It seems that the only thing the P4 can beat the Athlon on is anything that's memory bandwidth intensive . . . That's the difference between the Content Creation 2001/2002 suites that everyone seems to be completely baffled by - the new version includes apps that are bandwidth limited.
I'd be interested to see the performance of the Athlon XP if it had access to the same amount of memory bandwidth as the P4. . . I'd be willing to put money on the Athlon coming out on top.
So, is there a dual channel DDR chipset for the Athlon? Give the thing 4200GB/s memory bandwidth, and watch it kick the P4's arse even more . ..
Microsoft has the power to cease licensing people windows. They have the power to tie their software closely to windows, gaining a significant performance advantage. They have the power to change the interfaces that other software uses, forcing the developers of that software to update their products to work with newer versions of windows. They have the power to fail to document large parts of their interfaces. They have the power to make their code so obfuscated that replacing it is downright impossible. They have the power to tie the core operating system to various optional extras that they produce, and which compete with third party products.
Microsoft has been seen to do all of those things. In Microsoft's position (it/has/ been legally judged a monopoly, so arguing about whether or not it is one is moot), those things are considered abuses of monopoly power, and are illegal. End of story.
It's that simple, my partisan friend - they were found guilty, and the remedy phase is in full swing. Controlling their actions is one proposed remedy. The reasons for it being proposed are what I outlined in my previous post. Your arguments about whether or not they're a monopoly are moot, and most of them are really rather naive. Get over it, please.
Each one of those library dependencies provides a single module, with a single well defined (though quite possibly baroque) interface. Reimplement the interface, and you can replace the library completely. That's good software engineering, even though it can end up looking hideous when you see the number of different dependencies involved.
What Microsoft does is different: they don't put a single module in a seperate file, instead they spread the module's implementation around through various files, creating false dependencies. Replacing a particular module in/that/ system requires replacing all the files that implement parts of the module, and since there are other unrelated modules implemented in those files, you have to replace/those/ too. The end result is that you have to reimplement/everything/ in order to replace anything.
Why should MS be forced to provide a stable third-party software atmosphere for modifying and using _their_ operating system? Aren't they allowed to define what their operating system is?
Microsoft is a company. They produce a product which many many other companies rely upon. Microsoft also competes directly with many of those companies.
Microsoft's position as the producer of a fundamental dependency as well as a competitor is the source of the problem: they are in a position where they can make use of their control of one area to compete in other areas.
All of that is simply fact - you can't argue with it, it's just a simple statement of the situation.
Now, in the world we live in, competition in the market place is considered a Good Thing. Unfair competition is considered bad. There's plenty of evidence to back this up in most situations - monopolys almost always lead to inefficiencies, inequity, and prices that don't reflect costs in any way.
Since unfair competition is considered bad, governments generally go to some effort to ensure that competition/is/ fair. In this case, the idea is to put limits on what Microsoft can do in order to ensure that they can't use their control of Windows to take control of other unrelated markets.
Microsoft is coming up with a definition of what their operating system is that conveniently includes applications of theirs that are competing with alternatives. The definitions aren't technical, they're tactical - Microsoft is doing it in order to make use of it's operating system power to compete in other areas.
Microsoft wants to claim that a browser is part of the operating system? Then why can I use any one of about half a dozen different ones, that have no ties to the OS other than the published interfaces? The linkage has nothing to do with the requirements of the operating system, and everything to do with Microsoft's competition with Netscape.
That's why people want to put limits on Microsoft's "freedom of thought" - they're using their freedom of thought to gain an unfair advantage. And yes, that is a crime, particularly when it's done by a company with as much power as Microsoft has.
To replace a library module, all you have to do is reimplement that library's API and/or ABI. If the library is well documented, this is actually relatively easy - the major design decisions have already been made, all you have to do is write code.
The development of Mesa was hard because it's a hard problem space - the API was and is extremely well documented. Replacing MSHTML would be extremely hard, not because of the difficulty of the problem space (gecko does the same thing, as does KDE's html engine, and several others), but because the API is badly documented, and incompletely documented, and the actual implementation is badly modularised.
