I have a theory. I have to warn you in advance, they it might get labelled as "conspiracy theory". But just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not after you. So such label will be given ONLY by people who would like to hide the truth from us. The truth, that this theory of mine is actually true.
So, here we go:
This 22-year-young man, lets call him Mark, is in reality a secret agent of Russian federation, gathering secret "intel" for them from US officials. But he works "two ways" - he's also supplying both US and Russian secrets to Kuba, because he is a real communist. And Mark is also ecological activist, human right fighter (yes, just one, I can't tell you which one), he's supporting legalization of dangerous drugs and 3D RPS games, he's pro choice, he's gay and some other stuff. Almost like some twisted superhero.
And the FBI, well, they are trying to protect us from such twisted figures. Hero or not, he's twisted so they have to somehow take him off-line. It is hard to take down a super-hero. So they have to use some super-powers of theirs: "prove" him a paedophile - nobody will then touch him and they can do to him anything they want. Like, put him in jail, etc.
But please, keep that only between us. You know, secret super-weapons tend to loose their power when just anybody knows about them.
I've got apps blocked yet I do receive various announcements from them "camouflaged" as messages from my friends, like "George just conquered last free country in The World Domination Silly Game" etc. I have to then individually click "hide" to "kill off" all further announcements from that particular app. But next week, there is some new cools app making rounds...
We have some elections here right now and some people in capital city received "letters" (more like marketing materials) with "printed signature" of our prime minister. Those letters are from a prime minister's party and is about how the prime minister, the party and also some other figures (most notably some mayors of towns and villages) DO support some candidate.
Later on some of those mayors mentioned in the letter said "I do not know about this letter and I do not agree with the letter: I did not, do not and wont support that one candidate" etc.
So, people questioned the prime minister and his party. And the answer? Something like:
It's initiative of a party, it's essentially marketing material and only a "rubber stamp of signature of the prime minister used for marketing purposes" has been used in that letter, prime minister did not wrote nor signed it.
So yes, his party, his people did the letter, his name is used in it, picture of his signature is used in it. It is a lie. Yet it is not a problem and responsibility of a prime minister.
Thankfully there is one thing which can haunt him on that one: he likes to sue journalists if they defame him. So I guess now his own party defamed him by putting his name on letter full of lies. So he should sue them. But he is a populist so I guess he wont.
Some time ago I saw some documentary whose message has been essentially like "There are few hundred thousands of Muslims in Europe already. With average birth rate in EU being something like 1.6 but in those Muslim families 6-8 the future is most of the Europe countries becoming a muslim states in something like 30-40 years.".
So, seeing also your post I see this:
Europe will be conquered by Muslims by out-birthing Europeans.
USA will be conquered by Chinese thanks to Americans giving Chinese american know-how, money and land in exchange for few truckloads of cheap consumer goods.
Well, future seemed quite a lot different when I was a child: all that talk about leaps in science and technology, conquest of the universe, etc. presumably mainly by "white guys" from Europe and USA.
Well, problems with contracts, laws, etc. is that they are created (we enter into them,...) because we want something. But while doing so, some written document is produced and from that point, one big problem starts: we try to adhere to the agreement, law, whatever but some stuff can be evaluated in two different ways with two opposing results depending on whether you are interpreting "the spirit" of the contract, law,... or "the letter".
I guess, dynamically linked kernel extensions... are against "the spirit" of GPL (any GPL, not just v3). But such judgement will have to be individually handed out (at least by me, if i'm asked to:) depending also on what the module does, how it does that, who produced it, what is the intention of the producer,...
All that is complex. So, "in a spirit" of what I wrote earlier, I try to avoid such "complicated matters".
Thus, I did not follow closely the debate you are referring to. I just noted "yup, there are issues, mainly if you try to make a profit off of GPL licensed code". So my commercial work.. I simply avoid GPLv3 code - good for the company, good for the authors of the GPLv3 licensed code in question too.
My opinion (also as a developer of commercial software) is, that GPLv3 is mostly "controversial", "bad",... for those who for some reason try not to follow "the spirit", but "the letter" of that license. Maybe because they do not understand the free/open source movement. Or because they are trying to profit from the GPLv3 licensed works of others without without giving equally back.
But again, in some individual cases, such "harsh" opinion might be deadly wrong.
