We Don't Want Your Software Industry, We Just Want the World
(Let Anarchy Ring)
Hooray for S & K! As usual, the standard/.'ers response is to ardently
defend the "right" to copyright. Anybody have the guts around here to
seriously question the "right" to private property in the first place?
At base that is what S & K do here. Once land was viewed as something
many people could do many things with, and which animals had a right to
inhabit; today it is generally viewed as something the owner can do what
they please with, and nobody else even has a right to walk through. As a
result we are all more impoverished. Now not only our land, our natural
resources, our air, mountains, oceans, rivers. etc. are owned and
controlled by a small elite, but creative ideas.
The basic model on which GPL is based is academia; people are entirely
free to quote, cite, reference and use each others' writing and ideas.
I'm in atomic physics and all of the work I've done and my colleagues have
done is entirely free and open; yet somehow, we keep working, moving
forward and being productive. As a community we learn, develop and share
our ideas, and we prosper incredibly from this exchange. And we are
decades ahead of industry in every technological frontier. On top of
that, we do it all on pennies compared to what industry routinely spends
to do vastly simpler stuff. Most of our money actually comes out of odd
corners of education funding.
One can easily make the claim that industry would lose its raison d'etre
if patents disappeared, but I'm sorry, this is bullshit. If a company is
big enough, they make whatever they want regardless of who owns the patent
and bulldoze whoever tries to sue them./.'ers who follow the MS gossip
know what I am talking about. The only real advantage is gained through
industrial secrets, which don't usually last very long, and have nothing
to do with patent law. Patent law does not defend the weakling inventor
in his garage from the big company. It is a slegehammer that big
companies use to demolish their competition. Patents have nothing to do
with freedom, no more than copyrights or landownership.
Instead of meekly defending the coroporations that are ruining our music
with copyright law, and plastering all the rest of our culture with
advertisements, let's stand up and take credit for the incredible success
that free software has been, and travel on to spread freedom to other
parts of our society. Why not bring the kind of freedom OS programmers
enjoy to medicine, agriculture, publishing, music, land use? The robbery
of our minds, culture and resources has enslaved us and is enslaving more
of the world, more deeply, every year. In the words of someone, we don't
want your software industry, we just want the world.
Let's be honest, too, about what we're asking; Stallman took a few months
off, lived off his savings and started a non-profit organization, he
wasn't Jesus on the Cross or anything. We're not all going to starve if
we throw our lot in with free, open projects. Compared to most of the
world, Linux programmers who live in their parents' basements and collect
Star Trek DVD's have it easy.
If we understand quantum mechanics correctly, there is no way of lowering the temperature of anything below the quantum limit, which for Bosons is BEC. Saying that ETs may be able to cool things better is like saying that they can make Hydrogen in which electrons have less energy than our Hydrogen atoms do. In fact, technically speaking, a pure BEC (cloud in which every atom is condensed, which has been created) is by definition T = 0 Kelvin, even though the motion caused by vacuum fluctuations make the gas expand when released as though it had a temperature of 20 nK. While it is trapped in a magnetic trap, it has T=0 and no entropy. Show me an ET can do better than that!
The "2-D" BEC is not really 2-D, just flat enough that for some purposes you can approximate it as having an infinitesimal thickness. It was formed by laser cooling followed by evaporative cooling, just as the original BEC, but is then moved onto the surface of a chip where it can be more easily manipulated.
Hate to burst the bubble here, but before the hype
gets totally out of control, I think someone should mention that at the moment the best quantum computer has 2 bits, but will probably be scaled up soon.
There are claims about one demonstration of 7 bits using NMR, but in my field the conventional wisdom is that this one doesn't do true quantum computing, and anyway it's not scalable.
Unfortunately, the only working, 2-bit quantum computer, currently requires probably 1/2million$ of equipment to run, as it uses trapped ions in a very complex electrostatic trap inside a vacuum system.
So far nobody even has a very promising proposal for doing quantum computing in a solid-state (i.e., really manufacturable) device, as far as I know, although when grant money beckons, people become intensely optimistic.
