The Falkland Island War was Fought in the late 70's between Argentina and the UK over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. It was mostly a Naval/Air war. When Argentina lost all its ships and planes, they surrendured and gave up their claim to the Falkland Islands. It was a short war. It'sthe only war between two NATO countries that I am aware of. The UK was a little peeved about the fact that Argentina was a very good customer for American weapons. The UK lost a prize destroyer to a US made cruise missile.
The Robotic Dogs are actually old technology (by today's standards). The Computer Science department at Northwestern University has been doing programming and development on them since last school year (1997-98). They still have a ton of bugs in them.
As a personal project, I was planning on implementing a hearing system for the dogs. (3D sound localization) However, the head mounted microphones don't even have drivers yet. Not to mention that the quality of the microphones mounted on the head would have to be upgraded, and a few things would have to be added to the head to make sound localization a reality.
Long story short. Cool idea. They can't do much. Still a ton of bugs. They still have a long way to go before this would be a good product.
I plan on watching the rush hour show. I just checked last night ( TheMatrix) and the local AMC is going to open their call in line at 6:00am. I am going to order the tickets that way.
Unfortunately WAR does work. If you're willing to fight a war on an "Old Testament" scale, like the Romans rolling into Carthage, you can win your war.
There are two kinds of War War between governments and War between people.
The Falkland Islands war is a good example of a war between governments. A war between government is fought until one side surrenders. Reparations are then made, and life goes on.
A war between people are always more brutal. These wars aren't fought until one side surrendures, but are fought until one side decides they have won. Genocide is often the result. It does not take supertechnology to acheive this end, just lots of hate and a strong stomach. "Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Israel" These are not examples of the kind of conflict that is occurring within Serbia/Kosovo. Slobedan has no interest in the occupants of Kosovo, and it's quite obvious that he prefers Kosovo unoccupied.
I *did* like _City of Lost Children_ very much. It was another example of of creating an really interesting cinemagraphic world, full of puzzling and bizarre elements. But it seems like a very different ontological premise than _Dark City_ or _The Matrix_ (which I just saw since my first post). There was none of the Cartesian doubt element in _City of Lost Children_ that there was in the others. A strange and fascinating world, certainly. But it still was what it was... there was no skeptical question posed of whether the world the characters saw was really the world they lived in. I'm not saying that is either better or worse; but the comparison does not stand out so much for me.
My point is that Linus releasedLinux source long before it was a fully-functional OS. As with GNOME. Likely, as with KDE.
The first code that Mozilla released _did_ compile. We went to such lengths as having outside people bring their machines on campus to make sure that Real People could build and run the browser.
There are many times when Mozilla doesn't compile, but you can always pull from a known-good date stamp or use one of the monthly (now more frequent) tarballs. There are times when GNOME and KDE don't compile either, I'm sure, but nobody waves CatB in their faces -- why is that?
I'm not saying that our development practices are perfect, by any means, and I fret over a horked tree as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure your criticisms are grounded in fact.
I guess I'm the person to respond to this, because reporters keep calling me to ask if I'm the Jamie replacement. I guess I am, as much as anyone is; I've been with mozilla.org since pretty much day one, and I was the ``virtual jwz'' when he was on sabbatical. So just pretend it's a really, really long sabbatical or something.
First, I'll do the eulogy thing: we will certainly miss Jamie -- I think any organization except the Vatican would mourn his departure from their ranks. He did some great work here at Netscape and mozilla.org, and he was (usually) a pleasure to work with. Thanks for all the fish.
As for the issues at hand, I think I agree mostly with Jamie on the facts of the case, but my conclusions sometimes differ meaningfully: I, too wish we'd shipped a browser already, and a great one at that. But I think that the switch to the NGLayout/Gecko engine is a great example of how the mozilla.org project is a success: it was the best way to get a browser that matched the demands of our users, and I'm not sure that Netscape would have done The Right Thing before the advent of mozilla.org. Also, as Jamie himself points out, it did help us recruit more developers, which is always a win.
The balance of Netscape vs. non-Netscape developers doesn't bother me as much as it seems to bother Jamie. When we started, there were zero external developers in any form, and there are now many (34 non-netscape.com people have commit privileges on the mozilla.org CVS tree, and many more contribute patches for others to commit), and I think that matters more than the comparison to the large number of developers that Netscape pays.
What does the future hold? Well, our work towards 5.0 continues apace, so we'll still be trying to help our existing developers and recruit new ones. We'll be finishing up our efforts to make some of the Mozilla code available under the GPL as well (the JavaScript engine, in this case), to broaden our ``technology reach''.
