-grained "chmod" is.
So it doesn't make sense to say "this new sandbox is just like the old sandbox-- we haven't gained anything." If Microsoft uses this chance to improve their security model, and their development models, they have indeed gained a lot. I hope linux and the other free operating systems can change their infrastructure to keep up.
Call me a fanatic, but open source isn't worth crap if it can't be redistributed. This is _THE_ principle of open source, that anyone can make AND RUN their own version. There are business-ready licenses out there, but the GPL was made to perpetuate the programmers' and users' freedom.
Ok, but back in the real world, there are devices that can't even be modified. If you ever want companies to ship Linux on toasters, they better be able to distribute a non-modifiable version suitable to the hardware. Even if it's "politically incorrect."
I think Linus needs a reality check. Perhaps a few months of working for Microsoft will make him realize his mistakes. There ARE evil people, evil corporations trying to take over the world, just look at the patent business.
I think YOU need a reality check. Linus can't fix the patent system in the United States and elsewhere by himself, no matter what license he adopts. He can't repeal the DMCA either.
Anyway, Linus is not "just another programmer," and he never "went corporate". He's always been in it for the love of the work, unlike some other open source leaders I could name. The consequence has generally been that his code has been of a much higher quality! Compare the kernel code with the code for emacs, or configure scripts.
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I think the real question is, as an open-source developer, why wouldn't you choose GPLv3 over v2? Because you want some company to use your program and then sue you because you made use of their patents?
If your program existed before their patents, then the patents are invalid. That's what "prior art" means. If not, then it doesn't matter what license you use, they can still sue you. Sucks, doesn't it?
Or you want your software to make DRM devices cheaper to create?
The license doesn't prevent you from creating linux-powered baby-mulchers. Or linux-powered atom bombs. Quick, someone hurry up and use software licenses to enforce our morality!
Or you want your license to be worded in a way that is ambiguous in some regions?
The GPLv3 is far, far more ambiguous.
I wonder why Linus wants linux to be licensed without patent protections, with ambiguous language, and in a way that supports DRM?
I wonder why you can't think for youself on this issue.
The problem with the GPLv3 is that it makes a lot of demands on how end-users should be able to use the software.
For one thing, it demands that the end-users be able to modify the software. A lot of hardware manufacturers don't even have programmable firmware. Are they going to go out of their way, and increase the cost of the product, to give this capability? And what about the liability concerns that this opens up. If they provide a formally supported mechanism to change the software on the device-- which they must, according to the ideals expressed in the GPLv3-- they may be liable for when someone changes this software.
All of these issues are very vague. Is the company acting in bad faith if it ships its embedded Linux with just exactly enough hard disk space to run the software it ships with, but no more? Is the company acting in bad faith if the product needs to interact with another, closed source product in order to usefully function? What if the closed source product isn't even under their control, or contains DRM? What if the product can operating in a degraded mode without DRM, but needs DRM to get full performance?
The whole area is a legal minefield, as Linus and other kernel developers have pointed out time and time again. A lot of these legal issues are more complex than you think. In some cases, new law is being made even as we speak. It's very foolish to claim that any issue related to the GPLv3 is settled until a judge has made a ruling. And even then, that ruling only applies in the relevant country.
On the whole, the whole GPLv3 effort is just a very complicated political game trying to achieve something that can't be achieved by a software license-- the rollback of DRM and the service-based internet economy. It will fragment the open source community and scare away business investment.
Linus understands this and is coming out against it. Good for him.
Linus made it very clear that he chose the GPLv2 because he liked the license, not because he's drinking RMS's kool-aid. And yet, people still insist on whining when he doesn't agree with RMS' every pronouncement. Get over it! Linux is not "a GNU project," it's Linus' project.
The problem is, RMS is a megalomaniac. You can see this clearly in the way he tries to name projects after himself, and in the way he tries to micromanage projects that he has really very little involvement with! I can't believe that you sneer at Linus' successful, pragmatic approach, but sing the praises of the same project manager who gave us HURD, the decade-long vaporware disaster.
