>I've been advocating that exact idea for a while, with one slight change: if that happens, >the IP in question goes into the public domain instead of to the purchaser.
GPL and public domain are not the same thing. Linus owns parts of Linux and holds a trademark on Linux in some countries. He could not afford to pay such taxes, so a company like say microsoft could come along and use his code under these laws.
In general, these laws make no sense and would hurt open source developers even more than closed source developers.
Finally, these are in no way analogous to property tax because property tax is just on land, not on the various other things you own. Also the federal government doesn't even collect property tax. It's a stupid idea that would hurt everyone.
>Why not let it die, they ripped off the open source community to get the code for it in the first place. If you assign your copyright over to some open source group, you risk them relicensing it in a way you won't like. My understanding is that is what happened to divx.
That's why I've always considered the FSF scheme of forcing you to give them copyright before you can commit something to say, GCC, as kind of a scam. For instance, I much prefer V2 of the GPL to V3, so if I commit anything to GCC under V2, the FSF has the right to come along and change it to V3 without my permission. Or they could come up with a new license, or they could close the source and sell it commercially like Divx did (although this is less likely, it has happened a number of times).
The FSF is influential in the open source community, so people tend to ignore the fact that they are taking away the rights of various open source developers.
I like the Linux model where everyone retains their rights and the license remains static. If they want to change the license, they can ask the developer's permissions.
Property tax as it is practiced right now is a *real estate* tax on your *land* and it is only taken by some local governments (cities, counties, etc), not by the federal government, which only collects income taxes, social security tax, and the occasional tariff.
The "property tax" this guy is talking about is tax on your possessions. Do you really want to pay taxes on your computer? On your car? Do you want to pay the government to keep the stuff you already own every year? That's what this guy is talking about in his article, although he seems to be somehow unaware that we don't already do that. I think most of us would go broke inside of two years if we had to pay tax on every bit of property we have.
The guy who wrote this article clearly has never actually *paid* taxes, otherwise he would know this stuff. He thinks he's extending an existing tax to IP, but it is a tax that doesn't even exist for anything.
Also, as for IP, I have to think that it's a little ridiculous that if I write a book, or some software or whatever, I would have to pay the government for the privilege of saying that it is my book or my software. I already have to pay income tax every time I *sell* a copy of a book that I wrote, now I'd have to pay money for just having wrote it.
It sounds like he wants to come up with a law to essentially force people to give their IP to the public domain, which seems like an authoritarian measure, and essentially amounts to nationalizing personal property. However, you should note this would not only be bad for commercial software developers, but also for open source developers.
This law would be bad because open source developers would *also* have to pay this tax on all of the code they write. Public domain and GPL are not legally the same. GPL'd software is still owned by someone, they just give out a nonexclusive license for others to use it. Much of Linux is owned by Linus Torvalds and other developers. The monetary value of the Linux kernel is probably enormous. Do you really want Linus paying millions a year in taxes on the work he's done? The FSF would have the same problem under this law.
This law seems designed to hurt commercial software developers, a goal I can't say I agree with since I work for one. However, even if you are for taxing commercial software developers, I don't understand how you can be for a law which would do the same to open source developers, who may or may not even make a profit on their work.
Frankly, I don't see how new taxes would make anything better in the software development world. This is clearly the idea of someone who either doesn't pay taxes, or doesn't develop any kind of software, open source or otherwise, but probably both.
The person who wrote this article doesn't seem to understand how taxes work. Property tax is *real estate* tax. Has the person who wrote this article never filed a tax return?
Also, the federal government doesn't *have* a property tax, only an income tax. Some *local* governments have property taxes, but again, only on real estate. Land.
stage6 was by far the best video site out there in terms of video quality and the ability to watch things full screen.
It seems stupid to me that they couldn't make their business model work. They had excellent technology, but obviously like so many online ventures they didn't think very hard about how they were going to make money.
It seems obvious to me that they could have gotten significant cash on advertising if they did speach to text translation on the videos and then did some context based ads on that text. However, they seemed to have almost no advertising on their site, and thus no way to recoup losses.
Additionally, they could have tried a model that required users to subscribe to stage6 as basically an internet television service. However, they seemed like they weren't really willing to try *anything* to recoup expenses, and just killed the project by inaction.
This worries me because the same problems basically face youtube, and similarly google has done pretty much nothing to make the site profitable since purchasing it. The only real change has been the removal of copyrighted material from the site, and that can hardly be called an improvement.
Hopefully divx will license out the stage6 browser plugin and serving infrastructure to other companies so the technology won't die.
is something like core server with cheaper licensing. One area where linux kills windows right now are on clusters, where you have numerous relatively cheap boxes doing lots of raw computation.
Using windows for this you get a lot of overhead both in terms of cost, wasted HD space, memory, and processor usage on software and services that are irrelevant to a headless cluster node. Windows would be a lot more compelling for this space if they offered some kind of really cheap volume license for a stripped down windows that came utilities for managing a cluster of them. Some kind of logarithmic pricing model for clusters would be nice and make them a lot more competitive.
Of course I'm sure a lot of Linux enthusiasts would like to see Microsoft continue to price themselves out of the market. Personally, I think some more serious competition from windows on this front would be a good thing and spawn more innovation in the distributed computing space.
Silverlight for linux is already under development as part of mono. I'm sure we'll have a firefox plugin for linux by the time this stuff goes live. Also, microsoft produces a mac version of silverlight.
Since both mac and linux will be able to use the site it isn't really locking anyone out any more than flash locks people out.
Not everything that microsoft does is a doomsday scenerio.
