Why not? If I exercise my FREEDOM to choose to make software, should I not also be able to exercise my FREEDOM to choose to sell it for money and not have my effort rewarded by people who choose to copy it, rather than to buy it?
"Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free speech, not free beer."..."free software refers to the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software."
And therefore not to pay anything for it, thus making it FREE as in free lunch.
thanks for the link, unfortunately having read the article I now have concluded that Richard Stallman is a bit gone. Basically, his 'freedoms' are as constricting to others as certain current licensing practices are now.
I develop a program, spending my time and energy so to do. I need to eat, drink, surf and play Quake - and to do so I need to pay my electricity and grocery bills. How do I then make any money to repay my time and effort to enable me to live?
Merely because Mr./Dr./Prof. Stallman and others feel that they can devote their time to developing free software doesn't mean that all should be forced to.
As far as I can tell, his politics are merely the other extreme to Microsoft's and therefore just as suspect.
Okay, revolutionary statement here but selling software for money is not wrong. Did that run by a bit fast? Okay, I provide you with a service and you provide me with money in return. Sounds good? Flippant sarcasm aside, I honestly do not see why people shouldn't sell software. I certainly don't see anything wrong with open source software either.
It is all a question of balance - make some money, write some good software and prosper groovy! Write bad software and watch your stock fall. Alternatively write stuff for free in your spare time, gain karma. Do NOT on the other hand write software that is deliberately anti-competitive, ultimately feature-obsessed and ungainly not to mention unstable, insecure and ever-so-slightly crash-prone.
-'I think he is the one the prophecy spoke of.'
-'You mean the one who will bring balance to the source.'
Well, that all depends on your definition doesn't it? I mean enforcing a vicious caste-based system which kept the peasant serfs indentured; that is not at all bad, is it?
The Chinese have no more claim on Tibet than they do on Vancouver
As I pointed out at the beginnning of my mail I throroughly revile the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
While I am strongly against the occupation of Tibet by the PRC I would like to add some colour to this: I would like to point out that the regime that the Chinese replaced was almost as repressive. So much for Buddhist harmony.
I have two computers - a P120 laptop with 24M ram and a P166 desktop with 16M ram. Why? Because at the moment I am a poor student who can't afford a Beowulf Cluster to play Quake on. One runs Win95 the other Debian.
The really great thing about things like Linux is that they are a choice based OS, you want a login shell, a text editor and a coupla device drivers? No problem. OTOH if you want several shells, more programming languages than you can shake a stick at, an MS Office clone without (hooo-fu***ng-ray) the paperclip from hell, bell whistles and three different kinds of knob, that isn't a problem either.
This is where cumbersome implementations fall down there is little choice to have cross-platform uniformity and reasonable performance. You get the <sarcasm> perfect* </sarcasm> operating system or nothing, there is no pick-and-choose.
For my desktop I generally only ever use MS Word and Excel (which I must admit aren't bad) and Quake; on my laptop I like to do a bit of programmming in Perl and other assorted crufty things.
I know that there was one of Kings for Doom II, although I'd quite like to see the one for Trinity (I had several friends there), ditto Churchill (Ever meet Richard Birtwhistle or Rob Lygoe?)
Strictly speaking in England protestants do have a right to bear arms for protection against Jacobite revolutionaries - a fine piece of modern legislation. Although somewhat superceded by various other fine acts of legislation which affect the law-abiding and do nothing to prevent armed crime - handguns are illegal, knives are illegal, CS/Mace or even pepper spray is illegal.
Everyone in England is nice and well behaved - Good Sheep! Except of course, you know, criminals and stuff.
On the other side of the coin, I have several friends who were at Cambridge University (UK) - Parts of Blue Boar Court off Trinity Street and all of Robinson College on Grange Road have a serious DoomII-alike look.