The kind of modularity people are talking about here/should/ make replacement simply a matter of reimplementing an API. Thanks to MS' tricks, there's more to it than that - the code implementing 'modules' is actually spread throughout multiple dlls, so that replacing an implementation takes much more than just overwriting one dll.
Make no mistake: MS has gone to a/lot/ of trouble to make the dependencies within their OS as complicated as possible, specifically to make replacement of their products as hard as possible. Ever wondered why installing Office replaces large chunks of the system dlls? Or why installing most software requires a reboot? It's all those dependencies catching you.
That kind of crap is all well and good when you're not a monoply (though it's/always/ bad software engineering), but MS/is/, and that kind of thing involves abuse of their monopoly power. That's illegal, and they should be slapped down/hard/ for it.
The idea behind statically linking the HTML engine is that then the library doesn't have to be distributed, nor does the app rely on having the library available. If you're trying to avoid extra dependencies, this is perfectly reasonable.
As for who cares if IE is in windows . . . How about, say, Netscape, who lost their commercial market because MS started dumping IE?
Yup, Tux runs in-kernel. Then again, most of the *nix nfs servers run in-kernel, too, for the same reason - a userspace server is generally limited by all the context switching and copying to and from userspace. You can work around it, but it's often harder than just writing kernel code. Not so good in the long run, of course, because you have to track kernel changes continually, but hey, it flies!
Are there any servers on *BSD that can handle that kind of load? How do they do it?
Not sure of the implementation method, but whatever the case it definitely meets your requirements.
Quoted from Alan Cox's diary:
The Red Hat ftp boxes are fielding over 10,000 parallel downloads so our effort was slightly dwarfed. Everyone who downloaded 7.2 from Red Hat or ftp.linux.org.uk should say thank you to Chris Evans for vsftpd - finally we have a scalable ftpd for Linux.
(http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/, from the October 22nd, 2001 entry)
I suspect a Tux based server could do this too - the limitations on Tux are basically how much hardware you can throw at it.
Now it's your turn - show me a windows server that can handle the same kind of thing.
I think the poster's point was that after being screwed over for eight years, he'd rather not have to deal with the risk of being screwed over yet again, in yet another expensive way.
If NT isn't good enough for you, and you're not ready for 2000, where does that place you?
I don't know . . . Maybe with *nix? Which/is/ ready, and was ready back when NT was first released . . .
What makes something posh is it's uniqueness - a print of a pretty picture looks good, but there were another 500,000 identical copies produced at the same time, so it's just not particularly classy. The original is a one-of-a-kind, and derives it's value from that.
In music, any given/performance/ is unique - recordings are all identical. So imagine a world where the rich pay bands to perform for them, or create their own personal edition of their work, or something like that . . . The value to the person requesting the piece is it's uniqueness, and the uniqueness comes from it being a specific, unique, performance.
It's an extension of the value of live performances, and I think it's probably quite viable - perform live to get money to eat, record stuff and give it away so people get to hear about you, and top it off by selling individual performances to those who are willing to pay.
Ignore record companies and so forth - they likely won't have anything much to do with this. Big companies are great for selling commodities, but generally not so good for selling uniqueness. That type of transaction is generally more personal, if only as a way to guarantee that the result is unique.
Hmmmm . . . I'm not being very coherent . . . I need coffee . ..
/Really/ expensive - it's almost invariably SRAM, which requires 6 transistors per cell, as opposed to DRAM's 1 transistor and one capacitor. That adds up to/way/ more cost.
Putting 256kB to 512kB of cache on a modern x86 core seems to be the sweet spot, price wise - more cache makes a difference to a smaller and smaller subset of programs, and costs more and more, so it just isn't worth it.
Minimising the memory footprint of your code is/extremely/ important.
There/is/ a valid point somewhere in the middle of all that invective . ..
