3. While I do like GPL and Freeware I also believe that we need to have comercialware. Let's see, if all software was free then why would anyone in their right mind want to spend money to study programming at a an instituion? Why get a degree in software engineering?
Well I paid money to study physics in college, even though all physics is free. (Well, perhaps a few confidential exceptions.)
The fact that a program is not property would not necessarily mean that no on would pay for the labor of programming.
Not that I'm saying there shouldn't be commercial software, I just don't agree that software as intellectual property for sale is the only way that software would ever be developed, since of course there are already real world examples that disprove that hypothesis.
disagree, because I don't think your implied definition of value makes any sense; the "value" of a commodity is determined by what buyers are willing to pay for it, and what sellers are willing to sell it for.
I think this is a definition for cost, but does not signify value. dictionary.com defines cost as an amount paid or required in payment for a purchase; a price vs. the definition of value which is an amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else.
So I'm saying that commodity trading reflects the cost but if you were to try to recreate the oil from scratch and hence put an equitable amount of time, effort, energy, and resources into recreating, i.e. value, the cost of those equitable amounts would not equal the commodity cost of oil, so you have an cost1=oil=value=cost2, but cost1 != cost2 and so something is wrong with our economic system.
We have no 'rights' to view any movie, really. If we did, theaters couldn't make a profit off of tickets, and DVDs would only be priced high enough to cover costs.
The problem with this line of argument is that when you go to a theatre, it doesn't look like you are buying anything. The transaction doesn't make you believe that you are buying the theatre or the spool of film. When you buy a DVD the transaction does look like you are purchasing something, not like you are entering into a contract, or licensing agreement. There has been strong legal precedent that if a transaction looks like you are buying something then you are.
Elsewhere the poster said: When you purchase a DVD, you are paying for the ability to play it on players approved by the people who made the disc. As much as everyone hates to admit it, there is nothing illegal about this. You can buy a DVD without owning a player, and if you do you can't sue about not being able to watch it.
How did you get to be the arbiter of this? I'm sorry but the courts disagree. If it looks like a purchase then it is. Basically, you are saying that DVD purchase is a privelege of "club members" and that you get to be part of the club by purchasing an approved DVD player. Most states have laws governing how such clubs operate that as far as I know are being ignored by DVD player manufacturers and retailers.
P.S. I have moderator points, but I replied to this post rather than mod-ing it down, so all you people that bitch about that should mod me up!
One problem when comparing plans like this for producing fuel, to other more traditional fuels is that the cost of crude oil or whatever does not reflect the value of the oil.
That is if we had to reproduce the oil rather than just extracting it from the ground we'd probably find other more "green" methods of energy production much less of an investment.
The fact that something that is renewable cost more than something that is irreplaceable is a pointer to the shortcomings of our economic system, not to problems with solar, wind, or other alternative energy sources.
This doesn't support the original assertion that someone will never be able to learn to see. In fact, it is just the opposite, that people with eyesight restored do learn to see eventually.
Problem with brain is that unless you can see from the begining of your life, being able to see for the first time when you are 25 is not going to do you very good - brain simply hasn't had much training as to patern recogniton, depth perception, etc. People who get their vision later in life have hard time dealing with it, and it becomes more of a burden than heplful - they would still have to tuch things in order to recognize them, sometimes even different colour of the object will conI knew that psychology class i took last semester was worth something:)fuse them... So, while this is great news for people who are about to lose their sight (kids including), people that are blind today, and have been so for most of their lives, probably won't have much use of it.
Not that I don't believe everything that I read in the comment section of Slashdot, but do you have in references for the statements you make? What study is it that analyzed people who got their vision late in life and where did they find these people?
Most articles I've read on the subject indicate the brain is very adept at adapting to new input. (do a google search for brain adapating sensory input and you get tons of abstracts)
I knew that psychology class i took last semester was worth something:)
Were you awarded your PhD immediately after the class?
Perhaps you should try a neural physiology class next time.
Tolkien was a professor of english and was especially interested in old english language. LotR is as much an exercise in language and a forum for Tolkien's own "retro" poetry as an epic novel, but if you haven't ever read a better book, maybe you should put down the O'reilly and take a literature class!