RMS probably believes that he, himself, is solely responsible for the success of open source software. In reality, the rise of cheap PCs and the Internet (which allowed developers to collaborate cheaply) are the real driving forces. Let's also not forget the companies that have lent their support. IBM has probably done more to keep open-source UNIXes viable than any open source leader. No other organization had the budget to fight SCO!
In their blindness, RMS' zealots cannot see this. They can't see that corporate partnerships are not only desirable, but necessary, to keep free software alive in a world of patents, lawyers, and DRM. They can't see that changing the GPL will not stop DRM. DRM is a political problem, not a technological one. It can't be solved by imposing vague, onerous end-user license clauses on developers and users.
I can't believe that you say that the depression of 1987 was worse than that of 1929. Were children starving in the streets? Were families burning furniture for heat? I call bullshit. I was a kid in 1987, and I barely noticed what the economy was doing. None of the people I know would even react to the phrase "depression of 1987" with anything other than a blank stare.
I have highlighted where you have gone wrong. There is no such thing as a permanent monopoly. It is simply impossible to have one. Using your example of Microsoft: a counter-culture arose which undercut even MS, free and open source software.
Whether or not monopolies are permanent is kind of beside the point. The point is, an unfettered, "laissez-faire" market inevitably concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a very few. Certain socialist policies, like subsidized education, free libraries for the people, etc., are need to offset the anti-democratic tendencies of capitalism itself.
Don't get me wrong-- I am for smaller government. But what we need is not small government per se, but good government-- something which is a lot harder to define.
Have you ever programmed with X?
I mean, not with QT, or GTK, or some toolkit, but actually with X?
It takes ~200 lines of code just to get a reasonable hello world program.
Some X functions take like a 9 or 10 arguments, all of which are crusty old structs where you might only care about one or two values-- at most.
That should be your first clue that something is wrong.
Some more clues will occur to you when you realize the amazing amount of useless stuff that was put in back when color displays were exotic rarities. Things like 8-bit b&w bitmaps for dithering. The bizzaro font and rendering models. The lack of useful drawing primitives.
Seriously, someone should redo X with a more modern focus. And then write some backends for all the toolkits. Really, what you want for something like X is an object-oriented language like C++. (Of course, there should definitely be some kind of plain-old-C interface exported.)
More likey, though, people will continue to evolve the code we already have.
You CAN set the disk cache to 0 in Firefox. So why are you babbling on and on about hard disks and "finding everywhere I've been"?
I also don't understand your comment about the government getting your information from search engines. Do you understand that "anonymous surfing" makes that impossible?
There are still a bunch of ways someone can trace you, but those two don't always work.
> > Unfortunately, free markets lead to concentration of wealth. [...]
> Which has not been demonstrated.
It was demonstrated by the laissez-faire economies of the late 19th century. Read your history.
> > Free markets invariably become unfree because of a runaway feedback loop.
> Many people say this, yet are short on evidence or thorough argumentation supporting this conclusion.
Nelson Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Still feel short on evidence?
> Funny, because many people view democracy as a degenerate free market in which voting
> priviledges are not fully distributed (as money), but centralized (one vote per person
> on any given issue, or further centralized in a "representative" in a republic).
No doubt politics has some market-like aspects. It would be nice to see some new ideas about how to organize a republic that were based more on economic insights, and less on emotion and flawed arguments.
Unfortunately, most people just can't accept the fact that money will always dominate politics in a capitalist nation. Instead, they try to live in a fantasy world (c.f. campaign finance reform.)
> > Where are the checks and balances within a free market that will work to keep it free? there are none.
Exactly. If you are Joe Q. Capitalist, your deepest desire is to corner the market and establish a permanent monopoly. And once you have done that, the free market is over, and progress tends to grind to a halt.
It's hard to do this, but in practice you can come pretty damn close, using bundling, kickbacks, and bribes to government officials.
Of course, bribery is illegal-- it's called "lobbying" now. And bundling is illegal for monopolies, except that the law is seldom enforced.
It's also easy to come up with kickbacks that don't involve money directly, or are confusing and hard to trace, so the laws against that don't have teeth either.
