The advertising industry used this technique for over 30 years, spending millions of dollars on it. But, they never did a double bind test to find out if it works!
Just how plausible is this hypothesis?
The other hypothesis is that the technique is known to work!
Not one of these organization has made 1/10th the contribution of RMS.
RMS created gcc. Without gcc there would be no LINUX or BSD. Most of the utilities in the article would be impossible without gcc. Who was the original author of gcc? RMS.
RMS created most of the GNU utilities without which most of GNU lINUX and BSD would be worthless.
RMS was the first to proclaim the need for a free OS platform. He was the first to
try to make such a platform a practical reality. (GNU).
RMS created the GPL.
There is no one who has made contributions to the Free software and/or "open source"
software communities equal to that of RMS.
This includes LINUS.
I realize that RMS can be idealogical, stubborn and hard to deal with, but the
fact remains that in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, no one has made as
great a contribution.
When someone complains about the various software package utilities, the problem usually boils down to:
A simple problem that can be easily fixed. OR:
A problem with dependancy management!
The problems is that dependancy management is an essentially hard problem.
Some problems of dependancy management can not be solved automaticly but
require human judgement to find the best compromise. It is hard to write software that solves the easy cases, but welcomes human intervention to solve the hard problems. Joe Sixpack is not up to this in most cases. Most of the work in setting up a distro is designing a policy as to how dependancies are to be handled, that will allow the user to choose a subset of a given set of supported packages. No distro has come up with a perfect solution. It is unlikely that a "magic bullet" will be found that solves this problem.
I have read the threads in question and it seems that although Linus may have expressed himself somewhat shrilly, (when does he not) his opinion is commonly held. I have many times heard people in my Linux User's Group express essentially the same complaints.
If the Gnome people keep rejecting user directed extensibility, it would seem that a fork is in order. Perhaps the fork could be called extensible gnome. The fork should be
lead by someone who has experience with gnome development.
Any takers?
PJ is a journalist; will she go to jail?
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 1
PJ is a journalist. Will she go to jail to protect her sources if SCO should attempt to depose her over info that she received from a source?
If you can do your job from the burbs by telecommuting. Why can't your employer hire someone in Bangladesh to do your job? The only advantage high price U.S. workers have over others is physical presence in the U.S. Find a job that requires personal communication.
is that we are all dead meat if we don't figure a way out of this solar system and only the physicists can do it. If the physicists spend too much time playing with themselves and are too late we will die like a bacterial colony poisoned by its metabolic excretions. The bizarre aberrations we see in today's newspaper now are only the beginning!
I am not a physicist so I can not help much. My only suggestion: Play it like a bridge contract. When playing a contract bridge hand, one always assumes that the cards are placed in such a way so that it is possible to make the contract! If this assumption is false, it does not matter, because there was no chance to make the contract.
Similarly, physicists should assume that the rules of the universe are such that it is possible to escape this solar system before we all are dead. If this premiss is false, we have not lost anything.
Forced metrication is basicly and attempt to control how people communicate. Unfortunately, here in the U.S. we have a little thing like the first ammendment that stands in the way.
I am sure in time, the politicians and the lawyers will find a way to read this out of the law like they did with all the other amendments, and then this barrier will be gone.
Software is not created by software developers. Software evolves under selection
presure. Software developers do the dirty work of implementing this presure, but
they exist in a social milieu.
Managers prefer a different description. They like to say that software is created
by software developers under a process that they control.
This is false.
But it makes managers, their pathetic plans, and their meaningless schedules seem more important.
This deception has a cost. It makes software development even more difficult that it
already is. This is one of many advantages that open source development has over commercial software development.
The UFO problem will never be resolved. This is because the worlds leading governments have learned that from the point of view of space aliens humans are the solarmanite!
Humans have the same potential for exponential growth as bacteria have! This is unacceptable to space alien regulatory bodies.
The only species officially allowed to travel in space are those that have been modified so that their growth rate is artificially controlled. This is why some UFO renegades have exhibited an obsessive interest in human reproduction. They are seeking to restore their own reproductive potential. They hope to create alien-human hybrids with natural growth rates, bypassing alien modifications that prevent unauthorized reproduction. This is the ultimate form of hacking!
Planets that are classified as hostile or threatening are subject to sanctions from alien regulatory bodies. However under the regulatory scheme, it is impossible to classify a planet hostile unless the dominant form of life knows of intelligent life on other planets. The bureaucratic mentality is the one constant in the universe!