>Apple may be on dangerous ground here, >since those users might now start checking out competing services
What, some other service that offers DRM'd music that they *encourage* you to crack? When you buy a DRM'd itunes song, you know that apple is going to stop try to stop you from copying decrypting it. That's the point of DRM.
It should be noted that apple also offers music *without* DRM. You should not buy DRM music if you don't like DRM being enforced.
to me, this Yahoo Microsoft deal just says how bad Steve Ballmer's judgment has been as CEO of Microsoft.
First he let Vista development get out of hand, which would have resulted in his ouster at some companies, and now this. From what I hear, his main contribution to Microsoft has been longer meetings.
The truth is that Bill Gates was a much better CEO in terms of business strategy. Some people are still *angry* about some of those business strategies, but there's no denying that they *worked*.
I've got to think that Bill Gates is merely toeing the company line at this point, acting like the Microsoft Yahoo merger will be successful. My guess is Bill isn't in a position to change Microsoft policy anymore.
I'm hoping that at some point the Microsoft board will throw out Ballmer. My sense is that he's surrounded by yes men, who won't tell him how stupid these ideas are, so it might even be a good idea to bring in an outsider at this point to run Microsoft.
What shareholders would really like to see is more effort on Microsoft's bread and butter, Windows and Office, which accounts for almost all of Microsoft's profit. A CEO who lets the core business fall apart while focusing on a futile effort to expand into a market that's already been taken over by Google should not be left in charge of the company.
>>The religon behind OSS will keep those developers (and many investors) away. >It should. The religion behind OSS seeks to destroy their business model by making them obsolete.
Which is why that approach to open source can never succeed. The open source movement needs developers and software companies to succeed, and as long as the religious fanatics in the movement keep up their talk of destroying commercial software development, the majority of developers are going to put their effort into proprietary software.
Open source can be good for business, but businesses and developers want to see a model that lets them use both closed and open source systems together so that they can continue to make a profit on their specialized proprietary systems while cutting cost by using open source systems for things like kernels and compilers that they don't want to write from scratch. When fanatics talk about open source like it is all or nothing, that scares off developers and makes them think more about burrying open source than supporting it.
Be sure that the open source movement is all about developers, and scaring them off by threatening to put them out of work is the last thing you want to do.
is that ISPs have always done this. In effect, this behavior makes things like HTTP and small file downloads seem very snappy at the expense of larger file transfers.
It actually isn't that bad of a policy in that it prioritizes real time operations over batch jobs. Your CPU scheduler acts similarly. It does become a problem if the base rate really sucks.
>Imagine this hypothetical scenario: >1. We fully understand how a single neuron works and communicates with nearby units. 1. No we don't. We have some vague idea of how they work that is roughly modeled by a neural network in AI. However, neural networks aren't a magic solution to intelligence because there are different flavors of neural networks for different tasks both in the brain and in computer science, and all neural networks have to be trained.
Some neural networks in the brain are probably hardwired, and their configuration is determined genetically. We have no means of determining their configuration and mapping it to an electronic neural network.
2. even if we did have a perfect understanding of neurons it wouldn't be sufficient. You are talking about how the *hardware works*. A brain neuron is about as low level as a transistor. Nothing about a transistor tells you how to processor language or do anything higher level.
Additionally, there is no way to determine what algorithms our brain uses. There's no way to get a big graph of what neurons are connected to other neurons with what weights. There is no way to tell how the brain *updates* those weights (not all neurons are the same, not all follow the same rules).
>2. We possess "classical" computing power a couple orders of magnitude greater than >what is required for simulation of an entire brain
The human brain has 100 billion neurons that form a graph. The average number of edges in the graph is phenomenal. Each edge is weighted and usually directed in most neural network models.
All of that is the *easy* part.
What is the configuration of the graph? There's no way to get that from looking at a human brain. This isn't fucking star trek, we can't look at anything atom by atom, cell by cell.
Again, *we don't know how the cells work*, so we don't know how to update the graph.
What I'm trying to impress on you, is that the idea of simulating a human brain cell by cell is impossible, and that's not how AI works, nor will it ever be.
>Opera Screeches at Mozilla Over Security Disclosure
Common, can we get article titles and summaries that don't *immediately* tell us about how we should feel about an article before even telling us the circumstances?
I mean, give me a break, this is a lower standard of reporting than even fox news uses. For *once* I'd like to see a slashdot editor try to be objective, and let the reader make up our own mind instead of trying to spoon feed us our opinions.
I think that war would be a bad idea for everyone involved.
>This would also leave a nice, large reminder to other nations to back off.
I don't know what you hope to gain aside from stoking egos. Making us look like an aggressor is *not* going to increase our national security.
Also, as I pointed out, in a major war would probably sustain significant damage from thermonuclear ICBM's. China doesn't have as many as Russia does, but they have enough.
What I was trying to point out is that economic warfare could be as effective as actual warfare given China's internal troubles, and a lot less risky.
>An algorithm or algorithms is certainly required, and I never meant to imply otherwise. >Human understanding of said algorithm(s), however, is explicitly not required.
What you're saying is that we don't have to understand how algorithms related to various intelligent faculties work, but we can just make it magically happen if we copy the structure of the human brain? And this will be *easy*?
You expect us to be able to implement an algorithm that we have no understanding of in a meaningful way? Or do you expect us to create an atom by atom simulation of the human brain? Both of these things are impossible fantasies.
>It is one thing to understand the mechanism required for operation -- >it is quite another to understand the state it is in. I think you are >confusing the latter with the former; the former is relatively trivial,
Really? You think that the mechanisms of intelligence are simple? Maybe you'd like to enlighten the scientific community by telling them what they are.