Overall, we're fucked. But at least you can go to Wal*Mart and stuff your face with a valu-burger, so it can't be ALL bad.
Did you read my post at all?
It's not only "people who have something to hide" who should secure their wireless networks. Anyone whose local LAN is compromised by insecure wireless access can be hacked, with all the bad consequences that result from that-- badware installed on your local system, credit card numbers stolen, etc. Anyone who offers free wireless access to strangers can be used as an impromptu proxy for people you would prefer not to think about.
All of this because you didn't care enough to upgrade from WEP to WPA (or something even more secure?) Come on.
Some (not all) chemicals cause measurable, physical changes in your brain and in your body, such that sudden withdrawal can be dangerous or even fatal. This is called "chemical dependence" or "chemical addiction." I'm sorry, but that is just a scientific fact, regardless of how you feel about it.
Whether or not the person was stupid or immoral for taking the chemically addictive substance in the first place is a completely different question-- a philosophical and moral question rather than a scientific one. And it's not a simple question either.
If you really believe that chemical addiction is a hoax, then why don't you try some of these drugs rumored to cause it.
I'm sure that it won't ruin your life, and turn you into a drooling wreck. Unless, of course, your unscientific theories are total bullshit.
It's not only leet haxors that can crack WEP. I told my roomate about the vulnerability in WEP. Within 15 minutes he had downloaded a program called AirSniff and cracked our neighbors' WEP-protected network.
You wouldn't let strangers make phone calls from your phone. Why do you think it's ok to let strangers use your internet connection? What is to stop them from using your connection to launch attacks on web sites, or downloading child pornography? Never forget that in the eyes of your ISP, all the traffic coming from your IP address is YOU.
Also, local area networks implemented with ethernet and wireless ethernet were never designed to be secure. Once someone has access to your LAN, it's pretty much game over as far as security goes. For example, they can poison your ARP cache and redirect your traffic as they choose. So trust me. Having your wireless network cracked is a Bad Thing.
This post is so wrong, I don't even know where to begin.
You touch all the bases, from "OMG, think of the children," to blatant ludditism ("only the rich will ever use the internet!") Also, if you had read the article, you would know that it is a private, capitalist company that is funding the network, not the evil LIE-beral county government.
You also seem to be confused about the technology here. There are some standards; they are called 802.11b, 802.11g, and WiMax.
The only thing I can possibly say is this: if you think internet access is not useful for the general public, get off the internet already! Donate the money you would have paid for your internet access to that trailer you were talking about.
But, I do think that people who believ in the concept of personal responsiblity deserve to get punched in the mouth repeatedly until they get some sense of compassion.
LOL.
In related news, I'm a million times humbler than thou.
I know you're busy wallowing in righteous self-pity, but if you ever have time, you should read Nietzsche's critique of Christianity. I don't agree with all the points that he makes, but there's something to it. He raged against what he saw as the glorification of sickness over health, the permanent debt of guilt and misery ("original sin"), and the general failure to accept (let along effectively analyze) the world.
I was specifically refering to collaboration in spreadsheets. For the vast majority it is enough to simply have a spreadsheet on a file server available ot everyone to read. But if you need more, I hear Microsoft has realtime collaboriation as an optional part of MS Office.
Here's an example of where it is useful: keeping track of debts between people. For that, everyone needs read and write access.
I don't own any MS Office licenses, by the way, and I don't have Office installed. Neither do my roomates. It's expensive and buggy.
Personally, I think that Google spreadsheet is a great idea, and something that's likely to be used a lot.
I see a continued expansion of self-publishing (blogs, wikis, etc), email, ecommerce, etc. I see NEW applications opening up that can only effectively be done within a browser. What I don't see are traditional desktop applications moving into the browser. I certainly don't see the whole desktop moving into the browser ala WebOS.
The great thing about web browsers is that they're cross platform, and everyone has one. If you can't see the potential in that, it's probably futile to keep arguing with you. You're like that guy who can't understand why anyone would ever need or want a credit card.