People have asked if we have a plan for attracting more developers, and I think that the best answer is ``ship a beta''. When we get onto hackers' desktops, we have a much better shot at getting into their hearts and minds, too. In the nearer term, we just need to weather the storm of reporters and pundits, and concentrate on getting our jobs done. We'll make Jamie proud yet.
Well, let me ask you this: do you want to make fun stuff just for yourselves, or do you want to use that fun stuff to help improve the computing lives of less-clueful end users? If the latter, then you need someone who can speak to the clueless and get them to understand.
I have read through the several responses to my post. I do not so much want to respond to a specific one as to some general concepts. So I (hopefully) put this followup under my own original.
The thing is, I do also endorse the notions of collaboration and freely sharing code; it is just the specific GPL mechanism that I think is limited in some negative ways. My concern is not really with convenience, per se. I know there is a certain faction of FSF-sympaticos-but-not-quite-endorsers who like to think of software purely in terms of capabilities. Under this perspective, GPL software is just one more thing to evaluate on its specific functions. That is not my own attitude.
The strategy I would endorse would be making things public domain, rather than GPL. I cannot see in the arguments in this thread (or elsewhere), what actual greater freedom comes with the GPL. What DOES come with the GPL is the whole virus thing. Everyone else who derives works from your GPL code becomes committed to the very same procedural un-freedom as you yourself are in writing the code. The particular type of un-freedom associated with GPL is admittedly less egregious than that associated with proprietary, closed-source development. But it is still, unquestionably, a type of un-freedom.
When you release something as public domain--or in a general way under BSD and X licenses--you do not restrict the freedom of your users. Furthermore, by making YOUR code public domain, you also assure its forever-after availability to whoever wants to use it. The thing you DO NOT do is assure that derived works are similarly free. But the type of freedom I want is the ability to grant free use of *MY* code to others... but that does not mean that I want to *infect* those others.
The lack of GPL infection may suggest the bogey of greedy commercial companies taking over derived works. Indeed that is a possibility. But the only thing the open source community loses when the commercial company derives work from public domain code is the derivations, not the original code. The open source community is still just as free to go *back* to the revision level that was public domain, and start from there with a truly free project (for that matter, with a GPL one). The cynical will think this cannot work... but the success of BSD, X, Python, TK/TCL and other FREE, OPEN SOURCE projects belies the idea that only the GPL virus can keep projects open.
Curious. As I recall, Linux also broke rule #1, so maybe it's not such a great rule?
As far as whether Netscape should have waited until there was a fully-formed product to release, I think it has no-win written all over it. If we'd waited until whenever to release a fully-formed browser, then at the point of release we'd have had 100% Netscape hackers, 0% others. And yet people are lamenting the fact that we're currently 90% Netscape and 10% others, or however you choose to pick the numbers.
The Germans very well could have won the war in the air, if they had not been so stupid as to stop targeting the RAF, and start bombing civilian centers. The RAF was very close to complete destruction, when the Germans suddenly started targeting urban London, in retaliation to the RAF bombing of German cities.
This pig thinks the overacting was not totally intended...yes, there was some intentional humor in the flick (my favorite which was the shootout scene in the subway station with the newspapers blowing around) but they did take themselves pretty seriously during most of it, don't you think? Just the way Fishburn would talk so deep and slow...
I just wasn't able to "lose" myself in this movie...I was constantly being jerked back into my seat in the theatre as opposed to being immersed in the flick.
An excellent point, but the fact is that all three 'ethnic' groups were coexisting peacefully in Bosnia before the intervention of a revived Serbian nationalism. In the early days of the war in Yugoslavia, many of the Serbs living in Sarajevo fought on the side of the so-called Muslisms and Croats. A constant refrain of the writing of the time is disbelief that a secular Western state could be undergoing such a bloody civil war based on nothing more than a fictional past of a Greater Serbia. In fact, intermarriage amongst the three 'distinct' groups was so great that often the only way to tell them apart was by surname... and we all know how much that means.
Yes, there was a residual fear (which, as you pointed out, is not without a certain degree of legitimacy) amongst the rural Serbian 'peasantry' that a Croatian-dominated government might attempt to resume a policy of exclusion, even annihilation. But this fear was deliberately roused by Serbian nationalists such as Milosevic in the pursuit of political power. None of the sides in this series of wars comes out smelling like roses -- the partitioning of post-war Bosnia reveals the cynical manipulation carried out by political leaders on all sides, but when you look at Sarajevo before the war you see a functioning multi-cultural city within a functioning multi-cultural state.