Big redbrick building with large courtyard entered through a bastion with portcullis gates. The courtyard is surrounded by tiers of flats with walkways going round. *Shuuudddder* where's a dark corner to lurk in?
Elgon
Not to be rude but if you're referring to something related to EBE's etc... then I'm afraid it is a crock. Matter does not spontaneously turn from normal matter to antimatter (fortunately)
OTOH, if you wish to provide me with a few references etc... I will be more than happy to admit I am wrong.
Yep, unfortunately the hagfish are not immune to the slime themselves so they tie themselves in a knot which they then slide along their body to scrape it off. Either very cool or extremely dumb, I haven't decided.
The slime itself has loads of uses from helping to mop up chemical spills to (allegedly) tank armour(?!), via wallpaper paste probably.
"Here's a lead: Create atoms of element 115 in a particle accelerator and investigate them. Element 115's atoms are not only stable, they also have a unique feature: emition of gravity waves!!!. You only need to amplify them, and you got yourself a gravity wave generator."
Erm, firstly creating the damn stuff is hard you get a nucleus of heavy element every n-billionth collision. It generally takes several months of synthesis to create the two or three atoms of a super-heavy element to verify the synthesis.
Element 115 is stable, RELATIVELY speaking, ie. its half-life is measured in the millisecond to second region of things as opposed to elements 109 to 113 which have lives shorter than that of Bill Gates at a Linux Convention.
Finally, wtf are you talking about - gravity wave emission? Jesus, either I am really behind the times or you have being smoking funny tobacco.
"BTW, if you bombard 115 with protons, you get an anti-matter Element 116 atoms"
Hmmm...Anti-matter is (broadly speaking) where the nucleus is made of antiprotons and antineutrons and instead of electrons you have positrons 'orbiting' it. If you bombard element 115 with protons you are unlikely to acheive anything and certainly not antimatter - the superheavy nuclei are made by the fusion of two fairly heavy nuclei in the zinc-lead region of thing IIRC.
The thing I like about German science is, despite the Teutonic reputation for accuracy and precision, their really great ideas are about imprecision; to whit Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Gaussian Distributions.
Incertitude is far more important than exactitude.
I rather like the idea personally - a bit like the encrypted message hidden in Pi in Cosmos - although I do agree that the numbers he has chosen are cosmological in nature rather than at the microscopic level.
"Personally I... came into existance."
The problem with TOE's is that we might not recognise one when we see it. What if it is hideously complex and making any sort of useful or testable prediction is nigh impossible? I have to admit, I would like think that our universe has a nice, symmetrical, simple and elegant soluion but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't.
Elgon
Re:Stanislaw Lem is SF best kept secret
on
Solaris
·
· Score: 1
Iain M Banks is god, but watch for my first novel 'The Universal Engine' when it appears in ten years or so.
A mini clay is a disc made of pitch and chalk about 2.5ins in diamter which travels at anything up to 100mph; with practice a human can still smoke one with a shotgun at 20 yards.
we've all seen the hordes of concerned do-gooders and politicians looking dreadfully serious and saying that we should "save our children"by giving them the powers to determine what we see, hear or can say. This has nothing to do with filtering technology.
Why is this a bad thing? Surely they are so much smarter, nicer and more intelligent than us?
WRONG!
We, as people - individual conscious entities - should be allowed to read, watch or say whatever we like provided we accept the responsibility for our own actions. Okay, maybe children's access to porn etc.. should be limited, but all adults should haveaccessto whatever knowledge they like. Including, for example, how to make explosives, toxins or even nuclear devices - the knowledge itself is not dangerous, merely those who would misuse it.
It is all well and good pointing to examples of people using such knowledge to bad ends but this is essentially irrelevant - the words on the page did not turn themselves into the devices which blew up Universities and suchlike,it took Theodore Kaczynski (sp?) to do that.
Drinking down a glass of bacterial culture? Erm...yogurt?