Apparently the nuclear deterrent/did/ stop Iraq from using their biological and chemical weapons against US troops. Great. Pity it didn't stop them from gassing the Kurds, or Iran, or anyone else who lacked such a deterrent. And, most importantly, it didn't stop them from/developing/ the weapons in the first place. And once they've been developed, what's to stop them from being sold to the highest bidder? Like, say, a nicely funded terrorist organisation?
My original point was that none of this large scale deterrent stuff has any effect on the/real/ danger point: terrorists. They couldn't give a flying fuck about nuclear attacks - they/want/ to die gloriously.
You should get/your/ head out of your arse and realise that your country is fighting a different kind of war now, one that doesn't follow the old rules. Not realising that will get lots of you killed. Unfortunately, it'll also kill lots of people who had nothing to do with either side of it.
Notice I said "only rarely" - yes, I/do/ realise that WWII was necessary, and some other instances where war was justified, but in general, all that wars do is give countries good reason to hate one another.
Vietnam was probably also justified - the country was unstable, artificially divided after the French colonial withdrawl, and the division was propped up by a foriegn power: the war fought by the North Vietnamese was probably quite reasonable, and would have been fairly trivial if the US hadn't gotten involved.
However, most wars aren't at/all/ like that. Consider all the little wars fought in sub-saharan Africa - they do nothing to change the situations that caused the wars in the first place, and simply perpetuate the hatred. If the US stuck it's oar in on one side or the other, with adequate force to stop a particular conflict, it wouldn't change a thing - they'd be at each other's throats as soon as the US pulled out. On top of that, one side would hate the US for it's interference, and if the climate was right, you'd have a new group of anti-US terrorists.
Most of the wars fought in the world are the second type, and the only way to deal with them is general social changes in the affected nations. 'adequate' force does nothing positive beyond the immediate term, and often makes the long term worse.
They want us to back down? Then they need to take care of their own mess. If they are unwilling or unable, that is simply too fucking bad. Put up your dukes, get the fuck out of the way, or die.
You know, that's a very short sighted way of thinking . . . You might consider that the WTC attacks/were/ their way of "putting up their dukes" . ..
Making war is only rarely going to/stop/ war, either in the short term or in the long term - in the long term, it'll breed ever more terrorists: people who are willing to die in order to kill as many of/your/ civilians as they can.
Iraq was happily developing various forms of bio and chemical weapons, despite near-direct threats of nuclear attack.
They're the most obvious example, but there are sure to be others - if nothing else, ex-Soviet scientists selling things to people indiscriminately.
Take a look at the history of warfare during the cold war, when there was a/real/ nuclear deterrent: lots of little wars, all over the place, lots of countries doing their own research into weapons, and bying things from the Soviets, or being given them by the US, or whatever. The lesson to be learnt from that is that a large scale nuclear deterrent does not work against most things, and most states. Not at all.
Bush is fucking up seriously in his handling of the post WTO world.
All this does is up the stakes in any conflict that the US gets involved in, and encourages people who don't like the US to develop their own nukes, and to deploy them in ways that will make deterrence irrelevant.
This stuff would remove all directional control that aircraft had: in the event of even a slight crosswind on takeoff, it'd end up sliding off the tarmac and most likely trashing the undercarriage . . .
Water, snow and ice can all be made to have minimal resistance in one direction, but very high resistance perpendicular to that direction - it's a completely different matter to this goo.
Please consider the difference between 'society' and 'individuals in a society'.
Copyright protects justice for businesses.
Actually, copyright law is there to define the rights of the copyright holder - it has nothing to do with businesses, and everything to do with individuals.
Tell me, do you/really/ think that people will stop making music if the current recording industry dies? If you/do/ believe that, what are you smoking?
You want a company to be able to protect it's copyrights. Why? Because otherwise it'll go out of business . . . . Well, I'm afraid that's what happens to companies with unviable business plans - they die. Copyright law should have nothing to say about such things - all it should talk about is the rights of a copyright owner. And unless I've completely missed a large chunk of the discussion about things like fair use, those rights are reasonably limited, and for good reasons.
But the principle is the one I'd like to uphold--a company should be able to protect its copyrights.
This raises a number of questions, aside from the big one of whether a company should have the rights of a individual.
