Interesting, no doubt...
Would you say 'created' or 'recognized' ?
Some things are indeed created, others are discovered. Or is the power of creativity the force that is driving the discovery?
This leads onwards to the thorny issue of IP protection etc. Has someone created the IP or merely discovered it?
How are all the people that preceeded this discovery rewarded for their work... the Amazon one click patent is a particular case... where is Tim Berners-Lee reward from Amazon for creating the Web in the first place?
Bogus Genome patents are another absurd example. I (or more likely, some multinational) can get a patent on a naturally occuring gene...
Also, it is illegal for me to rip and distribute as MP3 a Led Zeppelin CD, but seemingly legal for them to rip off a folk artist note for note and record it on their album and not reward him for his original effort...
The major problem with your analogy is that it wrongly assumes that information has anything to do with nature. It doesn't. Information is an intellectual creation of mankind.
Unfortunately you are totally wrong.
To have some fun, I am quoting Schneir, Applied Cryptography, Second edition, p. 157.
"One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an amount of energy no less that kT, where T is the absolute temperature of the system and k is the boltzman constant"
free software isn't the most important cause in the world
True... but a case can be made that you defend freedoms when and where you can... thin end of the wedge and all that.
InfoTech will become increasingly important in economies and personal life. Free Software means more access to quality goods and services, and lessens monopolistic tendencies by mega corps... who knows... it has a lot of opportunity to help fix a lot of seemingly unrelated problems.
Depends on which side of the fence you are on. I side mainly with RMS, Free Software is better as it preserves and strengthens our freedoms.
ESR and others argue (badly) that Open Source software is better cos it performs better and has a better development model (all based on dodgy metaphors) and the code is maintained better and bugfixes are more rapid (good evidence for this).
I take my freedom first, and get the better software thrown in gratis.
On occasion, pragmatism rears its ugly head, but generally, for me and others, Free Software is a moral issue, tho not for everybody.
"[Founding Father] one Not Particularly Thoughtful Kid, decides copyright is Good. Or at least that he's bored. He decides to create and unleash an ideology that promotes it. And it spreads. Suddenly the whole world begins to resemble what one person, or one small group of people, decided it should resemble. "
Errrr,,, where did copyright come from in the first place?
Taco, I think slashdot is one of the truly great sites, and I have a lot of respect for you and the team.
However, I think your protestation of 'legally guarranteed' editorial independence are a bit naive.
Are your funding levels 'legally guarranteed' ?
Are you access to resources 'legally guarranteed' ?
In other words, what politica/economic pressures can be bought to bear on slashdot in order to make it conform to the 'party line'. ?
I suggest that being incorporated into a larger organisation will nearly always result in editorial compromise in one form or another to the interests of the larger body corporate. This may or may not be a good thing, but the pressures will be there, perhaps even socially.
As to whether or not slashdot is weakened by these pressures, or strengthened, time will tell.
To a large degree, if slashdot died tomorrow, its influence will still be felt for years to come. You have changed the face of internet news and journalism and user interaction probably for ever. Congratulations, and I look forward to the new era with interest.
What is the revenue stream for Metallica? Is it from CD sales, or like a lot of these sorts of exercises, do you make more money from the merchandising ?
I heard that Megadeth made much more money from T-Shirt sales that Metallica, even tho Metallica sold more albums. Could be bs, I spose, but I know that Star Wars made tons more cash from merchandising than from box office sales.
So... if you gave away an album for free download, would it be possible to make a decent living based solely on control of merchandising (physical products, much easier to control).
Ignorance like yours is truly stunning, but I found one thing that I can agree with: "Sending them checks and food only prolongs the condition they are in."... What is this condition? I think its called 'living'. So... 'Sending them checks and food only prolongs their life'. Serious organizations are about change, not charity, and promote active measures, such as education about alternative and sustainable agriculture, take steps to reduce the enforced poverty of cash-cropping (which it seems you know nothing) and other deliberate, poverty causing policies of the West, and its agent, the World Bank.
