In the long run, too much regulation favors large companies, not smaller ones.
Well, that's quite a disputable statement.
I for one, have always held that regulation is neccessary to keep big companies from getting too big and turning the market into a monopoly/oligopoly, hampering small businesses.
Government involvement didn't seem to benifit Standard Oil very much. And the deregulation of energy markets didn't seem to stop Enron. (RIP!)
True, the focus here is on the Tech sector, but pointing out how the browser wars became "irrelevant" is hardly a good argument against anti-trust, it's just a sign that the judicial process has become way too slow.
Here is some more legal commentary. It seems to dispute some of the OSDL's position - but comes up with other reasons why SCO's case may be flawed.
It's a pretty weak rebuttal though, first the guy claims that the analogy of software to a book in the OSDL paper is flawed, since software must be copied (into memory) to be used. And after Moglen points out that this is explicity permitted, he concedes the point and falls back on:
"[..] that almost all software licenses stipulate that the licensor retains title to the copy. "This is an important part which has substantially reduced the value of the section,"
He seems to be ill-informed about the GPL, and the particulars of this case.
You really have to start wondering just how incredibly incompetent military intelligence must be if they think that financial analysts of all people are better at predicting political events!
I mean, jesus christ, we're talking about farking market analysts here! What is their problem? Couldn't find a good astrologer? Out of tea-leaves?
The Rosetta stone itself did not do much in the way of our knowledge of the egyptian language. What it did do, was provide insight into their method of writing. It was the latter discovery of the the relation between Coptic and Egyptian that revealed most of the actual language.
It's hardly news that you can always find correlations in two sufficiently large sets of data.
Reminds me of the Steve Martin joke:
"Chicks go for the intellectual types. I figured the best way to impress 'em was to read a lot of books. But hey, do you know how many books there are? Why, there must be, hundreds of them. But I was already a pretty smart guy. I didn't waste my time reading all those books. Heck no. I read, the dictionary. Hey--I figure it's got all the other books in it."
Re:WRONG! POSIX does some really dumb things!!
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
·
· Score: 3, Informative
POSIX does some dumb things. Ever hear of the gets() function?
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure gets() was defined in the ANSI C standard libraries, and these were subsequently adopted by POSIX?
Although SCO has been shut down in Germany, their Benelux offices in Amsterdam still seem open for business, which probably means one can file complaints against them under Dutch law as well.
Although I'm no expert on the dutch system, they presumably have the same level of consumer-protection as the rest of Europe, meaning that action against them here would probably be fruitful.
In my opinion, computer programming should no longer be considered a "high-tech" job.
Sure, there is science in the mix (mostly logic, math), but how many programmers actually make use of this stuff on a daily basis? Most programming that is done in industry is relatively routine stuff; Code, Run, Debug, Repeat.
Only a lucky few are developing completely new algorithms, and doing what can really be called 'research'. The rest are just engineering jobs, if that.
Now the former, research-related stuff, will stay in the country. Our universities and research are still much better.
The latter type of programming, which unfortunately is what most people are doing, like writing VB programs to solve relatively simple tasks and such, cannot compete. There is no reason to keep those jobs in the country if someone else can do the same thing cheaper.
And that's just fine with me. For nations like India, it's still one step up on the ladder of technology, and for us, it's a motivation to keep pushing upwards towards the new areas that really are "high-tech".
There is simply no other activity that will give you the same ratio of exercise per unit of time and money..
Get a good pair of shoes (but don't spend more than $100), and you're set.
Start small say, 2-3 miles, 2-3 times a week. I won't BS you, it's tough getting started. Getting out the door is never easy. But if you stick with it for a month or two, I can promise you that you'll at least feel more fit. (weight loss is difficult to predict)
Remember geometry in high school? You probably proved that no triangle has interior angles greater than 180 degrees.
Strictly speaking, to prove that you need to assume the truth of the parallel postulate, which is true only for euclidean geometries.
Proof of a negative. Where did the ridiculous claim "you can't prove a negative" come from, anyways?
I believe it is a misinterpretation of "naive falsificationism" from Karl Popper's theory of knowledge. Basically, his standpoint was that a (scientific) statement is to be considered to be true, unless falsified. For instance the statement: "All sheep are white" is true, until the existance of a black sheep is verified.
Thus, his criteria for scientific statements is that they must be falsifiable. The problem is that certain statements are easier to falsify than their negatives. For instance: "Substance A does not cause cancer" is easily falsifiable: find a case where A did cause cancer. The negative, OTOH: "Substance A causes cancer" is much harder to falsify, proving something -didn't- cause cancer is rather difficult.
So the point is: the burden of proving a statement or disproving the opposite disproving is highly dependent on the nature of the statement. (and this is exactly the strategy employed in reduction ad absurdum)
I think Red Hat is making a mistake. There is enormous PR value in having a retail product available, even if it is not particularily profitable.