What's involved in protecting copyrights? What should be allowable? What rights should be taken away from non-copyright-holders in order to afford protections for the copyright holder? How do we strike a balance between people's right to make use of other people's ideas and the right of a person to control people's use of their ideas? Where does the public good come into all of this?
Those are all questions that were considered when current copyright law was first created: the decisions that were made then were most likely well balanced in the context of that era. The context has changed, though, and those questions need to be asked again, and new decisions made.
Your approach to those questions seems to lack balance - you're arguing for protection of copyright without considering the costs of that protection, to society and to the people who would make use of copyrighted material. That approach would lead to the kind of thing that we see now, with the DMCA and things like the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (ie, copyright extensions).
It is important if laws are to be effective that they be consistent.
What if the price of consistency is too great? Should we pay it anyway, rather than rethink the laws?
Ultimately, laws/must/ be considered in the context of the society they exist in. Otherwise they're worse than useless.
If laws codified what a society already did, we would have a murder quotient, where murder was allowed some of the time, since before laws people sometimes got murdered.
That is a blatant misreading of my argument, and if you don't realise that then you lack the intelligence to hold a reasonable discussion.
Murders happen, but they've/never/ been sanctioned by society. And it's what society sanctions that becomes codified in laws - if you go back and reread my comment, you'll see that this is exactly what I said.
If you actually take a look at the history of most laws you'll see that they tend to come long after whatever it is they regulate began to occur. Certainly most of the good laws are like that - the ones that were developed/after/ it became apparent what the effects of things were, and what it might be a good idea to regulate. Ideals tend to make bad laws, not good laws.
As for copyright's history, that's all well and good, but if it has little relevance/now/, then it may have become a bad set of laws. Society's don't stand still - they change over time, and their laws change accordingly. The context within which copyright exists now is vastly different to that which existed when it was created: perhaps copyright law needs to change to reflect those differences.
Yes, copyright had, and probably still has, a sound basis, but if copyright laws end up making most of the population criminals, then there's almost certainly something wrong with them.
What good is a law if all it does is make common usage a crime? You end up with a population made up of criminals, with all that entails.
Good laws simply codify what a society already does, so that serious transgressions can be handled consistently. If a society changes, then the laws should change to reflect that. Anything else is a short fast trip towards insanity.
Don't deify something simply because it's been written down officially./Think/ about what it means, and then support it or not based on what it/means/, not what it is.
Nuclear weapons are specifically designed to do illegal things (ie, killing people and destroying property).
Lockpicks are specifically designed to illegal things (ie, picking locks - they/do/ have a legitimate use, but it's still a special case of an illegal act: picking a lock you happen to own).
Ripping music to some portable digital form like mp3 files is designed to give you a portable copy of some piece of music - this is perfectly legal. It only becomes illegal when that piece of music isn't owned by you, or when you don't have the right to legally copy it.
See the difference? Your two cases are specifically designed to perform illegal acts - any possible legal uses for them are such a small percentage of the actual uses that they make no difference. The case of ripping music has a very big and extremely significant legal use.
When the legal use dominates the illegal use, you should look at controling the actions rather than the tools. That's why crowbars aren't illegal, but using them in a theft/is/ - it's far more useful to outlaw the act of using a crowbar in a crime than to outlaw all uses of a crowbar.
This is one of those decisions that goes on all the time in legal systems: how do you make your laws/useful/ for controlling the actions you want to control? It's a matter of compromising between what you want to control and what you/can/ control, and what it's worth trying to control. There are some good rules of thumb available to guide those decisions - the one about a known legal use dominating a potential illegal use is a good example.
As a side note, it should be noted that when you find yourself dealing with an unenforceable law, you've almost certainly got that compromise wrong, and should go back to the drawing board and start again. The problems with drug prohibition are a perfect example of this, and the current copyright issues look to be another example.
You have a right to listen to the stuff on the CD because you own your copy of the contents: you bought it, and that gives you the right to listen to it.
