I'm starting to wonder if we should be sending all these probes out without any chance of recovery or destruction. While it's probable there isn't any other sentient life out there, it's also probable that our efforts to explore our surroundings are affecting or destroying living and non-living celestial evidence.
Even if there is contamination from Earth, it should be easily identifiable, because it would consist of microbes that humans encounter on a daily basis. And it's highly likely that life from another world -- assuming it has the same characteristics of Earthly life -- would have very distinct DNA from evolving on an alien world for hundreds of millions of years.
As for damaging the evidence, life usually evolves to survive in particular climates. Microbes from the surface of Earth might survive at Mars, but they would probably not thrive, due to the differences in temperature, pressure, atmospheric composition, available nutrients, and so on. They would not take over Mars. (By a similar argument, it's unlikely that a microbe from Mars could cause any damage on Earth.)
And as for evidence of sentient life, if aliens are like humans in terms of cleaning up after themselves, the evidence should be absolutely everywhere. (This is also known as Fermi's objection, put crudely: if there is other intelligent life in the universe, and interstellar travel is possible, then where is everybody?)
Yeah, but ...
on
iPod-Jacked
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yeah, but what's the point? Apple users always seem to be out front with style and art. You would expect an iPod user to be listening to something cool, funky, and unusual (like all the people in the article).
By comparison PC users are the slack-jawed yokels of the computer world. This is true by design: Windows is intended to be a mass-market operating system. Get a bunch of PC users with iPod-equivalents, and what will they share? The latest bubblegum, sound-alike, pop drivel. And they will think it's cool.
When the PC world catches up, they will pummel this good idea into the ground. Mark my words.
Has it occurred to you that, under US law, a CEO must act in the best interests of his shareholders? Bear in mind that the company would have folded within a year without the lawsuit. With knowledge of possible IP infringement by IBM and others, it would have been illegal for these gentlemen not to follow up on it as agressively as possible.
UNIX: A rough implementation of Multics, written expressly so that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie could port a game called Space Travel to old, cheap hardware.
If there are few enough codes that two doors within the same neighborhood are operated by the same remote, there's a pretty good chance that a thief could get a remote and drive around town, trying systematically to activate garage doors.
If somebody cleaned out my garage because of poorly designed security, you bet I would sue the company (or I would certainly tell my insurance adjuster to look into it).
Maybe they will start making you sign an EULA when you get a door installed. (No warranties, expressed or implied...)
Most people, like the poster, incorrectly assume that "begs the question" is the same as "answers the question". This describes the proper use of the phrase.
Competitive edge works against source sharing, not in favor of it. In your example, you assume that every chip-making company is likely to go out of business in the near term. But on the contrary, if you buy your chip from a big player like IBM, Motorola, or Toshiba, this is extremely unlikely.
So it is only the small players who would have an incentive to release their schematic. Yet the competitive advantage of a small company is usually some new architecture or other idea, which are not quickly adopted by larger players. So releasing their schematic would doom them, in that if they are successful, their schematic would be copied by every major player and they would be out of business.
Even reverse engineering argues in favor of closing the source. Reverse engineering takes time and effort, in which time the original manufacturer has already established itself in the market and has made improvements -- a lead that would be eliminated if they opened their schematics.
In a world without IP protection, I see the unintended consequence of severe fragmentation of ideas, and far less sharing than before. Nobody would share with anybody, for fear of having an idea stolen. This is the power of the GPL: I share my idea with you, and I force you to share back.
No, we realise that the GPL depends on copyright laws. Its called playing the system.
Actually I think the greatest contribution of the GPL is to show how versatile and powerful copyright law really is.
In other words, it lets the corporations have their cake (my work, for free) and eat it too (I can't use their work, which is really my work, without paying). The GPL says they can have the cake, or they can eat it. One or the other- much more fair.