The mechanisms are various structures and algorithms that are *phenomenally* complicated. For instance, the way we process language is incredibly complicated. Hint, it's not enough to just know the grammer, vocabulary, etc. You also have to understand semantics, context, before you can even *parse* a sentence (which is the opposite of programming languages where lexical and syntactic analysis can happen independent of and prior to semantic analysis). We are nowhere *near* being able to do this even in principle. Just "copying the solution" from the brain isn't an answer, as it is not possible to do that without understanding what the brain is doing in the first place. Studying humans helps, but it doesn't solve the problem.
>and the latter is not required any more than a complete understanding of the state of >everything involved at NASA is required in order to create, launch and recover the space shuttle
If you need to make an analogy to something unrelated that you also don't understand how to do, it's a good hint that you don't know what you're talking about.
Futurists (whatever that means) have been saying that "human level" AI is 20 years off for well over 20 years now.
Anyone who's actually passingly familiar with the state of the field, and understands what rate the research progresses at (SLOWLY) can tell you this is bullshit.
Will computers ever reach human intelligence? If you mean, will they be able to do *math* faster than humans, it has already happened. If you mean, will you be able to have a conversation with a machine about how a movie made it feel, then certainly *not* within 20 years. In fact, I don't expect to be alive to see such a thing and I'm in my 20's.
One thing that people fail to understand is that AI research largely does not seek to make some kind of Asimovian robot, that interacts with the world like a human being does. AI is just another branch of computer science with exactly the same end, to write software that solves problems that people can't. There is no pressing problem that requires us to make intelligent androids to solve it.
Another thing that really annoys me, is that people assume that just as soon as computers are "complicated enough" they magically become intelligent, as if intelligence were some emergent property of complexity itself. This is utter crap science fiction thinking. Human intelligence is not some general power we have that emerges from complexity. Instead, what we call human intelligence is actually a bunch of separate systems designed to handle separate tasks, such as vision, sound, language processing, memory, deductive logic, inductive logic, spatial reasoning, etc. People often talk about their minds as a single indivisible entity with the semi magical property of being able to experience the world and reason about it, but this isn't really true. The mind is a collection of separate and distinct functional units each with its own task.
Each of these intricate systems evolved over millions of years, its design is not simple, and we won't be able to figure it out in a mere 20 years. We certainly won't be able to integrate them in a coherent way in that amount of time.
Some futurists, especially the ones that are obsessed with the so called singularity, will point at graphs showing that computing power is growing exponentially, and take that as some kind of proof that their wildest science fiction fantasies are going to come true.
Even if computing power increases exponentially forever (it *won't*, but that's another issue), it still doesn't solve the underlying problems of intelligence. If we have a thousands of cores of terahertz processors, our AI would only be marginally better. The reason for this is that we don't have a lot of the underlying *algorithms* for solving various intelligent tasks. It's not that we are too slow to solve the problem, it's that we either don't know how to solve the problem in the first place, we don't know how to formally state the problem we are trying to solve, or that we know how to solve the problem, but don't know how to solve the problem or an approximation of it in polynomial time. The fastest processor you can imagine doesn't really help with NP problems (assuming that NP != P, yada yada). Exponential growth in computing doesn't make the traveling salesman problem tractable.
What I fear is that spore will end up like black and white, which is to say they will try to turn it into a game.
Most simulation games are fun because they basically let you play god. The world is your sandbox and you can do pretty much anything you want.
Black and white had this, and had a pretty cool sandbox, with people you could pickup and throw around, and a semi intelligent animal you could train to do tricks. Then they added the "game" elements.
First, they intentionally made the interface hard to use so that it would be "challenging" to learn how to use it. Everything was done with a series of mouse gestures that rarely worked. The "game" was figuring out how to do the mouse gestures well.
Second, they made you build your own cities house by house with a frustrating interface. The game offered to let you play god, but for some reason your tribe of people expected their god to construct their houses for them?
Finally, while the game was "black and white" and advertised the ability to be good or evil, the game largely punished you if you were evil. The world and all the creatures in it started to look ugly, and your society would start to fall apart in many ways. Also, numerous highly annoying mini games were designed to punish you for evil and reward you for good.
What I fear, is that similar unfun tasks will be inserted into spore. I fear that much of the game will be spent micromanaging your creature, or in other boring tasks, like designing your city.
it's sad but true that American politicians aren't always working for the American people. Foreign interests can spread money around pretty easily, although they have to use a few levels of indirection.
Our policy, especially our trade policy, towards China has gotten ridiculous. We offer extremely low tariffs on Chinese imports, while Chinese tariffs are high. We ask them to put some effort in stopping the pirating of US products, and they respond by banning various US movies.
Also, it's distinctly *not* in America's interest to be propping up China's communist regime by keeping China profitable. In the short term we have some economic ties to China that are hard to break. In the long term, it's almost guaranteed that there will be some military conflict with China, a country that possesses a number of thermonuclear weapons mounted on ICBM's, as long as the communist party runs the country since they depend on ultra-nationalist and anti-american rhetoric to maintain political control of the country.
Even though the communist party knows that war with America would be a bad idea, they've relied so heavily on nationalist rhetoric, that position western powers and especially America as China's enemy, that they would have no choice but to go to war with us in a number of situations. For instance, whenever Taiwan gets around to declaring independence the Chinese government will be compelled by popular mandate to enter into war to occupy the island. The Chinese don't perceive Taiwan as an independent country and formal secession would be perceived as some kind of western aggression against Chinese territory.