The Economist, The Engineer and The Mechanic
on
Thus Spake Stallman
·
· Score: 1
Are stranded on a desert island with only a can of beans to eat. The mechanic finds a rock and says 'lets bash it open'. The engineer finds another rock and says 'no, no, lets use this rock to fashion the other rock into an edge, and cut it open'.
The economist looks at both of them and says, 'no, no, no, you have both got it wrong. Lets just *assume* we have a can opener.
Am interested in your story about porting from access to MySql, we have had no probs going from access to mysql or postgres, mysql has legendary reliability problems tho...
I am interested in replicating the bug you detail, will see what happens, and perhaps report it to the appropriate forum.
as for your comment fre microsoft.com, you are so wrong its not funny, and obviously speaking from ignorance.
apparently, microsoft.com is Four (4) quad-alpha servers (hrrmmm... what a big bank that is!).
This is quite common, and I am sure one crashes every now and then, but then so do many webservers, and no matter what OS you use, common sense depands that in mission critical situations you implement fail over servers.
Scary that these days I am being turned into a m$ apologist, but... Credit where credit is due. "anything critical"... like a website that gets millions of hits a day? When was the last time you saw microsoft.com go down? Last time I heard, it ran on NT. For what its worth, we run a whole heap of sites from an access backend, from scripts in visual basic (well, sort of) running cgi-bin on IBM HTTP Server, which is their name for APACHE. We use apache because IIS is pretty brain dead, and makes NT unreliable. Without IIS installed, NT is very robust. We use access because it is easily the fastest database on the market, but it will not scale very far, which is fine for our current situation. We are porting our scripting language to a Java Servlet Apache mod to target non m$ sites, most likely Linux, AIX and Solaris. If anyone wants to see it in action, mail me, but I don't think our infrastructure would survive a/. effect (then again, how many ppl read this part of/. ?).
are all 'e-commerce' companies. They sell products over the net, and rely on it more so for their supplier backends. E-commerce is a lot more pervasive than some overhype dotcoms.
Real businesses out there use it all day every day.
Hey, even FedEx qualifies as an e-commerce company.
Well, I can well understand the strike. I have heard about this before in a story about the nubmer of EFNET hosts shrinking. Its pretty lame to take down these servers.
But... our skript kiddies need somewhere to hone their 1337 skillz, so lets setup a few sites where they can practice, maybe even run a competition if it is feasible. Not that I am volunteering, but someone or some organisation somewhere may have the resources, and even profit from the exercise in a 'know your enemy' kind of way.
I just can't tell anymore if you believe this or are just trolling for the fun of it. I mean, xtianity has devolved to cliches, and it is easy to parrot this stuff out, I should probably write a script to do it.
Please god let your post be a hoax like Jesux distro!
anyway, just in case it aint: "And let's not forget that Gnutella allows all kinds of information to be spread across the Internet. Not only illegal MP3s, but other illegal and immoral content - pornography, terrorist manifestos, race-hate propaganda and anti-Christian bigotry. How are we supposed to eradicate these blights when they are available over a distributed network of servers which is practically impossible to shut down?"
This stuff will NEVER be eradicated and nor should it be. It will cease to have power when people are aware of its stupidity and understand its personal, societal and global destructiveness.
Trying to censor it out of existance is futile, and worse, dangerous...
Slashdot Mirror
Would you say 'created' or 'recognized' ?
Some things are indeed created, others are discovered. Or is the power of creativity the force that is driving the discovery?
This leads onwards to the thorny issue of IP protection etc. Has someone created the IP or merely discovered it?
How are all the people that preceeded this discovery rewarded for their work ... the Amazon one click patent is a particular case ... where is Tim Berners-Lee reward from Amazon for creating the Web in the first place?
Bogus Genome patents are another absurd example. I (or more likely, some multinational) can get a patent on a naturally occuring gene ...
Also, it is illegal for me to rip and distribute as MP3 a Led Zeppelin CD, but seemingly legal for them to rip off a folk artist note for note and record it on their album and not reward him for his original effort...
Unfortunately you are totally wrong.