The problem is that "ancient ethnic hatreds" is an easy out for the West. We simply throw up our hands and walk away saying "there's nothing we can do." But the truth is that there was something we could have done then (we could have defended Sarajevo and Bosnia against both Serb and Croat partitioning and held it up to the rest of Yugoslavia as the only thing worth fighting for and not over) and there's something we can do now (we can uphold the principle of self-determination upon which Western culture is supposedly founded and show that democracies can and will stand up to genocidal nationlists -- basically, we can make amends for WWII).
As a kind of aside: Rwanda was another country that we abandonned to 'ancient hatreds' until much of the killing was over as we could step in and try to look good. What most newspapers never bothered to say/discover was that this ethnic hatred was rooted in the policies of the Belgian colonial administration. Belgian administrators resurrected the myth of two founding peoples in Rwanda and allocated senior positions in the colonial government to those lumped under the term "Tutsi." Hutus were denied these positions on the basis of 'race.' How did the Belgians distinguish between these two 'races?' By the number of cows an individual owned. More than, as I remember, four cows and you were a wealthy Tutsi. Fewer and you must be Hutu. I think you'll agree that ownership is a pretty inaccurate way to determine 'racial' membership. But somehow, this became the reason to kill 500,000 of you neighbours.
Identity is malleable and constantly in a process of fabrication and reconstruction. There is a Yugoslavia in which people have been killing each other for millenia. But there is another Yugoslavia that was a tolerant, multi-ethnic state. By waiting so long to intervene in Bosnia, we allowed the ascendance of one identity over another (in this case, I believe, the 'bad' over the 'good') and the consequence was a cultural, if not fully physical, genocide -- a thousand years of largely peaceful coexistence were wiped out and replaced by a bloody, nationalist vision of history. We have an opportunity now to prevent a repeat in Kosovo.
I actually agree that "The air war will change nothing" in the sense that it will not solve the essential problem of Serbian/Kosovar identity (which hinges, thanks to nationalist rhetoric, upon the occupation of Kosovo), but I think that's also because we're going about it the wrong way. We believe that a santized air war will somehow save us from the very dirty, lengthy, and complicated process of establishing an environment in which moderates have a 'fighting' chance of creating a Serbian identity that is not contingent upon the posession of a battlefield upon which the Serbs lost over six hundred years ago to the Ottoman Empire, and a Kosovar identity that does not hinge upon the denial of Serbian rights within a primarily Albanian state. It might be messy. It will be complicated. But we should not walk away -- we have the capability and we have the ethical obligation.
whether they prove he wrote it or not.. its not that easy to charge him.. they need to find intent, and the prove fact that he was the one who released it into the wild.. writing virii is as legal and legit as writing any common program.. its only its use that can get someone into trouble..
Haven't seen the movie but that's a Tooter the Turtle reference!
dribble drabble drizzle droll...time for Tooter to come home..
(or whatever his magic words are...being ages since I've actually seen the cartoon):) ---- "Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify."
There was a very obscure pop cultural reference in The Matrix, and I'm looking for any kindred souls who got it, when Neo is running away from agents in the Matrix and yells into a cell phone, "Mr. Wizard, get me the hell out of here!"
I have to figure out how to say enough to get moderated over a reasonable threshhold.:-)
I just wanted to put in a really strong good word for the movie _Dark City_. It made it to theatres for all of 5 minutes, as I remember. I had to get it on video myself, which is too bad since it would have looked nice on the big screen.
But reading the reviews of _The Matrix_ (haven't seen it yet), and the trailers, it looks like _Dark City_ has an awful lot in comon with the former in both plot elements and visual style. That said, _Dark City_ winds up being genuinely interesting in the way it handles its philosophical/existential questions (and I might flaunt my credentials as a Philosophy Ph.D. in this regard... if only because most 'philosophical' questions in movies are so very dopey). OK, it's not the same as reading Deleuze, or even Descartes. But _Dark City_ actually does make you think about it at the end of it.