You do/not/ have a right to copy it indiscriminately, resell it commercially (you can sell your copy, but you can't make lots of copies and sell them), or do things like pass it off as your own work. Those rights are controlled by the copyright owner.
That's the idea of copyright: you get to control many of the rights of copying that are available. But you do/not/ control anything outside those rights - if you sell your copyrighted work to someone, they own that copy and can do what they like with it, including listening to it. The MPAA and RIAA are busy trying to gain control of things that copyright law doesn't allow them: that's why so many people are pissed off at them.
That's the nature of ideas - they build on previous ideas, and evolve, rather than revolutionise things.
It's not just the open source/free software world that's derivative, it's/everyone/: point me at a truly new and innovative idea that's come up in any form of software in the last two years, five years, and ten years, and then consider where it came from, and what it was based on. I'd bet you can't show that there are more coming from commercial development than from open source development - in fact, I'd be surprised if most of them/didn't/ come from academia originally.
Companies don't have a monopoly on innovation, they just have the money to put their ideas out into the world. Open source is an alternative way to do that - the source of the ideas is mostly irrelevant.
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grrrrrrrr
himi da foo'
It seems that the only thing the P4 can beat the Athlon on is anything that's memory bandwidth intensive . . . That's the difference between the Content Creation 2001/2002 suites that everyone seems to be completely baffled by - the new version includes apps that are bandwidth limited.
.
I'd be interested to see the performance of the Athlon XP if it had access to the same amount of memory bandwidth as the P4. . . I'd be willing to put money on the Athlon coming out on top.
So, is there a dual channel DDR chipset for the Athlon? Give the thing 4200GB/s memory bandwidth, and watch it kick the P4's arse even more . .
himi
Microsoft has the power to cease licensing people windows. They have the power to tie their software closely to windows, gaining a significant performance advantage. They have the power to change the interfaces that other software uses, forcing the developers of that software to update their products to work with newer versions of windows. They have the power to fail to document large parts of their interfaces. They have the power to make their code so obfuscated that replacing it is downright impossible. They have the power to tie the core operating system to various optional extras that they produce, and which compete with third party products.
/has/ been legally judged a monopoly, so arguing about whether or not it is one is moot), those things are considered abuses of monopoly power, and are illegal. End of story.
Microsoft has been seen to do all of those things. In Microsoft's position (it
It's that simple, my partisan friend - they were found guilty, and the remedy phase is in full swing. Controlling their actions is one proposed remedy. The reasons for it being proposed are what I outlined in my previous post. Your arguments about whether or not they're a monopoly are moot, and most of them are really rather naive. Get over it, please.
himi
What Microsoft does is different: they don't put a single module in a seperate file, instead they spread the module's implementation around through various files, creating false dependencies. Replacing a particular module in
Microsoft is a company. They produce a product which many many other companies rely upon. Microsoft also competes directly with many of those companies.
Microsoft's position as the producer of a fundamental dependency as well as a competitor is the source of the problem: they are in a position where they can make use of their control of one area to compete in other areas.
All of that is simply fact - you can't argue with it, it's just a simple statement of the situation.
Now, in the world we live in, competition in the market place is considered a Good Thing. Unfair competition is considered bad. There's plenty of evidence to back this up in most situations - monopolys almost always lead to inefficiencies, inequity, and prices that don't reflect costs in any way.
Since unfair competition is considered bad, governments generally go to some effort to ensure that competition
Microsoft is coming up with a definition of what their operating system is that conveniently includes applications of theirs that are competing with alternatives. The definitions aren't technical, they're tactical - Microsoft is doing it in order to make use of it's operating system power to compete in other areas.
Microsoft wants to claim that a browser is part of the operating system? Then why can I use any one of about half a dozen different ones, that have no ties to the OS other than the published interfaces? The linkage has nothing to do with the requirements of the operating system, and everything to do with Microsoft's competition with Netscape.
That's why people want to put limits on Microsoft's "freedom of thought" - they're using their freedom of thought to gain an unfair advantage. And yes, that is a crime, particularly when it's done by a company with as much power as Microsoft has.
himi
To replace a library module, all you have to do is reimplement that library's API and/or ABI. If the library is well documented, this is actually relatively easy - the major design decisions have already been made, all you have to do is write code.