I think that war with China would be a very bad idea for the US as well. We have them thoroughly outclassed in terms of naval and air forces, but that isn't all that helpful while they still have ICBM's. However, we need to negotiate more strongly and less naively, and put some effort into hamstringing China's long term economic growth, probably by cutting them off from oil supplies and imposing some prohibitive tariffs. China's growth is largely what sustains the communist party, and a strong economic downturn over a few years would probably result in a change of government.
What's really disturbing to me, is that neither the state nor the federal government does much about Scientology or other cults.
In Washington we have these LaRouche cultists all over the place http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche
but especially at colleges, and especially at the UW. They show up on school property rain or shine, and organize various brainwashing events. What's worse, is that they try to make themselves look like some kind of political organization, but actually they're just trying to brainwash you, try to get you to drop out of school, and scam you out of your money.
Instead of doing something about it, the government and the school let them use school facilities to hold their brainwashing sessions, and let them stay on campus harassing students day in and day out.
In California, where the Scientologists are powerful, I'm told that there's a similar situation. The organization is powerful enough that the government would rather look the other way, lest they suffer some kind of smear campaign.
which is why you see every library being redesigned over and over again, instead of just fixing the existing standards. In my opinion, the inability to use existing standards developed for other operating systems, and the insistence on reinventing the wheel is probably the biggest thing holding back Linux.
We're finally standardizing on DBUS, but the equivalent technology (COM) has been in windows since 16 bit; however, the Linux community always views any technology from outside, especially from Microsoft, as somehow ineffably inferior to their home-brewed concoctions. Instead we've sat around for decades with the C ABI as the dominant "object model" (if you can call it that), on Linux for the inability to standardize around any kind of component technology developed outside of the Linux world, including CORBA, COM, SOM, etc.
Even now, DBUS uses the GObject model, which is C ABI based.
>if it hadn't been for the Fed pumping money into the circuit, >a number of banks would have gone belly up, and their clients would be out in the streets.
So, what you are saying is that you *agree* with me about the fed preserving the economy by propping up banks, but you are still angry about it because you don't like all of the shady things that banks do.
Ok. I never said the people running banks were saints. However, if any significant number of banks go under everyone is screwed, which is why we have the fed to protect the banks in times of crisis. Additionally, the fed is responsible for raising interest rates when the banks are over investing in things like mortgages, or the dot com bubble, to soften the inevitable popping of the bubble.
Anyway, my point was that while the fed may be a fairly self serving institution for an industry that does shady things, it is essential to the proper functioning of our economy.
there are already a lot of object models out there.
There's various incarnations of CORBA on linux, COM on windows, XPCOM which is used for firefox components, DBUS on Gnome and now KDE.
Component software is a Good Thing(tm), but all the various implementations essentially do the same thing, which is to allow a cross language interface to be specified in a way that doesn't require wrapper libraries to be written. Also, it is common to include some kind of remote procedure call specification.
>>In over a decade and a half, no one (but maybe Apple) came close. Funny story, Apple uses COM.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that apple doesn't have a component model (you have to use wrapper libraries or objective-c++). In a few instances where this is a pain (plug-ins) they just use com. http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/04/16/com_osx.html
It should be noted that Apple's com implementation is *very* basic and not really meant for developing cross platform COM libraries like the article suggests.
>Finally, we get a candidate who has a 20 year voting record on fiscal responsibility >and supporting thee cconstitution and what is the response from slashdot? Ron Paul is kook.
Ron Paul isn't a kook for all of his *good* ideas. He has many good ideas, and you mentioned several of them.
Ron Paul is a kook because, like all kooks, not because of his good ideas, but because of his bad. And his bad ideas are *really* bad. Specifically he wants to dismantle pretty much the *entire federal government*.
He wants to abolish the IRS, the FDA, and the EPA. I can't take anyone seriously who thinks that we can run a nation of 300 million without those 3 institutions or something equivalent.
>Name one candidate who understands the monetary policy behind a fiat currency and >WHY the Fed is destroying our currency.
That Ron Paul thinks the fed is destroying our currency is another reason why he is a kook. Ron Paul is trying to fight the fight that William Jennings Brian and others lost 100 years ago against the banking industry. The Fed is set up to preserve the banking industry. The banking industry preserves the economy, and by the transitive property the Fed preserves the economy.
The reason that modern nations use centralized banking (we were one of the later western countries to switch over to that model) is that the gold standard doesn't actually prevent inflation in the way that Ron Paul thinks it does, and that's why it is *Ron Paul* who does not understand "fiat" money as you call it.
First of all, the fed printing more money isn't the only, or even primary, source of inflation *contrary* to what Ron Paul has been spouting off about. If oil prices, food prices, or consumer good prices rise, we get inflation because consumers spend more money for the same goods, and employers become obliged to pay those consumers higher wages, which raises the price of consumer goods, etc, ad infinitum.
Inflation can also happen because of a trade imbalance, which is a big part of what is driving up inflation right now.
Second of all, if the Fed isn't in charge of printing money, do you know who *is*? Congress. The constitution gives congress the power to print money whenever it so pleases, which they handed over to the Fed (who are professional bankers and economists), because frankly congress isn't competent to do such a thing. Think about how much deficit spending we have a year (around 1/2 trillion I believe). If the Fed was eliminated, we would likely be *printing* all of that money without even the obligation to pay it back. Now, *that* would cause inflation.
Slashdot Mirror
>A minor academic debate among astronomers is the final fate of the earth.
I don't know, but I bet the Cylons will have something to do with it.
>I've been advocating that exact idea for a while, with one slight change: if that happens,
>the IP in question goes into the public domain instead of to the purchaser.
