I can understand your problem. I went through a phase like that several years back. Here's the set of conclusions which I reached and which helped me work things out for myself. I'll state up front that I happen to be very religious; anyone who dislikes this should probably page down.
The first thing is that IMHO religion is not a scheme for making anyone a better person. It is a set of statements of fact--true or false, but statements nonetheless. Following the advice of these statements may or may not help improve one's life, much like following the advice of the statement 'Don't drink the bleach' tends to improve one's lot, but that is not the primary point.
Concerning your second point--would a good nonbeliever still be allowed into Heaven--there's a lot of groundwork I have to do to answer that. Let me state that I do not believe in the common 'cloud and harp' view of Heaven. Rather, I believe that Heaven is being in the presence of God and enjoying it. I believe that Hell is being in the presence of God and hating it.
One's actions in life determine one's personality. After death, this personality determines whether one enjoys God's presence or loathes it. Life is the Tuesday-Thursday practice; the Afterlife is the game on Saturday. God does not damn us; we damn ourselves. He loves us, but He has given us the freedom to not love Him. It's our choice.
Sin is another topic of contention. There are two important things to bear in mind. The first is aptly illustrated by the Greek word for sin. Translated literally, it means 'missing the mark.' Sin is not so much the active doing of something worng (although it is), but the failure to be the best possible. It's like aiming at a bullseye and missing. But you don't quit shoting when you miss: you continue, and get better. No-one is a perfect shot. But with practice we can all be decent. That's part of how sin should be perceived. You fall short of the glory of God, you pick yourself up and try again. You do a little better, but still not perfect. You try again.
The second part has to do with the 'wages of sin.' What are the stages of forgiveness and redemption--for anything, secular or religious? Well, first one must be sorry and ask forgiveness. God has already forgiven us for our sins. But we cannot stop with being forgiven. If I break your window and you forgive me, I still need to fix your window. But that price has already been paid on the Cross. So God has already done two things for us. There is a third though: to repent. The word 'repent' comes from the Latin for 'rethink.' Repentance means rethinking your life. To use the earlier broken window example, maybe you should stop playing baseball near glass buildings. The spiritual life is like that as well. We need to rise above our failings, but with the knowledge that we cannot completely conquer them in this life.
And the reason for worshipping God? Well, partly out of thankfulness. Worship should not be focused on us (this is one of my big problems with many 'worship services'--they are entertainment for an audience); worship should be focused on God, out of gratitude. Partly we worship to learn what to do in Heaven. We're going to spend eternity in God's presence; might as well learn how to behave now.
Those are my opinions, anyway. I hope that I addressed some of your concerns. If you have more you may email me (remove the no-spams).
Well, Origen is Christian but he was also anathematised. So he's not exactly a stellar interpretation.
IMHO the whole allegorical vs. literal argument is a little bit silly. To take the Creation bit--which is often the most contested--the words used in the Greek and the Hebrew are not necessarily 'day'; it is more 'period of time.' Thus it could mean billions of years.
People who argue philosophical points based on close readings of translations amuse me. You can only properly argue from the original. In my opinion, of course. But so much of the Christian Scriptures and the faith makes much more sense when it is read in the original. Translators make mistakes, add their own biases and in various ways mess things up.
I'm reminded of the Congressman who said 'If English was good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me.'
Of course, if it matches balanced expressions, than it is no longer just a regexp handler, but actually can accept any context-free grammar.
This is actually quite cool. Theyove gone from finite-state automata to push-down automata. Anyone have money on when Perl will be able to handle Turing machines (and hence perform any Von Neumann-computable operation) within its 'regexps'?
Ah, but you forget that Coca-Cola is the only decent tasting cola on the market. Pepsi, RC, Shasta, Sam's Choice Cola &c. are all pretty nasty.
Coke's not much better, of course. Give me a good beer anyday (not Budmilloors, but a good homebrew or microbrew).
However, advertising does work. I do not think that Amazon needs ot be advertising anymore, though. Who has not heard of Amazon that could use it? No-one that I know of. My grandmother has heard of Amazon. They should save the money and try to turn a profit.
Of course, if it is true that their marketing costs include shipping charges (I thought the bill included shipping...), and if the associate program is part of marketing, then it might not be so easy a) to cut costs b) to turn a profit. That is for Bexos to attempt. I don't own stock or buy from Amazon (B&N is usually a few pence cheaper), so it doesn't really affect me.
You know, I hate socialism as much as you do, if not more (I've taken economics classes and know why I hate it and why it is a bad idea). But I think that it is rather a strecth to call Hart a socialist.
Clue: there is naught anti-free market about giving things away for free, as long as it is not coerced by a government or anyone else. If one has the resources and wishes to be a philanthropist then that is one's right. It is also one's right to solicit other's help in such an endeavour.
Clue: it is hardly the impoverished who benefit (at least immediately) from project Gutenberg. It is scholars and students, lvoers of books and their ilk who do. These are books online--one does tend to need a computer to access them. This is sheer information. Do you oppose the library? At least an argument can be made that the library uses tax dollars when private donors are likely to provide funds and trusts for such a purpose.