Politics has a lot to do with technology, even though most people don't like to think about it.
When the U.S. was founded back in 1777, it was a Libertarian paradise. No welfare state, no standing army, no EPA, no income taxes-- and a whole lot of decentralization. This kind of government worked well for that period of time.
But times have changed. Technology has advanced.
War, which used to be fought slowly over the course of months, by commanders who might not have even heard from their commanding officers in weeks, became a lightning-fast test of brinksmanship. The next world war might be over in the course of a few hours if nuclear missiles are involved. Thus, we need a standing army of some kind, and some kind of defense establishment.
Industry, which used to be a bunch of artisans sitting in their homes plying their craft, became a massive, centralized, mechanized undertaking. Pollution became a serious problem, not only because of the lives it takes directly, but because of its long-term fatalities and effects on the landscape. Some chemicals do not naturally biodegrade-- for example, PCBs. So there needed to be an Environmental Protection Agency of some kind. Another problem was that since the consumers were now remote from the actual site of production, they began to have less and less idea of what they were consuming. To stop unscrupulous factory owners from selling tainted products, the Food and Drug Administration was formed.
These are only a few examples. Now, you can argue that these parts of the government have not done their job as well as they could. Or you could propose something to replace them. But you must first show that whatever would replace them would be better.
For example, if the Food and Drug Administration was replaced by a cartel of private businesses that refused to do business with anyone outside of the cartel, would this really be a fairer solution than the FDA as it is now? Government agencies are at least theoretically accountable to the public, whereas a cartel would not be. And to be considered a success, a cartel would have to have at least as much coercive power over producers as the FDA has now. So I do not believe there would be any advantage to this arrangement.
Too often, political philosophies ignore the real and concrete issues of the day, and I'm afraid Libertarianism has been no exception.
I believe that nearly _ALL_ chemicals can cause harm to fetuses.
Well, you're wrong about that.
DDT should be a community-selected issue. If you're dealing with massive mosquito-borne diseases, there is a CBA that should be performed to see if the benefits outweigh the costs.
DDT use cannot be a community-selected issue because the environment is common to all.
Water runoff from one community flows into another community, seeps into aquifers that feed wells, drains into the ocean.
This seems to be a typical blind spot for "libertarians," even the smarter ones. The. Environment. Can't. Be. Privatized.
The issue is a lot more complicated than either of us can debate in this forum, but I believe the issues must be brought back up.
The issues have been brought up. Well, all of them except for the issue of how this chemical ravages the natural world.
I brought that up in another post, but I doubt anyone will address it, because there's so many other reasons why using DDT is a manifestly stupid idea.
If you wanted to bring up the issue of environmentalism vs. utilitarianism, you could have easily picked a better issue. For example, is it moral for governments to drain swamps, and destroy the indiginous creatures living there, in order to reduce fatalities from malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases? Instead, you picked an issue where the harm to the public is obvious.
Yet we can't use DDT in much of the world, and I believe that is a bigger problem that was created by fiat and mandate than by research and reality.
Yes, I'm so sad that the government banned a chemical that was wiping out entire species of birds, causing retardation, and contaminating the groundwater. Private industry and selfishness would have solved the problem so much better. "More of this terrible gibberish," to borrow a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson. Man, I wonder what would have happened if he had been locked in a room with Ann Coulter for a few hours. I guess the world will never know.
That sounds like a great way to:
1. Breed DDT-resistant mosquitos
2. Contaminate the groundwater for generations, leading to
3. Retarded children and children with other developmental disabilities
4. Massive environmental damage, especially massive bird die-off
It's amazing how many great ideas you can have when you stop believing those so-called "scientists" and "researchers"
I like Red Hat. They've done a lot for linux, and a lot for the community.
They invented RPM, and many distros are based off of Red Hat.
They've also done a lot to make linux less scary to companies. Companies like dealing with an organization like Red Hat, because it gives them some reassurances. I'm not knocking the volunteer stuff-- but if linux was entirely a volunteer endeavor, I don't think you would see companies like IBM interested in it. Having organizations like Red Hat helps give the community the critical mass it needs to stay self-sustaining and free.