On top of all this is the final point that there are only basically 2 known applications at which quantum computers would outperform classical computers: code breaking (remeber BB will have this technology long befor you do!) and the simulation of quantum mechanics problems (almost a redundant application, really.)
The single-molecule, classical computer actually holds out vastly more promise for the industry.
I teach physics and I often tell my students that scientists need to take moral leadership in the technology field. Most scientists, even most in industrial labs, are sufficiently unconnected from the potential profits of a new technology (the companies profit, but not so much their R&D staff) that they can (if they are so inclined) make sober, relatively fair judgements about the future use and consequenses of new technology, and warn the public should dangers arise. In fact, some minority of the science community has always done this.
Without at least some scientists with a moral and social conscience, we don't have a hope of controlling abuses of technology, because any attempt to limit or stop a bad application of a technology requires that the opponents be well-informed.
So one good thing about all the public paranoia about genetic engineering is that the scientists involved in it are putting a lot more effort into dealing with ethical issues than in most research, where it is never publicly discussed at all -- until it is too late an there is a public health crisis.
So I say, if the scientists do what they say they'll do (with regard to ethical concerns), we should all support them - but with skepticism and scrutiny. If their pronoucements turn out to be smoke and mirrors, they should be ruthlessly criticized, as publicly as possible.
Silly child, this thread would be more appropriately entitled "environmental disasters" . . . I wonder how, when most of the GOVERNMENTS of the world and even quite a few of those EVIL CORPORATIONS are starting to listen to the "whiners" and realize that global warming is a disaster of epic proportions . . . Only all-out nuclear war poses a bigger threat to the future survival of our species. There's no way you can tell me that hugging trees is more ridiculous than millions of yuppies driving SUVs on their daily commute . . .
As far as the pollution of Earth and the rest of the solar system, in the words of Carl Sagan (on being asked about terraforming Mars), "We've made a pretty big mess of our own planet, so we need to be very careful if we start colonizing others." Perhaps we should think about cleaning up a little at home here first, even!
I'd say I see that Windows and Linux are showing that there are two desktop markets out there - one for the industry/academia (i.e., people who use computers run networks, develop new software, or even - to compute!), and the "mass" market for folks who want passive entertainment and a very simple multimedia/internet GUI. Clearly Linux wins hands down in the industry/academia market. The mass market would best be served, IMHO, by ebedded OSes, ala embedded Linux, PalmOS . . . these folks don't need or want full-blown Linux, but they do want the stability that Linux offers over Microsquish, so why not give them what they want? - i.e., embedded-OS desktop, dasboard, handheld, ceiling-mounted and waterproof shower-stall appliances! Windows is a mess because it tries to hit both markets, and Linux will turn into a similar mess if it does too - the desktops are cumbersome and buggy and I find myself going back to command-line stuff to avoid KDE2 - I just bought 64M more RAM to make it run off the swap partition - this is the kind of shit I dumped Windows to avoid! Keep it simple and stable, and dumb it down for non-hackers.
I'm a folksinger and songwriter and like most musicians I'm doing it for fun - I need a little money from gigs sometimes to cover my travel expenses, etc. The only reason I would have ever even bothered with a real record contract is so I could reach more people - but this is completely irrelevant now! The cool thing today is that I can make a CD myself, send it off to get gigs, reviews, radio spots, give it away for free or tips (lots of people give me $5 for one even though they cost me about $2 each to make), and distribute it for free online as.mp3s on my website and through MP3.com. I can therefore reach basically as big an audience as I want to without any help from the music industry. The best thing is, of course, I don't have to kiss anyone's ass or accept "production" to make my CD more commercial just to get it out there. So look and see the writing on the wall - as long as I can distribute a mailing list, get reviewers to post my website, etc. I'll _never_ need the record industry. Good riddance, capitalist pigs!
I think that musicians should be rewarded for putting on a good show, and paid for it. But spend a couple of hours in a studio and make a million dollars - sorry, sounds like the lottery, and I don't think anybody ever really had a _right_ to win the lottery! Anybody claims that there won't be good music anymore if the record industry dies really doesn't get it. I'd say, the entire thing could go under right now and none of us would miss a beat.