This is a pretty spineless reply to CmdrTaco. Sure attack him for picking Lord of the Rings as the best book (or books, depending on who you ask) ever written, but you don't offer an alternative "best book". You just talk about a literature class and attack him for interest in computers. How is an attempt to look superior without risking anything an insightful comment? (moderators? hello?!?)
SecureWorks has been selling their iSensor product for some time now. It is also based on OpenSource Software using Snort and IPChains. The product comes with monitoring and constant signature updates for the IDS functionality, so that could be seen as the "value-add" for buying what is basically a bunch of free software in a PC box.
They protect the creator in profiting from the art , literature or music they create. If there wasn't any copyright protection there wouldn't be any incentive to create anything. Sure some people will do it, but not on a scale like we have today.
This is one argument for copyrights that's always seemed a little skewed to me. How does getting residual profit from something you've already created encourage you to create more. I mean in programming for instance, the reason most commercial code is written is because the programmer does not get residual income, but rather only gets paid while actively programming. I mean would you continue to work if your company said, 'we'll continue paying you 80k a year for this one program you've written forever." I think the scheme that will lead to people producing more is one in which they are only paid while actively creating.
The idea of a starving artist or musician who creates for the love of art or music is a lie. Everyone dreams of being famous and profiting from their works.
I'm glad you settled that issue for us. If the majority of artist create with the goal of being famous and wealthy than they labor under a serious misapprehension since the vast majority will never be either. The fact is the vast majority of art is never rewarded in any financial fashion whatsoever. So if only profitable art were created there would be far less of it.
Intellectual property protections are actually good because they force people to create something better than what exists today. Patents are a perfect example. There are thousands of companies researching new technology to create products that are better and cheaper than what we have today. Without patent protection we would have to rely on the government and universities for research. And since they aren't for profit we would only get things some geek thought up in a lab and would probably have no practical use in the real world.
Kind of sly to mix patents in with copyright since many people have very different feelings on the two things. Muddying the issue only makes your argument look weaker, especially with smearing university researchers. The problem with all your speculation is that it's of the form, if the world were exactly the same except no patents... but the world would be vastly different without a concept of intellectual property. My problem with IP is that it introduces a prior restraint upon me. If I think up a great idea without any outside influences, I can be legally restrained from using just because someone else thought of it first.
Maybe, maybe not... it depends on what the goals are. If you want to have targeted exploration without a huge impact on the environment, it excludes some solutions.
Balloons. Whats wrong with having a computer-controlled balloon with a cannister of hydrogen or helium beneath it? As local temperature and air pressure change, the computer could inflate or deflate accordingly. Toss in a good altimeter, and you can drift across the surface within a few feet for months on end.
But you can't go and check out that thing over there as the research engineer mentions as on of the goals... You just go where the wind carries you, and if you release several from the same place at the same time, they are likely to all go the same place.
If not balloons, why not use spring-loaded "grasshoppers" ? Essentially big wind-up toys, you can deploy thousands of these on the surface. They dont require intelligence, they dont consume fuel, and they dont require supervision of any sort. They simply pop around the surface taking photographs both on the ground and in the air, and when their spring begins to run low, they use the remainder of the spring's potential energy to broadcast the pictures and atmospheric data they recorded during their lifespan of hopping around Mars for a few weeks.
I don't know what makes a spring a better place to store energy than the electo-chemical solution they have. And you need electricity throughout the probes life to pop photos etc, so you have a spring driven generator onboard, getting kind of complex. Plus having thousands of spring "grasshoppers" randomly popping around on the pristine martian surface is going to destroy a lot of potential data that scientist might be interested in.
I think this guy fails to realize that the more complicated his device becomes, the more risks of failure you encounter, the higher the pricetag becomes, and the more problems you'll have no way of addressing.
I think this guy is a senior research engineer who would understand that very well. Since the article states that this is an adaptation of a military project to mars exploration, I think the device is the simplest one that meets the requirements of it's original military purpose. NASA just seems to think it will work well on Mars also.
SPARCs come from Sun, everybody makes a PC - so guess which is cheaper? We see some reasons why they went for the Blade (a nice machine, but rather more expensive than a couple of PCs).