Clue: Hart does not live off of welfare. The 'Kindness of strangers' referred to is donations. Do you believe that the clergy live off of the welfare?
Clue: the market does not really care much for old books. There is something of a market for their physical artifacts, but not that much of a market for the books themselves. If there were, we might see an eBook archive of old, out-of-print books. Of course, the funny thing would be that since the copyrights have expired someone else could publish them. That's why we have expiring copyrights.
Project Gutenberg cuts all that sort of middleman nonsense. It lives on the edges of the market, goes where no sane businessman would go (there is no profit to be made charging people for what is free, although oxygen bars belie my point). It provides a valuable service to mankind for free. It asks no tax money. It just asks that we contribute as we see fit. In other words, as we value it. In other words, it asks the market to value it and pay it accordingly.
Project Gutenberg is a free enterprise. Were you to quell it, you would be no better than a socialist centraliser, ruthlessly manipulating for your won ideological pleasure. You would by no means be an advocate of the free market or of freedom. You would be an authoritarian.
As an aside, I urge everyone to contribute to the project. Type in a book, donate old computers or just donate some money. If you use the service, help it out.
We as knowledgeable Internet users need to to do two things. First, we need to use Project Gutenberg. Instead of purchasing a copy of The Prisoner of Zenda, read it online. Professors: you can assign out-of-print reading material if a copy is on the site. If it's not, then give a student extra credit for typing it in.
Second, we who use it need to support it. If there are any worthy causes, Project Gutenberg is one. Who else performs such a massive work without compensation, without help (and oftentimes with a lot of deliberate trouble-making)? This isn't something as material as world hunger (a worthy cause, too, but in a different way); this is our very culture! If every person who uses the Project submitted just one favourite old book, imagine how quickly it would have grown. It would have far more than the 10,000 he wanted by 2,500.
We also need to fight the ridiculous expansion of copyright. Copyright should last at most to the author's death, or to the emancipation of his children. No adult child has any inherent natural right to control his father's published writings, IMHO. The Disney-sponsored extension is just plain flat-out ridiculous. Whom is it protecting? The authors who are dead long before copyright expires? Their children, who are retired at best? No, it protects large Disneyesque media corporations. They don't need protection. This legislation simply ruins it for the rest of us.
There are many more out-of-print books than books in print. I would wager, though, that the last century has seen more books published than all previous centuries put together. Relaxing copyright to a saner system would release many works to the world.
In re your matter of HTTP: yes, Mr. Berners-Lee (or his employer; I am not familiar with the terms of his employment) does have a right to the HTTP protocol for a brief period of time.
This may sound awful--where would the WWW be--but it may not actually so be. For one thing, it might have been a 'short patent,' expiring in three years. For another, it seems to me that HTTP does naught fundamentally different from, say, gopher; it is just more flexible. The great things about this is that since the fundamental basis cannot be patented, than anyone can come up with a competing technology, one which may or may not be open. It would simply have to be a little different.
But look at it this way: Berners-Lee did something that few had done before (I do not know if previous hypertext systems count as prior art); does he not deserve some sort of advantage because of this?
But I think that most of us would agree that this advantage should not be perpetual. Imagine having to pay Og's male-line for the wheel...
The GPL states in paragraph 4 that the license cannot be revoked as long as the licensee stays in compliance with the GPL.
But the GPL cannot take effect unless put in place by the legitimate copyright owner. If you work for a computer company, odds are that you have already assigned all copyright to all works to your company. Some companies, such as IBM, are pretty nice; you merely have to ask your manager to get permission to work on soemthing outside of work. But others are much tighter.
But anyway, the problem is that the owner of the code (the large company) has not placed it under the GPL; a legally unrelated person has done so. It would be somewhat similar to an employee selling, or even giving away, his employer's staplers and fax paper.
IMHO, the sign-over-copyright scheme is not as unreasonable as it first seems. It is obviously fair for work which is done on company time and on company hardware. But even work which is done at home probably benefits from the company; who among us has never researched something private during work hours? I don't particularly like it, but as long as people are dishonest and spend three hours a week working on a private project instead of their job, I cannot complain.
The whole bit with Business method patents is abso freaking EVIL. I need to run down and file my patent on selling fruit from a cart near the corner of busy intersections...
That's what prior art is for. But if you really and truly invented a new method of doing business, then it would be worthy of a patent. Imagine that someone invents a radically new method of selling sprockets such that customers get better sprockets and more are sold. No-one has ever even conceived of such a sprocket in the past. This is genuinely new work. This fellow deserves to profit from it for a short while. That is why we have business method profits.
You always see people thinking that it is possible to patent anything. It's not; you can only patent new things. The real problem is that the USPO is not as good as it should be at ferreting out prior art. The proposed public commentary period should help.
As an example, Sun has a patent on online dictionary lookups originally made by Jakob Nielsen. There must be a huge amount of prior art; CS profs have been assigning such things for decades, I should think. That patent should have been denied.
But something new (e.g. the Amazon Associates program) deserves a few years of protection before the competition can run away with it.
Remember that patents are meant to give a company an opportunity to establish a foothold and to make some profits. After they expire, then anyone can use the patented tech. In some ways, it's a primitive Ghostscript license...
