RMS's loss would cut the heart out of the free software movement
HAHAHAHAHA!
I'm not even convinced he played a significant role in any major trend except promoting the TLAs: FSF, GNU, GPL, and RMS. That, and injecting a lot of moralistic nonsense into what are essentially economic and engineering issues.
Free software is not like free speech. It is like public domain text: nice to have, but not a fundamental property of a free society. Going around convincing people that it is essential is harmful both to them and to the people who have rational reasons for releasing free software.
If he was never born, the major difference would be that Emacs wouldn't be around. If he died today, nothing would really change. He hasn't really done anything significant in a long time, he just goes around as a figurehead of the "free software movement" who is hated by half of the people involved in free software.
It's useful as an abstract-conceptweight. You know, one of those things you use to plunk down on your grasp of a complex problem to keep it from blowing away.
Sure, in the concrete world, retaining the copyright while giving free permission for all uses to everyone serves no purpose, but in your own mind, you can't just pick up a rock and put it on top of a thought, so you need something useless, yet abstract.
Also, the BSDL keeps those evil GPL bastards from using your code. You know they're evil, why let them have your code?
I challenge you to find imposed by the X11 license "any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein"
"The authors hereby grant permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and license this software and its documentation for any purpose, provided that existing copyright notices are retained in all copies and that this notice is included verbatim in any distributions."
There you go. Anyone, except the authors, is required to include the X11 license verbatim in any distribution. That's a restriction that's incompatible with the GPL.
The X11 license does not have a general license surrender. Piling requirements of other licensing-agreements atop it is acceptable, removing the requirements of the X11 license is not.
whether RMS considered Xfree to be non-free. What were you saying about that?
His rant on the Great X Betrayal makes it abundantly clear that he considers the X11 license untrustworthy and less free than the GPL.
After all, we make thinking machines by etching arcane symbols with rare elements into a pure crystal, and binding the symbols with inlaid metal. We make mighty creatures of steel that obey us with curious precision, like the genie from the lamp. We have great roaring war chariots of the skies that fly faster than sound itself and hurl fiery spears that hunt their targets with mindless fury. We can see across the world in an instant. We looked into the smallest things to find the secrets of the universe, and learned to make weapons that could destroy the world. We have visited another world, and prepare to visit others, sending our mechanical forerunners into the fathomless void between worlds on a pillar of flame. We play with the language of life itself, and reshape the plants and the beasts to suit us.
Magic is bloody boring compared to the real world.
If you want to look at the world through a romantic fog, you don't need to make up new rules for it.
Given that copyright is based on commercial value, and copyright litigation awards damages based on an estimate of direct financial loss, every free software license is on unsteady legal ground. If it ever went to court, I think they would be legally found to be in the public domain.
Why waste all that effort, instead of just dumping everything into the public domain, like in the good old days?
The X11 License This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.
And yet, it isn't. This is a cop-out, IMHO because RMS saw that if he pushed the issue, more people would realize that X11 is more free than the GPL. The GPL specifically prohibits any other restrictions. The X11 license has other restrictions, which it doesn't surrender without specific permission from the copyright holder.
There are only 3 categories GPL-compatible, but non-GPL software: public domain, strict GPL subsets, and software with a specific GPL-surrender (a clause that says "you can also just forget any other terms and distribute it under the GPL"). Anything else contains terms which are incompatible with the GPL.
RMS has never said anything along the lines of "non-GPL is not free",
Maybe not straight out, but he sure seems to imply it often enough. Stunts like demoting the LGPL to "lesser" status certainly don't argue against this perception.
without RMS or another hard liner who stuck to his guns and just plain simply refused to give an inch we'd not have all the wonderful choices we have today, we'd all be running Windows 95
(hrm)FreeBSD(cough)XFree86(blurgh)lcc(hrrump)
(I could go on, but I think that last one was a lung)
KDE... was technically NOT free because of the licensing issues
No. KDE was technically illegal to compile because of the licensing issues. It was not GNU/free because it relies on Qt, which is gratis but severely restricted.
His current talk about requiring copyright "forgiveness" is what's ridiculous nonsense.