To be fair, the bacteria could turn out to be the great killer plague but they could also change into ice-skating mongooses and dance the bolero, which is about as likely.
(It'd be highly ironic if I was proved 100% wrong though.)
Also, beacuse if you happen to know about the people in London who first isolated the penicillin type which occurs in some penicillium molds you'll know that it is highly toxic.
The penicillins are chemically altered versions.
Elgon
PS - Little known shooting-legend (alas, pobably untrue): Alexander Fleming left his petri dishes over the weekend because he was going to a shooting match.
The best lubricant for many (high temp. high pressure) engineering processes is currently molybdenum disulphide (for example: I coat bullets in it for highpower rifle shooting) as it has a lamellar structure, the layers of which slide over each other nicely.
I also remember reading somewhere that at really high temperatures and pressures fullerenes tended to become really hard, on the order of tungsten carbide or even diamond. Anyone wanta pour some sand in your engine oil?
Erm...diamond carbon-carbon bonds are exactly the same strength (give or take a little bit) as other carbon-carbon bonds. It is the high levels of symmetry which are difficult to produce IIRC, and which make diamonds hard.
Otherwise I agree entirely, we are in an age of high carbon usage. Carefully made synthetic diamond has already been suggested (in SciAm) as a substrate for TFT screens and other annoyingly difficult to manufacture semiconductors.
Just wait until the chips themselves are made of doped buckyballs connected with nanofibres made of single filament hyperconjugated carbon chains.
Silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide still have a long way to go but just maybe we're seeing the compounds and concepts that will replace them in a hundred years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not? If I exercise my FREEDOM to choose to make software, should I not also be able to exercise my FREEDOM to choose to sell it for money and not have my effort rewarded by people who choose to copy it, rather than to buy it?
"Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free speech, not free beer."..."free software refers to the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software."
And therefore not to pay anything for it, thus making it FREE as in free lunch.
Elgon
sylvester,
thanks for the link, unfortunately having read the article I now have concluded that Richard Stallman is a bit gone. Basically, his 'freedoms' are as constricting to others as certain current licensing practices are now.
I develop a program, spending my time and energy so to do. I need to eat, drink, surf and play Quake - and to do so I need to pay my electricity and grocery bills. How do I then make any money to repay my time and effort to enable me to live?
Merely because Mr./Dr./Prof. Stallman and others feel that they can devote their time to developing free software doesn't mean that all should be forced to.
As far as I can tell, his politics are merely the other extreme to Microsoft's and therefore just as suspect.
Elgon
Okay, revolutionary statement here but selling software for money is not wrong. Did that run by a bit fast? Okay, I provide you with a service and you provide me with money in return. Sounds good? Flippant sarcasm aside, I honestly do not see why people shouldn't sell software. I certainly don't see anything wrong with open source software either.
It is all a question of balance - make some money, write some good software and prosper groovy! Write bad software and watch your stock fall. Alternatively write stuff for free in your spare time, gain karma. Do NOT on the other hand write software that is deliberately anti-competitive, ultimately feature-obsessed and ungainly not to mention unstable, insecure and ever-so-slightly crash-prone.
-'I think he is the one the prophecy spoke of.'
-'You mean the one who will bring balance to the source.'
Elgon
This is, of course, not true
Well, that all depends on your definition doesn't it? I mean enforcing a vicious caste-based system which kept the peasant serfs indentured; that is not at all bad, is it?
The Chinese have no more claim on Tibet than they do on Vancouver
As I pointed out at the beginnning of my mail I throroughly revile the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
Elgon
While I am strongly against the occupation of Tibet by the PRC I would like to add some colour to this: I would like to point out that the regime that the Chinese replaced was almost as repressive. So much for Buddhist harmony.
Elgon
First some intro...
I have two computers - a P120 laptop with 24M ram and a P166 desktop with 16M ram. Why? Because at the moment I am a poor student who can't afford a Beowulf Cluster to play Quake on. One runs Win95 the other Debian.