Example: Ericsson is widely known as a "cell phone manufacturer". Actually, they make very little money off selling consumer products like cell phones. Ericsson has always made its money off the sales of system hardware. (switches and whatnot) But it's the consumer products that have given them brand-recognition, and that is worth a lot.
In other news, SCO is reportedly also selling the following:
Deed to the Eiffel tower
Herbalife
Property on the moon, nicely situated near the Sea of Tranquility
London Bridge
Viagra pills
These REVOLUTIONARY PRODUCTS are to be sold through the REVOLUTION of multi-level-marketing, please contact SCO if you wish to make THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS from YOUR OWN HOME.
Really.. They're quick to publish spectacular theories on violence in computer games, movies, art, and just about every aspect of culture but themeselves.
How about removing the beam from their own eyes? Modern news media (and especially the American ones) are flooded with violence. There is a key difference here though: People, even young children, understand that films, computer games etc. are fiction. News media, on the other hand, is treated as fact, no matter how distorted the picture is.
People are lead to believe that violence is constantly increasing (even when it's not), that their neighborhoods are unsafe, and that a prowler, burglar or hoodlum could be waiting for them at any minute.
Excessive violence in news reporting leads to excessive fear. Fear in turn, leads to violence.
Blame the media is a popular game.. but they still don't get nearly enough criticism, and you can wonder why..
I sure hope this isn't really true. If mathematicans aren't really interested in helping understand the world, why should society fund them? I certainly know that a major motivation for my career in science is that understanding the world through science will help people, cure diseases, etc.
Guess what? It gets worse.. it's not only the mathematicians, but just about anyone and everyone involved in fundamental research.
I know I am.. I do theoretical chemistry.. and although I'd love to see something useful come out of what I do, I cannot see any immediate uses for my work.
The point is: It's the foundation research, the fundamentals, that lead to the big, *big* innovations. Although it might not seem useful at the time, it may (or may not) turn out to be very very important in the future. However, by it's nature, we can't know which research is going to pay off in practical terms.
Einsteins work on stimulated emission probably didn't look very useful back in 1910 either, but it lead to the devlopment of the laser, which noone could've predicted at that time.
Us "self-important" Brits (yes, all 65 million of us) tend to get slightly pissed off with the condescending way Americans (or some of them) assume that the entire population of the UK have either upper-class or Cockney accents and look down our noses at Americans!
That isn't true! Americans can't even tell the difference between an upper-class and a Cockney accent!:-)
The stance of RMS and the FSF is irrelevant. When SCO/IBM is talking about Linux in this case, they're talking about the kernel and nothing else, which is rather obvious from the few details that have been given.
The FSF own no kernel copyrights as far as I know, they're just using this stuff to trumpet out RMSs tired old message of "it's GNU/Linux not Linux".
Sometimes I feel it'd be worth porting over the BSD runtime environment just to stop having to hear these sour grapes..
It continues to seem that most companies simply don't believe that the GPL is a real license. It's as if they think that secretly free software authors "don't really mean it" when they explicitly define rights and restrictions in a license.
Oh, the GPL is a real licence, and either they've all understood that, or they're just incompetent with respect to licensing issues. Remember that IBM, which has more IP lawyers than many (most?) western nations has carefully examined the thing. If there were any loopholes or room for doubt, IBM probably would've exploited them long ago.
Rather, I think it's an issue of big guys believing that they can s--t all over the small guys. Sadly, this often makes good business sense. You can do whatever you want to people if they can't afford to sue you.
If you're big enough to afford lots of defense lawyers (and perhaps a few campaign donations to the powers that be), you don't even have to worry about getting sued.
First up, I don't agree with this proposal at all, but it seems apparent that there are some exaggerations here.
First, this proposal seems to be aimed at protecting the individual from slander by business, not vice-versa.
Second, I don't see how this relates to blogs.. the draft specifically says "professional on-line media": The right of reply, and in particular the principles of Resolution (74) 26, should apply not only to the press, radio and television, but also to professional on-line media.
and in the "definitions": the term "professional on-line media" means any natural or legal person or other entity whose main professional activity is to engage in the collection, dissemination and/or editing of information to the public on a regular basis via the Internet
Slashdot Mirror
In the long run, too much regulation favors large companies, not smaller ones.
Well, that's quite a disputable statement.
I for one, have always held that regulation is neccessary to keep big companies from getting too big and turning the market into a monopoly/oligopoly, hampering small businesses.
Government involvement didn't seem to benifit Standard Oil very much. And the deregulation of energy markets didn't seem to stop Enron. (RIP!)
True, the focus here is on the Tech sector, but pointing out how the browser wars became "irrelevant" is hardly a good argument against anti-trust, it's just a sign that the judicial process has become way too slow.