The delusional bit is that KDE threatened an area that was previous pure GNU/free software. Hell, you can't use any X-based programs without running non-GPL software. There is no GNU/purity to protect.
but if it were not for RMS's radicalism, there would be no FSF and GNU Project
Yes indeed. Fewer idiotic recursive acronyms. More licenses used that don't require you to redistribute source. No FSF-propaganda induced hostility against the Great Satan of commercial software. No raving lunatic who claims to represent us.
I would miss him horribly. He surely made the world a better place.
Seriously,/. is "shiny things for geeks". I think the story approval process is:
1) read submission, if not immediately compelled to follow the link, toss it out
2) follow link, if link is obviously not as described by submission on first glance, toss it out
3) post submission to front page, don't stop to check trivial details like facts or spelling
4) read the linked article
Journalistic integrity doesn't even come into it. It is not only amateur, but lazy. If it sounds really cool (to someone who has top-level posting privileges), it goes up. It's that simple, and, yes, that stupid.
It sorta works, too. Since it's interesting, and there's a discussion forum, all the relevant facts get posted and modded up by the readers. Really, the articles aren't what we're here for. Each article is just the topic of the hour. It's the discussion that makes/. worth reading, and the community that creates the discussion. The articles are just decoys that happen to call the right kind of people here.
He can't seriously be concerned about the legal difficulties he mentioned. The KDE guy's response was too obvious (and too obviously right) for him to miss.
He really does come off as severely delusional, especially that part about having to start to Gnome to stop non-free software from taking root. Umm... I think non-free software took root a long time ago. I don't think there are many people using nothing but GPL software. I also don't remember a top-priority effort to replace something evil and unfree like XFree86 (gasp! people are allowed to reuse the code without being required to distribute the source, it's not free!).
But I guess spoiled children, when denied positive attention, will go for negative attention.
Of course, trying it yourself is always the best way to learn about anything. Ignore the millions of hours of collective experience out there, if you spend a few hours with the products, you'll learn much more about subtle incompatabilities and transient, but catastrophic, bugs.
It's also much more economical for you to duplicate all your services, train all your personnel in both systems, and see for yourself, rather than asking some questions and hearing what other people have to say about it.
And, of course, it's totally worth buying as many copies of W2K, and the applications you intend to run on it, as you need to test them.
Therefore, I obviously also must heartily recommend that you go out and try both yourself. It's not like you can save lots of time, effort, and money just by asking people who already know.
That wasn't so hard. When people say things like "that's like comparing apples and oranges!" it makes me crazy.
They're rejecting a simple quality comparision, telling you the difference is instead in kind. Usually a response to an inappropriately simple "which is better?" question.
By saying "it's like apples and oranges", they express that the answer is largely subject to individual tastes and requirements, as one's preference for apples or oranges would be. It rejects direct and general value comparison, not qualitatively contrasting descriptions.
This has been a public service announcement from The Straight-Faced Pedant, long may he blather on.
By no means is this even close to the upper echelon of anime.
Of course not. I'm not arguing that many anime fans consider it one of the best, just that they watch it anyway.
Despite everybody bitching about how bad it is, most of the guys I talk to who have joined anime watching clubs, get fansubs, and have large personal collections of anime still watch Dragonball Z. After all, it is anime piped conveniently into their homes, even if it is butchered.
People are lazy. 9 times out of 10, they'd rather have hot dogs served to them than go get steak themselves.
I think this is a case of the silent majority acting differently than the highly vocal minority.
That was the real killer. It really, really sucked.
But even after that, they casually give away all sorts of things that are supposed to be shocking revelations. They don't seem to have any regard for the mystery and suspense that was a big part of the original.
(I hate the new music, too. It's disrespectful to play technocrap in the Escaflowne temple.)
I wouldn't say that. The dub is embarassingly bad (especially that damned opening song), but that hasn't stopped me from watching it. They didn't hack the storyline to pieces like the Fox Escaflowne dub.
I mean, where else can you watch a 3-month fight scene? Remember, it was originally a weekly series.
Hell, just last week (where I'm watching, anyway) there was a 3-episode fireball attack. Where else can you get strung along on one attack like that for so long?