The really great thing about things like Linux is that they are a choice based OS, you want a login shell, a text editor and a coupla device drivers? No problem. OTOH if you want several shells, more programming languages than you can shake a stick at, an MS Office clone without (hooo-fu***ng-ray) the paperclip from hell, bell whistles and three different kinds of knob, that isn't a problem either.
This is where cumbersome implementations fall down there is little choice to have cross-platform uniformity and reasonable performance. You get the <sarcasm> perfect* </sarcasm> operating system or nothing, there is no pick-and-choose.
For my desktop I generally only ever use MS Word and Excel (which I must admit aren't bad) and Quake; on my laptop I like to do a bit of programmming in Perl and other assorted crufty things.
Three cheers for Linus and Tux.
Elgon
I know that there was one of Kings for Doom II, although I'd quite like to see the one for Trinity (I had several friends there), ditto Churchill (Ever meet Richard Birtwhistle or Rob Lygoe?)
Elgon
Strictly speaking in England protestants do have a right to bear arms for protection against Jacobite revolutionaries - a fine piece of modern legislation. Although somewhat superceded by various other fine acts of legislation which affect the law-abiding and do nothing to prevent armed crime - handguns are illegal, knives are illegal, CS/Mace or even pepper spray is illegal.
Everyone in England is nice and well behaved - Good Sheep! Except of course, you know, criminals and stuff.
Elgon
On the other side of the coin, I have several friends who were at Cambridge University (UK) - Parts of Blue Boar Court off Trinity Street and all of Robinson College on Grange Road have a serious DoomII-alike look.
Big redbrick building with large courtyard entered through a bastion with portcullis gates. The courtyard is surrounded by tiers of flats with walkways going round. *Shuuudddder* where's a dark corner to lurk in?
Elgon
Troll??? (ducks as comment flies way over my head)
Elgon
Not to be rude but if you're referring to something related to EBE's etc... then I'm afraid it is a crock. Matter does not spontaneously turn from normal matter to antimatter (fortunately)
OTOH, if you wish to provide me with a few references etc... I will be more than happy to admit I am wrong.
Elgon
Yep, unfortunately the hagfish are not immune to the slime themselves so they tie themselves in a knot which they then slide along their body to scrape it off. Either very cool or extremely dumb, I haven't decided.
The slime itself has loads of uses from helping to mop up chemical spills to (allegedly) tank armour(?!), via wallpaper paste probably.
Elgon
Acumen wrote...
"You are doing it all wrong!"
Heard that before!
"Here's a lead: Create atoms of element 115 in a particle accelerator and investigate them. Element 115's atoms are not only stable, they also have a unique feature: emition of gravity waves!!!. You only need to amplify them, and you got yourself a gravity wave generator."
Erm, firstly creating the damn stuff is hard you get a nucleus of heavy element every n-billionth collision. It generally takes several months of synthesis to create the two or three atoms of a super-heavy element to verify the synthesis.
Element 115 is stable, RELATIVELY speaking, ie. its half-life is measured in the millisecond to second region of things as opposed to elements 109 to 113 which have lives shorter than that of Bill Gates at a Linux Convention.
Finally, wtf are you talking about - gravity wave emission? Jesus, either I am really behind the times or you have being smoking funny tobacco.
"BTW, if you bombard 115 with protons, you get an anti-matter Element 116 atoms"
Hmmm...Anti-matter is (broadly speaking) where the nucleus is made of antiprotons and antineutrons and instead of electrons you have positrons 'orbiting' it. If you bombard element 115 with protons you are unlikely to acheive anything and certainly not antimatter - the superheavy nuclei are made by the fusion of two fairly heavy nuclei in the zinc-lead region of thing IIRC.
Elgon - karma whore to the rescue
The thing I like about German science is, despite the Teutonic reputation for accuracy and precision, their really great ideas are about imprecision; to whit Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Gaussian Distributions.