Here is some more legal commentary. It seems to dispute some of the OSDL's position - but comes up with other reasons why SCO's case may be flawed.
It's a pretty weak rebuttal though, first the guy claims that the analogy of software to a book in the OSDL paper is flawed, since software must be copied (into memory) to be used. And after Moglen points out that this is explicity permitted, he concedes the point and falls back on:
"[..] that almost all software licenses stipulate that the licensor retains title to the copy. "This is an important part which has substantially reduced the value of the section,"
He seems to be ill-informed about the GPL, and the particulars of this case.
You really have to start wondering just how incredibly incompetent military intelligence must be if they think that financial analysts of all people are better at predicting political events!
I mean, jesus christ, we're talking about farking market analysts here! What is their problem? Couldn't find a good astrologer? Out of tea-leaves?
The Rosetta stone itself did not do much in the way of our knowledge of the egyptian language.
What it did do, was provide insight into their method of writing.
It was the latter discovery of the the relation between Coptic and Egyptian that revealed most of the actual language.
(IIRC)
What is the novelty of this?
It's hardly news that you can always find correlations in two sufficiently large sets of data.
Reminds me of the Steve Martin joke:
"Chicks go for the intellectual types. I figured the best way to impress 'em was to read a lot of books. But hey, do you know how many books there are? Why, there must be, hundreds of them. But I was already a pretty smart guy. I didn't waste my time reading all those books. Heck no.
I read, the dictionary. Hey--I figure it's got all the other books in it."
POSIX does some dumb things. Ever hear of the gets() function?
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure gets() was defined
in the ANSI C standard libraries, and these were subsequently adopted by POSIX?
Not to mention scanf()/sscanf()..
Although SCO has been shut down in Germany, their Benelux offices in Amsterdam still seem open for business,
which probably means one can file complaints against them under Dutch law as well.
Although I'm no expert on the dutch system, they presumably have the same level of consumer-protection as the rest of Europe, meaning that action against them here would probably be fruitful.
In my opinion, computer programming should no longer be considered a "high-tech" job.
Sure, there is science in the mix (mostly logic, math), but how many programmers actually make use of this stuff on a daily basis? Most programming that is done in industry is relatively routine stuff;
Code, Run, Debug, Repeat.
Only a lucky few are developing completely new algorithms, and doing what can really be called 'research'. The rest are just engineering jobs, if that.
Now the former, research-related stuff, will stay in the country. Our universities and research are still much better.
The latter type of programming, which unfortunately is what most people are doing, like writing VB programs to solve relatively simple tasks and such, cannot compete.
There is no reason to keep those jobs in the country if someone else can do the same thing cheaper.
And that's just fine with me. For nations like India, it's still one step up on the ladder of technology, and for us, it's a motivation to keep pushing upwards towards the new areas that really are "high-tech".
There is simply no other activity that will give you the
same ratio of exercise per unit of time and money..
Get a good pair of shoes (but don't spend more than $100), and you're set.
Start small say, 2-3 miles, 2-3 times a week.
I won't BS you, it's tough getting started. Getting out the door is never easy. But if you stick with it for a month or two, I can promise you that you'll at least feel more fit. (weight loss is difficult to predict)
Oh, and quit the beer.
Remember geometry in high school? You probably proved that no triangle has interior angles greater than 180 degrees.
Strictly speaking, to prove that you need to assume the truth of the parallel postulate, which is true only for euclidean geometries.
Proof of a negative. Where did the ridiculous claim "you can't prove a negative" come from, anyways?
I believe it is a misinterpretation of "naive falsificationism" from Karl Popper's theory of knowledge.
Basically, his standpoint was that a (scientific) statement is to be considered to be true, unless falsified.
For instance the statement: "All sheep are white" is true, until the existance of a black sheep is verified.
Thus, his criteria for scientific statements is that they must be falsifiable. The problem is that certain statements are easier to falsify than their negatives. For instance: "Substance A does not cause cancer" is easily falsifiable: find a case where A did cause cancer.
The negative, OTOH: "Substance A causes cancer" is much harder to falsify, proving something -didn't- cause cancer is rather difficult.
So the point is: the burden of proving a statement or disproving the opposite disproving is highly dependent on the nature of the statement.
(and this is exactly the strategy employed in reduction ad absurdum)
I think Red Hat is making a mistake.
There is enormous PR value in having a retail product available, even if it is not particularily profitable.
Example: Ericsson is widely known as a "cell phone manufacturer". Actually, they make very little money off selling consumer products like cell phones. Ericsson has always made its money off the sales of system hardware. (switches and whatnot)
But it's the consumer products that have given them brand-recognition, and that is worth a lot.
I think Red Hat should take note of this.
Deed to the Eiffel tower
Herbalife
Property on the moon, nicely situated near the Sea of Tranquility
London Bridge
Viagra pills
These REVOLUTIONARY PRODUCTS are to be sold through the REVOLUTION of multi-level-marketing, please contact SCO if you wish to make THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS from YOUR OWN HOME.