In order to avoid this classification, leading earth governments have secretly agreed
to consistently deny UFOs and extraterestial intelligent life and all evidence for the same.
This is a brillant survival plan! Survival by manipulation of alien bureaucratic classification methods! The ultimate loophole. I guess lawyers are
good for something after all!
Unfortunately, this plan requires that the UFO coverup be extended indefinitely! Oh well, a small price to pay for the survival of the human race.
Free software creates choices, some are afraid they might make the wrong choice.
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!" Samuel Adams
If you create a new modified DVD you are creating a derived work. You would be violating the author's copyright. If you do this for private use, it may be difficult to find you, to prosecute you. But if you do it commercially you may be caught, sued and/or prosecuted.
"editing" = creating a derived work. They have no license from the copyright holder to do this. The right to control derived works is one of the rights granted by copyright.
This decision is based on the same principle that powers the GPL: The right to control Derivative Works! The GPL could not control the terms licences of derivative works without the basic right to control derivative works!
Besides, authors do not necessarily write only for money. Without the right to control derivative works, anyone can come along and butcher your work which was intended to be a thing of beauty!
Hello Canada, We have a lot of nuts here in the U.S.A. Our nuts have the right to expression since we have free expression. Its part of our constitution. We like that way. We are not going to change it. No matter how wrong, dumb, or hurtfull the speech of these nuts is, we are not going to amend our constitution to silence them (as some other countries have). Get used to it. We have.
On the other hand you people of Canada also rights, amoung these rights is the right to ignore what our nuts say. We recomend that you do so. We do.
Sociotism is a mental disorder characterised by an undue obsession with social interaction and eye contact, which often interferes with healthy interests such as computer programming and science fiction. Sociotistic people often band together in tightly-knit heirarchies, where social status is determined by subtle shifts in "body language" rather than skill or experience. Sociotistic children often play cruel tricks on their healthier playmates for no logical reason. They prefer brutal team-oriented games like football over healthy, abstract tests of individual merit, such as video games.
Victims of sociotism of all ages tend to be less intelligent than healthy people. They are capable of learning skills that have an obvious and immediate short-term benifit, but profoundly lack the social independance and intellectual curiosity needed to explore new frontiers of knowledge. As a result, sociotistic people rarely succeed in fields such as science or engineering, and when they do succeed in these feilds it is usually only in a managerial capacity.
If you know anyone that fits the description of a sociotistic person, please pat them on the head in a sympathetic but condecending manner and tell them to get professional help for their obvious deficiencies. With any luck, we will some day discover powerful mind-altering drugs that will force these people to be as healthy and well-adjusted as we are.
Any computer language, from machine language including those languages runnable on computers, but understandable by trained humans like Java, involves a large number of essentially arbitrary decisions. Which "opcode" is going to represent which functionality? Without this knowledge, it is difficult to imagine anyone, no matter how advanced, writting code that will not immediately crash.
It is possible to write multi-platform viruses, but only with knowledge for all target platforms.
If a alien race were to take the trouble to determine how our computer languages were designed -- then it could determine how to infect us! But this info is not available from popular entertainment broadcasts!
But enough computer programs are transfered via wireless networks that the inforation could be had there!
So SETI, is not a risk! TV is not a risk! But Wireless networks are a risk, and must be shutdown immediately!
What happens when parties to a civil suit start subpoenaing this info to establish authorship in civil cases? What if one of the parties is the U.S. government? Is there any chance this could backfire?
All disclosures and notifications should be done anonymously, using an uncustomized publicly released live distro (like KNOPPIX, ubuntu or mepis), (this insures no mail headers unique to you) several anonymous remailers and a resterant's public wifi connection. That way the vendor won't who to threaten.
Also use method 2.5, QUIETLY fix your client's applications, then release all info anonymously.
This is a perfect blue state proposal. Liberals in blue states get their sensitive ecological consciences placated and the people of the red states get their children eaten. Let's move the lions tigers and bears to the blue states. When enough blue state people get their children eaten, maybe they will stop carring so much about their consciences and they will turn red.
The greatness of the open source development model is that idiots like the author of this article have no way to inflict their totalitarian ideas on us. Hence they have no way to screw us! If all the idiot WINBLOWS users in existence suddenly switched to "mindless lemming-LINUX (TM)", the size of the idiot distro, would numerically dwarf all other distros. However, there would be absolutely NO compelling reason forcing any intelligent person to switch to "IDIOT-LINUX" (TM). There would be nothing to stop any geek from starting a new distro the next day! If the parasitic suits who were running "IDIOT-LINUX" started the usual user manipulating shit, in typical microsoft fashion, there would be nothing preventing "IDIOT-LINUX" users from switching! Even idiots eventually see the handwriting on the wall.