I'm not a lawyer but maybe precisely because of that it seems more dangerous to me to work with something directly covered by Microsoft patents and specs - like Mono - than with the rest of the examples you gave, or those I know something about (Python and C).
We're "techies" here on/. . So it's hard to make arguments for something whose main "problem" is related to laws, contracts, copyrights, patents, etc.
On the other hand, why should "techies" even worry to much about non technical stuff? We want to do stuff, develop, deploy, install, maintain. Not to practise law. Period.
So instead of spending money on lawyers we either use tools with simple enough licence terms so that we can at least think we can understand them or we avoid the tools with licence terms we do not understand (and thus rightfully fear).
In your other post you wrote "... his [Stallman's] objections are based on fear and innuendo, not on principles or reason.". Yup, he might be "fearmongering", but IMO based on principle: "The tools comes with difficult licence terms. And company with history of... well, questionable tactics is involved in those terms. So I better not use that tools. And warn others.". I see no problem there.
So, what I would like to see instead of debates like this would be a debate, where reasons (technical reasons) for using Mono would be given and discussed. This debate about legal issues is informative (to give warning) but in its details is mainly waste of time for me.
... or Slovak Telecom: IIRC all backbone routers with same password. (page 10 of the linked PDF)
Or National Security Agency (Narodny Bezpecnostny Urad Slovenskej Republiky) - something like NSA?: root password nbusr123 IIRC on public server facing Internet, some further authorization credentials stored on that system and used by attackers to get further inside. (page 11-13 of the linked PDF)
If the Feds paid nearly 10 million bucks for that I am obviously in the wrong line of work. It looks like something I could knock off in a few weeks with Django and MySQL.
Here you're wrong also. If you used those you would produce something better than current APSX+Flash+whatever. I guess.:)
Little example: You are walking the street. The street is nicely covered with cameras, everything is recorded by the police. Some guy comes to you and robs you of your wallet and phone. As expected, this crime is properly recorded.
So, you go to police to file "what ever it is called" and expect police to find the perpetrator and give you back your wallet and phone. Should be easy, right?
Well, in reality they will simply try to convince you they can't do anything about it because "there are lots of such small incidents and even IF they do look at the tapes, and even IF they do successfully identify the guy, and even IF they do find him quite quickly, you wont get your wallet and phone back - wallet would be long since empty and discarded somewhere and phone sold". And even getting the man to court would be quite... expansive and the resulting conviction... unsatisfactory.
In IT terms, cameras do not scale properly and small criminals are flooding them so much that they are not effective.
So yes, sometimes cameras can help with something big. But otherwise they are not helping and can be hugely abused (if not already).
So, the big multinational company tries to leave your region and wont hire you unless you are willing to leave to say India too.
So, you stay in U.S., for now unemployed.
You would be thinking "What should I do now?" You should remember, how the U.S. started - colony, 3rd world country, pioneering, hard work,...
So you should simply begin to care for yourself: start your own small company, be self employed,...
While doing so, you would realize how much you're paying to the state and what you get from state in return. So you will push the state to drop the "services" which do not have good price/benefit ratio. Like all the stuff which some big copanies lobbied for themselves at the expanse of small people.
And you either succeed or die.
I guess you would succeed, but of course only because you are skilled and work hard.
And IBM? They can lobby also say in India. They might even make same stuff happen to India as previously U.S. and India will become the world power. But if the ways of IBM do not change, India will too grow "over regulated" and thus "too expansive" and they will move on.
Good things:
Those who are skilled and hard working will survive. (applies to people both in U.S . and elsewhere)
It will push states to optimize - dropping unnecessary bureaucracy, pointless "political quest", unwanted military campaigns,...
Companies have to adapt also to a long term survival - if they succeed only if they abuse the country they are based in, soon they will run out of countries they can relocate to.
Bad things:
This "self regulation" takes a looong time. Balancing of the U.S. and the rest of the world, the people in U.S., the people elsewhere,... wont happen throughout the night.
There's "easy" solution: You are a telco with declining number of subscribers on landlines. So, just take those billions of dollars you got few years back to upgrade your network to deliver next generation broadband speeds. Use them to upgrade old telephone lines into new "packet tubes" and migrate your old telephony system onto those new "tubes". And here you go: one infrastructure which is going to make you money as ISP *and* which will allow you to operate the "old telephony network" almost for free.