I agree. But how is this improved if IP laws are abolished? Now a company can take your source code and produce a binary, which you can copy freely, but they have no obligation to release their source. And a freely copyable binary might be useless, since it might only be usable on proprietary, closed hardware.
because it would become impossible to take someone else's code and use it in a proprietary product
can logically be followed by this sentence:
Whatever yohatever you coded and distributed could be freely distributed without your permission.
If you write code, there is nothing preventing me from using it in a proprietary product. This is important since I could, for example, use it in a proprietary hardware application and keep my source closed. So the application would be worthless to you unless you bought my hardware -- and you can't use my ideas because I'm keeping my source closed, and there is nothing you can do about that.
Why, in a world without IP protection, would anyone give away their source code? That part is poorly explained in FSF philosophy.
That "nothing else" clause pretty much goes away if copyright goes away
But the "nothing else" clause is critical! In other words, the only way to share the software is to release it under GPL, and its descendents to the Nth generation.
A point anti-IP advocates miss is that there is nothing forcing anyone from sharing information. This is especially important in a field like programming, which includes two distinct pieces of IP: the source code, which contains the idea, and the binary, obtained from the source code, which is purely functional. Individuals and businesses who don't want their ideas stolen are not obliged to release their source code, and I have yet to hear a rational argument as to why they would want to give it away without the protection of the GPL.
I suspect in an economy free of IP laws, there would be much less free trading of ideas, because once an idea is in the public domain it would be gone from your control forever. The GPL gives the author an additional measure of control.
I find this question particularly funny given that you yourself have said:
i don't particularly care for finance
which is to say, you don't get corporate America.
What's more, you miss what most GNU advocates miss, which is the irony of their position: the GPL strongly depends on intellectual property protection! The BSD license is much less restrictive, yet it is much less popular than the GPL.
IBM and Its thoughts, not IBM and It's= it is thoughts. If you can't tell the difference, this might help.
Dammit, it's hell knowing how to write. I know exactly what the poster meant, but my vision focuses intently on the errant apostrophe, unable to concentrate on anything else, trying to banish it with the force of pure frustration.
Feel free to mod into oblivion, it will only aid me in damning the lot of you as ignorant philistines. Thank you and goodnight.
The solution to me seems to be large groups supporting the system by agreement and pledges.
This has been tried before. Can you imagine: you're running Linux, and once a year, for a week, Linux stops running ten minutes an hour and bombards you with messages in which Betty White asks you to send money to support this quality program. Send in $30 and get a mug, send in $100 and get a lovely coffee-table book.
RMS has stated many times that copyleft is necessary only because of copyright. It's a hack of a hack
Then he's not paying attention, or is blinded by his biases. If anything copyleft illustrates the versatility and power of copyright laws. After all, people have the option of BSD-style licenses, which are far weaker than the GPL, and convey far more power to end users -- yet they are far less popular than the GPL.
Well, a democracy is two things: the will of the majority, but respect for rights of the individual. If one direction normally had more traffic, it's possible that an individual who wanted to cross traffic would never proceed. So I would argue that the proximity detector is democratic, while the light switcher represents a tyrrany of the majority.
More mathematically, if you assumed a Poisson distribution it would be possible to estimate the Poisson parameter based on whether a car was present or absent at the proximity detector. So you would again have a system that was almost as good. And Poisson is an excellent model for arrival processes.
They already do that. They're called proximity detectors, and they determine when cars are sitting on top of them. They work based on induction.
Sometimes you can see where they were embedded in the road, especially if the light was retrofitted. Look for a patched-over hole in the pavement directly underneath where the first car would pull up at a stop light.
That is why some lights only change when your car is sitting there. For additional fun, you might be caught behind some dingus who, for some reason, stopped too far back to trigger the sensor. You're going to be there a while.
The free market is a very successful system. However, it is imperfect: it assumes that everyone acting selfishly will accomplish the common good, which sets up prisoner's dilemma problems.
In this case, nobody likes banner ads, and everyone selfishly wants to block them. If everyone did this, content on the web would be diminished, because fewer people could afford to produce web content full-time, and more content would go to subscriber-pay sites. (Or worse, the advertising will become more embedded and harder to filter out, even visually. For example, this sentence is brought to you by the good people at State Farm. Or every web comic would suddenly have a character named Cisco.) Yet if everyone co-operated by not blocking banner ads, free web content is made available to everyone.