I agree with your general assessment, except that you have overlooked two crucial details: the ability to make micropayments instantly (I only support e-gold because it the only working international micropayment system), and the advantages for taking payment.
You can't send small amounts (pennies, nickels, dimes) by credit card. There are minimum credit card charges, somewhere around $0.50, so small payments are mostly transfer fee, and just aren't worth doing. A realistic minimum for cc payment is about $3, and that's really pushing it.
As for the other half, anyone can be taking e-gold payment as soon as they get an account, which only takes a few minutes. Perhaps most importantly, there are no chargebacks, and no possibility of a payment dispute. For good or for ill, once a payment is made, it is done.
I'd hate to take credit cards for payment over the internet. As the merchant, you are basically the one taking all the risk. If something goes wrong, it comes out of your pocket. Also, there are a lot of rules in the merchant account agreement that aren't directly related to taking cc payment. For example, you can't charge extra for a cc purchase than a cash purchase: you have to hide that $0.50 or whatever it costs per transaction in your price, so your prices have to go up across the board.
Wouldn't it be great if you could have one distributed system for transferring any fungible commodity?
Think of buying stuff with gallons of gasoline, standard bricks, or milligrams of antimatter (eventually).
I don't think we can hang on to any one commodity as money forever. Eventually we'll mine gold out of asteroids and make children's toys, statues, and novelty houses out it. We'll have to keep switching to whatever is valuable. (and, no, levitating legal tender bank notes aren't good long-term money by themselves; they're only as good as their government's economic health)
Basically, if you give money away for anything you like, people will realize this and start trying to make stuff you like. If you don't give out money, nobody will care what you do or don't like. Being generous makes you relevant to the busking industry, much like being gullible makes you relevant to the advertising industry (and think how much better TV would be if it wasn't targeted at people dumb enough to be influenced by advertising, but rather targeted at people bright enough to understand why they should do things that don't have an immediate personal payoff like donating and voting).
It includes a bit on why shareware doesn't work. Basically, shareware screws things up by trying to set a price, and usually way too high (presumably with the thought "I have to set some price, and I know most people won't pay, so I'll have to set it high enough that the few who do pay will make it worth my while."). The fact that making small payments over the internet only recently became possible, and still isn't well-understood by the general public, probably also had something to do with it. I mean, how far are you going to go out of your way to send $20 to some guy who wrote one cheesy utility you use?
Inexchange costs: somewhat painful. As for outexchange, the SOP is to calculate payments as the amount that could be outexchanged, so it makes more sense to look at all the exchange costs as inexchange costs. But re. storage: 1% per year? That's nothing. Your money shouldn't be sitting there that long anyway.
All in all, if you're careful and willing to wait a while for your deposit to get in, you'll lose maybe 5-7% between putting money in and getting money out. The nice thing is that 5-7% holds no matter whether you're transferring pennies or thousands. Of course, that's assuming the precious metal market doesn't go nuts (of course it could go either way, but in the long term... well, asteroid mining can't help the price of gold much). Also, if you're in a rush, or you're lazy about shopping around, you can expect to lose closer to 15% through the transfer. Ironically, the best combination of price and convenience comes from funding your e-gold account with PayPal!
I think it's a pretty good deal if you want to send nickels and dimes all over the place, and you never keep more money in it than you are willing to lose. I think a fair assumption of risk is that your account will zero once every 2 years (yes, I pulled that number out of my hat; more below), at least unless they make some major changes to their security model. No big deal for a micropayment account, as long as you keep it in mind.
Obviously, I don't think much of the security. You have to remember that these people don't know you. With a bank, you go and create an account face-to-face, they have all sorts of nice meatspace backups and redundancies to make sure you are you when you go in to do something with your money. With something like e-gold, if you have the password, you must be the right person, and your account can be emptied, laundered through an anonymous e-cash system like digigold, and safely in the account of the thief in an eyeblink. You might be able to get your money back, but only if you could prove you didn't transfer it.