The Greatness of of LINUX is that it is OUT OF CONTROL, with no way for idiots like the author of this article to impose bright ideas like "consolidation" on it!
I have always enjoyed the ninth. But I've always felt that the "choral Fantasy" OP.80 Fantasia in C for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra was much better. The music is better (if shorter) and the sentiment expressed by the lyrics is purer.
Slashdot Mirror
If students would use
http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm/ the digital timestamping service,
they can prove at what time they created a given document.
Just how plausible is this hypothesis?
The other hypothesis is that the technique is known to work!
-
RMS created gcc. Without gcc there would be no LINUX or BSD. Most of the utilities in the article would be impossible without gcc. Who was the original author of gcc? RMS.
-
RMS created most of the GNU utilities without which most of GNU lINUX and BSD would be worthless.
-
RMS was the first to proclaim the need for a free OS platform. He was the first to
try to make such a platform a practical reality. (GNU).
-
RMS created the GPL.
There is no one who has made contributions to the Free software and/or "open source" software communities equal to that of RMS.This includes LINUS.
I realize that RMS can be idealogical, stubborn and hard to deal with, but the fact remains that in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, no one has made as great a contribution.
The problems is that dependancy management is an essentially hard problem. Some problems of dependancy management can not be solved automaticly but require human judgement to find the best compromise. It is hard to write software that solves the easy cases, but welcomes human intervention to solve the hard problems. Joe Sixpack is not up to this in most cases. Most of the work in setting up a distro is designing a policy as to how dependancies are to be handled, that will allow the user to choose a subset of a given set of supported packages. No distro has come up with a perfect solution. It is unlikely that a "magic bullet" will be found that solves this problem.
If the Gnome people keep rejecting user directed extensibility, it would seem that a fork is in order. Perhaps the fork could be called extensible gnome. The fork should be lead by someone who has experience with gnome development.
Any takers?
PJ is a journalist. Will she go to jail to protect her sources if SCO should attempt to depose her over info that she received from a source?
The day of the inarticulate geek is over.
I am not a physicist so I can not help much. My only suggestion: Play it like a bridge contract. When playing a contract bridge hand, one always assumes that the cards are placed in such a way so that it is possible to make the contract! If this assumption is false, it does not matter, because there was no chance to make the contract.
Similarly, physicists should assume that the rules of the universe are such that it is possible to escape this solar system before we all are dead. If this premiss is false, we have not lost anything.
Come on, physicists, the UFO space aliens did it!
I am sure in time, the politicians and the lawyers will find a way to read this out of the law like they did with all the other amendments, and then this barrier will be gone.
Managers prefer a different description. They like to say that software is created by software developers under a process that they control.
This is false.
But it makes managers, their pathetic plans, and their meaningless schedules seem more important.
This deception has a cost. It makes software development even more difficult that it already is. This is one of many advantages that open source development has over commercial software development.
Humans have the same potential for exponential growth as bacteria have! This is unacceptable to space alien regulatory bodies.
The only species officially allowed to travel in space are those that have been modified so that their growth rate is artificially controlled. This is why some UFO renegades have exhibited an obsessive interest in human reproduction. They are seeking to restore their own reproductive potential. They hope to create alien-human hybrids with natural growth rates, bypassing alien modifications that prevent unauthorized reproduction. This is the ultimate form of hacking!
Planets that are classified as hostile or threatening are subject to sanctions from alien regulatory bodies. However under the regulatory scheme, it is impossible to classify a planet hostile unless the dominant form of life knows of intelligent life on other planets. The bureaucratic mentality is the one constant in the universe! In order to avoid this classification, leading earth governments have secretly agreed to consistently deny UFOs and extraterestial intelligent life and all evidence for the same.
This is a brillant survival plan! Survival by manipulation of alien bureaucratic classification methods! The ultimate loophole. I guess lawyers are good for something after all!
Unfortunately, this plan requires that the UFO coverup be extended indefinitely! Oh well, a small price to pay for the survival of the human race.
Has anybody tried running under Linux except for this guy?
Free software creates choices, some are afraid they might make the wrong choice.
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!" Samuel Adams
If you create a new modified DVD you are creating a derived work. You would be violating the author's copyright. If you do this for private use, it may be difficult to find you, to prosecute you. But if you do it commercially you may be caught, sued and/or prosecuted.
and then editing them.