Let's not jump to conclusions here. This sounds suspiciously like one of those personality conflicts which are all too common nowadays. It could be that either or both players are acting in ill will, or it could eb that each thinks ill of the otehr but neither is bad from our perspective.
For that matter, if Mr. de Joot has simply not replied to any emails, it may be that he has passed away (don't laugh; it happened to Duane Blehme, a Macintosh shareware programmer years back).
It would seem to me that the wise things to do is to wait and hear from both sides. Remember the Uruguayan Linux fiasco awhile back? We don't really want a repeat of that hysteria, do we?
To address thy first point: what exactly is wrong with taking a good ol' boy approach to things? You'll note that O'Reilly has Bezos actually talking to him, as opposed to those who merely send hatemail. You use what works. Besides, this is one of the reasons that we have CEOs and managers; much of what they do is negotiate with each other. It's politics; it's their job.
On your second point, he is doing it not so much because Amazon provides a valuable service (B&N is oftentimes cheaper), but because Amazon is, in every other respect, a top-notch quality company. He respects them; they respect him. You don't get very much respect by boycotting and refusing to talk. You simply get press. O'Reilly wants to get things done, not get on the evening news (although that's always fun too...).
$1.65 billion divided over the hunrededs of millions of taxpayers who funded it isn't a bad price at all to pay.$1.65 billion divided over the hunrededs of millions of taxpayers who funded it isn't a bad price at all to pay.
Well, by my calculations (assuming that there are 250 million people in this country), that comes out to $6.60 that I could have had. To be quite honest, I wouldn't throw more than about $1 to confirm what other programmes have already found; I'd rather eat a bacon double cheese burger at Burger King. If it's so important let those who care baout it fund it. There is something fundamentally unjust about making someone pay for something he does not want.
But do you consider it legal if I made a mix CD for a friend for their birthday, just as people have made mix tapes in the past?
Actually, it's not legal to do that. I don't think that it's even legal if the person already owns copies of that music; one could not, for example, set up a publisher who sells copyrighted material to those who already own it. I may be wrong on this.
However, the fact remains that it is normally illegal. It's just one of those things which are rarely prosecuted. The police have better things to do with their time. Not that they actually do; they seem to spend most of their time chasing after speeders who have hurt no-one, but cannot find a murderer given any length of time. But that's another argument...
If people have banned things that have no legitimate purpose, they're probably using them for illegitimate purposes.
Of course. But, as a libertarian (i.e. and advocate of freedom) I don't care about what someone is probably doing; I care about what he is doing. That's why I'm for drug legalisation; I don't care if someone is possibly or probably driving high, but only care if he does and causes harm thereby. It's one of the many reasons I am opposed to any form of weapon control (e.g. guns, knives, baseball bats); I don't care what someone can do to me or anyone else, but only what he has done.
This is very related to computers. Certain products are used almost always for illicit purposes: password crackers, network scanners, credit card number generators, DeCSS, the MP3 format &c. These all have legitimate uses, but I think that we all can admit that they are mostly used improperly, by which I mean almost all the time. Yet to ban them would be sheerest folly, not simply because it detracts from legitimate usage, but also because posession of a tool does not equal use of that tool. I may like to collect thumbscrews; it doesn't mean that I plan to torture anyone (I don't actually collect thumbscrews, but...).
What right does society have to limit an individual's freedom, provided he has done naught wrong? None at all. That's the whole point of freedom. Now, once he has done wrong he may rightfully be punished, as he has given up any right to security by his action. But there must be an action.
Punish copyright violations. Like it or not, an author has a right to his work. If he wishes every purchaser to stand on one leg and hop in a circle chanting `ohwa tana siam' that is his right. Punish those who are actually doing wrong, but don't punish the innocent. Tough luck if it's hard to figure out who's doing wrong; that's the job of law enforcement. It's not our job to make things easier for them.
The fundamental problem of bandwidth abuse (and it is abuse; some are taking up more than their fair share) is that the current network regime follows a catch-as-catch-can economic model: you get the bandwidth you ask for, if someone hasn't gotten there first. The problem is, of course, that there is not enough bandwidth for everyone to use. Fortunately, there already exists a mechanism for the fair allocations of resources: make people pay for their usage.
I am not aware of very many network architectures which allow this, but it is necessary. Charge whatever is necessary per megabyte to fund network services. Those who use the system more will pay more; that it more than fair.
I can pretty much guarantee that a penny a megabyte would prevent most students from wasting; a gigabyte a day would be $10; that's a lot of money to a student. But if the student wishes to spend that much, then he has every right to.
We have right now the 'tragedy of the commons'; the solution is well-known. We need to implement that solution.
If it has any legitimate use, it should not be banned.
Actually, I would go even further. Even if it has no legitimate use, it should still be legal; make the illegitimate uses illegal and ban them. But there are any number of reasos that people may want to posess things. Collectors, say, or movie studios which need props.
Napster should not be banned. Piracy should be; if a student is offering files which he has no legal right to offer, then he should be prosecuted. Actually, he should be warned, which is what schools generally do with violations of the law. A few more troubles and he is reported to the police, which should knock the fear of God into him...
What about going about word processing in an entirely different fashion? What if there is a better way than the direction we have been going?