GPL and public domain are not the same thing. Linus owns parts of Linux and holds a trademark on Linux in some countries. He could not afford to pay such taxes, so a company like say microsoft could come along and use his code under these laws.
In general, these laws make no sense and would hurt open source developers even more than closed source developers.
Finally, these are in no way analogous to property tax because property tax is just on land, not on the various other things you own. Also the federal government doesn't even collect property tax. It's a stupid idea that would hurt everyone.
>Why not let it die, they ripped off the open source community to get the code for it in the first place.
If you assign your copyright over to some open source group, you risk them relicensing it in a way you won't like. My understanding is that is what happened to divx.
That's why I've always considered the FSF scheme of forcing you to give them copyright before you can commit something to say, GCC, as kind of a scam. For instance, I much prefer V2 of the GPL to V3, so if I commit anything to GCC under V2, the FSF has the right to come along and change it to V3 without my permission. Or they could come up with a new license, or they could close the source and sell it commercially like Divx did (although this is less likely, it has happened a number of times).
The FSF is influential in the open source community, so people tend to ignore the fact that they are taking away the rights of various open source developers.
I like the Linux model where everyone retains their rights and the license remains static. If they want to change the license, they can ask the developer's permissions.
Property tax as it is practiced right now is a *real estate* tax on your *land* and it is only taken by some local governments (cities, counties, etc), not by the federal government, which only collects income taxes, social security tax, and the occasional tariff.
The "property tax" this guy is talking about is tax on your possessions. Do you really want to pay taxes on your computer? On your car? Do you want to pay the government to keep the stuff you already own every year? That's what this guy is talking about in his article, although he seems to be somehow unaware that we don't already do that. I think most of us would go broke inside of two years if we had to pay tax on every bit of property we have.
The guy who wrote this article clearly has never actually *paid* taxes, otherwise he would know this stuff. He thinks he's extending an existing tax to IP, but it is a tax that doesn't even exist for anything.
Also, as for IP, I have to think that it's a little ridiculous that if I write a book, or some software or whatever, I would have to pay the government for the privilege of saying that it is my book or my software. I already have to pay income tax every time I *sell* a copy of a book that I wrote, now I'd have to pay money for just having wrote it.
It sounds like he wants to come up with a law to essentially force people to give their IP to the public domain, which seems like an authoritarian measure, and essentially amounts to nationalizing personal property. However, you should note this would not only be bad for commercial software developers, but also for open source developers.
This law would be bad because open source developers would *also* have to pay this tax on all of the code they write. Public domain and GPL are not legally the same. GPL'd software is still owned by someone, they just give out a nonexclusive license for others to use it. Much of Linux is owned by Linus Torvalds and other developers. The monetary value of the Linux kernel is probably enormous. Do you really want Linus paying millions a year in taxes on the work he's done? The FSF would have the same problem under this law.
This law seems designed to hurt commercial software developers, a goal I can't say I agree with since I work for one. However, even if you are for taxing commercial software developers, I don't understand how you can be for a law which would do the same to open source developers, who may or may not even make a profit on their work.
Frankly, I don't see how new taxes would make anything better in the software development world. This is clearly the idea of someone who either doesn't pay taxes, or doesn't develop any kind of software, open source or otherwise, but probably both.
The person who wrote this article doesn't seem to understand how taxes work. Property tax is *real estate* tax. Has the person who wrote this article never filed a tax return?
Also, the federal government doesn't *have* a property tax, only an income tax. Some *local* governments have property taxes, but again, only on real estate. Land.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax#United_States
What a moron.
stage6 was by far the best video site out there in terms of video quality and the ability to watch things full screen.
It seems stupid to me that they couldn't make their business model work. They had excellent technology, but obviously like so many online ventures they didn't think very hard about how they were going to make money.
It seems obvious to me that they could have gotten significant cash on advertising if they did speach to text translation on the videos and then did some context based ads on that text. However, they seemed to have almost no advertising on their site, and thus no way to recoup losses.
Additionally, they could have tried a model that required users to subscribe to stage6 as basically an internet television service. However, they seemed like they weren't really willing to try *anything* to recoup expenses, and just killed the project by inaction.
This worries me because the same problems basically face youtube, and similarly google has done pretty much nothing to make the site profitable since purchasing it. The only real change has been the removal of copyrighted material from the site, and that can hardly be called an improvement.
Hopefully divx will license out the stage6 browser plugin and serving infrastructure to other companies so the technology won't die.
is something like core server with cheaper licensing. One area where linux kills windows right now are on clusters, where you have numerous relatively cheap boxes doing lots of raw computation.
Using windows for this you get a lot of overhead both in terms of cost, wasted HD space, memory, and processor usage on software and services that are irrelevant to a headless cluster node. Windows would be a lot more compelling for this space if they offered some kind of really cheap volume license for a stripped down windows that came utilities for managing a cluster of them. Some kind of logarithmic pricing model for clusters would be nice and make them a lot more competitive.
Of course I'm sure a lot of Linux enthusiasts would like to see Microsoft continue to price themselves out of the market. Personally, I think some more serious competition from windows on this front would be a good thing and spawn more innovation in the distributed computing space.
a non issue.
Silverlight for linux is already under development as part of mono. I'm sure we'll have a firefox plugin for linux by the time this stuff goes live. Also, microsoft produces a mac version of silverlight.
Since both mac and linux will be able to use the site it isn't really locking anyone out any more than flash locks people out.
Not everything that microsoft does is a doomsday scenerio.
>Apple may be on dangerous ground here,
>since those users might now start checking out competing services
What, some other service that offers DRM'd music that they *encourage* you to crack? When you buy a DRM'd itunes song, you know that apple is going to stop try to stop you from copying decrypting it. That's the point of DRM.