SPARC does not come from Sun. See the SPARC organizations homepage. I believe Sun actually purchases many of its chips from another company. SPARC is a standard. Of course other people have addressed why you are wrong about everything else you've said.
Forgive my ignorance on this matter, but don't ISP's ALREADY log every task you complete? I could be wrong, but I would think they have records of what websites and newsgroups and such you've been to. This info is probably supposed to be kept private, but who knows nowadays.
As someone who has worked at a couple of ISPs (including a southeastern one with millions of subscribers) it is definitely not common practice to keep records of anything users do. In fact, none of the data on email servers (or similar user data elsewhere) was ever backed up. The reason: so that anytime they received a subpoena, like from a divorce asking for a list of porno sites or nasty email exchanges, they could immediately return it saying they did not keep any such information. A System Administrator was already devoted almost 100% of the time just to deal with Criminal investigations, if user data tracking usage were kept it would have taken a team of people to deal with the civil cases.
While Clinton and his running mate were elected in 1992, they did not take office until Jan 1993. Would have been kind of hard for them to kill the program before they were in office. It's kind of scary that someone so careless with facts has anything to do with nuclear power.
It's become hackneyed on Slashdot forums for posters to (pre-emptively) bash anyone who attacks MS for bashing MS. Every MS (or Intellectual Property, Napster, 2600, Patents, whatever) story posted sees a rash of post saying 'oh here comes the anti-MS bashing. everyone on slashdot bash MS for making money.' But it seems there are at least as many defenders as bashers, so part of their criticism (the part about everyone at/. doing some groupspeak MS bashing) rings hollow. I suggest that everyone from both sides argue the issue with facts (and hopefully references; hypertext is a wonderful thing!) and reason . . . not attacks on other people's tendency (fictional, in any case) to bash. Perhaps if you seriously examine everything you are going to say and look for some hard evidence to support it, you might find you are less certain about the convictions you hold. (A good thing for people across the spectrum, being open minded.) And in closing, in the words of Oliver Cromwell (how 'bout him for a target to bash) "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken..."
Something I've wondered about regarding all these DeCSS cases where the lawyers are saying that code is not speech (not expression, by extension one might say) and hence not protected, where does that leave software copyright? Now if code is just functional specification or what not...
Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration
... it is NOT copyright-able according to the U.S. Copyright office. So does this mean if 2600 (and DeCSS as speech) lose their court case, we can all copy MS products to our hearts content? Since as far as I'm aware copyright is what protects those products, and if they are a mechanism and not expression, they've chosen the wrong law to protect them with... I may just be all messed up but I've alway tended to associate Copyright with protecting Speech.
Re:Pro GPL people with mod points are delusional.
on
xMach GPL Free
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· Score: 1
There is a difference between how understandable boilerplate is and how understandable the ideas of the GPL, BSD, etc are. For example, the lease on my Apartment is thirty some odd pages of legalese. But the idea is simple, I pay the owner and I get to live here.
Now, as to your suggested alternative, it doesn't matter how much more easily an idea can be stated if it doesn't communicate what you want to convey. I think people who use the GPL recognize the difference between it and the public domain. And decide the GPL is what makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I paid money to study physics in college, even though all physics is free. (Well, perhaps a few confidential exceptions.)
The fact that a program is not property would not necessarily mean that no on would pay for the labor of programming.
Not that I'm saying there shouldn't be commercial software, I just don't agree that software as intellectual property for sale is the only way that software would ever be developed, since of course there are already real world examples that disprove that hypothesis.
I think this is a definition for cost, but does not signify value. dictionary.com defines cost as an amount paid or required in payment for a purchase; a price vs. the definition of value which is an amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else.
So I'm saying that commodity trading reflects the cost but if you were to try to recreate the oil from scratch and hence put an equitable amount of time, effort, energy, and resources into recreating, i.e. value, the cost of those equitable amounts would not equal the commodity cost of oil, so you have an cost1=oil=value=cost2, but cost1 != cost2 and so something is wrong with our economic system.
The problem with this line of argument is that when you go to a theatre, it doesn't look like you are buying anything. The transaction doesn't make you believe that you are buying the theatre or the spool of film. When you buy a DVD the transaction does look like you are purchasing something, not like you are entering into a contract, or licensing agreement. There has been strong legal precedent that if a transaction looks like you are buying something then you are.