/should/ make replacement simply a matter of reimplementing an API. Thanks to MS' tricks, there's more to it than that - the code implementing 'modules' is actually spread throughout multiple dlls, so that replacing an implementation takes much more than just overwriting one dll.
/lot/ of trouble to make the dependencies within their OS as complicated as possible, specifically to make replacement of their products as hard as possible. Ever wondered why installing Office replaces large chunks of the system dlls? Or why installing most software requires a reboot? It's all those dependencies catching you.
/always/ bad software engineering), but MS /is/, and that kind of thing involves abuse of their monopoly power. That's illegal, and they should be slapped down /hard/ for it.
The development of Mesa was hard because it's a hard problem space - the API was and is extremely well documented. Replacing MSHTML would be extremely hard, not because of the difficulty of the problem space (gecko does the same thing, as does KDE's html engine, and several others), but because the API is badly documented, and incompletely documented, and the actual implementation is badly modularised.
The kind of modularity people are talking about here
Make no mistake: MS has gone to a
That kind of crap is all well and good when you're not a monoply (though it's
himi
The idea behind statically linking the HTML engine is that then the library doesn't have to be distributed, nor does the app rely on having the library available. If you're trying to avoid extra dependencies, this is perfectly reasonable.
As for who cares if IE is in windows . . . How about, say, Netscape, who lost their commercial market because MS started dumping IE?
himi
Yup, Tux runs in-kernel. Then again, most of the *nix nfs servers run in-kernel, too, for the same reason - a userspace server is generally limited by all the context switching and copying to and from userspace. You can work around it, but it's often harder than just writing kernel code. Not so good in the long run, of course, because you have to track kernel changes continually, but hey, it flies!
Are there any servers on *BSD that can handle that kind of load? How do they do it?
himi
Not sure of the implementation method, but whatever the case it definitely meets your requirements.
Quoted from Alan Cox's diary:
I suspect a Tux based server could do this too - the limitations on Tux are basically how much hardware you can throw at it.
Now it's your turn - show me a windows server that can handle the same kind of thing.
himi
I don't know . . . Maybe with *nix? Which
himi
The beta silicon is for the clawhammer - I'm not sure, but I think they may be releasing the sldgehammer later, ie, next year . . .
.
Then again, it's more likely either a typo or a thinko . .
himi
What makes something posh is it's uniqueness - a print of a pretty picture looks good, but there were another 500,000 identical copies produced at the same time, so it's just not particularly classy. The original is a one-of-a-kind, and derives it's value from that.
/performance/ is unique - recordings are all identical. So imagine a world where the rich pay bands to perform for them, or create their own personal edition of their work, or something like that . . . The value to the person requesting the piece is it's uniqueness, and the uniqueness comes from it being a specific, unique, performance.
.
In music, any given
It's an extension of the value of live performances, and I think it's probably quite viable - perform live to get money to eat, record stuff and give it away so people get to hear about you, and top it off by selling individual performances to those who are willing to pay.
Ignore record companies and so forth - they likely won't have anything much to do with this. Big companies are great for selling commodities, but generally not so good for selling uniqueness. That type of transaction is generally more personal, if only as a way to guarantee that the result is unique.
Hmmmm . . . I'm not being very coherent . . . I need coffee . .
himi
/Really/ expensive - it's almost invariably SRAM, which requires 6 transistors per cell, as opposed to DRAM's 1 transistor and one capacitor. That adds up to /way/ more cost.
/extremely/ important.
Putting 256kB to 512kB of cache on a modern x86 core seems to be the sweet spot, price wise - more cache makes a difference to a smaller and smaller subset of programs, and costs more and more, so it just isn't worth it.
Minimising the memory footprint of your code is
himi
There /is/ a valid point somewhere in the middle of all that invective . . .