It should be noted that apple also offers music *without* DRM. You should not buy DRM music if you don't like DRM being enforced.
to me, this Yahoo Microsoft deal just says how bad Steve Ballmer's judgment has been as CEO of Microsoft.
First he let Vista development get out of hand, which would have resulted in his ouster at some companies, and now this. From what I hear, his main contribution to Microsoft has been longer meetings.
The truth is that Bill Gates was a much better CEO in terms of business strategy. Some people are still *angry* about some of those business strategies, but there's no denying that they *worked*.
I've got to think that Bill Gates is merely toeing the company line at this point, acting like the Microsoft Yahoo merger will be successful. My guess is Bill isn't in a position to change Microsoft policy anymore.
I'm hoping that at some point the Microsoft board will throw out Ballmer. My sense is that he's surrounded by yes men, who won't tell him how stupid these ideas are, so it might even be a good idea to bring in an outsider at this point to run Microsoft.
What shareholders would really like to see is more effort on Microsoft's bread and butter, Windows and Office, which accounts for almost all of Microsoft's profit. A CEO who lets the core business fall apart while focusing on a futile effort to expand into a market that's already been taken over by Google should not be left in charge of the company.
>>The religon behind OSS will keep those developers (and many investors) away.
>It should. The religion behind OSS seeks to destroy their business model by making them obsolete.
Which is why that approach to open source can never succeed. The open source movement needs developers and software companies to succeed, and as long as the religious fanatics in the movement keep up their talk of destroying commercial software development, the majority of developers are going to put their effort into proprietary software.
Open source can be good for business, but businesses and developers want to see a model that lets them use both closed and open source systems together so that they can continue to make a profit on their specialized proprietary systems while cutting cost by using open source systems for things like kernels and compilers that they don't want to write from scratch. When fanatics talk about open source like it is all or nothing, that scares off developers and makes them think more about burrying open source than supporting it.
Be sure that the open source movement is all about developers, and scaring them off by threatening to put them out of work is the last thing you want to do.
is that ISPs have always done this. In effect, this behavior makes things like HTTP and small file downloads seem very snappy at the expense of larger file transfers.
It actually isn't that bad of a policy in that it prioritizes real time operations over batch jobs. Your CPU scheduler acts similarly. It does become a problem if the base rate really sucks.
>Imagine this hypothetical scenario:
>1. We fully understand how a single neuron works and communicates with nearby units.
1. No we don't. We have some vague idea of how they work that is roughly modeled by a neural network in AI. However, neural networks aren't a magic solution to intelligence because there are different flavors of neural networks for different tasks both in the brain and in computer science, and all neural networks have to be trained.
Some neural networks in the brain are probably hardwired, and their configuration is determined genetically. We have no means of determining their configuration and mapping it to an electronic neural network.
2. even if we did have a perfect understanding of neurons it wouldn't be sufficient. You are talking about how the *hardware works*. A brain neuron is about as low level as a transistor. Nothing about a transistor tells you how to processor language or do anything higher level.
Additionally, there is no way to determine what algorithms our brain uses. There's no way to get a big graph of what neurons are connected to other neurons with what weights. There is no way to tell how the brain *updates* those weights (not all neurons are the same, not all follow the same rules).
>2. We possess "classical" computing power a couple orders of magnitude greater than
>what is required for simulation of an entire brain
The human brain has 100 billion neurons that form a graph. The average number of edges in the graph is phenomenal. Each edge is weighted and usually directed in most neural network models.
All of that is the *easy* part.
What is the configuration of the graph? There's no way to get that from looking at a human brain. This isn't fucking star trek, we can't look at anything atom by atom, cell by cell.
Again, *we don't know how the cells work*, so we don't know how to update the graph.
What I'm trying to impress on you, is that the idea of simulating a human brain cell by cell is impossible, and that's not how AI works, nor will it ever be.
>Opera Screeches at Mozilla Over Security Disclosure
Common, can we get article titles and summaries that don't *immediately* tell us about how we should feel about an article before even telling us the circumstances?
I mean, give me a break, this is a lower standard of reporting than even fox news uses. For *once* I'd like to see a slashdot editor try to be objective, and let the reader make up our own mind instead of trying to spoon feed us our opinions.
I think that war would be a bad idea for everyone involved.
>This would also leave a nice, large reminder to other nations to back off.
I don't know what you hope to gain aside from stoking egos. Making us look like an aggressor is *not* going to increase our national security.
Also, as I pointed out, in a major war would probably sustain significant damage from thermonuclear ICBM's. China doesn't have as many as Russia does, but they have enough.
What I was trying to point out is that economic warfare could be as effective as actual warfare given China's internal troubles, and a lot less risky.
>An algorithm or algorithms is certainly required, and I never meant to imply otherwise.
>Human understanding of said algorithm(s), however, is explicitly not required.
What you're saying is that we don't have to understand how algorithms related to various intelligent faculties work, but we can just make it magically happen if we copy the structure of the human brain? And this will be *easy*?
You expect us to be able to implement an algorithm that we have no understanding of in a meaningful way? Or do you expect us to create an atom by atom simulation of the human brain? Both of these things are impossible fantasies.
>It is one thing to understand the mechanism required for operation --
>it is quite another to understand the state it is in. I think you are
>confusing the latter with the former; the former is relatively trivial,
Really? You think that the mechanisms of intelligence are simple? Maybe you'd like to enlighten the scientific community by telling them what they are.