Something similar to what has been used for allowing analog TVs to receive digital TV can be used to connect old analog phones into new digital network.
Well, example from Slovakia (part of EU): When (not if, when) the minister causes too much trouble (like say stealing so much that it is impossible to cover it up) he gets kicked out. But hey, his comrades wont let him fall on the street. He gets a new job as a member of parliament - usually position with much less work but better pay.
Now, I just wonder where is the motivation for a minister to do a good work (for the citizens).
Because, there was a story, that if you look (hard enough) into say Pi, you find your latest favourite Hollywood flick in there somewhere. So DMCA or something similar might be used to forbid you from even possessing a Pi number computed to a big fraction.
I guess (I have to, I do not have mathematical proof) that similar argument can be made also for any big enough random number.
So, RNG generator are not only "munitions" but also a "devices for creating copies of copyrighted works".
note: Yes, I'm joking here. But in some court rooms it might not be taken as a joke. I guess.
The price discrepancies you mentioned have nothing to do with Indians as per their nationality/place they live and everything to do with whom you're buying from and what nationality/where you live (US) you are.
The "beauty" of import/export/retail is, that you simply haggle for the price, charging different people in different places different prices.
Example: We are in the US, I see you are a wealthy American so what do I charge you? If you are really eager to get my stuff, I ask hight price. If I see you are not interested, I offer it for lower price. The only part of that, where my production cost of the item comes into play is when you are really not interested: then I have to be really careful so as to not to sell you the item bellow my cost.
But that's it.
You pay more in the US (for the items in examples you gave) because:
you can
you are willing to
Btw, in Slovakia (where I'm from) there was a time, when a same piece of furniture in one global company costed almost twice as much in Bratislava then in Vienna (we can say, almost "next village", half an hour drive) while in Slovakia the average income was a fraction of the average Austrian income. How's that? Because Slovak people were willing to pay the price.:)
Well, yes. On Linux platform, there are usually choices. And it's not uncommon that the choices are unclear, no straight winner,...
But being and application developer and targeting Linux then one has responsibility or privilege - depending on how you look at the problem.
If I'm a user, its really quite hard or nearly impossible to choose say sound system. OSS? Pusle Audio? ALSA?...? After all, I just want to hear something from my machine without hickups or any other distortions.
But if I'm application developer for say some sound oriented application? Well, I'm already on totally different level when it comes to competency to choose a sound system: I'm not only able to simply listen to what I hear from the machine, I'm also a programmer with some knowledge about this and that.
So as developer, I have to (and should) choose which sound system to target thus helping end users to decide which one to choose.
Of course, in short term it leads to some conflicts - you get the machine and one sound application wants OSS, another Pulse,... But after some time (i.e. few iterations later) we will have a winner. Because:
user choose apps (thus usage scenarios,...)
application developers choose subsystems (which works best for the target user base and the developers building for them)
subsystem developers will try to provide as much BANG as possible to the app. developers and their users
Thus, best susbsytem(s) will win. Because the best app. choose them and drive/help them. Because users want the best apps.
So, Google (and any other developer) should investigate options available and decide, which one to support based on what is best suited for the needs for their users and also best suited to be used for development. In that way, some options will get eliminated (by simple lack of attention), others get pushed up (additional attention will help them become better), some options will merge (and either strenghten or vanish).
This reminds me of a story from a bank few years ago:
A software company has developed a trading system for the bank. One of bank mid-managers was very keen of the product and supported it strongly because it was going to have a nice feature: reports about all the trades on per employee basis so that at the and of month, year, whatever it would be very easy to see who make the most money for the bank (and who the least).
His backing for the project ended abruptly right after the first month of the deployment of the product when the stat results were for him... well, not very favourable.
The Welfare State We're In (another link) describe parts of current governmental policies which while maybe meant to be good, fail miserably. Some of them are the areas you mention.
That of course only if a) I understand you post correctly and b) I'm not mistaken about the book and author (I did not read it, I've just read some longer summary of it, then forgot the exact name) - hopefully sufficient for./ posting:)
By the way, I do not say that paying taxes is either good or bad but I do tend to agree with you if I take a look at the current (or I can even say almost any) government of my country and see what did they achieve with all the money the taxpayers are paying.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a theory. I have to warn you in advance, they it might get labelled as "conspiracy theory". But just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not after you. So such label will be given ONLY by people who would like to hide the truth from us. The truth, that this theory of mine is actually true.