I also don't like the way they've eroded the legal foundation of e-gold. They keep talking about replacing the user contract, and they've got a clause which allows them to make any changes if you don't object within a week of them posting it on their website... whether you read it or not within that time. They made a big deal about the "unconditional right of redemption", which was your only last-ditch guarantee: if everything goes wrong, you can always have the metal in your account (having the cash value sent to you is not a guaranteed service; they have no contractual obligation to provide any service but that of returning your gold). In the proposed changes to the contract, they changed it to "conditional right of redemption", and they only have to give you your gold in neat bar-sized increments. Since a gold bar is worth something in the region of a year's pay, obviously this isn't a lot of help to the typical user. In the past, they dealt in coins, right down to silver coins worth under $20, so you could redeem practically any account. If the system ever becomes so insecure that everyone wants out, and nobody wants any e-gold, there's no guarantee that you'll get your money out. Basically, under the new plan, the emergency escape clause only works as long as there isn't any emergency.
It isn't secure, it isn't terribly convenient, and it isn't really cheap, but it works, it works all over the world, and it works now (that is, at least when the servers are up:) ).
Basically they were basically almost kind of like a SNES system with a different controller. They missed the boat with the playstation being released and then nintendo produced the N64 which basically took over what other people didn't own a playstation. The only reason that they have succeeded as long as they have is that they have had the ability to take advantage of the slow emergence of nintendo's new offering.
Wow, what backward logic!
Do you remember how long the Genesis was out before the SNES? They were roughly equivalent, and Genesis was out over a year (and nearly two) before the SNES. Nintendo only managed to hang on to their loyal customers that long by lying about when the SNES was coming out (it was always "Don't waste your money on Genesis, SNES will be better, and it's coming out in just a couple of months!").
Sega has survived because they make better systems than Nintendo. They aren't "taking advantage of the slow emergence of nintendo's new offering", if the past is any clue, they're releasing a great system long before Nintendo's disappointingly similar release.
The SMS was a much more powerful system than the NES, was much easier to program, came out at roughly the same time, and sold for roughly the same price. Nintendo won out through business maneuvering: by making exclusive deals they prevented the best 3rd party developers from developing any SMS games. This seems to have been done largely without consulting the programmers, since the NES is about as hard to program as an Atari 2600.
As for Saturn, that was killed by Playstation and Sony's revolutionary open style of letting practically anyone make games for it instead of trying to be the sacred guardian of good taste and high quality (IOW, beat the snot out of the industry with old Atari cluestick), and Nintendo continued business-as-usual: delivering a disappointing product late in the game, surviving on exclusive franchises (the Zelda/Mario/Pokemon addicts out there are guaranteed to buy anything with a big N on it from now to eternity).
You may sense some bitterness. It's not that Nintendo makes crappy games (they don't; they're no technology drivers, but they have some very good designers), it's that they are a pack of deceitful little backstabbing weasels who focus on preventing you from buying their competitors product, rather than wanting to buy their own.
a computer using a novel technique to design a machine with minimal human programming,
Actually, it almost certainly took more human effort to do the programming than it would have to just design the damned robots. I wouldn't call it "minimal" human programming by any means.
I really don't think this is all that impressive. Similar simulations have been running for years, the only new thing these guys did was hook it up to a manufacturing machine.
"You Yankee bastard! Self reh-producing robot is du way Canada will going to take over de world."
-what the Canadian Prime Minister was shouting from over in the Photo of the Day
I'm not entirely against the "let's do it because we can do it" spirit, but this is an indescribably lame hack.
It would have satisfied the same basic criteria to have a bunch of snap-together motor+wheel blocks, and have the computer "evolve" the idea of snapping four of them into a little car (and I believe that the computer didn't evolve the construction method either, but just handled the design given a fixed set of parts; it might as well have been human technicians building the robots).
The sad fact of evolutionary design techniques is that they only work for an adequately simulated environment with a formally-defined design goal. Useful, but no silver bullet; certainly not a way to improve the versatility of designs (since they only take into account what conditions and criteria you program into them).
You can't move it out of a simulated environment (like having it build and test all models under real working conditions), or it would take as long as biological evolution, and we might as well breed our machines.
Slashdot Mirror
RMS's loss would cut the heart out of the free software movement
HAHAHAHAHA!
I'm not even convinced he played a significant role in any major trend except promoting the TLAs: FSF, GNU, GPL, and RMS. That, and injecting a lot of moralistic nonsense into what are essentially economic and engineering issues.