I am sure that _Dark City_ did not have the FX budget that _The Matrix_ did... but it had enough to do some nice stuff. And the visual mood is fascinating throughout... I especially like the consistent syncretism of the film, which it shares with some notable others, like _Brazil_ (and in some ways, _Blade Runner_). That is, there are a number of films (and some Gibson short story, I forget the title) that are about a future... but the future is the *PAST's* future. That is, the films (made in 1980-2000, say) try to create a world which is the sci-fi future envisioned in the 1920s through 1950s. The effect is to be simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic. It is a nice effect, and one which presents a fascinating cinimegraphic image.
The more I read about various opinions in the Open Source community, the less confidence I have in the GPL terms. This recent article on the Java license terms makes, I think, a good argument for a particular different strategy that that license uses.
But more than anything else, it is RMS himself that pushes me away from liking the GPL. I was just so struck by the RMS interview recently linked by slashdot about how muddled and objuscatory the RMS arguments are. Re-reading the GPL and LGPL carefully in the last couple days also just reinforces this impression.
The main deceit, to my mind, is the catchy saying "free speech not free beer". It has a nice sound. It expresses a noble sentiment about cooperation in ideas. But in the end, it both covers over real (important) complexities, and even misrepresents the GPL itself.
In the recent interview, as in others, RMS has emphasized over and over how important it is to use software that gives you freedom. But the GPL does not do this. The GPL is one of the most restrictive software licenses I have ever seen. Every paragraph starkly limits your freedom to do various things with the code you are licensing. Really, the ONLY reason I would ever consent to such extreme limitations on FREEDOM are because of the free PRICE of GPL software. If I were paying money, I would never give up that much freedom. Not all--not even most, by far--of the commercial software I use comes with source. But that that does (which tends to be that that matters, i.e. libraries), never restricts so much what I can do with the source once I have paid for it as the GPL does.
The truth is, that money is already inherently a limitation on freedom. By putting a price on something, you restrict people from using it. This is true equally of material objects as of software. The nature of money is to provide a structure for the limitation of freedoms. Now some of the particular restrictions that money/price can enforce are a lot more just and fair than others. But everything money does is to limit freedom. Free beer is beer that you have FREEDOM in drinking. The stuff that costs money also restricts your freedom in proportion to its price. These two aspects are not nearly as seperable as RMS and others claim.
In association with this somewhat crude ideology of freedom, RMS winds up making what are just plain perverse claims. For example, in the same recent interview, RMS is critical of people considering using Oracle software (on their Linux systems, specifically). He accurately points out that this is proprietary and restricted software; and concludes that open source alternatives are automatically better.
But for me, and really for every rational person I know, software exists to DO SOMETHING for you.... it is not an end in itself. If it turns out that Oracle processes my transacations faster, or provides other features, it is a bit crazy to think that avoiding the proprietary software is worth giving up (part of) my original goal in using the software to start with. I do not want a flawed solution (even if just slower) just to gain "freedom".
The reason is not because I do not value freedom, but rather because I DO value freedom. If buying Oracle means that I do not have to spend, or commit, an extra 1000 hours of programming time, or buy extra server hardware, that gives my back a lot of freedom. In the form of money I can spend on something else. In terms of my own time. In terms of having control over my own options. I realize the Oracle choice restricts how much I can give back to the programming community in a way that those free solutions do not... but I may well be able to give much more back using those 1000 hours, or those $10,000 that I would have spent on hardware.
I can't help but wonder if the moderation vs. posting scheme will work. If a moderator has something really cool to say, but has to choose between that and supporting someone else's comments (or blasting a idiot comment down to -1), I think we'd lose out on some good perspectives.
As for the number of moderators, well, 4000 seems like a lot. Maybe I'm wrong, but the bigger the pool, the bigger the chances for someone to abuse the privilege.
Only Two thumbs...C'mon guys!!! You've both got two hands! It deserves at least three thumbs and a toe! This movie...."oh my god" sums it up very well.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by Zyca:
:)
:)
You don't do that, you simply open the weapon bay and start firing that Avanger 30mm gattling cannon with Depeleted Uranium shells...
No need to wait for the network admin to recover the site from "smash dot" effect...
Posted by LOTHAR, of the Hill People:
The Falkland Island War was Fought in the late 70's between Argentina and the UK over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. It was mostly a Naval/Air war. When Argentina lost all its ships and planes, they surrendured and gave up their claim to the Falkland Islands. It was a short war. It'sthe only war between two NATO countries that I am aware of. The UK was a little peeved about the fact that Argentina was a very good customer for American weapons. The UK lost a prize destroyer to a US made cruise missile.
Posted by sinfonian:
The Robotic Dogs are actually old technology (by today's standards). The Computer Science department at Northwestern University has been doing programming and development on them since last school year (1997-98). They still have a ton of bugs in them.