I use Fedora at home, and also at work. If you don't like the distro, don't use it. Simple as that. No need to spread FUD.
I agree that it does seem like an inversion of the social order to have service workers making so much more than they are "really worth." Before you call me a capitalist pig, think of this:
In other countries with more relaxed minimum wage and labor laws, it's easy to get things repaired on the cheap. Radio is busted? Have someone fix it for you. Broken bicycle? Same thing. Talk to anyone from Mexico. Many middle-class households there have maids.
In the States, it's impossible to get a car mechanic to even look at you sideways for less than $50. And if any appliance valued less than $100 breaks, you might as well buy a new one, because it's cheaper than paying the repairman. This leads to a lot of waste, obviously. It also tends to inflate the cost of living here, so that people making $50,000/year in the States are not "really" making as much as similarly paid people in India or elsewhere in the world.
Peronsally, I think that, on the whole, the tradeoff is worth it. I don't really want to go back to the bad old days where employers could pay whatever they wanted to, and give no benefits at all. I'm just trying to play devil's advocate.
Unfortunately, employers are starting to move more and more towards automation and robotics to solve their wage problems. Think of how automated your average, garden-variety McDonald's is, for example. Half of the machinery in the back of the store is just there to save manpower... like the automated fry baskets. To return to the example of janitors, companies like Roomba are already starting to create automated vacuuming robots. In a few decades, it may well be more economical to have robots doing most of the janitorial work, supported by a small staff of humans who catch the inevitable screwups and do some touch-up work on places that robots have a hard time with.
So really, so-called "service sector" jobs are not the fortresses of security that many people would like to believe. They are also under assault in this era of technology-- it's just that they are being eliminated by robotics and automation rather than outsourcing and deskilling. So what will we do with all of the former service workers in the future? I don't know, but it will probably involve yet more expansion of the government.
Of course, we all know who funds academia, for the most part. Government grants and subsidies. Assuming you have tenure, Professor, I think you have nothing to complain about.
Books don't fail to boot.
Books don't require batteries.
Ok, this is true.
Books are often more compact than their electronic equivalent.
Maybe in 1975. Nowadays, we have these things called "CD ROMs," "Hard Drives," and "flash memory" which can fit hundreds, if not thousands of books in a tiny space.
Books can withstand massive g-forces and falls from great heights.
Not really. Try dropping a hardcover physics textbook off of the top of a building. At the very least, you have ruined the binding, and lost a lot of pages.
I think CD-ROMs win here, because they have no loose moving parts, unlike books.
Anyway, why would "can withstand a fall from a very great height" be something I think about when making purchases? I'm not Indiana Jones.
Properly cared for books can last hundreds to thousands of years.
The books that last for thousands of years are books that have been printed on good quality acid-free paper or vellum, with the proper inks, and stored in the correct humidity, probably away from sunlight. Very few home libraries fall into this category. I doubt most of the paperbacks printed during this century will see the next few centuries, just because of how cheaply they were made.
I think computer technology has the potential to preserve books pretty effectively. Check out project Gutenberg for an example of how people scanned in some of the classics, and are now distributing them for free on the internet.
I agree there are a lot of practical reasons why books will stick around. The one you didn't mention, but which is important to me, is readability! I still find it easier on my eyes to read paper books. Hopefully this will be fixed eventually. The other problematic issues are copyright issues.
Hell, I read books to get a break from computers. I think if I had that many books I'd donate most of them to the local library. I know I don't have time to reread 3,500 books - there's millions more out there I haven't read yet!
The fact that you can go to the library and get a book doesn't make home book collections worthless. Sometimes, it's really nice to read for an hour, without having to worry about due dates or dealing with librarians. My parents always had a lot of books in their house, and I ended up reading a lot of them at various times. I think that, on the whole, it was much more helpful than living next to a library would have been.
Some people have been mentioning e-books. Well, it's still a lot more comfortable to read a physical book than to stare at a screen. Until the technology catches up, books are still the best.