Free software is not like free speech. It is like public domain text: nice to have, but not a fundamental property of a free society. Going around convincing people that it is essential is harmful both to them and to the people who have rational reasons for releasing free software.
If he was never born, the major difference would be that Emacs wouldn't be around. If he died today, nothing would really change. He hasn't really done anything significant in a long time, he just goes around as a figurehead of the "free software movement" who is hated by half of the people involved in free software.
--------
It's useful as an abstract-conceptweight. You know, one of those things you use to plunk down on your grasp of a complex problem to keep it from blowing away.
Sure, in the concrete world, retaining the copyright while giving free permission for all uses to everyone serves no purpose, but in your own mind, you can't just pick up a rock and put it on top of a thought, so you need something useless, yet abstract.
Also, the BSDL keeps those evil GPL bastards from using your code. You know they're evil, why let them have your code?
--------
Sheep: The Catapulting
--------
I challenge you to find imposed by the X11 license "any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein"
"The authors hereby grant permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and license this software and its documentation for any purpose, provided that existing copyright notices are retained in all copies and that this notice is included verbatim in any distributions."
There you go. Anyone, except the authors, is required to include the X11 license verbatim in any distribution. That's a restriction that's incompatible with the GPL.
The X11 license does not have a general license surrender. Piling requirements of other licensing-agreements atop it is acceptable, removing the requirements of the X11 license is not.
whether RMS considered Xfree to be non-free. What were you saying about that?
His rant on the Great X Betrayal makes it abundantly clear that he considers the X11 license untrustworthy and less free than the GPL.
--------
After all, we make thinking machines by etching arcane symbols with rare elements into a pure crystal, and binding the symbols with inlaid metal. We make mighty creatures of steel that obey us with curious precision, like the genie from the lamp. We have great roaring war chariots of the skies that fly faster than sound itself and hurl fiery spears that hunt their targets with mindless fury. We can see across the world in an instant. We looked into the smallest things to find the secrets of the universe, and learned to make weapons that could destroy the world. We have visited another world, and prepare to visit others, sending our mechanical forerunners into the fathomless void between worlds on a pillar of flame. We play with the language of life itself, and reshape the plants and the beasts to suit us.
Magic is bloody boring compared to the real world.
If you want to look at the world through a romantic fog, you don't need to make up new rules for it.
--------
Given that copyright is based on commercial value, and copyright litigation awards damages based on an estimate of direct financial loss, every free software license is on unsteady legal ground. If it ever went to court, I think they would be legally found to be in the public domain.
Why waste all that effort, instead of just dumping everything into the public domain, like in the good old days?
--------
The X11 License
This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.
And yet, it isn't. This is a cop-out, IMHO because RMS saw that if he pushed the issue, more people would realize that X11 is more free than the GPL. The GPL specifically prohibits any other restrictions. The X11 license has other restrictions, which it doesn't surrender without specific permission from the copyright holder.
There are only 3 categories GPL-compatible, but non-GPL software: public domain, strict GPL subsets, and software with a specific GPL-surrender (a clause that says "you can also just forget any other terms and distribute it under the GPL"). Anything else contains terms which are incompatible with the GPL.
RMS has never said anything along the lines of "non-GPL is not free",
Maybe not straight out, but he sure seems to imply it often enough. Stunts like demoting the LGPL to "lesser" status certainly don't argue against this perception.
--------
without RMS or another hard liner who stuck to his guns and just plain simply refused to give an inch we'd not have all the wonderful choices we have today, we'd all be running Windows 95
(hrm)FreeBSD(cough)XFree86(blurgh)lcc(hrrump)
(I could go on, but I think that last one was a lung)
--------
KDE ... was technically NOT free because of the licensing issues
No. KDE was technically illegal to compile because of the licensing issues. It was not GNU/free because it relies on Qt, which is gratis but severely restricted.
His current talk about requiring copyright "forgiveness" is what's ridiculous nonsense.
The delusional bit is that KDE threatened an area that was previous pure GNU/free software. Hell, you can't use any X-based programs without running non-GPL software. There is no GNU/purity to protect.