As a personal project, I was planning on implementing a hearing system for the dogs. (3D sound localization) However, the head mounted microphones don't even have drivers yet. Not to mention that the quality of the microphones mounted on the head would have to be upgraded, and a few things would have to be added to the head to make sound localization a reality.
Long story short. Cool idea. They can't do much. Still a ton of bugs. They still have a long way to go before this would be a good product.
Posted by bafoon:
What if you didn't need yer virtual machine? Makes it look a bit different now, doesn't it?
Posted by dhickman:
I plan on watching the rush hour show. I just checked last night ( TheMatrix) and the local AMC is going to open their call in line at 6:00am. I am going to order the tickets that way.
( Now I just hope I can get a seat)
Posted by aelyn:
I saw a preview screening last Wednesday (The 24th of March) and was completely awed by this movie.
It is now my absolutely favorite and I'm already planning on seeing this weekend and again next week with a friend!
Woohoo!
Posted by LOTHAR, of the Hill People:
Unfortunately WAR does work. If you're willing to fight a war on an "Old Testament" scale, like the Romans rolling into Carthage, you can win your war.
There are two kinds of War
War between governments and War between people.
The Falkland Islands war is a good example of a war between governments. A war between government is fought until one side surrenders. Reparations are then made, and life goes on.
A war between people are always more brutal. These wars aren't fought until one side surrendures, but are fought until one side decides they have won. Genocide is often the result. It does not take supertechnology to acheive this end, just lots of hate and a strong stomach. "Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Israel" These are not examples of the kind of conflict that is occurring within Serbia/Kosovo. Slobedan has no interest in the occupants of Kosovo, and it's quite obvious that he prefers Kosovo unoccupied.
Posted by Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters:
I *did* like _City of Lost Children_ very much. It was another example of of creating an really interesting cinemagraphic world, full of puzzling and bizarre elements. But it seems like a very different ontological premise than _Dark City_ or _The Matrix_ (which I just saw since my first post). There was none of the Cartesian doubt element in _City of Lost Children_ that there was in the others. A strange and fascinating world, certainly. But it still was what it was... there was no skeptical question posed of whether the world the characters saw was really the world they lived in. I'm not saying that is either better or worse; but the comparison does not stand out so much for me.
My point is that Linus releasedLinux source long before it was a fully-functional OS. As with GNOME. Likely, as with KDE.
The first code that Mozilla released _did_ compile. We went to such lengths as having outside people bring their machines on campus to make sure that Real People could build and run the browser.
There are many times when Mozilla doesn't compile, but you can always pull from a known-good date stamp or use one of the monthly (now more frequent) tarballs. There are times when GNOME and KDE don't compile either, I'm sure, but nobody waves CatB in their faces -- why is that?
I'm not saying that our development practices are perfect, by any means, and I fret over a horked tree as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure your criticisms are grounded in fact.
I guess I'm the person to respond to this, because reporters keep calling me to ask if I'm the Jamie replacement. I guess I am, as much as anyone is; I've been with mozilla.org since pretty much day one, and I was the ``virtual jwz'' when he was on sabbatical. So just pretend it's a really, really long sabbatical or something.
First, I'll do the eulogy thing: we will certainly miss Jamie -- I think any organization except the Vatican would mourn his departure from their ranks. He did some great work here at Netscape and mozilla.org, and he was (usually) a pleasure to work with. Thanks for all the fish.
As for the issues at hand, I think I agree mostly with Jamie on the facts of the case, but my conclusions sometimes differ meaningfully: I, too wish we'd shipped a browser already, and a great one at that. But I think that the switch to the NGLayout/Gecko engine is a great example of how the mozilla.org project is a success: it was the best way to get a browser that matched the demands of our users, and I'm not sure that Netscape would have done The Right Thing before the advent of mozilla.org. Also, as Jamie himself points out, it did help us recruit more developers, which is always a win.
The balance of Netscape vs. non-Netscape developers doesn't bother me as much as it seems to bother Jamie. When we started, there were zero external developers in any form, and there are now many (34 non-netscape.com people have commit privileges on the mozilla.org CVS tree, and many more contribute patches for others to commit), and I think that matters more than the comparison to the large number of developers that Netscape pays.
What does the future hold? Well, our work towards 5.0 continues apace, so we'll still be trying to help our existing developers and recruit new ones. We'll be finishing up our efforts to make some of the Mozilla code available under the GPL as well (the JavaScript engine, in this case), to broaden our ``technology reach''.