/did/ stop Iraq from using their biological and chemical weapons against US troops. Great. Pity it didn't stop them from gassing the Kurds, or Iran, or anyone else who lacked such a deterrent. And, most importantly, it didn't stop them from /developing/ the weapons in the first place. And once they've been developed, what's to stop them from being sold to the highest bidder? Like, say, a nicely funded terrorist organisation?
/real/ danger point: terrorists. They couldn't give a flying fuck about nuclear attacks - they /want/ to die gloriously.
/your/ head out of your arse and realise that your country is fighting a different kind of war now, one that doesn't follow the old rules. Not realising that will get lots of you killed. Unfortunately, it'll also kill lots of people who had nothing to do with either side of it.
Apparently the nuclear deterrent
My original point was that none of this large scale deterrent stuff has any effect on the
You should get
himi
Notice I said "only rarely" - yes, I /do/ realise that WWII was necessary, and some other instances where war was justified, but in general, all that wars do is give countries good reason to hate one another.
/all/ like that. Consider all the little wars fought in sub-saharan Africa - they do nothing to change the situations that caused the wars in the first place, and simply perpetuate the hatred. If the US stuck it's oar in on one side or the other, with adequate force to stop a particular conflict, it wouldn't change a thing - they'd be at each other's throats as soon as the US pulled out. On top of that, one side would hate the US for it's interference, and if the climate was right, you'd have a new group of anti-US terrorists.
Vietnam was probably also justified - the country was unstable, artificially divided after the French colonial withdrawl, and the division was propped up by a foriegn power: the war fought by the North Vietnamese was probably quite reasonable, and would have been fairly trivial if the US hadn't gotten involved.
However, most wars aren't at
Most of the wars fought in the world are the second type, and the only way to deal with them is general social changes in the affected nations. 'adequate' force does nothing positive beyond the immediate term, and often makes the long term worse.
himi
You know, that's a very short sighted way of thinking . . . You might consider that the WTC attacks
Making war is only rarely going to
Please don't go there.
himi
Iraq was happily developing various forms of bio and chemical weapons, despite near-direct threats of nuclear attack.
/real/ nuclear deterrent: lots of little wars, all over the place, lots of countries doing their own research into weapons, and bying things from the Soviets, or being given them by the US, or whatever. The lesson to be learnt from that is that a large scale nuclear deterrent does not work against most things, and most states. Not at all.
They're the most obvious example, but there are sure to be others - if nothing else, ex-Soviet scientists selling things to people indiscriminately.
Take a look at the history of warfare during the cold war, when there was a
Bush is fucking up seriously in his handling of the post WTO world.
himi
Would tactical nukes deterr terrorists? Hardly.
All this does is up the stakes in any conflict that the US gets involved in, and encourages people who don't like the US to develop their own nukes, and to deploy them in ways that will make deterrence irrelevant.
himi
Damnit, why don't I have mod points when I need them . . .
himi
This stuff would remove all directional control that aircraft had: in the event of even a slight crosswind on takeoff, it'd end up sliding off the tarmac and most likely trashing the undercarriage . . .
Water, snow and ice can all be made to have minimal resistance in one direction, but very high resistance perpendicular to that direction - it's a completely different matter to this goo.
himi
Actually, copyright law is there to define the rights of the copyright holder - it has nothing to do with businesses, and everything to do with individuals.
Tell me, do you
You want a company to be able to protect it's copyrights. Why? Because otherwise it'll go out of business . . . . Well, I'm afraid that's what happens to companies with unviable business plans - they die. Copyright law should have nothing to say about such things - all it should talk about is the rights of a copyright owner. And unless I've completely missed a large chunk of the discussion about things like fair use, those rights are reasonably limited, and for good reasons.
This raises a number of questions, aside from the big one of whether a company should have the rights of a individual.
What's involved in protecting copyrights? What should be allowable? What rights should be taken away from non-copyright-holders in order to afford protections for the copyright holder? How do we strike a balance between people's right to make use of other people's ideas and the right of a person to control people's use of their ideas? Where does the public good come into all of this?
Those are all questions that were considered when current copyright law was first created: the decisions that were made then were most likely well balanced in the context of that era. The context has changed, though, and those questions need to be asked again, and new decisions made.