The mechanisms are various structures and algorithms that are *phenomenally* complicated. For instance, the way we process language is incredibly complicated. Hint, it's not enough to just know the grammer, vocabulary, etc. You also have to understand semantics, context, before you can even *parse* a sentence (which is the opposite of programming languages where lexical and syntactic analysis can happen independent of and prior to semantic analysis). We are nowhere *near* being able to do this even in principle. Just "copying the solution" from the brain isn't an answer, as it is not possible to do that without understanding what the brain is doing in the first place. Studying humans helps, but it doesn't solve the problem.
>and the latter is not required any more than a complete understanding of the state of
>everything involved at NASA is required in order to create, launch and recover the space shuttle
If you need to make an analogy to something unrelated that you also don't understand how to do, it's a good hint that you don't know what you're talking about.
Futurists (whatever that means) have been saying that "human level" AI is 20 years off for well over 20 years now.
Anyone who's actually passingly familiar with the state of the field, and understands what rate the research progresses at (SLOWLY) can tell you this is bullshit.
Will computers ever reach human intelligence? If you mean, will they be able to do *math* faster than humans, it has already happened. If you mean, will you be able to have a conversation with a machine about how a movie made it feel, then certainly *not* within 20 years. In fact, I don't expect to be alive to see such a thing and I'm in my 20's.
One thing that people fail to understand is that AI research largely does not seek to make some kind of Asimovian robot, that interacts with the world like a human being does. AI is just another branch of computer science with exactly the same end, to write software that solves problems that people can't. There is no pressing problem that requires us to make intelligent androids to solve it.
Another thing that really annoys me, is that people assume that just as soon as computers are "complicated enough" they magically become intelligent, as if intelligence were some emergent property of complexity itself. This is utter crap science fiction thinking. Human intelligence is not some general power we have that emerges from complexity. Instead, what we call human intelligence is actually a bunch of separate systems designed to handle separate tasks, such as vision, sound, language processing, memory, deductive logic, inductive logic, spatial reasoning, etc. People often talk about their minds as a single indivisible entity with the semi magical property of being able to experience the world and reason about it, but this isn't really true. The mind is a collection of separate and distinct functional units each with its own task.
Each of these intricate systems evolved over millions of years, its design is not simple, and we won't be able to figure it out in a mere 20 years. We certainly won't be able to integrate them in a coherent way in that amount of time.
Some futurists, especially the ones that are obsessed with the so called singularity, will point at graphs showing that computing power is growing exponentially, and take that as some kind of proof that their wildest science fiction fantasies are going to come true.
Even if computing power increases exponentially forever (it *won't*, but that's another issue), it still doesn't solve the underlying problems of intelligence. If we have a thousands of cores of terahertz processors, our AI would only be marginally better. The reason for this is that we don't have a lot of the underlying *algorithms* for solving various intelligent tasks. It's not that we are too slow to solve the problem, it's that we either don't know how to solve the problem in the first place, we don't know how to formally state the problem we are trying to solve, or that we know how to solve the problem, but don't know how to solve the problem or an approximation of it in polynomial time. The fastest processor you can imagine doesn't really help with NP problems (assuming that NP != P, yada yada). Exponential growth in computing doesn't make the traveling salesman problem tractable.
What I fear is that spore will end up like black and white, which is to say they will try to turn it into a game.
Most simulation games are fun because they basically let you play god. The world is your sandbox and you can do pretty much anything you want.
Black and white had this, and had a pretty cool sandbox, with people you could pickup and throw around, and a semi intelligent animal you could train to do tricks. Then they added the "game" elements.
First, they intentionally made the interface hard to use so that it would be "challenging" to learn how to use it. Everything was done with a series of mouse gestures that rarely worked. The "game" was figuring out how to do the mouse gestures well.
Second, they made you build your own cities house by house with a frustrating interface. The game offered to let you play god, but for some reason your tribe of people expected their god to construct their houses for them?
Finally, while the game was "black and white" and advertised the ability to be good or evil, the game largely punished you if you were evil. The world and all the creatures in it started to look ugly, and your society would start to fall apart in many ways. Also, numerous highly annoying mini games were designed to punish you for evil and reward you for good.
What I fear, is that similar unfun tasks will be inserted into spore. I fear that much of the game will be spent micromanaging your creature, or in other boring tasks, like designing your city.
>Besides, I'd be surprised if we aren't doing the same thing to China, at least I'd hope we are.
I don't know. Our policy towards China has been very soft. Part of that may be the China lobby
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_lobby
it's sad but true that American politicians aren't always working for the American people. Foreign interests can spread money around pretty easily, although they have to use a few levels of indirection.
Our policy, especially our trade policy, towards China has gotten ridiculous. We offer extremely low tariffs on Chinese imports, while Chinese tariffs are high. We ask them to put some effort in stopping the pirating of US products, and they respond by banning various US movies.
Also, it's distinctly *not* in America's interest to be propping up China's communist regime by keeping China profitable. In the short term we have some economic ties to China that are hard to break. In the long term, it's almost guaranteed that there will be some military conflict with China, a country that possesses a number of thermonuclear weapons mounted on ICBM's, as long as the communist party runs the country since they depend on ultra-nationalist and anti-american rhetoric to maintain political control of the country.
Even though the communist party knows that war with America would be a bad idea, they've relied so heavily on nationalist rhetoric, that position western powers and especially America as China's enemy, that they would have no choice but to go to war with us in a number of situations. For instance, whenever Taiwan gets around to declaring independence the Chinese government will be compelled by popular mandate to enter into war to occupy the island. The Chinese don't perceive Taiwan as an independent country and formal secession would be perceived as some kind of western aggression against Chinese territory.