People have asked if we have a plan for attracting more developers, and I think that the best answer is ``ship a beta''. When we get onto hackers' desktops, we have a much better shot at getting into their hearts and minds, too. In the nearer term, we just need to weather the storm of reporters and pundits, and concentrate on getting our jobs done. We'll make Jamie proud yet.
Posted by Assmodeus:
hey you moron!!! i havent seen the crying game yet!!!!
Posted by Mike@ABC:
Well, let me ask you this: do you want to make fun stuff just for yourselves, or do you want to use that fun stuff to help improve the computing lives of less-clueful end users? If the latter, then you need someone who can speak to the clueless and get them to understand.
Posted by Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters:
I have read through the several responses to my post. I do not so much want to respond to a specific one as to some general concepts. So I (hopefully) put this followup under my own original.
The thing is, I do also endorse the notions of collaboration and freely sharing code; it is just the specific GPL mechanism that I think is limited in some negative ways. My concern is not really with convenience, per se. I know there is a certain faction of FSF-sympaticos-but-not-quite-endorsers who like to think of software purely in terms of capabilities. Under this perspective, GPL software is just one more thing to evaluate on its specific functions. That is not my own attitude.
The strategy I would endorse would be making things public domain, rather than GPL. I cannot see in the arguments in this thread (or elsewhere), what actual greater freedom comes with the GPL. What DOES come with the GPL is the whole virus thing. Everyone else who derives works from your GPL code becomes committed to the very same procedural un-freedom as you yourself are in writing the code. The particular type of un-freedom associated with GPL is admittedly less egregious than that associated with proprietary, closed-source development. But it is still, unquestionably, a type of un-freedom.
When you release something as public domain--or in a general way under BSD and X licenses--you do not restrict the freedom of your users. Furthermore, by making YOUR code public domain, you also assure its forever-after availability to whoever wants to use it. The thing you DO NOT do is assure that derived works are similarly free. But the type of freedom I want is the ability to grant free use of *MY* code to others... but that does not mean that I want to *infect* those others.
The lack of GPL infection may suggest the bogey of greedy commercial companies taking over derived works. Indeed that is a possibility. But the only thing the open source community loses when the commercial company derives work from public domain code is the derivations, not the original code. The open source community is still just as free to go *back* to the revision level that was public domain, and start from there with a truly free project (for that matter, with a GPL one). The cynical will think this cannot work... but the success of BSD, X, Python, TK/TCL and other FREE, OPEN SOURCE projects belies the idea that only the GPL virus can keep projects open.
Posted by shaver@netscape.com:
Curious. As I recall, Linux also broke rule #1, so maybe it's not such a great rule?
As far as whether Netscape should have waited until there was a fully-formed product to release, I think it has no-win written all over it. If we'd waited until whenever to release a fully-formed browser, then at the point of release we'd have had 100% Netscape hackers, 0% others. And yet people are lamenting the fact that we're currently 90% Netscape and 10% others, or however you choose to pick the numbers.
What to do?
Posted by Bastard Operator From Hell:
My cool ass company is organizing an outing for lunch. And the Austin Powers movie.
There not as cool to pay for it, but that's all I ask for.
Hopefully the lines won't be long and we'lll have a sectretary to wait for our tickets, or one of the code monkeys.
Posted by ostbahn:
The Germans very well could have won the war in the air, if they had not been so stupid as to stop targeting the RAF, and start bombing civilian centers. The RAF was very close to complete destruction, when the Germans suddenly started targeting urban London, in retaliation to the RAF bombing of German cities.
Posted by shauna_d:
This pig thinks the overacting was not totally intended...yes, there was some intentional humor in the flick (my favorite which was the shootout scene in the subway station with the newspapers blowing around) but they did take themselves pretty seriously during most of it, don't you think? Just the way Fishburn would talk so deep and slow...
I just wasn't able to "lose" myself in this movie...I was constantly being jerked back into my seat in the theatre as opposed to being immersed in the flick.
An excellent point, but the fact is that all three 'ethnic' groups were coexisting peacefully in Bosnia before the intervention of a revived Serbian nationalism. In the early days of the war in Yugoslavia, many of the Serbs living in Sarajevo fought on the side of the so-called Muslisms and Croats. A constant refrain of the writing of the time is disbelief that a secular Western state could be undergoing such a bloody civil war based on nothing more than a fictional past of a Greater Serbia. In fact, intermarriage amongst the three 'distinct' groups was so great that often the only way to tell them apart was by surname... and we all know how much that means.
