Don't kid yourself: open source is nice, but it doesn't guarantee a fault-proof or secure voting system (suppose somebody installs wrong or malicious software on one of the machines?). The only way to do that is to provide voting receipts which can be counted independently, by hand -- and that does not exclude closed-source solutions.
Did you read the article? They interviewed an investor who (wisely) said that he would not invest anything in nanotechnology until it was proven safe with other peoples' money. So in many ways the nanotech industry is stuck. It can't get money from investors until it's proven safe, and it can prove itself safe without money from investors.
I've seen the same problem with public access terminals in a library. About half were linux, and the users would only use them if they had to (i.e., all the windows machines were in use).
Maybe, if you charge for use, you could try the following: start with a few linux machines, and charge less for using them -- and hang a little sign saying, "These machines use linux, they cost less because linux is free and windows is expensive". Make them as similar to windows as possible, with similar desktops and behaviors.
People might be willing to put up with something new if it will save them money. Just my $0.02.
Obviously, we would be completely fucked. For one thing, our entire food supply is powered by the sun, and within days every crop and every piece of livestock would be dead, frozen -- except for those in insulated greenhouses. For another thing, eventually it would be so cold that the atmosphere would start to condense, and we wouldn't even be able to burn things to keep warm, or breathe. It is utterly beyond the ability of existing technology to survive on Earth without the sun.
We would probably need a century of warning at least, and even then, the best strategy would be to move humanity to a different star system. And that feat is beyond any current or forseeable technology.
Sounds like the real scary part will be once they figure that out and someone figures out a work around.
Well, think of it this way: the world is basically a huge biological laboratory, with viruses being created by mutation and experimented with by natural selection. A mutation leading to a work around would be a huge advantage, yet in hundreds of millions of years of animal virus evolution, none has been discovered. Likely there is something fundamental that prevents such a deadly strain from occurring.
The point of researching these things is to not get caught with your pants down when someone else invents it. Now that this strain of smallpox has been developed, the scientists can determine how to protect against it.
Examining one scientific study or result out of context usually misses the point of the overall body of research. For example, several congressmen have been campaigning against studies into sexual deviancy that have been funded with federal money. However, these studies are critical to understanding how diseases like HIV spread.
The day will come when there will be a NYT link to a reg-required page with no mentioning of the procedure whatsoever.
No, I don't think so, and the reason is that the free registration is an excellent proxy for the free/open software debate. Most people are happy to register as Dwight Eisenhower, from 69 Up Yours Avenue, Intercourse, PA; and they get their free article. Others get all uptight over the distinction between "free registration" and "freedom", and bore everyone to tears about it in the comments.
My opinion: It won't kill you to register, and I'd rather read the article and learn something interesting than rail against them as a matter of principle and isolate myself.
Yeah, the problem is that as the stock started to rise, everyone on Slashdot started crying "They're going to lose! Short the stock!". Unfortunately, those who took out short positions at $5 or $10 got screwed, because those positions don't last forever.
On the other hand, if you had gone against Slashdot and put your life savings into SCO back in May when the story broke, you would be laughing now.
Actually, what's surprising about SCO's tactics is that they went straight for IBM in the lawsuit and the Fortune 1000 for licenses.
Traditionally, IP cases tend to start out against the small operations who don't have the resources for a court battle. The small companies either give in without a fight, or can't afford strong legal representation, leading to precedent-setting legal victories for the plaintiff.
SCO went big game hunting immediately either because it thought its case was rock solid, or because it wanted the publicity of taking on IBM (or both).
As much as I love a good conspiracy story, integrated the first integrated circuits date to 1958. A much better story would be the Roswell (UFO crash in July 1947) - Transistor (Bell Labs produced the first one in December 1947) connection.
Well, that might be prohibited under a strong DRM scheme. However, there's certainly nothing preventing me from whipping out my digital camera and taking pictures of the screen, then forwarding the images to whomever I please.
Better yet, it could be one of those cell phone cameras. Technology gives back what technology takes away.
Wrong, the DOD already uses laser rangefinders, laser-guided bombs, ring-laser gyros in submarines...
Most likely they mean use of lasers as weapons, and it would be nice if it stayed that way. The inventor of the laser was recently quoted as saying that in spite of seeming like a death ray, he was unaware of any instance in which a laser had directly killed anyone, even by accident.
Some people are banking on a more extreme version of the idea. Economic justifications of the X prize have included the development of suborbital rocket courier and passenger services, when you (or your package) absolutely has to get to Tokyo in two hours from New York. Of course you would be paying five or six figures for the privilege, which makes Concorde seem like taking the bus.