So, here we go:
This 22-year-young man, lets call him Mark, is in reality a secret agent of Russian federation, gathering secret "intel" for them from US officials. But he works "two ways" - he's also supplying both US and Russian secrets to Kuba, because he is a real communist. And Mark is also ecological activist, human right fighter (yes, just one, I can't tell you which one), he's supporting legalization of dangerous drugs and 3D RPS games, he's pro choice, he's gay and some other stuff. Almost like some twisted superhero.
And the FBI, well, they are trying to protect us from such twisted figures. Hero or not, he's twisted so they have to somehow take him off-line. It is hard to take down a super-hero. So they have to use some super-powers of theirs: "prove" him a paedophile - nobody will then touch him and they can do to him anything they want. Like, put him in jail, etc.
But please, keep that only between us. You know, secret super-weapons tend to loose their power when just anybody knows about them.
:)
I've got apps blocked yet I do receive various announcements from them "camouflaged" as messages from my friends, like "George just conquered last free country in The World Domination Silly Game" etc. I have to then individually click "hide" to "kill off" all further announcements from that particular app. But next week, there is some new cools app making rounds ...
Well, Europe is not even trying, yet it is succeeding in this area (look for example here).
Similar case in Slovakia:
We have some elections here right now and some people in capital city received "letters" (more like marketing materials) with "printed signature" of our prime minister. Those letters are from a prime minister's party and is about how the prime minister, the party and also some other figures (most notably some mayors of towns and villages) DO support some candidate.
Later on some of those mayors mentioned in the letter said "I do not know about this letter and I do not agree with the letter: I did not, do not and wont support that one candidate" etc.
So, people questioned the prime minister and his party. And the answer? Something like:
It's initiative of a party, it's essentially marketing material and only a "rubber stamp of signature of the prime minister used for marketing purposes" has been used in that letter, prime minister did not wrote nor signed it.
So yes, his party, his people did the letter, his name is used in it, picture of his signature is used in it. It is a lie. Yet it is not a problem and responsibility of a prime minister.
Thankfully there is one thing which can haunt him on that one: he likes to sue journalists if they defame him. So I guess now his own party defamed him by putting his name on letter full of lies. So he should sue them. But he is a populist so I guess he wont.
Neither should you - as Linux user, you should be using CLI, no?
Of course I'm joking, but they do not know that. :)
Some time ago I saw some documentary whose message has been essentially like "There are few hundred thousands of Muslims in Europe already. With average birth rate in EU being something like 1.6 but in those Muslim families 6-8 the future is most of the Europe countries becoming a muslim states in something like 30-40 years.".
So, seeing also your post I see this:
Well, future seemed quite a lot different when I was a child: all that talk about leaps in science and technology, conquest of the universe, etc. presumably mainly by "white guys" from Europe and USA.
Who would have thought?
Well, problems with contracts, laws, etc. is that they are created (we enter into them, ...) because we want something. But while doing so, some written document is produced and from that point, one big problem starts: we try to adhere to the agreement, law, whatever but some stuff can be evaluated in two different ways with two opposing results depending on whether you are interpreting "the spirit" of the contract, law, ... or "the letter".
I guess, dynamically linked kernel extensions ... are against "the spirit" of GPL (any GPL, not just v3). But such judgement will have to be individually handed out (at least by me, if i'm asked to :) depending also on what the module does, how it does that, who produced it, what is the intention of the producer, ...
All that is complex. So, "in a spirit" of what I wrote earlier, I try to avoid such "complicated matters".
Thus, I did not follow closely the debate you are referring to. I just noted "yup, there are issues, mainly if you try to make a profit off of GPL licensed code". So my commercial work .. I simply avoid GPLv3 code - good for the company, good for the authors of the GPLv3 licensed code in question too.
My opinion (also as a developer of commercial software) is, that GPLv3 is mostly "controversial", "bad", ... for those who for some reason try not to follow "the spirit", but "the letter" of that license. Maybe because they do not understand the free/open source movement. Or because they are trying to profit from the GPLv3 licensed works of others without without giving equally back.