Yes, there was a residual fear (which, as you pointed out, is not without a certain degree of legitimacy) amongst the rural Serbian 'peasantry' that a Croatian-dominated government might attempt to resume a policy of exclusion, even annihilation. But this fear was deliberately roused by Serbian nationalists such as Milosevic in the pursuit of political power. None of the sides in this series of wars comes out smelling like roses -- the partitioning of post-war Bosnia reveals the cynical manipulation carried out by political leaders on all sides, but when you look at Sarajevo before the war you see a functioning multi-cultural city within a functioning multi-cultural state.
The problem is that "ancient ethnic hatreds" is an easy out for the West. We simply throw up our hands and walk away saying "there's nothing we can do." But the truth is that there was something we could have done then (we could have defended Sarajevo and Bosnia against both Serb and Croat partitioning and held it up to the rest of Yugoslavia as the only thing worth fighting for and not over) and there's something we can do now (we can uphold the principle of self-determination upon which Western culture is supposedly founded and show that democracies can and will stand up to genocidal nationlists -- basically, we can make amends for WWII).
As a kind of aside: Rwanda was another country that we abandonned to 'ancient hatreds' until much of the killing was over as we could step in and try to look good. What most newspapers never bothered to say/discover was that this ethnic hatred was rooted in the policies of the Belgian colonial administration. Belgian administrators resurrected the myth of two founding peoples in Rwanda and allocated senior positions in the colonial government to those lumped under the term "Tutsi." Hutus were denied these positions on the basis of 'race.' How did the Belgians distinguish between these two 'races?' By the number of cows an individual owned. More than, as I remember, four cows and you were a wealthy Tutsi. Fewer and you must be Hutu. I think you'll agree that ownership is a pretty inaccurate way to determine 'racial' membership. But somehow, this became the reason to kill 500,000 of you neighbours.
Identity is malleable and constantly in a process of fabrication and reconstruction. There is a Yugoslavia in which people have been killing each other for millenia. But there is another Yugoslavia that was a tolerant, multi-ethnic state. By waiting so long to intervene in Bosnia, we allowed the ascendance of one identity over another (in this case, I believe, the 'bad' over the 'good') and the consequence was a cultural, if not fully physical, genocide -- a thousand years of largely peaceful coexistence were wiped out and replaced by a bloody, nationalist vision of history. We have an opportunity now to prevent a repeat in Kosovo.
I actually agree that "The air war will change nothing" in the sense that it will not solve the essential problem of Serbian/Kosovar identity (which hinges, thanks to nationalist rhetoric, upon the occupation of Kosovo), but I think that's also because we're going about it the wrong way. We believe that a santized air war will somehow save us from the very dirty, lengthy, and complicated process of establishing an environment in which moderates have a 'fighting' chance of creating a Serbian identity that is not contingent upon the posession of a battlefield upon which the Serbs lost over six hundred years ago to the Ottoman Empire, and a Kosovar identity that does not hinge upon the denial of Serbian rights within a primarily Albanian state. It might be messy. It will be complicated. But we should not walk away -- we have the capability and we have the ethical obligation.
Posted by pARODY - oberphlow:
whether they prove he wrote it or not.. its not that easy to charge him.. they need to find intent, and the prove fact that he was the one who released it into the wild..
writing virii is as legal and legit as writing any common program.. its only its use that can get someone into trouble..
Posted by The Incredible Mr. Limpett:
:)
Haven't seen the movie but that's a Tooter the Turtle reference!
dribble drabble drizzle droll...time for Tooter to come home..
(or whatever his magic words are...being ages since I've actually seen the cartoon)
----
"Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a
villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify."
Posted by gcanyon:
There was a very obscure pop cultural reference in The Matrix, and I'm looking for any kindred souls who got it, when Neo is running away from agents in the Matrix and yells into a cell phone, "Mr. Wizard, get me the hell out of here!"
Hint--it's not the science experiment Mr. Wizard.
Posted by Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters:
:-)
I have to figure out how to say enough to get moderated over a reasonable threshhold.
I just wanted to put in a really strong good word for the movie _Dark City_. It made it to theatres for all of 5 minutes, as I remember. I had to get it on video myself, which is too bad since it would have looked nice on the big screen.