To have some fun, I am quoting Schneir, Applied Cryptography, Second edition, p. 157.
"One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an amount of energy no less that kT, where T is the absolute temperature of the system and k is the boltzman constant"
True ... but a case can be made that you defend freedoms when and where you can ... thin end of the wedge and all that.
InfoTech will become increasingly important in economies and personal life. Free Software means more access to quality goods and services, and lessens monopolistic tendencies by mega corps ... who knows ... it has a lot of opportunity to help fix a lot of seemingly unrelated problems.
ESR and others argue (badly) that Open Source software is better cos it performs better and has a better development model (all based on dodgy metaphors) and the code is maintained better and bugfixes are more rapid (good evidence for this).
I take my freedom first, and get the better software thrown in gratis.
On occasion, pragmatism rears its ugly head, but generally, for me and others, Free Software is a moral issue, tho not for everybody.
"[Founding Father] one Not Particularly Thoughtful Kid, decides copyright is Good. Or at least that he's bored. He decides to create and unleash an ideology that promotes it. And it spreads. Suddenly the whole world begins to resemble what one person, or one small group of people, decided it should resemble. "
Errrr ,,, where did copyright come from in the first place?
Its an old old trick, but would you like to comment on the 'correctness' of your displeasure with 'political correctness'?
Lovely work. I really do appreciate this kind of thing.
Bletchely Park
Taco, I think slashdot is one of the truly great sites, and I have a lot of respect for you and the team.
However, I think your protestation of 'legally guarranteed' editorial independence are a bit naive.
Are your funding levels 'legally guarranteed' ?
Are you access to resources 'legally guarranteed' ?
In other words, what politica/economic pressures can be bought to bear on slashdot in order to make it conform to the 'party line'. ?
I suggest that being incorporated into a larger organisation will nearly always result in editorial compromise in one form or another to the interests of the larger body corporate. This may or may not be a good thing, but the pressures will be there, perhaps even socially.
As to whether or not slashdot is weakened by these pressures, or strengthened, time will tell.
To a large degree, if slashdot died tomorrow, its influence will still be felt for years to come. You have changed the face of internet news and journalism and user interaction probably for ever. Congratulations, and I look forward to the new era with interest.
Be careful, you will be judged.
Posted to /. maybe, from a british Hi-Fi magazine.
Double blinded and all that. The so-called hi-fi buffs actually thought MP3's sounded better than the original sources.
But, of course, they would often say that about two identical pieces, ie, they thought one sounded better.
What is the revenue stream for Metallica? Is it from CD sales, or like a lot of these sorts of exercises, do you make more money from the merchandising ?
... if you gave away an album for free download, would it be possible to make a decent living based solely on control of merchandising (physical products, much easier to control).
I heard that Megadeth made much more money from T-Shirt sales that Metallica, even tho Metallica sold more albums. Could be bs, I spose, but I know that Star Wars made tons more cash from merchandising than from box office sales.
So
I suspect yes.
Ignorance like yours is truly stunning, but I found one thing that I can agree with: "Sending them checks and food only prolongs the condition they are in." ... What is this condition? I think its called 'living'. So ... 'Sending them checks and food only prolongs their life'. Serious organizations are about change, not charity, and promote active measures, such as education about alternative and sustainable agriculture, take steps to reduce the enforced poverty of cash-cropping (which it seems you know nothing) and other deliberate, poverty causing policies of the West, and its agent, the World Bank.
Are stranded on a desert island with only a can of beans to eat. The mechanic finds a rock and says 'lets bash it open'. The engineer finds another rock and says 'no, no, lets use this rock to fashion the other rock into an edge, and cut it open'.
The economist looks at both of them and says, 'no, no, no, you have both got it wrong. Lets just *assume* we have a can opener.
Oh well, lets get seriously offtopic ...
It is arguable that 'overpopulation' is a created artifact of food distribution, despotic regimes, world bank policies such as cash-cropping and more.
There are ecological definitions of overpopulation, but with a global food distribution system, the earth is a long long way from overpopulated.
That there are people starving is a situation created by greed and not by lack of food, or means to distribute it.