Your approach to those questions seems to lack balance - you're arguing for protection of copyright without considering the costs of that protection, to society and to the people who would make use of copyrighted material. That approach would lead to the kind of thing that we see now, with the DMCA and things like the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (ie, copyright extensions).
What if the price of consistency is too great? Should we pay it anyway, rather than rethink the laws?
Ultimately, laws
himi
That is a blatant misreading of my argument, and if you don't realise that then you lack the intelligence to hold a reasonable discussion.
Murders happen, but they've
If you actually take a look at the history of most laws you'll see that they tend to come long after whatever it is they regulate began to occur. Certainly most of the good laws are like that - the ones that were developed
As for copyright's history, that's all well and good, but if it has little relevance
Yes, copyright had, and probably still has, a sound basis, but if copyright laws end up making most of the population criminals, then there's almost certainly something wrong with them.
himi
. . . are almost inevitably /bad/ laws.
/Think/ about what it means, and then support it or not based on what it /means/, not what it is.
What good is a law if all it does is make common usage a crime? You end up with a population made up of criminals, with all that entails.
Good laws simply codify what a society already does, so that serious transgressions can be handled consistently. If a society changes, then the laws should change to reflect that. Anything else is a short fast trip towards insanity.
Don't deify something simply because it's been written down officially.
himi
Nuclear weapons are specifically designed to do illegal things (ie, killing people and destroying property).
/do/ have a legitimate use, but it's still a special case of an illegal act: picking a lock you happen to own).
/is/ - it's far more useful to outlaw the act of using a crowbar in a crime than to outlaw all uses of a crowbar.
/useful/ for controlling the actions you want to control? It's a matter of compromising between what you want to control and what you /can/ control, and what it's worth trying to control. There are some good rules of thumb available to guide those decisions - the one about a known legal use dominating a potential illegal use is a good example.
Lockpicks are specifically designed to illegal things (ie, picking locks - they
Ripping music to some portable digital form like mp3 files is designed to give you a portable copy of some piece of music - this is perfectly legal. It only becomes illegal when that piece of music isn't owned by you, or when you don't have the right to legally copy it.
See the difference? Your two cases are specifically designed to perform illegal acts - any possible legal uses for them are such a small percentage of the actual uses that they make no difference. The case of ripping music has a very big and extremely significant legal use.
When the legal use dominates the illegal use, you should look at controling the actions rather than the tools. That's why crowbars aren't illegal, but using them in a theft
This is one of those decisions that goes on all the time in legal systems: how do you make your laws
As a side note, it should be noted that when you find yourself dealing with an unenforceable law, you've almost certainly got that compromise wrong, and should go back to the drawing board and start again. The problems with drug prohibition are a perfect example of this, and the current copyright issues look to be another example.
himi
IANAL, of course . . .
/not/ have a right to copy it indiscriminately, resell it commercially (you can sell your copy, but you can't make lots of copies and sell them), or do things like pass it off as your own work. Those rights are controlled by the copyright owner.
/not/ control anything outside those rights - if you sell your copyrighted work to someone, they own that copy and can do what they like with it, including listening to it. The MPAA and RIAA are busy trying to gain control of things that copyright law doesn't allow them: that's why so many people are pissed off at them.
You have a right to listen to the stuff on the CD because you own your copy of the contents: you bought it, and that gives you the right to listen to it.
You do
That's the idea of copyright: you get to control many of the rights of copying that are available. But you do
himi
That's the nature of ideas - they build on previous ideas, and evolve, rather than revolutionise things.
/everyone/: point me at a truly new and innovative idea that's come up in any form of software in the last two years, five years, and ten years, and then consider where it came from, and what it was based on. I'd bet you can't show that there are more coming from commercial development than from open source development - in fact, I'd be surprised if most of them /didn't/ come from academia originally.
It's not just the open source/free software world that's derivative, it's
Companies don't have a monopoly on innovation, they just have the money to put their ideas out into the world. Open source is an alternative way to do that - the source of the ideas is mostly irrelevant.
himi