Elsewhere the poster said: When you purchase a DVD, you are paying for the ability to play it on players approved by the people who made the disc. As much as everyone hates to admit it, there is nothing illegal about this. You can buy a DVD without owning a player, and if you do you can't sue about not being able to watch it.
How did you get to be the arbiter of this? I'm sorry but the courts disagree. If it looks like a purchase then it is. Basically, you are saying that DVD purchase is a privelege of "club members" and that you get to be part of the club by purchasing an approved DVD player. Most states have laws governing how such clubs operate that as far as I know are being ignored by DVD player manufacturers and retailers.
P.S. I have moderator points, but I replied to this post rather than mod-ing it down, so all you people that bitch about that should mod me up!
One problem when comparing plans like this for producing fuel, to other more traditional fuels is that the cost of crude oil or whatever does not reflect the value of the oil.
That is if we had to reproduce the oil rather than just extracting it from the ground we'd probably find other more "green" methods of energy production much less of an investment.
The fact that something that is renewable cost more than something that is irreplaceable is a pointer to the shortcomings of our economic system, not to problems with solar, wind, or other alternative energy sources.
This doesn't support the original assertion that someone will never be able to learn to see. In fact, it is just the opposite, that people with eyesight restored do learn to see eventually.
Not that I don't believe everything that I read in the comment section of Slashdot, but do you have in references for the statements you make? What study is it that analyzed people who got their vision late in life and where did they find these people?
Most articles I've read on the subject indicate the brain is very adept at adapting to new input. (do a google search for brain adapating sensory input and you get tons of abstracts)
I knew that psychology class i took last semester was worth something :)
Were you awarded your PhD immediately after the class?
Perhaps you should try a neural physiology class next time.
Tolkien was a professor of english and was especially interested in old english language. LotR is as much an exercise in language and a forum for Tolkien's own "retro" poetry as an epic novel, but if you haven't ever read a better book, maybe you should put down the O'reilly and take a literature class!
This is a pretty spineless reply to CmdrTaco. Sure attack him for picking Lord of the Rings as the best book (or books, depending on who you ask) ever written, but you don't offer an alternative "best book". You just talk about a literature class and attack him for interest in computers. How is an attempt to look superior without risking anything an insightful comment? (moderators? hello?!?)
SecureWorks has been selling their iSensor product for some time now. It is also based on OpenSource Software using Snort and IPChains. The product comes with monitoring and constant signature updates for the IDS functionality, so that could be seen as the "value-add" for buying what is basically a bunch of free software in a PC box.
They protect the creator in profiting from the art , literature or music they create. If there wasn't any copyright protection there wouldn't be any incentive to create anything. Sure some people will do it, but not on a scale like we have today.
This is one argument for copyrights that's always seemed a little skewed to me. How does getting residual profit from something you've already created encourage you to create more. I mean in programming for instance, the reason most commercial code is written is because the programmer does not get residual income, but rather only gets paid while actively programming. I mean would you continue to work if your company said, 'we'll continue paying you 80k a year for this one program you've written forever." I think the scheme that will lead to people producing more is one in which they are only paid while actively creating.
The idea of a starving artist or musician who creates for the love of art or music is a lie. Everyone dreams of being famous and profiting from their works.
I'm glad you settled that issue for us. If the majority of artist create with the goal of being famous and wealthy than they labor under a serious misapprehension since the vast majority will never be either. The fact is the vast majority of art is never rewarded in any financial fashion whatsoever. So if only profitable art were created there would be far less of it.
Intellectual property protections are actually good because they force people to create something better than what exists today. Patents are a perfect example. There are thousands of companies researching new technology to create products that are better and cheaper than what we have today. Without patent protection we would have to rely on the government and universities for research. And since they aren't for profit we would only get things some geek thought up in a lab and would probably have no practical use in the real world.