Sounds like the Data Havens in the (otherwise extremely tedious) Bruce Sterling (so called 'cyberpunk') book, 'Islands in the Net'.
For the uninitiated, the Data Havens offer unlicenced pirate 'data', whether it be software, television programming or whatever.
History tells us there will always be black markets and smugglers, and even entire regimes devoted to these pursuits.
Eve is an Eavesdropper
Mallory is a Malicious third party wanting to disrupt the communication
I am interested in replicating the bug you detail, will see what happens, and perhaps report it to the appropriate forum.
as for your comment fre microsoft.com, you are so wrong its not funny, and obviously speaking from ignorance.
apparently, microsoft.com is Four (4) quad-alpha servers (hrrmmm ... what a big bank that is!).
This is quite common, and I am sure one crashes every now and then, but then so do many webservers, and no matter what OS you use, common sense depands that in mission critical situations you implement fail over servers.
Scary that these days I am being turned into a m$ apologist, but ... Credit where credit is due. "anything critical" ... like a website that gets millions of hits a day? When was the last time you saw microsoft.com go down? Last time I heard, it ran on NT. For what its worth, we run a whole heap of sites from an access backend, from scripts in visual basic (well, sort of) running cgi-bin on IBM HTTP Server, which is their name for APACHE. We use apache because IIS is pretty brain dead, and makes NT unreliable. Without IIS installed, NT is very robust. We use access because it is easily the fastest database on the market, but it will not scale very far, which is fine for our current situation. We are porting our scripting language to a Java Servlet Apache mod to target non m$ sites, most likely Linux, AIX and Solaris. If anyone wants to see it in action, mail me, but I don't think our infrastructure would survive a /. effect (then again, how many ppl read this part of /. ?).
are all 'e-commerce' companies. They sell products over the net, and rely on it more so for their supplier backends. E-commerce is a lot more pervasive than some overhype dotcoms.
Real businesses out there use it all day every day.
Hey, even FedEx qualifies as an e-commerce company.
Yeah ... But is a bit like a graffiti wall where its legit to practice spray can art.
... neighbourhoods where all the bus stops are painted don't get as much graffiti as bland boring others.
...) on the net and get a competitive spirit going ...
Some kids use em
Maybe it will create a contra example to the skript kiddies and get some other ideas into their 'community'.
It more trying to alleviate some of the problem, and maybe co-opt some of the brighter ones to our side that to fix it completely.
I think it is feasible. Hang a couple of nice tight boxes (ha ha
Maybe its worth a try, maybe I am dreaming.
This doesn't quite work.
...
Serfs 'paid' for their land rental with a portion of their output.
The alternative was to starve to death.
You may argue that their life was 'worth' the crops they handed over, but they had very little choice in the matter.
Hence, I suppose, the microsoft trial
Well, I can well understand the strike. I have heard about this before in a story about the nubmer of EFNET hosts shrinking. Its pretty lame to take down these servers.
... our skript kiddies need somewhere to hone their 1337 skillz, so lets setup a few sites where they can practice, maybe even run a competition if it is feasible. Not that I am volunteering, but someone or some organisation somewhere may have the resources, and even profit from the exercise in a 'know your enemy' kind of way.
But
Here's hoping some form of sanity prevails.
I just can't tell anymore if you believe this or are just trolling for the fun of it. I mean, xtianity has devolved to cliches, and it is easy to parrot this stuff out, I should probably write a script to do it.
idiots like you caused columbine and worse.
anyway, just in case it aint:
"And let's not forget that Gnutella allows all kinds of information to be spread across the Internet. Not only illegal MP3s, but other illegal and immoral content - pornography, terrorist manifestos, race-hate propaganda and anti-Christian bigotry. How are we supposed to eradicate these blights when they are available over a distributed network of servers which is practically impossible to shut down?"
This stuff will NEVER be eradicated and nor should it be. It will cease to have power when people are aware of its stupidity and understand its personal, societal and global destructiveness.
Trying to censor it out of existance is futile, and worse, dangerous ...