I am writing about TeX and LaTeX. I am sure that many of you are right rolling your eyes, but stop a moment and think about it. TeX gives the most comprehensive formatting capabilities I have ever seen. It outputs utterly beautiful text. LaTeX gives TeX structural markup. This makes writing consistent documents easier, and has the advantage of easy export to other formats such as HTML and pure text.
In addition to the beautiful text output TeX provides, it also has an extremely capable equation language. I have never seen any system be half as good.
Sure, the write-compile regime is a little bit foreign to Joe Computer User, but that small learning hurdle is worth it. Users are generally intelligent people (with some fairly glaring exceptions) and if something is explained they can grok it.
Besides, in the future every user will be a programmer. All programmers are familiar with write-run anyway.
This is horribly off-topic (moderate away!), but I simply cannot let this statement stand unchallenged:
...the laws were imposed by the King and his minions to profit themselves.
This is, quite simply, false. The laws were passed by the Parliament, which had since the time of the Civil War been largely in the hands of wealthy non-nobles. The colonies' quarrel was not with the King but with his Parliament. Unfortunately, to fight the one was to fight the other.
In fact, George Washington and his officers regularly toasted the health of the King well into the Revolutionary War.
What the Brits should have done while they had us was to create New World peerages and added some seats for MPs from the colonies.
Imagine how different history might have been if the colonies had never split. Sigh...
Oh, and a breakhead is an off-shore pile of stones that protects the shore from big waves (i think).
Where I grew up (Norfolk, Va.), that was a bulkhead. Also used for a wall along a lake ro waterway to prevent erosion. I cannot find breakhead in any dictionaries, but that doesn't mean that it isn't sued for that term elsewhere...
The fundamental assumptions of the supporters of online voting are several. First is the idea that if voting is made easier more will vote. This is not necessarily true, but we can let that slide for the moment. The greater problem is the unsupported assumption that more people voting is a good thing.
On the contrary, I assert that the only reason that we have gotten where we are today is the fact that so few have historically voted. Take a walk down a city street sometime and look around you. How many people do you see who should be allowed to vote, i.e. to determine the very future of our nation?
The common man is a fool. He is easily swayed by advertisements. He does not care about issues so much as he cares about bread and circuses. As long as the politicians keep him distracted he is happy. There's nothing wrong with this; not everyone needs to have control over the government not everyone needs to be in charge. But our nation (the US, in my case, and most other modern nations) is founded on the fundamentally incorrect premise that every man's opinion is equally correct (i.e. it has an equal chance of being correct). This is demonstrably wrong.
As for myself, I do not vote. I find the system of universal suffrage to be an insult to all, learned and unlearned. What this country needs is fewer, not more, voters. I also have no desire to be part of ruling class; I have no wish to be responsible for wars (even though I generallt support them), executions (even though I support capital punishment), imprisonments and the rest of the sordid business of governance. I wish merely to live my life under the rulers who have been set over me. In this country the rulers are all those who vote.
Your point got me to thinking. A sysadmin (or his employer) is a ruler in the same way that a king is; the system is his fief, his domain. He can do whatever he wishes. He can drop packets from certain hosts, UDP, WDP, block mail &c. at his discretion. A sysadmin is the government in a system.
Now, what about the users of a system? Well, thye are in the position of subjects to a ruler; they exist at the sysadmin's pleasure. Now, this is not very appealing to us nowadays. So let's think back to how we handled offensive rulers in the old days: we forced them to sign constitutions which limited their powers.
The contracts which a user and his ISP sign when service is provided are the same as civil constitution. So if a customer desires to read alt.politics.white-power or alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.coffe-shops, he can negotiate such a contract.
The beautiful thing is that we have choice in ISPs and it is relatively cheap to set up a small ISP. As long as this holds, the situation is fair.
Now, if there is only one ISP, then this is a problem.
What most people mean by a "free market" is a market that is left alone to operate by its own laws.
A free market is one in which buyers are free to choose their product rationally; i.e. one in which all act in their own self-interest. It has been shown that this results in everyone being better off (simple example: I have a cow, but want goat meat, while you have three goats but want beef; an exchange of goods benefits us both).
Among other things, a free market requires competition to work. We do not have competition in the Windows OS arena; naught but Windows runs Windows apps (well, there are VirtualPC for Macs and wine for Linux x86, but they are marginal). In addition, buyers do not act in their own best interest, but rather buy according to a fuzzy, ill-defined and irrational idea of what they must do, due to the network effects of using tied software (i.e. software which runs on one OS).
Contrast this with the Unix market. You can download just about anything from Freshmeat and get it to run on just about any Unix. I understand that some fellow runs Gnome on AIX machiens and makes it look almost exactly like it's a standard RedHat install, with all the trimmings.
This is competition. In theory, anyone can run anything on anything. Of course, it's not quite that good, but it's not Windows. You will note how utterly great the Unix market is. This is not due solely to the inherent greatness of Unix; the Windows API, odd as it is, could probably be made to work well. There's just no way to break into the market.