I think that war with China would be a very bad idea for the US as well. We have them thoroughly outclassed in terms of naval and air forces, but that isn't all that helpful while they still have ICBM's. However, we need to negotiate more strongly and less naively, and put some effort into hamstringing China's long term economic growth, probably by cutting them off from oil supplies and imposing some prohibitive tariffs. China's growth is largely what sustains the communist party, and a strong economic downturn over a few years would probably result in a change of government.
What's really disturbing to me, is that neither the state nor the federal government does much about Scientology or other cults.
In Washington we have these LaRouche cultists all over the place
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche
but especially at colleges, and especially at the UW. They show up on school property rain or shine, and organize various brainwashing events. What's worse, is that they try to make themselves look like some kind of political organization, but actually they're just trying to brainwash you, try to get you to drop out of school, and scam you out of your money.
Instead of doing something about it, the government and the school let them use school facilities to hold their brainwashing sessions, and let them stay on campus harassing students day in and day out.
In California, where the Scientologists are powerful, I'm told that there's a similar situation. The organization is powerful enough that the government would rather look the other way, lest they suffer some kind of smear campaign.
although I don't have exact numbers
http://www.king5.com/localnews/stories/NW_021008WAB_scientology_protest_SW.accc9b6e.html
>I've seen various incarnations of object models in KDE/Gnome alone,
>why start over everytime and set yourself years back?
The Linux community has a strong case of Not Invented Here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here
which is why you see every library being redesigned over and over again, instead of just fixing the existing standards. In my opinion, the inability to use existing standards developed for other operating systems, and the insistence on reinventing the wheel is probably the biggest thing holding back Linux.
We're finally standardizing on DBUS, but the equivalent technology (COM) has been in windows since 16 bit; however, the Linux community always views any technology from outside, especially from Microsoft, as somehow ineffably inferior to their home-brewed concoctions. Instead we've sat around for decades with the C ABI as the dominant "object model" (if you can call it that), on Linux for the inability to standardize around any kind of component technology developed outside of the Linux world, including CORBA, COM, SOM, etc.
Even now, DBUS uses the GObject model, which is C ABI based.
>if it hadn't been for the Fed pumping money into the circuit,
>a number of banks would have gone belly up, and their clients would be out in the streets.
So, what you are saying is that you *agree* with me about the fed preserving the economy by propping up banks, but you are still angry about it because you don't like all of the shady things that banks do.
Ok. I never said the people running banks were saints. However, if any significant number of banks go under everyone is screwed, which is why we have the fed to protect the banks in times of crisis. Additionally, the fed is responsible for raising interest rates when the banks are over investing in things like mortgages, or the dot com bubble, to soften the inevitable popping of the bubble.
Anyway, my point was that while the fed may be a fairly self serving institution for an industry that does shady things, it is essential to the proper functioning of our economy.
there are already a lot of object models out there.
There's various incarnations of CORBA on linux, COM on windows, XPCOM which is used for firefox components, DBUS on Gnome and now KDE.
Component software is a Good Thing(tm), but all the various implementations essentially do the same thing, which is to allow a cross language interface to be specified in a way that doesn't require wrapper libraries to be written. Also, it is common to include some kind of remote procedure call specification.
>>In over a decade and a half, no one (but maybe Apple) came close.
Funny story, Apple uses COM.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that apple doesn't have a component model (you have to use wrapper libraries or objective-c++). In a few instances where this is a pain (plug-ins) they just use com.
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/04/16/com_osx.html
It should be noted that Apple's com implementation is *very* basic and not really meant for developing cross platform COM libraries like the article suggests.
>Finally, we get a candidate who has a 20 year voting record on fiscal responsibility
>and supporting thee cconstitution and what is the response from slashdot? Ron Paul is kook.
Ron Paul isn't a kook for all of his *good* ideas. He has many good ideas, and you mentioned several of them.
Ron Paul is a kook because, like all kooks, not because of his good ideas, but because of his bad. And his bad ideas are *really* bad. Specifically he wants to dismantle pretty much the *entire federal government*.
He wants to abolish the IRS, the FDA, and the EPA. I can't take anyone seriously who thinks that we can run a nation of 300 million without those 3 institutions or something equivalent.
>Name one candidate who understands the monetary policy behind a fiat currency and
>WHY the Fed is destroying our currency.
That Ron Paul thinks the fed is destroying our currency is another reason why he is a kook. Ron Paul is trying to fight the fight that William Jennings Brian and others lost 100 years ago against the banking industry. The Fed is set up to preserve the banking industry. The banking industry preserves the economy, and by the transitive property the Fed preserves the economy.
The reason that modern nations use centralized banking (we were one of the later western countries to switch over to that model) is that the gold standard doesn't actually prevent inflation in the way that Ron Paul thinks it does, and that's why it is *Ron Paul* who does not understand "fiat" money as you call it.
First of all, the fed printing more money isn't the only, or even primary, source of inflation *contrary* to what Ron Paul has been spouting off about. If oil prices, food prices, or consumer good prices rise, we get inflation because consumers spend more money for the same goods, and employers become obliged to pay those consumers higher wages, which raises the price of consumer goods, etc, ad infinitum.
Inflation can also happen because of a trade imbalance, which is a big part of what is driving up inflation right now.
Second of all, if the Fed isn't in charge of printing money, do you know who *is*? Congress. The constitution gives congress the power to print money whenever it so pleases, which they handed over to the Fed (who are professional bankers and economists), because frankly congress isn't competent to do such a thing. Think about how much deficit spending we have a year (around 1/2 trillion I believe). If the Fed was eliminated, we would likely be *printing* all of that money without even the obligation to pay it back. Now, *that* would cause inflation.