But reading the reviews of _The Matrix_ (haven't seen it yet), and the trailers, it looks like _Dark City_ has an awful lot in comon with the former in both plot elements and visual style. That said, _Dark City_ winds up being genuinely interesting in the way it handles its philosophical/existential questions (and I might flaunt my credentials as a Philosophy Ph.D. in this regard... if only because most 'philosophical' questions in movies are so very dopey). OK, it's not the same as reading Deleuze, or even Descartes. But _Dark City_ actually does make you think about it at the end of it.
I am sure that _Dark City_ did not have the FX budget that _The Matrix_ did... but it had enough to do some nice stuff. And the visual mood is fascinating throughout... I especially like the consistent syncretism of the film, which it shares with some notable others, like _Brazil_ (and in some ways, _Blade Runner_). That is, there are a number of films (and some Gibson short story, I forget the title) that are about a future... but the future is the *PAST's* future. That is, the films (made in 1980-2000, say) try to create a world which is the sci-fi future envisioned in the 1920s through 1950s. The effect is to be simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic. It is a nice effect, and one which presents a fascinating cinimegraphic image.
Posted by Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters:
The more I read about various opinions in the Open Source community, the less confidence I have in the GPL terms. This recent article on the Java license terms makes, I think, a good argument for a particular different strategy that that license uses.
But more than anything else, it is RMS himself that pushes me away from liking the GPL. I was just so struck by the RMS interview recently linked by slashdot about how muddled and objuscatory the RMS arguments are. Re-reading the GPL and LGPL carefully in the last couple days also just reinforces this impression.
The main deceit, to my mind, is the catchy saying "free speech not free beer". It has a nice sound. It expresses a noble sentiment about cooperation in ideas. But in the end, it both covers over real (important) complexities, and even misrepresents the GPL itself.
In the recent interview, as in others, RMS has emphasized over and over how important it is to use software that gives you freedom. But the GPL does not do this. The GPL is one of the most restrictive software licenses I have ever seen. Every paragraph starkly limits your freedom to do various things with the code you are licensing. Really, the ONLY reason I would ever consent to such extreme limitations on FREEDOM are because of the free PRICE of GPL software. If I were paying money, I would never give up that much freedom. Not all--not even most, by far--of the commercial software I use comes with source. But that that does (which tends to be that that matters, i.e. libraries), never restricts so much what I can do with the source once I have paid for it as the GPL does.
The truth is, that money is already inherently a limitation on freedom. By putting a price on something, you restrict people from using it. This is true equally of material objects as of software. The nature of money is to provide a structure for the limitation of freedoms. Now some of the particular restrictions that money/price can enforce are a lot more just and fair than others. But everything money does is to limit freedom. Free beer is beer that you have FREEDOM in drinking. The stuff that costs money also restricts your freedom in proportion to its price. These two aspects are not nearly as seperable as RMS and others claim.
In association with this somewhat crude ideology of freedom, RMS winds up making what are just plain perverse claims. For example, in the same recent interview, RMS is critical of people considering using Oracle software (on their Linux systems, specifically). He accurately points out that this is proprietary and restricted software; and concludes that open source alternatives are automatically better.
But for me, and really for every rational person I know, software exists to DO SOMETHING for you.... it is not an end in itself. If it turns out that Oracle processes my transacations faster, or provides other features, it is a bit crazy to think that avoiding the proprietary software is worth giving up (part of) my original goal in using the software to start with. I do not want a flawed solution (even if just slower) just to gain "freedom".
The reason is not because I do not value freedom, but rather because I DO value freedom. If buying Oracle means that I do not have to spend, or commit, an extra 1000 hours of programming time, or buy extra server hardware, that gives my back a lot of freedom. In the form of money I can spend on something else. In terms of my own time. In terms of having control over my own options. I realize the Oracle choice restricts how much I can give back to the programming community in a way that those free solutions do not... but I may well be able to give much more back using those 1000 hours, or those $10,000 that I would have spent on hardware.
Posted by Mike@ABC:
I can't help but wonder if the moderation vs. posting scheme will work. If a moderator has something really cool to say, but has to choose between that and supporting someone else's comments (or blasting a idiot comment down to -1), I think we'd lose out on some good perspectives.
As for the number of moderators, well, 4000 seems like a lot. Maybe I'm wrong, but the bigger the pool, the bigger the chances for someone to abuse the privilege.
Posted by Nericus:
:)
Only Two thumbs...C'mon guys!!! You've both got two hands! It deserves at least three thumbs and a toe! This movie...."oh my god" sums it up very well.