Laissez-faire capitalism has been tried before in the 19th century. It failed then, before any legal restrictions or minimum wage laws were in place. People were stuffing sausages with sawdust and adulterating milk with formaldhyde because there was no FDA. Markets went through boom and bust cycles that left millions unemployed. The Great Depression is the best-known one, but by no means the only one. Boom and bust cycles are the natural consequence of an unregulated free market.
Read some history-- I mean real history, not the kind that says the Jews started World War II or that aliens invented the automobile. Your local library might be a good place to start-- see what textbooks they have for high school history classes.
If I post the links, will you bother reading them?
Maybe, but I will read them in the knowledge that they are NOT the work of real, mainstream economists, but rather that of racist political kooks. One step above the "time cube" guy. One very small step.
When I told you to put down the Ayn Rand, this is not what I meant.
>> You can, in theory, prove that a particular sandbox running on a particular OS is secure.
> Cantor's diagonal argument doesn't reduce the problem to a proof-by-divine-intervention.
> Humans do not have a magical exemption from the halting problem, just that we currently
> have better hardware for solving certain classes of "hard" problems. We can make better
> (meta^x)schemas than today's computers can. But problems still exist that we not only
> cannot solve, but we can't tell if we can ever solve them...
Don't confuse the halting problem with the statement that "proving code correct is impossible." There's a large amount of code that has been proven correct. There's even a project at Carnegie Mellon to construct a provably correct TCP/IP stack...
Also, as developers move away from older languages like C and C++, and towards more abstract languages like Java and C#, certain classes of careless errors become impossible to make. Buffer overflows and other memory corruptions are the most high-profile, but there's a lot of more obscure errors like failing to include a virtual destructor in a virtual class in C++.
There is also a growing acknowledgement of the importance of having a good security model.
There's been a lot of research in the field of operating systems on this topic.
The basic idea is that the operating system should use "capabilities" rather than "permissions."
With "permissions," a given user runs code, and the code gets to do whatever actions that user has permission to do. So if he is root, or Administrator, he can wipe the hard disk, send emails, etc. With "capabilities," the user chooses which abilities to give to the code he runs. Then, this code can call other code with either the same or reduced permissions, etc.
The basic idea is to have separation of power. For example, a rogue email application may be able to send out rogue emails, but it shouldn't be able to modify the hard disk. Since that is not required for its normal operation, it should never get that capability in the first place. In fact, it may not even be aware of whether there is a hard disk or not. Information and abilities should be on a "need to know" basis.
Unfortunately, to a large extent, the current model is that you are either the "super user"-- in which case you can do anything-- or else you are a regular user, and you have all the regular user permissions. Think of how coarse-grained "chmod" is.
So it doesn't make sense to say "this new sandbox is just like the old sandbox-- we haven't gained anything."
If Microsoft uses this chance to improve their security model, and their development models, they have indeed gained a lot. I hope linux and the other free operating systems can change their infrastructure to keep up.
I hope I'm not feeding the troll here... but does anyone really believe that deleting folders in "program files" uninstalls applications?
Call me a fanatic, but open source isn't worth crap if it can't be redistributed. This is _THE_ principle of open source, that anyone can make AND RUN their own version. There are business-ready licenses out there, but the GPL was made to perpetuate the programmers' and users' freedom.
Ok, but back in the real world, there are devices that can't even be modified. If you ever want companies to ship Linux on toasters, they better be able to distribute a non-modifiable version suitable to the hardware. Even if it's "politically incorrect."
I think Linus needs a reality check. Perhaps a few months of working for Microsoft will make him realize his mistakes. There ARE evil people, evil corporations trying to take over the world, just look at the patent business.
I think YOU need a reality check. Linus can't fix the patent system in the United States and elsewhere by himself, no matter what license he adopts. He can't repeal the DMCA either.
Anyway, Linus is not "just another programmer," and he never "went corporate". He's always been in it for the love of the work, unlike some other open source leaders I could name.
The consequence has generally been that his code has been of a much higher quality!
Compare the kernel code with the code for emacs, or configure scripts.