"editing" = creating a derived work. They have no license from the copyright holder to do this.
The right to control derived works is one of the rights granted by copyright.
And it powers the GPL.
This decision is based on the same principle that powers the GPL: The right to control Derivative Works! The GPL could not control the terms licences of derivative works without the basic right to control derivative works!
Besides, authors do not necessarily write only for money. Without the right to control derivative works, anyone can come along and butcher your work which was intended to be a thing of beauty!
Hello Canada, We have a lot of nuts here in the U.S.A. Our nuts have the right to expression since we have free expression. Its part of our constitution. We like that way. We are not going to change it. No matter how wrong, dumb, or hurtfull the speech of these nuts is, we are not going to amend our constitution to silence them (as some other countries have). Get used to it. We have.
On the other hand you people of Canada also rights, amoung these rights
is the right to ignore what our nuts say. We recomend that you do so. We do.
Is there an url that will let me see the original april 1 /. article in its original pink?
A reply to a previous slashdot article mentioned the dangers of sociotism:
Sociotism is a mental disorder characterised by an undue obsession with social interaction and eye contact, which often interferes with healthy interests such as computer programming and science fiction. Sociotistic people often band together in tightly-knit heirarchies, where social status is determined by subtle shifts in "body language" rather than skill or experience. Sociotistic children often play cruel tricks on their healthier playmates for no logical reason. They prefer brutal team-oriented games like football over healthy, abstract tests of individual merit, such as video games.
Victims of sociotism of all ages tend to be less intelligent than healthy people. They are capable of learning skills that have an obvious and immediate short-term benifit, but profoundly lack the social independance and intellectual curiosity needed to explore new frontiers of knowledge. As a result, sociotistic people rarely succeed in fields such as science or engineering, and when they do succeed in these feilds it is usually only in a managerial capacity.
If you know anyone that fits the description of a sociotistic person, please pat them on the head in a sympathetic but condecending manner and tell them to get professional help for their obvious deficiencies. With any luck, we will some day discover powerful mind-altering drugs that will force these people to be as healthy and well-adjusted as we are.
Any computer language, from machine language including those languages runnable on computers, but understandable by trained humans like Java, involves a large number of essentially arbitrary decisions. Which "opcode" is going to represent which functionality? Without this knowledge, it is difficult to imagine anyone, no matter how advanced, writting code that will not immediately crash.
It is possible to write multi-platform viruses, but only with knowledge for all target platforms.
If a alien race were to take the trouble to determine how our computer languages were designed -- then it could determine how to infect us! But this info is not available from popular entertainment broadcasts!
But enough computer programs are transfered via wireless networks that the inforation could be had there!
So SETI, is not a risk! TV is not a risk! But Wireless networks are a risk, and must be shutdown immediately!
What happens when parties to a civil suit start subpoenaing this info to establish authorship in civil cases? What if one of the parties is the U.S. government? Is there any chance this could backfire?
All disclosures and notifications should be done anonymously, using an uncustomized publicly released live distro (like KNOPPIX, ubuntu or mepis), (this insures no mail headers unique to you) several anonymous remailers and a resterant's public wifi connection. That way the vendor won't who to threaten.
Also use method 2.5, QUIETLY fix your client's applications, then release all info anonymously.
This is a perfect blue state proposal. Liberals in blue states get their sensitive ecological consciences placated and the people of the red states get their children eaten. Let's move the lions tigers and bears to the blue states. When enough blue state people get their children eaten, maybe they will stop carring so much about their consciences and they will turn red.
The greatness of the open source development model is that idiots like the author of this article have no way to inflict their totalitarian ideas on us. Hence they have no way to screw us! If all the idiot WINBLOWS users in existence suddenly switched to "mindless lemming-LINUX (TM)", the size of the idiot distro, would numerically dwarf all other distros. However, there would be absolutely NO compelling reason forcing any intelligent person to switch to "IDIOT-LINUX" (TM). There would be nothing to stop any geek from starting a new distro the next day! If the parasitic suits who were running "IDIOT-LINUX" started the usual user manipulating shit, in typical microsoft fashion, there would be nothing preventing "IDIOT-LINUX" users from switching! Even idiots eventually see the handwriting on the wall.
The Greatness of of LINUX is that it is OUT OF CONTROL, with no way for idiots like the author of this article to impose bright ideas like "consolidation" on it!
I have always enjoyed the ninth. But I've always felt that the "choral Fantasy" OP.80 Fantasia in C for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra was much better. The music is better (if shorter) and the sentiment expressed by the lyrics is purer.