And don't give me a lot of crap about "someone will figure out a better business model", unless you can actually point to a particular website with that model, that is succeeding.
All I'm saying is, think about the unintended consequences before you act selfishly, or praise others for doing so.
Which leads me to another point: there's an appalling lack of ethical behavior on the internet. Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so.
The roots of Christianity are in Judaism, which is an ancient religion with a number of innovations (such as a formless God). Granted, the Jews borrowed from the Egyptians via Moses.
Also, Christianity has produced a host of philosophers who are considered great by western standards. The two who come immediately to mind are Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, but there are certainly others.
This isn't the first time an organization has conquered the world without any significant original ideas. Conquest is a skill unto itself. Often those skilled at conquest are poor at innovation, and vice versa. Just think of all the engineers who have gotten screwed by selling the rights to world-changing inventions for next to nothing. On the other side, hell, think of the Roman empire -- they basically stole all their good ideas from the Greeks. Can you name a single notable Roman mathematician? There was probably a notable Roman philosopher or two, but I can't think of anyone immediately.
What makes you think that there are enough people out there who would spend that time and money to keep this thing alive that don't care about Freedom? What on earth would be their motivation?
Well, Ihavenoidea. Maybe they don't have girlfriends and are trying to fill the gaping void.
meaning what? If the punch card machines had provided a human-readable printout that the voter could read, and realize that he/she accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan rather than Al Gore, there would have been no issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm starting to wonder if we should be sending all these probes out without any chance of recovery or destruction. While it's probable there isn't any other sentient life out there, it's also probable that our efforts to explore our surroundings are affecting or destroying living and non-living celestial evidence.
Even if there is contamination from Earth, it should be easily identifiable, because it would consist of microbes that humans encounter on a daily basis. And it's highly likely that life from another world -- assuming it has the same characteristics of Earthly life -- would have very distinct DNA from evolving on an alien world for hundreds of millions of years.
As for damaging the evidence, life usually evolves to survive in particular climates. Microbes from the surface of Earth might survive at Mars, but they would probably not thrive, due to the differences in temperature, pressure, atmospheric composition, available nutrients, and so on. They would not take over Mars. (By a similar argument, it's unlikely that a microbe from Mars could cause any damage on Earth.)
And as for evidence of sentient life, if aliens are like humans in terms of cleaning up after themselves, the evidence should be absolutely everywhere. (This is also known as Fermi's objection, put crudely: if there is other intelligent life in the universe, and interstellar travel is possible, then where is everybody?)
Yeah, but what's the point? Apple users always seem to be out front with style and art. You would expect an iPod user to be listening to something cool, funky, and unusual (like all the people in the article).
By comparison PC users are the slack-jawed yokels of the computer world. This is true by design: Windows is intended to be a mass-market operating system. Get a bunch of PC users with iPod-equivalents, and what will they share? The latest bubblegum, sound-alike, pop drivel. And they will think it's cool.
When the PC world catches up, they will pummel this good idea into the ground. Mark my words.
Has it occurred to you that, under US law, a CEO must act in the best interests of his shareholders? Bear in mind that the company would have folded within a year without the lawsuit. With knowledge of possible IP infringement by IBM and others, it would have been illegal for these gentlemen not to follow up on it as agressively as possible.
Linux: A clone of Minix, itself a clone of UNIX.
UNIX: A rough implementation of Multics, written expressly so that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie could port a game called Space Travel to old, cheap hardware.
Who's got new ideas now?
If there are few enough codes that two doors within the same neighborhood are operated by the same remote, there's a pretty good chance that a thief could get a remote and drive around town, trying systematically to activate garage doors.
...)
If somebody cleaned out my garage because of poorly designed security, you bet I would sue the company (or I would certainly tell my insurance adjuster to look into it).