But again, in some individual cases, such "harsh" opinion might be deadly wrong.
Reality will kick in sooner or later. If later, it usually takes form of a "global depression", "global warming" or something similar.
So I guess, the sooner it kicks in, the better. :)
I'm not a lawyer but maybe precisely because of that it seems more dangerous to me to work with something directly covered by Microsoft patents and specs - like Mono - than with the rest of the examples you gave, or those I know something about (Python and C).
We're "techies" here on /. . So it's hard to make arguments for something whose main "problem" is related to laws, contracts, copyrights, patents, etc.
On the other hand, why should "techies" even worry to much about non technical stuff? We want to do stuff, develop, deploy, install, maintain. Not to practise law. Period.
So instead of spending money on lawyers we either use tools with simple enough licence terms so that we can at least think we can understand them or we avoid the tools with licence terms we do not understand (and thus rightfully fear).
In your other post you wrote "... his [Stallman's] objections are based on fear and innuendo, not on principles or reason.". Yup, he might be "fearmongering", but IMO based on principle: "The tools comes with difficult licence terms. And company with history of ... well, questionable tactics is involved in those terms. So I better not use that tools. And warn others.". I see no problem there.
So, what I would like to see instead of debates like this would be a debate, where reasons (technical reasons) for using Mono would be given and discussed. This debate about legal issues is informative (to give warning) but in its details is mainly waste of time for me.
... or Slovak Telecom: IIRC all backbone routers with same password. (page 10 of the linked PDF)
Or National Security Agency (Narodny Bezpecnostny Urad Slovenskej Republiky) - something like NSA?: root password nbusr123 IIRC on public server facing Internet, some further authorization credentials stored on that system and used by attackers to get further inside. (page 11-13 of the linked PDF)
More info: .sk scene:
from past to present.
Here you're wrong also. If you used those you would produce something better than current APSX+Flash+whatever. I guess. :)
Finally.
Good idea. Hopefully implementation will be also very good and suitable also for times when there is no disaster. :)
... and "mine" those Chinese hard-drives for this rare materials to manufacture our own hard drives. :)
Here you go.
Where the mirror of polish original? Looks like it got lost. :)
And it's not just alcohol.
Little example: You are walking the street. The street is nicely covered with cameras, everything is recorded by the police. Some guy comes to you and robs you of your wallet and phone. As expected, this crime is properly recorded.
So, you go to police to file "what ever it is called" and expect police to find the perpetrator and give you back your wallet and phone. Should be easy, right?
Well, in reality they will simply try to convince you they can't do anything about it because "there are lots of such small incidents and even IF they do look at the tapes, and even IF they do successfully identify the guy, and even IF they do find him quite quickly, you wont get your wallet and phone back - wallet would be long since empty and discarded somewhere and phone sold". And even getting the man to court would be quite ... expansive and the resulting conviction ... unsatisfactory.
In IT terms, cameras do not scale properly and small criminals are flooding them so much that they are not effective.
So yes, sometimes cameras can help with something big. But otherwise they are not helping and can be hugely abused (if not already).
IMHO.
So, the big multinational company tries to leave your region and wont hire you unless you are willing to leave to say India too.
So, you stay in U.S., for now unemployed.
You would be thinking "What should I do now?" You should remember, how the U.S. started - colony, 3rd world country, pioneering, hard work, ...
So you should simply begin to care for yourself: start your own small company, be self employed, ...
While doing so, you would realize how much you're paying to the state and what you get from state in return. So you will push the state to drop the "services" which do not have good price/benefit ratio. Like all the stuff which some big copanies lobbied for themselves at the expanse of small people.
And you either succeed or die.
I guess you would succeed, but of course only because you are skilled and work hard.
And IBM? They can lobby also say in India. They might even make same stuff happen to India as previously U.S. and India will become the world power. But if the ways of IBM do not change, India will too grow "over regulated" and thus "too expansive" and they will move on.
Good things:
Bad things:
There's "easy" solution: You are a telco with declining number of subscribers on landlines. So, just take those billions of dollars you got few years back to upgrade your network to deliver next generation broadband speeds. Use them to upgrade old telephone lines into new "packet tubes" and migrate your old telephony system onto those new "tubes". And here you go: one infrastructure which is going to make you money as ISP *and* which will allow you to operate the "old telephony network" almost for free.