Anyway, your 'nobody made them buy stuff' rationale is the first-level doesn't-understand-the-free-market sort of thing used by both free-market advocates who misunderstand what they advocate and buy socialists who misunderstand what they advocate (i.e. large-scale theft, removal of incentives and the start of a downward spiral into dystopia).
Well, you need to no longer start a GNOME session. When you login, select one of the other options your display manager offers. I would do a straight X session; you can then set things up as the God of Unix Meant Them to Be;-)
I am quite fond of fvwm2; others like WindowMaker or AfterStep. If you have a slower computer, blackbox is very good. Be aware that with any of these, but especially fvwm2 or blackbox, you will feel as though you've gotten a processor upgrade. Everything is faster. Part of this is the lack of Gnome/KDE stuff running. Part of this is that these window managers are significantly faster than E or kwm.
Personally, I'd like to try out sawmill. It looks neat, and it uses Lisp to control everything. Pretty cool.
If Microsoft the result of a true free market, I would quit being the rabid free market enthusiast I am and become a socialist post-haste.
Microsoft's success is due to not living in a free market, to locking users into a system, to the unfortunate network effects that cause people to stick with one product even when it is not very good. As a contrast, the Unix market is fairly free; with a bit of effort, anyone can use just about any Unix. A simple recompile of apps is often all that is needed. At the moment, Linux is doing well in this market, but it will someday be replaced by a slimmer competitor.
There is no competitor to Windows. The Windows market is served by exactly one product, owned by MS.
You're as bad as that twit communist AC who has been posting. Take some econ classes and come back.
The Catholic Church, for all its faults, did not keep the price of Bibles artificially high; the price was very high as it was. You cannot manually copy out an entire document, illustrate (rather well) and bind it for a pittance.
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The first thing is that IMHO religion is not a scheme for making anyone a better person. It is a set of statements of fact--true or false, but statements nonetheless. Following the advice of these statements may or may not help improve one's life, much like following the advice of the statement 'Don't drink the bleach' tends to improve one's lot, but that is not the primary point.
Concerning your second point--would a good nonbeliever still be allowed into Heaven--there's a lot of groundwork I have to do to answer that. Let me state that I do not believe in the common 'cloud and harp' view of Heaven. Rather, I believe that Heaven is being in the presence of God and enjoying it. I believe that Hell is being in the presence of God and hating it.
One's actions in life determine one's personality. After death, this personality determines whether one enjoys God's presence or loathes it. Life is the Tuesday-Thursday practice; the Afterlife is the game on Saturday. God does not damn us; we damn ourselves. He loves us, but He has given us the freedom to not love Him. It's our choice.
Sin is another topic of contention. There are two important things to bear in mind. The first is aptly illustrated by the Greek word for sin. Translated literally, it means 'missing the mark.' Sin is not so much the active doing of something worng (although it is), but the failure to be the best possible. It's like aiming at a bullseye and missing. But you don't quit shoting when you miss: you continue, and get better. No-one is a perfect shot. But with practice we can all be decent. That's part of how sin should be perceived. You fall short of the glory of God, you pick yourself up and try again. You do a little better, but still not perfect. You try again.
The second part has to do with the 'wages of sin.' What are the stages of forgiveness and redemption--for anything, secular or religious? Well, first one must be sorry and ask forgiveness. God has already forgiven us for our sins. But we cannot stop with being forgiven. If I break your window and you forgive me, I still need to fix your window. But that price has already been paid on the Cross. So God has already done two things for us. There is a third though: to repent. The word 'repent' comes from the Latin for 'rethink.' Repentance means rethinking your life. To use the earlier broken window example, maybe you should stop playing baseball near glass buildings. The spiritual life is like that as well. We need to rise above our failings, but with the knowledge that we cannot completely conquer them in this life.
And the reason for worshipping God? Well, partly out of thankfulness. Worship should not be focused on us (this is one of my big problems with many 'worship services'--they are entertainment for an audience); worship should be focused on God, out of gratitude. Partly we worship to learn what to do in Heaven. We're going to spend eternity in God's presence; might as well learn how to behave now.
Those are my opinions, anyway. I hope that I addressed some of your concerns. If you have more you may email me (remove the no-spams).
IMHO the whole allegorical vs. literal argument is a little bit silly. To take the Creation bit--which is often the most contested--the words used in the Greek and the Hebrew are not necessarily 'day'; it is more 'period of time.' Thus it could mean billions of years.
People who argue philosophical points based on close readings of translations amuse me. You can only properly argue from the original. In my opinion, of course. But so much of the Christian Scriptures and the faith makes much more sense when it is read in the original. Translators make mistakes, add their own biases and in various ways mess things up.
I'm reminded of the Congressman who said 'If English was good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me.'
This is actually quite cool. Theyove gone from finite-state automata to push-down automata. Anyone have money on when Perl will be able to handle Turing machines (and hence perform any Von Neumann-computable operation) within its 'regexps'?
Perl is so cool...
Coke's not much better, of course. Give me a good beer anyday (not Budmilloors, but a good homebrew or microbrew).
However, advertising does work. I do not think that Amazon needs ot be advertising anymore, though. Who has not heard of Amazon that could use it? No-one that I know of. My grandmother has heard of Amazon. They should save the money and try to turn a profit.