Maybe they will start making you sign an EULA when you get a door installed. (No warranties, expressed or implied
Most people, like the poster, incorrectly assume that "begs the question" is the same as "answers the question". This describes the proper use of the phrase.
It's refreshing to see mainstream media getting it right.
Not so fast. He called it the GNU/Linux operating system, which is clearly a misrepresentation.
Competitive edge works against source sharing, not in favor of it. In your example, you assume that every chip-making company is likely to go out of business in the near term. But on the contrary, if you buy your chip from a big player like IBM, Motorola, or Toshiba, this is extremely unlikely.
So it is only the small players who would have an incentive to release their schematic. Yet the competitive advantage of a small company is usually some new architecture or other idea, which are not quickly adopted by larger players. So releasing their schematic would doom them, in that if they are successful, their schematic would be copied by every major player and they would be out of business.
Even reverse engineering argues in favor of closing the source. Reverse engineering takes time and effort, in which time the original manufacturer has already established itself in the market and has made improvements -- a lead that would be eliminated if they opened their schematics.
In a world without IP protection, I see the unintended consequence of severe fragmentation of ideas, and far less sharing than before. Nobody would share with anybody, for fear of having an idea stolen. This is the power of the GPL: I share my idea with you, and I force you to share back.
No, we realise that the GPL depends on copyright laws. Its called playing the system.
Actually I think the greatest contribution of the GPL is to show how versatile and powerful copyright law really is.
In other words, it lets the corporations have their cake (my work, for free) and eat it too (I can't use their work, which is really my work, without paying). The GPL says they can have the cake, or they can eat it. One or the other- much more fair.
I agree. But how is this improved if IP laws are abolished? Now a company can take your source code and produce a binary, which you can copy freely, but they have no obligation to release their source. And a freely copyable binary might be useless, since it might only be usable on proprietary, closed hardware.
Explain how this sentence:
because it would become impossible to take someone else's code and use it in a proprietary product
can logically be followed by this sentence:
Whatever yohatever you coded and distributed could be freely distributed without your permission.
If you write code, there is nothing preventing me from using it in a proprietary product. This is important since I could, for example, use it in a proprietary hardware application and keep my source closed. So the application would be worthless to you unless you bought my hardware -- and you can't use my ideas because I'm keeping my source closed, and there is nothing you can do about that.
Why, in a world without IP protection, would anyone give away their source code? That part is poorly explained in FSF philosophy.
That "nothing else" clause pretty much goes away if copyright goes away
But the "nothing else" clause is critical! In other words, the only way to share the software is to release it under GPL, and its descendents to the Nth generation.
A point anti-IP advocates miss is that there is nothing forcing anyone from sharing information. This is especially important in a field like programming, which includes two distinct pieces of IP: the source code, which contains the idea, and the binary, obtained from the source code, which is purely functional. Individuals and businesses who don't want their ideas stolen are not obliged to release their source code, and I have yet to hear a rational argument as to why they would want to give it away without the protection of the GPL.
I suspect in an economy free of IP laws, there would be much less free trading of ideas, because once an idea is in the public domain it would be gone from your control forever. The GPL gives the author an additional measure of control.
When will corperate america *get it*?
I find this question particularly funny given that you yourself have said:
i don't particularly care for finance
which is to say, you don't get corporate America.
What's more, you miss what most GNU advocates miss, which is the irony of their position: the GPL strongly depends on intellectual property protection! The BSD license is much less restrictive, yet it is much less popular than the GPL.
IBM and Its thoughts, not IBM and It's = it is thoughts. If you can't tell the difference, this might help.
Dammit, it's hell knowing how to write. I know exactly what the poster meant, but my vision focuses intently on the errant apostrophe, unable to concentrate on anything else, trying to banish it with the force of pure frustration.
Feel free to mod into oblivion, it will only aid me in damning the lot of you as ignorant philistines. Thank you and goodnight.
The point is that they are not supposed to get tossed in the trash, but calling them "disposable" suggests that they will be.