You know... Canada is probably the only western democracy I've ever seen where you can only buy liquor at government-approved stores (Alberta and Quebec excepted, of course). In Europe and the US, you can get wine at the grocery store. In Japan, there are beer-vending machines on every corner.
Of course, the difference goes to the tax coffers, paying for social programs like medicine and education
Probably most of it goes to the union wage that is paid to the retail workers, all of whom are government employees. And the government taxes the snot out of alcohol anyway, so I'm not seeing the big benefit.
Well, not exactly. In the new world, the colonial powers couldn't afford to pay for standing navies to enforce their claims and beat up on the enemy of the week. So many pirates were private military contractors, who carried out the bidding of the various powers in exchange for a (large) percentage of whatever they plundered.
Didn't you ever play Pirates by Sid Meier? Damn, I was addicted to that game for, like, two years. The best part was having to duel some snotty major over the governor's hot daughter.
If anything, the media should be embedding advertising and so on so they can sell commercial time on the traded files. It's an opportunity.
Are you sure you want to live in this world, where every movie has a character named Cisco and all the characters pause every thirty seconds to drink a Pepsi and comment on how refreshing it is? I will have even less reason to follow popular media, which may not be a bad thing.
Now I'm no Gates apologist -- I haven't even used Windows for years, except when I am forced to kicking and screaming -- but harping on these statements bothers me.
In 1981, NOBODY needed 640k on the desktop. IBM PCs shipped with a tenth that amount of memory. Even assuming memory growth is exponential in the same manner as Moore's Law, this meant that the average user probably wouldn't need 640k for five years or more. Even in 1987, I remember programs (such as WordPerfect 4.2) that could fit on a single 360k floppy -- so the 640k prediction held for several generations of machine. Not a bad prediction in the computer industry.
There were good reasons for making the 640k assumption. All I'm saying is, don't fault an engineer for making a design decision, even if you don't like him personally.
Having said that, you want a desktop application that takes up more than 4 GB of physical memory? Go download the OpenOffice source and add a line:
I consider the distinction of kernel (Linux) versus operating system (GNU/Linux) to be hair splitting, since it is beyond the average computer user.
Nonetheless, regardless of the author's biases, this behavior is typical of Stallman, who has turned down other speaking requests from organizations that use the terminology "Linux" rather than "GNU/Linux". I suspect he fancies himself to be standing up for a principle, but it is a sufficiently narrow principle that it comes across as, frankly, immature and stubborn.
I also find hilarious the hypocritical irony of this man advocating freedom and eschewing reward on one hand, and trying to exercise control over the use of his software on the other (by demanding credit). Linus gets it: in the interview, he notes that someone could take the entirety of Linux, rename it "Sally", and release it, and there is not a thing he could do -- which, he says, focuses him on the technical excellence and inclusiveness of the Linux project, and avoiding the factionalism in which Stallman seems to delight.
This is more true than you know. According to the article, Stallman declined to be interviewed for the article unless the article used "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" throughout. Which would have effectively made the article about him and not Linus.
Stallman may be smart and may have accomplished great things, but his actions bespeak a petulant toddler more than a great man of vision.
I wasn't claiming that it was a definition, merely an indicator. Similarly, an acid is not defined as any substance that turns litmus paper red, though red litmus paper is an excellent indicator for acid.
I would dare say that my classification is a useful one based on observation rather than a fanciful one based on religous faith.
Most classifications are based on observation, and even a layperson could form a useful classification of X versus not-X based on careful observation. Whether the X is itself useless is irrelevant to the classification. As a person of faith myself, I don't find religion "fanciful", but that's a discussion for another time.
To reiterate, it is my observations that zealots -- particularly religious zealots, or pseudo-religious zealots such as those in the FSF -- tend to categorize the world into us-versus-them. However, this is not how I define zealotry. The dictionary definition you gave is perfectly fine.
And for the record, I've been using Linux exclusively since 1998, and have even released software under the GPL.
the terms "advocate" and "zealot" have been conflated lately on slashdot by pro-Microsoft folks... An advocate is one who vocally supports a position. A zealot is one who loudly ignores contrary evidence.
Those two properties are not mutually exclusive.
I would argue that a sign of a zealot is a person who obsessively views the world in terms of "us" and "them". Your view that the confusion of "advocate" and "zealot" is the responsibility of pro-Microsoft forces implies to me that you are not only an advocate, but also a zealot.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't kid yourself: open source is nice, but it doesn't guarantee a fault-proof or secure voting system (suppose somebody installs wrong or malicious software on one of the machines?). The only way to do that is to provide voting receipts which can be counted independently, by hand -- and that does not exclude closed-source solutions.