Of course, if it is true that their marketing costs include shipping charges (I thought the bill included shipping...), and if the associate program is part of marketing, then it might not be so easy a) to cut costs b) to turn a profit. That is for Bexos to attempt. I don't own stock or buy from Amazon (B&N is usually a few pence cheaper), so it doesn't really affect me.
Clue: there is naught anti-free market about giving things away for free, as long as it is not coerced by a government or anyone else. If one has the resources and wishes to be a philanthropist then that is one's right. It is also one's right to solicit other's help in such an endeavour.
Clue: it is hardly the impoverished who benefit (at least immediately) from project Gutenberg. It is scholars and students, lvoers of books and their ilk who do. These are books online--one does tend to need a computer to access them. This is sheer information. Do you oppose the library? At least an argument can be made that the library uses tax dollars when private donors are likely to provide funds and trusts for such a purpose.
Clue: Hart does not live off of welfare. The 'Kindness of strangers' referred to is donations. Do you believe that the clergy live off of the welfare?
Clue: the market does not really care much for old books. There is something of a market for their physical artifacts, but not that much of a market for the books themselves. If there were, we might see an eBook archive of old, out-of-print books. Of course, the funny thing would be that since the copyrights have expired someone else could publish them. That's why we have expiring copyrights.
Project Gutenberg cuts all that sort of middleman nonsense. It lives on the edges of the market, goes where no sane businessman would go (there is no profit to be made charging people for what is free, although oxygen bars belie my point). It provides a valuable service to mankind for free. It asks no tax money. It just asks that we contribute as we see fit. In other words, as we value it. In other words, it asks the market to value it and pay it accordingly.
Project Gutenberg is a free enterprise. Were you to quell it, you would be no better than a socialist centraliser, ruthlessly manipulating for your won ideological pleasure. You would by no means be an advocate of the free market or of freedom. You would be an authoritarian.
As an aside, I urge everyone to contribute to the project. Type in a book, donate old computers or just donate some money. If you use the service, help it out.
Second, we who use it need to support it. If there are any worthy causes, Project Gutenberg is one. Who else performs such a massive work without compensation, without help (and oftentimes with a lot of deliberate trouble-making)? This isn't something as material as world hunger (a worthy cause, too, but in a different way); this is our very culture! If every person who uses the Project submitted just one favourite old book, imagine how quickly it would have grown. It would have far more than the 10,000 he wanted by 2,500.
We also need to fight the ridiculous expansion of copyright. Copyright should last at most to the author's death, or to the emancipation of his children. No adult child has any inherent natural right to control his father's published writings, IMHO. The Disney-sponsored extension is just plain flat-out ridiculous. Whom is it protecting? The authors who are dead long before copyright expires? Their children, who are retired at best? No, it protects large Disneyesque media corporations. They don't need protection. This legislation simply ruins it for the rest of us.
There are many more out-of-print books than books in print. I would wager, though, that the last century has seen more books published than all previous centuries put together. Relaxing copyright to a saner system would release many works to the world.
This may sound awful--where would the WWW be--but it may not actually so be. For one thing, it might have been a 'short patent,' expiring in three years. For another, it seems to me that HTTP does naught fundamentally different from, say, gopher; it is just more flexible. The great things about this is that since the fundamental basis cannot be patented, than anyone can come up with a competing technology, one which may or may not be open. It would simply have to be a little different.
But look at it this way: Berners-Lee did something that few had done before (I do not know if previous hypertext systems count as prior art); does he not deserve some sort of advantage because of this?
But I think that most of us would agree that this advantage should not be perpetual. Imagine having to pay Og's male-line for the wheel...
But the GPL cannot take effect unless put in place by the legitimate copyright owner. If you work for a computer company, odds are that you have already assigned all copyright to all works to your company. Some companies, such as IBM, are pretty nice; you merely have to ask your manager to get permission to work on soemthing outside of work. But others are much tighter.
But anyway, the problem is that the owner of the code (the large company) has not placed it under the GPL; a legally unrelated person has done so. It would be somewhat similar to an employee selling, or even giving away, his employer's staplers and fax paper.
IMHO, the sign-over-copyright scheme is not as unreasonable as it first seems. It is obviously fair for work which is done on company time and on company hardware. But even work which is done at home probably benefits from the company; who among us has never researched something private during work hours? I don't particularly like it, but as long as people are dishonest and spend three hours a week working on a private project instead of their job, I cannot complain.
That's what prior art is for. But if you really and truly invented a new method of doing business, then it would be worthy of a patent. Imagine that someone invents a radically new method of selling sprockets such that customers get better sprockets and more are sold. No-one has ever even conceived of such a sprocket in the past. This is genuinely new work. This fellow deserves to profit from it for a short while. That is why we have business method profits.
You always see people thinking that it is possible to patent anything. It's not; you can only patent new things. The real problem is that the USPO is not as good as it should be at ferreting out prior art. The proposed public commentary period should help.
As an example, Sun has a patent on online dictionary lookups originally made by Jakob Nielsen. There must be a huge amount of prior art; CS profs have been assigning such things for decades, I should think. That patent should have been denied.
But something new (e.g. the Amazon Associates program) deserves a few years of protection before the competition can run away with it.