Slashdot Mirror
We Don't Want Your Software Industry, We Just Want the World
/.'ers response is to ardently
/.'ers who follow the MS gossip
(Let Anarchy Ring)
Hooray for S & K! As usual, the standard
defend the "right" to copyright. Anybody have the guts around here to
seriously question the "right" to private property in the first place?
At base that is what S & K do here. Once land was viewed as something
many people could do many things with, and which animals had a right to
inhabit; today it is generally viewed as something the owner can do what
they please with, and nobody else even has a right to walk through. As a
result we are all more impoverished. Now not only our land, our natural
resources, our air, mountains, oceans, rivers. etc. are owned and
controlled by a small elite, but creative ideas.
The basic model on which GPL is based is academia; people are entirely
free to quote, cite, reference and use each others' writing and ideas.
I'm in atomic physics and all of the work I've done and my colleagues have
done is entirely free and open; yet somehow, we keep working, moving
forward and being productive. As a community we learn, develop and share
our ideas, and we prosper incredibly from this exchange. And we are
decades ahead of industry in every technological frontier. On top of
that, we do it all on pennies compared to what industry routinely spends
to do vastly simpler stuff. Most of our money actually comes out of odd
corners of education funding.
One can easily make the claim that industry would lose its raison d'etre
if patents disappeared, but I'm sorry, this is bullshit. If a company is
big enough, they make whatever they want regardless of who owns the patent
and bulldoze whoever tries to sue them.
know what I am talking about. The only real advantage is gained through
industrial secrets, which don't usually last very long, and have nothing
to do with patent law. Patent law does not defend the weakling inventor
in his garage from the big company. It is a slegehammer that big
companies use to demolish their competition. Patents have nothing to do
with freedom, no more than copyrights or landownership.
Instead of meekly defending the coroporations that are ruining our music
with copyright law, and plastering all the rest of our culture with
advertisements, let's stand up and take credit for the incredible success
that free software has been, and travel on to spread freedom to other
parts of our society. Why not bring the kind of freedom OS programmers
enjoy to medicine, agriculture, publishing, music, land use? The robbery
of our minds, culture and resources has enslaved us and is enslaving more
of the world, more deeply, every year. In the words of someone, we don't
want your software industry, we just want the world.
Let's be honest, too, about what we're asking; Stallman took a few months
off, lived off his savings and started a non-profit organization, he
wasn't Jesus on the Cross or anything. We're not all going to starve if
we throw our lot in with free, open projects. Compared to most of the
world, Linux programmers who live in their parents' basements and collect
Star Trek DVD's have it easy.
If we understand quantum mechanics correctly, there is no way of lowering the temperature of anything below the quantum limit, which for Bosons is BEC. Saying that ETs may be able to cool things better is like saying that they can make Hydrogen in which electrons have less energy than our Hydrogen atoms do. In fact, technically speaking, a pure BEC (cloud in which every atom is condensed, which has been created) is by definition T = 0 Kelvin, even though the motion caused by vacuum fluctuations make the gas expand when released as though it had a temperature of 20 nK. While it is trapped in a magnetic trap, it has T=0 and no entropy. Show me an ET can do better than that!
The "2-D" BEC is not really 2-D, just flat enough that for some purposes you can approximate it as having an infinitesimal thickness. It was formed by laser cooling followed by evaporative cooling, just as the original BEC, but is then moved onto the surface of a chip where it can be more easily manipulated.
Hate to burst the bubble here, but before the hype gets totally out of control, I think someone should mention that at the moment the best quantum computer has 2 bits, but will probably be scaled up soon. There are claims about one demonstration of 7 bits using NMR, but in my field the conventional wisdom is that this one doesn't do true quantum computing, and anyway it's not scalable. Unfortunately, the only working, 2-bit quantum computer, currently requires probably 1/2million$ of equipment to run, as it uses trapped ions in a very complex electrostatic trap inside a vacuum system. So far nobody even has a very promising proposal for doing quantum computing in a solid-state (i.e., really manufacturable) device, as far as I know, although when grant money beckons, people become intensely optimistic. On top of all this is the final point that there are only basically 2 known applications at which quantum computers would outperform classical computers: code breaking (remeber BB will have this technology long befor you do!) and the simulation of quantum mechanics problems (almost a redundant application, really.) The single-molecule, classical computer actually holds out vastly more promise for the industry.