Incertitude is far more important than exactitude.
Elgon
It was written...
... underlying forces."
... came into existance."
"For a start
I rather like the idea personally - a bit like the encrypted message hidden in Pi in Cosmos - although I do agree that the numbers he has chosen are cosmological in nature rather than at the microscopic level.
"Personally I
The problem with TOE's is that we might not recognise one when we see it. What if it is hideously complex and making any sort of useful or testable prediction is nigh impossible? I have to admit, I would like think that our universe has a nice, symmetrical, simple and elegant soluion but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't.
Elgon
Iain M Banks is god, but watch for my first novel 'The Universal Engine' when it appears in ten years or so.
Elgon
Blaargh! One learns more each day.
Elgon
A mini clay is a disc made of pitch and chalk about 2.5ins in diamter which travels at anything up to 100mph; with practice a human can still smoke one with a shotgun at 20 yards.
Elgon - goodbye karma!
(Bill Gates as) Sherriff of Nottingham: And what makes you think that people will follow your operating system?
(Linus Torvalds as) Robin Hood: Because, unlike other operating systems, mine has a system which operates!
Elgon
Okay folks,
we've all seen the hordes of concerned do-gooders and politicians looking dreadfully serious and saying that we should "save our children"by giving them the powers to determine what we see, hear or can say. This has nothing to do with filtering technology.
Why is this a bad thing? Surely they are so much smarter, nicer and more intelligent than us?
WRONG!
We, as people - individual conscious entities - should be allowed to read, watch or say whatever we like provided we accept the responsibility for our own actions. Okay, maybe children's access to porn etc.. should be limited, but all adults should haveaccessto whatever knowledge they like. Including, for example, how to make explosives, toxins or even nuclear devices - the knowledge itself is not dangerous, merely those who would misuse it.
It is all well and good pointing to examples of people using such knowledge to bad ends but this is essentially irrelevant - the words on the page did not turn themselves into the devices which blew up Universities and suchlike,it took Theodore Kaczynski (sp?) to do that.
Elgon
Drinking down a glass of bacterial culture? Erm...yogurt?
To be fair, the bacteria could turn out to be the great killer plague but they could also change into ice-skating mongooses and dance the bolero, which is about as likely.
(It'd be highly ironic if I was proved 100% wrong though.)
Elgon
Not American and not gun nuts.
Responsible, law abiding British firearms users.
Alexander Fleming was a rifle shooter, as was Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle.
Elgon
Also, beacuse if you happen to know about the people in London who first isolated the penicillin type which occurs in some penicillium molds you'll know that it is highly toxic.
The penicillins are chemically altered versions.
Elgon
PS - Little known shooting-legend (alas, pobably untrue): Alexander Fleming left his petri dishes over the weekend because he was going to a shooting match.
The best lubricant for many (high temp. high pressure) engineering processes is currently molybdenum disulphide (for example: I coat bullets in it for highpower rifle shooting) as it has a lamellar structure, the layers of which slide over each other nicely.
I also remember reading somewhere that at really high temperatures and pressures fullerenes tended to become really hard, on the order of tungsten carbide or even diamond. Anyone wanta pour some sand in your engine oil?
Elgon
Erm...diamond carbon-carbon bonds are exactly the same strength (give or take a little bit) as other carbon-carbon bonds. It is the high levels of symmetry which are difficult to produce IIRC, and which make diamonds hard.
Otherwise I agree entirely, we are in an age of high carbon usage. Carefully made synthetic diamond has already been suggested (in SciAm) as a substrate for TFT screens and other annoyingly difficult to manufacture semiconductors.
Just wait until the chips themselves are made of doped buckyballs connected with nanofibres made of single filament hyperconjugated carbon chains.
Silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide still have a long way to go but just maybe we're seeing the compounds and concepts that will replace them in a hundred years or so.
Elgon