Why not call them "returnable cell phones" or "temporary cell phones"?
The solution to me seems to be large groups supporting the system by agreement and pledges.
... users like you.
This has been tried before. Can you imagine: you're running Linux, and once a year, for a week, Linux stops running ten minutes an hour and bombards you with messages in which Betty White asks you to send money to support this quality program. Send in $30 and get a mug, send in $100 and get a lovely coffee-table book.
Software supported by
RMS has stated many times that copyleft is necessary only because of copyright. It's a hack of a hack
Then he's not paying attention, or is blinded by his biases. If anything copyleft illustrates the versatility and power of copyright laws. After all, people have the option of BSD-style licenses, which are far weaker than the GPL, and convey far more power to end users -- yet they are far less popular than the GPL.
Yet the irony is that mechanisms which keep information free, such as the GPL, depend strongly on intellectual property protection.
Well, a democracy is two things: the will of the majority, but respect for rights of the individual. If one direction normally had more traffic, it's possible that an individual who wanted to cross traffic would never proceed. So I would argue that the proximity detector is democratic, while the light switcher represents a tyrrany of the majority.
More mathematically, if you assumed a Poisson distribution it would be possible to estimate the Poisson parameter based on whether a car was present or absent at the proximity detector. So you would again have a system that was almost as good. And Poisson is an excellent model for arrival processes.
They already do that. They're called proximity detectors, and they determine when cars are sitting on top of them. They work based on induction.
Sometimes you can see where they were embedded in the road, especially if the light was retrofitted. Look for a patched-over hole in the pavement directly underneath where the first car would pull up at a stop light.
That is why some lights only change when your car is sitting there. For additional fun, you might be caught behind some dingus who, for some reason, stopped too far back to trigger the sensor. You're going to be there a while.
The free market is a very successful system. However, it is imperfect: it assumes that everyone acting selfishly will accomplish the common good, which sets up prisoner's dilemma problems.
In this case, nobody likes banner ads, and everyone selfishly wants to block them. If everyone did this, content on the web would be diminished, because fewer people could afford to produce web content full-time, and more content would go to subscriber-pay sites. (Or worse, the advertising will become more embedded and harder to filter out, even visually. For example, this sentence is brought to you by the good people at State Farm. Or every web comic would suddenly have a character named Cisco.) Yet if everyone co-operated by not blocking banner ads, free web content is made available to everyone.
And don't give me a lot of crap about "someone will figure out a better business model", unless you can actually point to a particular website with that model, that is succeeding.
All I'm saying is, think about the unintended consequences before you act selfishly, or praise others for doing so.
Which leads me to another point: there's an appalling lack of ethical behavior on the internet. Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so.
[end rant]
The roots of Christianity are in Judaism, which is an ancient religion with a number of innovations (such as a formless God). Granted, the Jews borrowed from the Egyptians via Moses.
Also, Christianity has produced a host of philosophers who are considered great by western standards. The two who come immediately to mind are Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, but there are certainly others.
"Innovation" through assimilation.
This isn't the first time an organization has conquered the world without any significant original ideas. Conquest is a skill unto itself. Often those skilled at conquest are poor at innovation, and vice versa. Just think of all the engineers who have gotten screwed by selling the rights to world-changing inventions for next to nothing. On the other side, hell, think of the Roman empire -- they basically stole all their good ideas from the Greeks. Can you name a single notable Roman mathematician? There was probably a notable Roman philosopher or two, but I can't think of anyone immediately.
Meat-space politics come and go, but operating system politics cause flamewars at dawn with dueling forks.
I'm reminded of what they say about academic politics: it's vicious, only because the stakes are so terribly small.
What makes you think that there are enough people out there who would spend that time and money to keep this thing alive that don't care about Freedom? What on earth would be their motivation?
Well, I have no idea. Maybe they don't have girlfriends and are trying to fill the gaping void.
meaning what? If the punch card machines had provided a human-readable printout that the voter could read, and realize that he/she accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan rather than Al Gore, there would have been no issue.