--------
but if it were not for RMS's radicalism, there would be no FSF and GNU Project
Yes indeed. Fewer idiotic recursive acronyms. More licenses used that don't require you to redistribute source. No FSF-propaganda induced hostility against the Great Satan of commercial software. No raving lunatic who claims to represent us.
I would miss him horribly. He surely made the world a better place.
--------
Seriously, /. is "shiny things for geeks". I think the story approval process is:
/. worth reading, and the community that creates the discussion. The articles are just decoys that happen to call the right kind of people here.
1) read submission, if not immediately compelled to follow the link, toss it out
2) follow link, if link is obviously not as described by submission on first glance, toss it out
3) post submission to front page, don't stop to check trivial details like facts or spelling
4) read the linked article
Journalistic integrity doesn't even come into it. It is not only amateur, but lazy. If it sounds really cool (to someone who has top-level posting privileges), it goes up. It's that simple, and, yes, that stupid.
It sorta works, too. Since it's interesting, and there's a discussion forum, all the relevant facts get posted and modded up by the readers. Really, the articles aren't what we're here for. Each article is just the topic of the hour. It's the discussion that makes
--------
I mean, what other motivation does he have?
He can't seriously be concerned about the legal difficulties he mentioned. The KDE guy's response was too obvious (and too obviously right) for him to miss.
He really does come off as severely delusional, especially that part about having to start to Gnome to stop non-free software from taking root. Umm... I think non-free software took root a long time ago. I don't think there are many people using nothing but GPL software. I also don't remember a top-priority effort to replace something evil and unfree like XFree86 (gasp! people are allowed to reuse the code without being required to distribute the source, it's not free!).
But I guess spoiled children, when denied positive attention, will go for negative attention.
--------
Of course, trying it yourself is always the best way to learn about anything. Ignore the millions of hours of collective experience out there, if you spend a few hours with the products, you'll learn much more about subtle incompatabilities and transient, but catastrophic, bugs.
It's also much more economical for you to duplicate all your services, train all your personnel in both systems, and see for yourself, rather than asking some questions and hearing what other people have to say about it.
And, of course, it's totally worth buying as many copies of W2K, and the applications you intend to run on it, as you need to test them.
Therefore, I obviously also must heartily recommend that you go out and try both yourself. It's not like you can save lots of time, effort, and money just by asking people who already know.
--------
That wasn't so hard. When people say things like "that's like comparing apples and oranges!" it makes me crazy.
They're rejecting a simple quality comparision, telling you the difference is instead in kind. Usually a response to an inappropriately simple "which is better?" question.
By saying "it's like apples and oranges", they express that the answer is largely subject to individual tastes and requirements, as one's preference for apples or oranges would be. It rejects direct and general value comparison, not qualitatively contrasting descriptions.
This has been a public service announcement from The Straight-Faced Pedant, long may he blather on.
--------
By no means is this even close to the upper echelon of anime.
Of course not. I'm not arguing that many anime fans consider it one of the best, just that they watch it anyway.
Despite everybody bitching about how bad it is, most of the guys I talk to who have joined anime watching clubs, get fansubs, and have large personal collections of anime still watch Dragonball Z. After all, it is anime piped conveniently into their homes, even if it is butchered.
People are lazy. 9 times out of 10, they'd rather have hot dogs served to them than go get steak themselves.
I think this is a case of the silent majority acting differently than the highly vocal minority.
--------
That was the real killer. It really, really sucked.
But even after that, they casually give away all sorts of things that are supposed to be shocking revelations. They don't seem to have any regard for the mystery and suspense that was a big part of the original.
(I hate the new music, too. It's disrespectful to play technocrap in the Escaflowne temple.)
--------
I wouldn't say that. The dub is embarassingly bad (especially that damned opening song), but that hasn't stopped me from watching it. They didn't hack the storyline to pieces like the Fox Escaflowne dub.
I mean, where else can you watch a 3-month fight scene? Remember, it was originally a weekly series.
Hell, just last week (where I'm watching, anyway) there was a 3-episode fireball attack. Where else can you get strung along on one attack like that for so long?
--------
I agree with your general assessment, except that you have overlooked two crucial details: the ability to make micropayments instantly (I only support e-gold because it the only working international micropayment system), and the advantages for taking payment.