Did you read the article? They interviewed an investor who (wisely) said that he would not invest anything in nanotechnology until it was proven safe with other peoples' money. So in many ways the nanotech industry is stuck. It can't get money from investors until it's proven safe, and it can prove itself safe without money from investors.
I've seen the same problem with public access terminals in a library. About half were linux, and the users would only use them if they had to (i.e., all the windows machines were in use).
Maybe, if you charge for use, you could try the following: start with a few linux machines, and charge less for using them -- and hang a little sign saying, "These machines use linux, they cost less because linux is free and windows is expensive". Make them as similar to windows as possible, with similar desktops and behaviors.
People might be willing to put up with something new if it will save them money. Just my $0.02.
Me without mod points. Alas.
Obviously, we would be completely fucked. For one thing, our entire food supply is powered by the sun, and within days every crop and every piece of livestock would be dead, frozen -- except for those in insulated greenhouses. For another thing, eventually it would be so cold that the atmosphere would start to condense, and we wouldn't even be able to burn things to keep warm, or breathe. It is utterly beyond the ability of existing technology to survive on Earth without the sun.
We would probably need a century of warning at least, and even then, the best strategy would be to move humanity to a different star system. And that feat is beyond any current or forseeable technology.
Sounds like the real scary part will be once they figure that out and someone figures out a work around.
Well, think of it this way: the world is basically a huge biological laboratory, with viruses being created by mutation and experimented with by natural selection. A mutation leading to a work around would be a huge advantage, yet in hundreds of millions of years of animal virus evolution, none has been discovered. Likely there is something fundamental that prevents such a deadly strain from occurring.
The point of researching these things is to not get caught with your pants down when someone else invents it. Now that this strain of smallpox has been developed, the scientists can determine how to protect against it.
Examining one scientific study or result out of context usually misses the point of the overall body of research. For example, several congressmen have been campaigning against studies into sexual deviancy that have been funded with federal money. However, these studies are critical to understanding how diseases like HIV spread.
The day will come when there will be a NYT link to a reg-required page with no mentioning of the procedure whatsoever.
No, I don't think so, and the reason is that the free registration is an excellent proxy for the free/open software debate. Most people are happy to register as Dwight Eisenhower, from 69 Up Yours Avenue, Intercourse, PA; and they get their free article. Others get all uptight over the distinction between "free registration" and "freedom", and bore everyone to tears about it in the comments.
My opinion: It won't kill you to register, and I'd rather read the article and learn something interesting than rail against them as a matter of principle and isolate myself.
Does make you wish you'd bought SCOX at a buck and sold today, tho, don't it? :)
Yes. Hence my sig.
Yeah, the problem is that as the stock started to rise, everyone on Slashdot started crying "They're going to lose! Short the stock!". Unfortunately, those who took out short positions at $5 or $10 got screwed, because those positions don't last forever.
On the other hand, if you had gone against Slashdot and put your life savings into SCO back in May when the story broke, you would be laughing now.
Actually, what's surprising about SCO's tactics is that they went straight for IBM in the lawsuit and the Fortune 1000 for licenses.
Traditionally, IP cases tend to start out against the small operations who don't have the resources for a court battle. The small companies either give in without a fight, or can't afford strong legal representation, leading to precedent-setting legal victories for the plaintiff.
SCO went big game hunting immediately either because it thought its case was rock solid, or because it wanted the publicity of taking on IBM (or both).
As much as I love a good conspiracy story, integrated the first integrated circuits date to 1958. A much better story would be the Roswell (UFO crash in July 1947) - Transistor (Bell Labs produced the first one in December 1947) connection.
Well, that might be prohibited under a strong DRM scheme. However, there's certainly nothing preventing me from whipping out my digital camera and taking pictures of the screen, then forwarding the images to whomever I please.
Better yet, it could be one of those cell phone cameras. Technology gives back what technology takes away.
"No coherent plan" to use lasers in warfare?
...
Wrong, the DOD already uses laser rangefinders, laser-guided bombs, ring-laser gyros in submarines
Most likely they mean use of lasers as weapons, and it would be nice if it stayed that way. The inventor of the laser was recently quoted as saying that in spite of seeming like a death ray, he was unaware of any instance in which a laser had directly killed anyone, even by accident.
Some people are banking on a more extreme version of the idea. Economic justifications of the X prize have included the development of suborbital rocket courier and passenger services, when you (or your package) absolutely has to get to Tokyo in two hours from New York. Of course you would be paying five or six figures for the privilege, which makes Concorde seem like taking the bus.