Something similar to what has been used for allowing analog TVs to receive digital TV can be used to connect old analog phones into new digital network.
Unless I'm mistaken and/or too optimistic. :)
Well, example from Slovakia (part of EU): When (not if, when) the minister causes too much trouble (like say stealing so much that it is impossible to cover it up) he gets kicked out. But hey, his comrades wont let him fall on the street. He gets a new job as a member of parliament - usually position with much less work but better pay.
Now, I just wonder where is the motivation for a minister to do a good work (for the citizens).
Aren't they already?
Because, there was a story, that if you look (hard enough) into say Pi, you find your latest favourite Hollywood flick in there somewhere. So DMCA or something similar might be used to forbid you from even possessing a Pi number computed to a big fraction.
I guess (I have to, I do not have mathematical proof) that similar argument can be made also for any big enough random number.
So, RNG generator are not only "munitions" but also a "devices for creating copies of copyrighted works".
note: Yes, I'm joking here. But in some court rooms it might not be taken as a joke. I guess.
After reading the article I can say "me too".
Now I just have to take a look at all the open source projects I'm releasing ... :)
(almost none but not zero)
The price discrepancies you mentioned have nothing to do with Indians as per their nationality/place they live and everything to do with whom you're buying from and what nationality/where you live (US) you are.
The "beauty" of import/export/retail is, that you simply haggle for the price, charging different people in different places different prices.
Example: We are in the US, I see you are a wealthy American so what do I charge you? If you are really eager to get my stuff, I ask hight price. If I see you are not interested, I offer it for lower price. The only part of that, where my production cost of the item comes into play is when you are really not interested: then I have to be really careful so as to not to sell you the item bellow my cost.
But that's it.
You pay more in the US (for the items in examples you gave) because:
Btw, in Slovakia (where I'm from) there was a time, when a same piece of furniture in one global company costed almost twice as much in Bratislava then in Vienna (we can say, almost "next village", half an hour drive) while in Slovakia the average income was a fraction of the average Austrian income. How's that? Because Slovak people were willing to pay the price. :)
Well, yes. On Linux platform, there are usually choices. And it's not uncommon that the choices are unclear, no straight winner, ...
But being and application developer and targeting Linux then one has responsibility or privilege - depending on how you look at the problem.
If I'm a user, its really quite hard or nearly impossible to choose say sound system. OSS? Pusle Audio? ALSA? ...? After all, I just want to hear something from my machine without hickups or any other distortions.
But if I'm application developer for say some sound oriented application? Well, I'm already on totally different level when it comes to competency to choose a sound system: I'm not only able to simply listen to what I hear from the machine, I'm also a programmer with some knowledge about this and that.
So as developer, I have to (and should) choose which sound system to target thus helping end users to decide which one to choose.
Of course, in short term it leads to some conflicts - you get the machine and one sound application wants OSS, another Pulse, ... But after some time (i.e. few iterations later) we will have a winner. Because:
Thus, best susbsytem(s) will win. Because the best app. choose them and drive/help them. Because users want the best apps.
So, Google (and any other developer) should investigate options available and decide, which one to support based on what is best suited for the needs for their users and also best suited to be used for development. In that way, some options will get eliminated (by simple lack of attention), others get pushed up (additional attention will help them become better), some options will merge (and either strenghten or vanish).
So please, make a choice.
This reminds me of a story from a bank few years ago:
A software company has developed a trading system for the bank. One of bank mid-managers was very keen of the product and supported it strongly because it was going to have a nice feature: reports about all the trades on per employee basis so that at the and of month, year, whatever it would be very easy to see who make the most money for the bank (and who the least).
His backing for the project ended abruptly right after the first month of the deployment of the product when the stat results were for him ... well, not very favourable.
The Welfare State We're In (another link) describe parts of current governmental policies which while maybe meant to be good, fail miserably. Some of them are the areas you mention.
That of course only if a) I understand you post correctly and b) I'm not mistaken about the book and author (I did not read it, I've just read some longer summary of it, then forgot the exact name) - hopefully sufficient for ./ posting :)
By the way, I do not say that paying taxes is either good or bad but I do tend to agree with you if I take a look at the current (or I can even say almost any) government of my country and see what did they achieve with all the money the taxpayers are paying.