Kind of sly to mix patents in with copyright since many people have very different feelings on the two things. Muddying the issue only makes your argument look weaker, especially with smearing university researchers. The problem with all your speculation is that it's of the form, if the world were exactly the same except no patents... but the world would be vastly different without a concept of intellectual property. My problem with IP is that it introduces a prior restraint upon me. If I think up a great idea without any outside influences, I can be legally restrained from using just because someone else thought of it first.
Maybe, maybe not... it depends on what the goals are. If you want to have targeted exploration without a huge impact on the environment, it excludes some solutions.
Balloons. Whats wrong with having a computer-controlled balloon with a cannister of hydrogen or helium beneath it? As local temperature and air pressure change, the computer could inflate or deflate accordingly. Toss in a good altimeter, and you can drift across the surface within a few feet for months on end.
But you can't go and check out that thing over there as the research engineer mentions as on of the goals... You just go where the wind carries you, and if you release several from the same place at the same time, they are likely to all go the same place.
If not balloons, why not use spring-loaded "grasshoppers" ? Essentially big wind-up toys, you can deploy thousands of these on the surface. They dont require intelligence, they dont consume fuel, and they dont require supervision of any sort. They simply pop around the surface taking photographs both on the ground and in the air, and when their spring begins to run low, they use the remainder of the spring's potential energy to broadcast the pictures and atmospheric data they recorded during their lifespan of hopping around Mars for a few weeks.
I don't know what makes a spring a better place to store energy than the electo-chemical solution they have. And you need electricity throughout the probes life to pop photos etc, so you have a spring driven generator onboard, getting kind of complex. Plus having thousands of spring "grasshoppers" randomly popping around on the pristine martian surface is going to destroy a lot of potential data that scientist might be interested in.
I think this guy fails to realize that the more complicated his device becomes, the more risks of failure you encounter, the higher the pricetag becomes, and the more problems you'll have no way of addressing.
I think this guy is a senior research engineer who would understand that very well. Since the article states that this is an adaptation of a military project to mars exploration, I think the device is the simplest one that meets the requirements of it's original military purpose. NASA just seems to think it will work well on Mars also.
SPARC does not come from Sun. See the SPARC organizations homepage. I believe Sun actually purchases many of its chips from another company. SPARC is a standard. Of course other people have addressed why you are wrong about everything else you've said.
As someone who has worked at a couple of ISPs (including a southeastern one with millions of subscribers) it is definitely not common practice to keep records of anything users do. In fact, none of the data on email servers (or similar user data elsewhere) was ever backed up. The reason: so that anytime they received a subpoena, like from a divorce asking for a list of porno sites or nasty email exchanges, they could immediately return it saying they did not keep any such information. A System Administrator was already devoted almost 100% of the time just to deal with Criminal investigations, if user data tracking usage were kept it would have taken a team of people to deal with the civil cases.
While Clinton and his running mate were elected in 1992, they did not take office until Jan 1993. Would have been kind of hard for them to kill the program before they were in office. It's kind of scary that someone so careless with facts has anything to do with nuclear power.
It's become hackneyed on Slashdot forums for posters to (pre-emptively) bash anyone who attacks MS for bashing MS. Every MS (or Intellectual Property, Napster, 2600, Patents, whatever) story posted sees a rash of post saying 'oh here comes the anti-MS bashing. everyone on slashdot bash MS for making money.' But it seems there are at least as many defenders as bashers, so part of their criticism (the part about everyone at /. doing some groupspeak MS bashing) rings hollow. I suggest that everyone from both sides argue the issue with facts (and hopefully references; hypertext is a wonderful thing!) and reason . . . not attacks on other people's tendency (fictional, in any case) to bash. Perhaps if you seriously examine everything you are going to say and look for some hard evidence to support it, you might find you are less certain about the convictions you hold. (A good thing for people across the spectrum, being open minded.) And in closing, in the words of Oliver Cromwell (how 'bout him for a target to bash) "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken..."
There is a difference between how understandable boilerplate is and how understandable the ideas of the GPL, BSD, etc are. For example, the lease on my Apartment is thirty some odd pages of legalese. But the idea is simple, I pay the owner and I get to live here.
Now, as to your suggested alternative, it doesn't matter how much more easily an idea can be stated if it doesn't communicate what you want to convey. I think people who use the GPL recognize the difference between it and the public domain. And decide the GPL is what makes sense.