You know ... Canada is probably the only western democracy I've ever seen where you can only buy liquor at government-approved stores (Alberta and Quebec excepted, of course). In Europe and the US, you can get wine at the grocery store. In Japan, there are beer-vending machines on every corner.
Of course, the difference goes to the tax coffers, paying for social programs like medicine and education
Probably most of it goes to the union wage that is paid to the retail workers, all of whom are government employees. And the government taxes the snot out of alcohol anyway, so I'm not seeing the big benefit.
Ontario: Better society through alcoholism!
Try clicking on the link labelled "Screenshot". I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
Well, not exactly. In the new world, the colonial powers couldn't afford to pay for standing navies to enforce their claims and beat up on the enemy of the week. So many pirates were private military contractors, who carried out the bidding of the various powers in exchange for a (large) percentage of whatever they plundered.
Didn't you ever play Pirates by Sid Meier? Damn, I was addicted to that game for, like, two years. The best part was having to duel some snotty major over the governor's hot daughter.
If anything, the media should be embedding advertising and so on so they can sell commercial time on the traded files. It's an opportunity.
Are you sure you want to live in this world, where every movie has a character named Cisco and all the characters pause every thirty seconds to drink a Pepsi and comment on how refreshing it is? I will have even less reason to follow popular media, which may not be a bad thing.
Now I'm no Gates apologist -- I haven't even used Windows for years, except when I am forced to kicking and screaming -- but harping on these statements bothers me.
In 1981, NOBODY needed 640k on the desktop. IBM PCs shipped with a tenth that amount of memory. Even assuming memory growth is exponential in the same manner as Moore's Law, this meant that the average user probably wouldn't need 640k for five years or more. Even in 1987, I remember programs (such as WordPerfect 4.2) that could fit on a single 360k floppy -- so the 640k prediction held for several generations of machine. Not a bad prediction in the computer industry.
There were good reasons for making the 640k assumption. All I'm saying is, don't fault an engineer for making a design decision, even if you don't like him personally.
Having said that, you want a desktop application that takes up more than 4 GB of physical memory? Go download the OpenOffice source and add a line:
calloc(4294967296,sizeof(char));
Take THAT, Bill!
I consider the distinction of kernel (Linux) versus operating system (GNU/Linux) to be hair splitting, since it is beyond the average computer user.
Nonetheless, regardless of the author's biases, this behavior is typical of Stallman, who has turned down other speaking requests from organizations that use the terminology "Linux" rather than "GNU/Linux". I suspect he fancies himself to be standing up for a principle, but it is a sufficiently narrow principle that it comes across as, frankly, immature and stubborn.
I also find hilarious the hypocritical irony of this man advocating freedom and eschewing reward on one hand, and trying to exercise control over the use of his software on the other (by demanding credit). Linus gets it: in the interview, he notes that someone could take the entirety of Linux, rename it "Sally", and release it, and there is not a thing he could do -- which, he says, focuses him on the technical excellence and inclusiveness of the Linux project, and avoiding the factionalism in which Stallman seems to delight.
This is more true than you know. According to the article, Stallman declined to be interviewed for the article unless the article used "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" throughout. Which would have effectively made the article about him and not Linus.
Stallman may be smart and may have accomplished great things, but his actions bespeak a petulant toddler more than a great man of vision.
Your definition stinks
I wasn't claiming that it was a definition, merely an indicator. Similarly, an acid is not defined as any substance that turns litmus paper red, though red litmus paper is an excellent indicator for acid.
I would dare say that my classification is a useful one based on observation rather than a fanciful one based on religous faith.
Most classifications are based on observation, and even a layperson could form a useful classification of X versus not-X based on careful observation. Whether the X is itself useless is irrelevant to the classification. As a person of faith myself, I don't find religion "fanciful", but that's a discussion for another time.
To reiterate, it is my observations that zealots -- particularly religious zealots, or pseudo-religious zealots such as those in the FSF -- tend to categorize the world into us-versus-them. However, this is not how I define zealotry. The dictionary definition you gave is perfectly fine.
And for the record, I've been using Linux exclusively since 1998, and have even released software under the GPL.
the terms "advocate" and "zealot" have been conflated lately on slashdot by pro-Microsoft folks ... An advocate is one who vocally supports a position. A zealot is one who loudly ignores contrary evidence.
Those two properties are not mutually exclusive.
I would argue that a sign of a zealot is a person who obsessively views the world in terms of "us" and "them". Your view that the confusion of "advocate" and "zealot" is the responsibility of pro-Microsoft forces implies to me that you are not only an advocate, but also a zealot.