Really.. They're quick to publish spectacular theories on violence in computer games, movies, art, and just about every aspect of culture but themeselves.
How about removing the beam from their own eyes?
Modern news media (and especially the American ones) are flooded with violence.
There is a key difference here though: People, even young children, understand that films, computer games etc. are fiction. News media, on the other hand, is treated as fact, no matter how distorted the picture is.
People are lead to believe that violence is constantly increasing (even when it's not), that their neighborhoods are unsafe, and that a prowler, burglar or hoodlum could be waiting for them at any minute.
Excessive violence in news reporting leads to excessive fear. Fear in turn, leads to violence.
Blame the media is a popular game.. but they still don't get nearly enough criticism, and you can wonder why..
It's scary when the attitudes allow for getting away with writing stuff like this:
His story illustrates new ripples in the old tension between an open society and a secure society.
I never realized before that these things were contrary to each other!
Well, I'm off to North Korea now. It must be the safest place on earth!
Including typos is common method of increasing crypto security in substitution methods.
:-)
Or maybe I just fscked up..
Dzsup csfbijoh jt gps epslt.
Yes.. and (IMHO) if there really was even the slightest chance of IBM losing this case,
they would've bought and liquidized SCO long ago.
IBM has an army of lawyers, and those guys can hardly have been sitting idle. It's not like they don't check up on threats, no matter how outragous.
SCO has no case. I don't need a court to tell me that, IBM's reaction says it all.
Releasing stuff under a BSD-like license gives a short-term benefit to society: it makes closed-source software cheaper.
Wrong. It makes closed-source software development cheaper!
I sure hope this isn't really true. If mathematicans aren't really interested in helping understand the world, why should society fund them? I certainly know that a major motivation for my career in science is that understanding the world through science will help people, cure diseases, etc.
Guess what? It gets worse.. it's not only the mathematicians, but just about anyone and everyone involved in fundamental research.
I know I am.. I do theoretical chemistry.. and although I'd love to see something useful come out of what I do, I cannot see any immediate uses for my work.
The point is: It's the foundation research, the fundamentals, that lead to the big, *big* innovations. Although it might not seem useful at the time, it may (or may not) turn out to be very very important in the future. However, by it's nature, we can't know which research is going to pay off in practical terms.
Einsteins work on stimulated emission probably didn't look very useful back in 1910 either, but it lead to the devlopment of the laser, which noone could've predicted at that time.
That's why we need to fund this stuff.
Us "self-important" Brits (yes, all 65 million of us) tend to get slightly pissed off with the condescending way Americans (or some of them) assume that the entire population of the UK have either upper-class or Cockney accents and look down our noses at Americans!
:-)
That isn't true! Americans can't even tell the difference between an upper-class and a Cockney accent!
The stance of RMS and the FSF is irrelevant.
When SCO/IBM is talking about Linux in this case, they're talking about the kernel and nothing else, which is rather obvious from the few details that have been given.
The FSF own no kernel copyrights as far as I know, they're just using this stuff to trumpet out RMSs tired old message of "it's GNU/Linux not Linux".
Sometimes I feel it'd be worth porting over the BSD runtime environment just to stop having to hear these sour grapes..
..an Assembly-optimized, thoroughly bug-fixed..
Now, THAT is an oxymoron!
It continues to seem that most companies simply don't believe that the GPL is a real license. It's as if they think that secretly free software authors "don't really mean it" when they explicitly define rights and restrictions in a license.
Oh, the GPL is a real licence, and either they've all understood that, or they're just incompetent with respect to licensing issues. Remember that IBM, which has more IP lawyers than many (most?) western nations has carefully examined the thing.
If there were any loopholes or room for doubt, IBM probably would've exploited them long ago.
Rather, I think it's an issue of big guys believing that they can s--t all over the small guys. Sadly, this often makes good business sense. You can do whatever you want to people if they can't afford to sue you.
If you're big enough to afford lots of defense lawyers (and perhaps a few campaign donations to the powers that be), you don't even have to worry about getting sued.
It's been done.. well, don't know about the PDP-11,
but I did know a guy who built his Atari 1024 STE into a PC box.
First up, I don't agree with this proposal at all, but it seems apparent that there are some exaggerations here.
First, this proposal seems to be aimed at protecting the individual from slander by business, not vice-versa.
Second, I don't see how this relates to blogs.. the draft specifically says "professional on-line media":
The right of reply, and in particular the principles of Resolution (74) 26, should apply not only to the press, radio and television, but also to professional on-line media.
and in the "definitions":
the term "professional on-line media" means any natural or legal person or other entity whose main professional activity is to engage in the collection, dissemination and/or editing of information to the public on a regular basis via the Internet