You can't send small amounts (pennies, nickels, dimes) by credit card. There are minimum credit card charges, somewhere around $0.50, so small payments are mostly transfer fee, and just aren't worth doing. A realistic minimum for cc payment is about $3, and that's really pushing it.
As for the other half, anyone can be taking e-gold payment as soon as they get an account, which only takes a few minutes. Perhaps most importantly, there are no chargebacks, and no possibility of a payment dispute. For good or for ill, once a payment is made, it is done.
I'd hate to take credit cards for payment over the internet. As the merchant, you are basically the one taking all the risk. If something goes wrong, it comes out of your pocket. Also, there are a lot of rules in the merchant account agreement that aren't directly related to taking cc payment. For example, you can't charge extra for a cc purchase than a cash purchase: you have to hide that $0.50 or whatever it costs per transaction in your price, so your prices have to go up across the board.
--------
Wouldn't it be great if you could have one distributed system for transferring any fungible commodity?
Think of buying stuff with gallons of gasoline, standard bricks, or milligrams of antimatter (eventually).
I don't think we can hang on to any one commodity as money forever. Eventually we'll mine gold out of asteroids and make children's toys, statues, and novelty houses out it. We'll have to keep switching to whatever is valuable. (and, no, levitating legal tender bank notes aren't good long-term money by themselves; they're only as good as their government's economic health)
--------
Mass Market Busking: The Inevitable Economics of Software
Basically, if you give money away for anything you like, people will realize this and start trying to make stuff you like. If you don't give out money, nobody will care what you do or don't like. Being generous makes you relevant to the busking industry, much like being gullible makes you relevant to the advertising industry (and think how much better TV would be if it wasn't targeted at people dumb enough to be influenced by advertising, but rather targeted at people bright enough to understand why they should do things that don't have an immediate personal payoff like donating and voting).
It includes a bit on why shareware doesn't work. Basically, shareware screws things up by trying to set a price, and usually way too high (presumably with the thought "I have to set some price, and I know most people won't pay, so I'll have to set it high enough that the few who do pay will make it worth my while."). The fact that making small payments over the internet only recently became possible, and still isn't well-understood by the general public, probably also had something to do with it. I mean, how far are you going to go out of your way to send $20 to some guy who wrote one cheesy utility you use?
--------
Inexchange costs: somewhat painful. As for outexchange, the SOP is to calculate payments as the amount that could be outexchanged, so it makes more sense to look at all the exchange costs as inexchange costs. But re. storage: 1% per year? That's nothing. Your money shouldn't be sitting there that long anyway.
:) ).
All in all, if you're careful and willing to wait a while for your deposit to get in, you'll lose maybe 5-7% between putting money in and getting money out. The nice thing is that 5-7% holds no matter whether you're transferring pennies or thousands. Of course, that's assuming the precious metal market doesn't go nuts (of course it could go either way, but in the long term... well, asteroid mining can't help the price of gold much). Also, if you're in a rush, or you're lazy about shopping around, you can expect to lose closer to 15% through the transfer. Ironically, the best combination of price and convenience comes from funding your e-gold account with PayPal!
I think it's a pretty good deal if you want to send nickels and dimes all over the place, and you never keep more money in it than you are willing to lose. I think a fair assumption of risk is that your account will zero once every 2 years (yes, I pulled that number out of my hat; more below), at least unless they make some major changes to their security model. No big deal for a micropayment account, as long as you keep it in mind.
Obviously, I don't think much of the security. You have to remember that these people don't know you. With a bank, you go and create an account face-to-face, they have all sorts of nice meatspace backups and redundancies to make sure you are you when you go in to do something with your money. With something like e-gold, if you have the password, you must be the right person, and your account can be emptied, laundered through an anonymous e-cash system like digigold, and safely in the account of the thief in an eyeblink. You might be able to get your money back, but only if you could prove you didn't transfer it.