I teach physics and I often tell my students that scientists need to take moral leadership in the technology field. Most scientists, even most in industrial labs, are sufficiently unconnected from the potential profits of a new technology (the companies profit, but not so much their R&D staff) that they can (if they are so inclined) make sober, relatively fair judgements about the future use and consequenses of new technology, and warn the public should dangers arise. In fact, some minority of the science community has always done this. Without at least some scientists with a moral and social conscience, we don't have a hope of controlling abuses of technology, because any attempt to limit or stop a bad application of a technology requires that the opponents be well-informed. So one good thing about all the public paranoia about genetic engineering is that the scientists involved in it are putting a lot more effort into dealing with ethical issues than in most research, where it is never publicly discussed at all -- until it is too late an there is a public health crisis. So I say, if the scientists do what they say they'll do (with regard to ethical concerns), we should all support them - but with skepticism and scrutiny. If their pronoucements turn out to be smoke and mirrors, they should be ruthlessly criticized, as publicly as possible.
Silly child, this thread would be more appropriately entitled "environmental disasters" . . . I wonder how, when most of the GOVERNMENTS of the world and even quite a few of those EVIL CORPORATIONS are starting to listen to the "whiners" and realize that global warming is a disaster of epic proportions . . . Only all-out nuclear war poses a bigger threat to the future survival of our species. There's no way you can tell me that hugging trees is more ridiculous than millions of yuppies driving SUVs on their daily commute . . . As far as the pollution of Earth and the rest of the solar system, in the words of Carl Sagan (on being asked about terraforming Mars), "We've made a pretty big mess of our own planet, so we need to be very careful if we start colonizing others." Perhaps we should think about cleaning up a little at home here first, even!
I'd say I see that Windows and Linux are showing that there are two desktop markets out there - one for the industry/academia (i.e., people who use computers run networks, develop new software, or even - to compute!), and the "mass" market for folks who want passive entertainment and a very simple multimedia/internet GUI. Clearly Linux wins hands down in the industry/academia market. The mass market would best be served, IMHO, by ebedded OSes, ala embedded Linux, PalmOS . . . these folks don't need or want full-blown Linux, but they do want the stability that Linux offers over Microsquish, so why not give them what they want? - i.e., embedded-OS desktop, dasboard, handheld, ceiling-mounted and waterproof shower-stall appliances! Windows is a mess because it tries to hit both markets, and Linux will turn into a similar mess if it does too - the desktops are cumbersome and buggy and I find myself going back to command-line stuff to avoid KDE2 - I just bought 64M more RAM to make it run off the swap partition - this is the kind of shit I dumped Windows to avoid! Keep it simple and stable, and dumb it down for non-hackers.
I'm a folksinger and songwriter and like most musicians I'm doing it for fun - I need a little money from gigs sometimes to cover my travel expenses, etc. The only reason I would have ever even bothered with a real record contract is so I could reach more people - but this is completely irrelevant now! The cool thing today is that I can make a CD myself, send it off to get gigs, reviews, radio spots, give it away for free or tips (lots of people give me $5 for one even though they cost me about $2 each to make), and distribute it for free online as .mp3s on my website and through MP3.com. I can therefore reach basically as big an audience as I want to without any help from the music industry. The best thing is, of course, I don't have to kiss anyone's ass or accept "production" to make my CD more commercial just to get it out there. So look and see the writing on the wall - as long as I can distribute a mailing list, get reviewers to post my website, etc. I'll _never_ need the record industry. Good riddance, capitalist pigs!
I think that musicians should be rewarded for putting on a good show, and paid for it. But spend a couple of hours in a studio and make a million dollars - sorry, sounds like the lottery, and I don't think anybody ever really had a _right_ to win the lottery! Anybody claims that there won't be good music anymore if the record industry dies really doesn't get it. I'd say, the entire thing could go under right now and none of us would miss a beat.