Remember that patents are meant to give a company an opportunity to establish a foothold and to make some profits. After they expire, then anyone can use the patented tech. In some ways, it's a primitive Ghostscript license...
For that matter, if Mr. de Joot has simply not replied to any emails, it may be that he has passed away (don't laugh; it happened to Duane Blehme, a Macintosh shareware programmer years back).
It would seem to me that the wise things to do is to wait and hear from both sides. Remember the Uruguayan Linux fiasco awhile back? We don't really want a repeat of that hysteria, do we?
To address thy first point: what exactly is wrong with taking a good ol' boy approach to things? You'll note that O'Reilly has Bezos actually talking to him, as opposed to those who merely send hatemail. You use what works. Besides, this is one of the reasons that we have CEOs and managers; much of what they do is negotiate with each other. It's politics; it's their job.
On your second point, he is doing it not so much because Amazon provides a valuable service (B&N is oftentimes cheaper), but because Amazon is, in every other respect, a top-notch quality company. He respects them; they respect him. You don't get very much respect by boycotting and refusing to talk. You simply get press. O'Reilly wants to get things done, not get on the evening news (although that's always fun too...).
Well, by my calculations (assuming that there are 250 million people in this country), that comes out to $6.60 that I could have had. To be quite honest, I wouldn't throw more than about $1 to confirm what other programmes have already found; I'd rather eat a bacon double cheese burger at Burger King. If it's so important let those who care baout it fund it. There is something fundamentally unjust about making someone pay for something he does not want.
Actually, it's not legal to do that. I don't think that it's even legal if the person already owns copies of that music; one could not, for example, set up a publisher who sells copyrighted material to those who already own it. I may be wrong on this.
However, the fact remains that it is normally illegal. It's just one of those things which are rarely prosecuted. The police have better things to do with their time. Not that they actually do; they seem to spend most of their time chasing after speeders who have hurt no-one, but cannot find a murderer given any length of time. But that's another argument...
Of course. But, as a libertarian (i.e. and advocate of freedom) I don't care about what someone is probably doing; I care about what he is doing. That's why I'm for drug legalisation; I don't care if someone is possibly or probably driving high, but only care if he does and causes harm thereby. It's one of the many reasons I am opposed to any form of weapon control (e.g. guns, knives, baseball bats); I don't care what someone can do to me or anyone else, but only what he has done.
This is very related to computers. Certain products are used almost always for illicit purposes: password crackers, network scanners, credit card number generators, DeCSS, the MP3 format &c. These all have legitimate uses, but I think that we all can admit that they are mostly used improperly, by which I mean almost all the time. Yet to ban them would be sheerest folly, not simply because it detracts from legitimate usage, but also because posession of a tool does not equal use of that tool. I may like to collect thumbscrews; it doesn't mean that I plan to torture anyone (I don't actually collect thumbscrews, but...).
What right does society have to limit an individual's freedom, provided he has done naught wrong? None at all. That's the whole point of freedom. Now, once he has done wrong he may rightfully be punished, as he has given up any right to security by his action. But there must be an action.
Punish copyright violations. Like it or not, an author has a right to his work. If he wishes every purchaser to stand on one leg and hop in a circle chanting `ohwa tana siam' that is his right. Punish those who are actually doing wrong, but don't punish the innocent. Tough luck if it's hard to figure out who's doing wrong; that's the job of law enforcement. It's not our job to make things easier for them.
I am not aware of very many network architectures which allow this, but it is necessary. Charge whatever is necessary per megabyte to fund network services. Those who use the system more will pay more; that it more than fair.
I can pretty much guarantee that a penny a megabyte would prevent most students from wasting; a gigabyte a day would be $10; that's a lot of money to a student. But if the student wishes to spend that much, then he has every right to.
We have right now the 'tragedy of the commons'; the solution is well-known. We need to implement that solution.
Actually, I would go even further. Even if it has no legitimate use, it should still be legal; make the illegitimate uses illegal and ban them. But there are any number of reasos that people may want to posess things. Collectors, say, or movie studios which need props.
Napster should not be banned. Piracy should be; if a student is offering files which he has no legal right to offer, then he should be prosecuted. Actually, he should be warned, which is what schools generally do with violations of the law. A few more troubles and he is reported to the police, which should knock the fear of God into him...
What about going about word processing in an entirely different fashion? What if there is a better way than the direction we have been going?
I am writing about TeX and LaTeX. I am sure that many of you are right rolling your eyes, but stop a moment and think about it. TeX gives the most comprehensive formatting capabilities I have ever seen. It outputs utterly beautiful text. LaTeX gives TeX structural markup. This makes writing consistent documents easier, and has the advantage of easy export to other formats such as HTML and pure text.
In addition to the beautiful text output TeX provides, it also has an extremely capable equation language. I have never seen any system be half as good.
Sure, the write-compile regime is a little bit foreign to Joe Computer User, but that small learning hurdle is worth it. Users are generally intelligent people (with some fairly glaring exceptions) and if something is explained they can grok it.
Besides, in the future every user will be a programmer. All programmers are familiar with write-run anyway.