I also don't like the way they've eroded the legal foundation of e-gold. They keep talking about replacing the user contract, and they've got a clause which allows them to make any changes if you don't object within a week of them posting it on their website... whether you read it or not within that time. They made a big deal about the "unconditional right of redemption", which was your only last-ditch guarantee: if everything goes wrong, you can always have the metal in your account (having the cash value sent to you is not a guaranteed service; they have no contractual obligation to provide any service but that of returning your gold). In the proposed changes to the contract, they changed it to "conditional right of redemption", and they only have to give you your gold in neat bar-sized increments. Since a gold bar is worth something in the region of a year's pay, obviously this isn't a lot of help to the typical user. In the past, they dealt in coins, right down to silver coins worth under $20, so you could redeem practically any account. If the system ever becomes so insecure that everyone wants out, and nobody wants any e-gold, there's no guarantee that you'll get your money out. Basically, under the new plan, the emergency escape clause only works as long as there isn't any emergency.
It isn't secure, it isn't terribly convenient, and it isn't really cheap, but it works, it works all over the world, and it works now (that is, at least when the servers are up
Here's an e-gold discussion forum that goes way back. It covers the good, the bad, and the ugly of e-gold, with tasty sprinklings of marketroidese and paranoid ranting.
--------
Basically they were basically almost kind of like a SNES system with a different controller. They missed the boat with the playstation being released and then nintendo produced the N64 which basically took over what other people didn't own a playstation. The only reason that they have succeeded as long as they have is that they have had the ability to take advantage of the slow emergence of nintendo's new offering.
Wow, what backward logic!
Do you remember how long the Genesis was out before the SNES? They were roughly equivalent, and Genesis was out over a year (and nearly two) before the SNES. Nintendo only managed to hang on to their loyal customers that long by lying about when the SNES was coming out (it was always "Don't waste your money on Genesis, SNES will be better, and it's coming out in just a couple of months!").
Sega has survived because they make better systems than Nintendo. They aren't "taking advantage of the slow emergence of nintendo's new offering", if the past is any clue, they're releasing a great system long before Nintendo's disappointingly similar release.
The SMS was a much more powerful system than the NES, was much easier to program, came out at roughly the same time, and sold for roughly the same price. Nintendo won out through business maneuvering: by making exclusive deals they prevented the best 3rd party developers from developing any SMS games. This seems to have been done largely without consulting the programmers, since the NES is about as hard to program as an Atari 2600.
As for Saturn, that was killed by Playstation and Sony's revolutionary open style of letting practically anyone make games for it instead of trying to be the sacred guardian of good taste and high quality (IOW, beat the snot out of the industry with old Atari cluestick), and Nintendo continued business-as-usual: delivering a disappointing product late in the game, surviving on exclusive franchises (the Zelda/Mario/Pokemon addicts out there are guaranteed to buy anything with a big N on it from now to eternity).
You may sense some bitterness. It's not that Nintendo makes crappy games (they don't; they're no technology drivers, but they have some very good designers), it's that they are a pack of deceitful little backstabbing weasels who focus on preventing you from buying their competitors product, rather than wanting to buy their own.
--------
a computer using a novel technique to design a machine with minimal human programming,
Actually, it almost certainly took more human effort to do the programming than it would have to just design the damned robots. I wouldn't call it "minimal" human programming by any means.
I really don't think this is all that impressive. Similar simulations have been running for years, the only new thing these guys did was hook it up to a manufacturing machine.
--------
"You Yankee bastard! Self reh-producing robot is du way Canada will going to take over de world."
-what the Canadian Prime Minister was shouting from over in the Photo of the Day
--------
I'm not entirely against the "let's do it because we can do it" spirit, but this is an indescribably lame hack.
It would have satisfied the same basic criteria to have a bunch of snap-together motor+wheel blocks, and have the computer "evolve" the idea of snapping four of them into a little car (and I believe that the computer didn't evolve the construction method either, but just handled the design given a fixed set of parts; it might as well have been human technicians building the robots).
The sad fact of evolutionary design techniques is that they only work for an adequately simulated environment with a formally-defined design goal. Useful, but no silver bullet; certainly not a way to improve the versatility of designs (since they only take into account what conditions and criteria you program into them).
You can't move it out of a simulated environment (like having it build and test all models under real working conditions), or it would take as long as biological evolution, and we might as well breed our machines.
--------