This is, quite simply, false. The laws were passed by the Parliament, which had since the time of the Civil War been largely in the hands of wealthy non-nobles. The colonies' quarrel was not with the King but with his Parliament. Unfortunately, to fight the one was to fight the other.
In fact, George Washington and his officers regularly toasted the health of the King well into the Revolutionary War.
What the Brits should have done while they had us was to create New World peerages and added some seats for MPs from the colonies.
Imagine how different history might have been if the colonies had never split. Sigh...
Where I grew up (Norfolk, Va.), that was a bulkhead. Also used for a wall along a lake ro waterway to prevent erosion. I cannot find breakhead in any dictionaries, but that doesn't mean that it isn't sued for that term elsewhere...
On the contrary, I assert that the only reason that we have gotten where we are today is the fact that so few have historically voted. Take a walk down a city street sometime and look around you. How many people do you see who should be allowed to vote, i.e. to determine the very future of our nation?
The common man is a fool. He is easily swayed by advertisements. He does not care about issues so much as he cares about bread and circuses. As long as the politicians keep him distracted he is happy. There's nothing wrong with this; not everyone needs to have control over the government not everyone needs to be in charge. But our nation (the US, in my case, and most other modern nations) is founded on the fundamentally incorrect premise that every man's opinion is equally correct (i.e. it has an equal chance of being correct). This is demonstrably wrong.
As for myself, I do not vote. I find the system of universal suffrage to be an insult to all, learned and unlearned. What this country needs is fewer, not more, voters. I also have no desire to be part of ruling class; I have no wish to be responsible for wars (even though I generallt support them), executions (even though I support capital punishment), imprisonments and the rest of the sordid business of governance. I wish merely to live my life under the rulers who have been set over me. In this country the rulers are all those who vote.
Your point got me to thinking. A sysadmin (or his employer) is a ruler in the same way that a king is; the system is his fief, his domain. He can do whatever he wishes. He can drop packets from certain hosts, UDP, WDP, block mail &c. at his discretion. A sysadmin is the government in a system.
Now, what about the users of a system? Well, thye are in the position of subjects to a ruler; they exist at the sysadmin's pleasure. Now, this is not very appealing to us nowadays. So let's think back to how we handled offensive rulers in the old days: we forced them to sign constitutions which limited their powers.
The contracts which a user and his ISP sign when service is provided are the same as civil constitution. So if a customer desires to read alt.politics.white-power or alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.coffe-shops, he can negotiate such a contract.
The beautiful thing is that we have choice in ISPs and it is relatively cheap to set up a small ISP. As long as this holds, the situation is fair.
Now, if there is only one ISP, then this is a problem.
A free market is one in which buyers are free to choose their product rationally; i.e. one in which all act in their own self-interest. It has been shown that this results in everyone being better off (simple example: I have a cow, but want goat meat, while you have three goats but want beef; an exchange of goods benefits us both).
Among other things, a free market requires competition to work. We do not have competition in the Windows OS arena; naught but Windows runs Windows apps (well, there are VirtualPC for Macs and wine for Linux x86, but they are marginal). In addition, buyers do not act in their own best interest, but rather buy according to a fuzzy, ill-defined and irrational idea of what they must do, due to the network effects of using tied software (i.e. software which runs on one OS).
Contrast this with the Unix market. You can download just about anything from Freshmeat and get it to run on just about any Unix. I understand that some fellow runs Gnome on AIX machiens and makes it look almost exactly like it's a standard RedHat install, with all the trimmings.
This is competition. In theory, anyone can run anything on anything. Of course, it's not quite that good, but it's not Windows. You will note how utterly great the Unix market is. This is not due solely to the inherent greatness of Unix; the Windows API, odd as it is, could probably be made to work well. There's just no way to break into the market.
Anyway, your 'nobody made them buy stuff' rationale is the first-level doesn't-understand-the-free-market sort of thing used by both free-market advocates who misunderstand what they advocate and buy socialists who misunderstand what they advocate (i.e. large-scale theft, removal of incentives and the start of a downward spiral into dystopia).
I am quite fond of fvwm2; others like WindowMaker or AfterStep. If you have a slower computer, blackbox is very good. Be aware that with any of these, but especially fvwm2 or blackbox, you will feel as though you've gotten a processor upgrade. Everything is faster. Part of this is the lack of Gnome/KDE stuff running. Part of this is that these window managers are significantly faster than E or kwm.
Personally, I'd like to try out sawmill. It looks neat, and it uses Lisp to control everything. Pretty cool.
Microsoft's success is due to not living in a free market, to locking users into a system, to the unfortunate network effects that cause people to stick with one product even when it is not very good. As a contrast, the Unix market is fairly free; with a bit of effort, anyone can use just about any Unix. A simple recompile of apps is often all that is needed. At the moment, Linux is doing well in this market, but it will someday be replaced by a slimmer competitor.
There is no competitor to Windows. The Windows market is served by exactly one product, owned by MS.
You're as bad as that twit communist AC who has been posting. Take some econ classes and come back.
The Catholic Church, for all its faults, did not keep the price of Bibles artificially high; the price was very high as it was. You cannot manually copy out an entire document, illustrate (rather well) and bind it for a pittance.