You ask: If I'm against "Them", I would much rather have a government that has to pretend to care about me than a corporation that has no such obligations or conceits. If I'm with "Them", I'd choose a government as well -- they're far less fickle. What's there to prefer about corporations?
For as long as there is a separate state and judicial presence, corporations can't apply coercion at the point of a gun. That makes them weaker in practice despite being all-pervasive in theory. In contrast, the state has no such limits, and that means that the day you discover you are not PC mainstream, you will have no refuge. In contrast, in the diverse "mess" that is the US, that very mess provides a measure of support.
It seems to me that the point you're making is something like: "If you're swift/strong/smart then you can work to your best advantage by riding on top of totalitarian political systems, making them work for you by being influential, belonging to the power structure, or simply being in their good books." Well sure, and the same applies in the US system, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do, neither personally nor for society at large. In the long run, when your mainstream position is no longer palatable to you, you'll regret supporting a regime where diversity is dissuaded.
You write: The US is fucking anarchy, with no benefit going to the swift or the strong or the smart.
The US is not an anarchy nor anything remotely approaching it. The US is an inefficient corporate totalitarianism, and it's only its inefficiency that gives its citizens a reasonable amount of freedom. Unfortunately that inefficiency is rapidly disappearing because it gives corporatism headaches and so laws are being adjusted to streamline corporate controls. That's the road towards a Big Brother if there ever was one (albeit corporate), and freedom of the press is one of the few barriers in its way.
If only the US was an anarchy. Then you'd see "benefit going to the swift or the strong or the smart", as you put it, assuming that you were talking about individuals. Instead, the benefit is currently going to the power organizations, which is the exact opposite of anarchy. Learn and think about terms before repeating state political rhetoric.
It's very easy to make a logical case for strong, even totalitarian government. In theory it can deliver many things that are often considered worthwhile goals, like efficient organization, reduced crime, and long-range planning.
Unfortunately, other worthwhile goals like individual freedom and diversity are sacrificed when you go down that road, and more often than not it's a road that you cannot easily leave.
That's why you're misguided in supporting the status quo in its headlong rush towards total population control. Those easy wins against crime which you so appreciate do not come free, and in due course, you will regret choosing to cut down those messy rain forests to make way for efficient modern living and industrialization, to make an analogy.
Individual lofty goals may seen incongruous and ineffective against power politics, but they're the only things that stand between our current relative freedoms and the state-corporate totalitarianism that's just over the next hill. I'm just glad that there are still people around with the personal integrity to continue the fight for lofty intangibles like freedom of the press, despite the odds against.
Alas, this whole area is heading in the direction of law and the courts, and there's nothing they hate more than vigilantism.
Whatever we may think of the arguments ourselves, aiken_d makes a strong case why blame for spam cannot be transitive: if Ibill is RBL'd, then so should the electricity and water boards, supermarkets, McDonalds and everyone else that supplies the spammers with indirect support. It's all a matter of degree, and you can bet your life that the courts will not see Ibill as being in the spamming business any more than those who indirectly support (say) the financial (banks and the US Treasury!) or stationary needs of spammers. It's not transitive.
Nerds like mecha design, and traditionally anime features a lot of it, or at least the large SF sub-genre does. It's quite pervasive, from nano to mega gadgets and worlds and universes, to the mechanization of the mind and soul, as well as advanced science as magic.
But yes, those that don't relate to anime ought to be able to filter it out.
Observe, listen, think, then talk
on
Tenchi Muyou 3?
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· Score: 3
That was such a grossly silly and utterly uninformed assessment of anime that it'd be funny if it wasn't so tragic to read it here on Slashdot, a place where people didn't used to accept journalistic fud. But times change.
The medium is not the message, nor vice versa. You can express any message in any medium, and I don't hear you say "[film/Internet/TV] is child porn" despite the fact that each of these mediums occasionally features an item with those qualities. And so it is with anime. The vast majority of it doesn't even feature sex, let alone with children, so your remarks are utterly ridiculous.
But if you still have an open mind, let the medium itself do the convincing. Watch the wonderfully produced DVD set Tenchi Muyo Ultimate Edition (a hilarious comedy with wonderful characters) and the Ghost in the Shell DVD (a beautiful and pensive thriller), and try to find a trace of child porn in them.
Having said that, if a person sees children in films and instantly thinks "child porn" then maybe it's time to wonder not about the films but about the person that's watching them. Under that kind of skewed judgement, all anime, all of childrens' TV and a hell of a lot of other things are also tarred. It's a ridiculous assessment.
For a rollout of that size, I'd say that you need two key things: first, either a network or CDR-based install from a cut-down release tailored to your business environment, with all options pre-selected, and secondly, the seemingly trivial but massively important separation of system and user areas, each in their own filestore.
The first is important because one of your major costs is going to be support --- this will skyrocket if you use standard distro CDs because they're all based on interactive user choice in varying degrees, and corporate handholding costs money.
The second is important because without the separation, upgrading will become a nightmare over time --- again, this will increase your support costs. In fact, consider seriously the possibility of not holding any user data on the workstations at all, but on a central filestore instead. That simplifies data backup as well as workstation upgrading, because then you can regard workstation state as throwaway.
Re:A scientist and a Christian ...
on
Calculating God
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· Score: 2
No, a scientist wearing his genuine Scientist hat cannot "believe" in the existence of God because the scientific method itself cannot test for the existence of God. Nor can the scientific method test the notion of "belief", and possibly it can't even test "inner voices" or "divine intervention", so there's a double or triple barrier here.
Furthermore, the scientist's own thoughts and beliefs as a human being are not relevant in the slightest in this process, and if he does apply them to argue otherwise then he is corrupting the scientific model that he supposedly supports.
Having said that, it is not uncommon to find the two areas coming together in one man, humans being human. The important thing is to recognize when this happens, accept it as a product of the human condition, and treat it as one would any other inconsistent position.
Science and the nature of reality
on
Calculating God
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· Score: 2
Science is based on the belief that the world can be understood by humanity.
You're totally wrong. Science doesn't make any attempt whatsoever to understand the world, because it does not have the tools to do so. All it does is to create models that yield testable predictions, and then to test the behaviour of reality by direct physical probing to see if the provoked response is anywhere close to the predicted one. If there is a good match then the model is said to be consistent with reality, but that does not mean that reality is anything like the model at all. We have no means of determining that, because we have no way of looking inside reality, but only of testing her behaviour from the outside.
And that's why the scientific method is so powerful. A model can look like X at one point in time and like Y at another, and no scientist cares a damn as long as the models yielded predictions that were usefully close to how reality responded to the test probes at each point in time. That's why progress is so rapid in Science: old dogma can be thrown away with impunity. We could never do that if we thought for an instant that the structure of a model truly depicts the actual structure of reality --- we couldn't throw away The Truth! Not a cat's chance in hell of that happening though, especially considering that a lot of Science's models are riddled with holes. But that doesn't matter --- as long as the predictions are close enough then we can make use of them and get reality to work for us in our TVs and microwave ovens. But that doesn't mean that we have any idea at all what reality really looks like inside.
Admittedly sometimes we talk about what goes on in models as if we're talking about reality herself, but that's just shorthand. No genuine scientist that is true to the scientific method would claim otherwise. Unfortunately there are a few quacks around, and a few that have forgotten the fundamental premises of their discipline, but that's true in any sphere of endeavour.
A scientist and a Christian ...
on
Calculating God
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· Score: 2
I know what you mean, but strictly speaking it's not a valid statement.
You cannot be a scientist and a Christian at the same time. The "scientist" is not a scientist unless he applies the scientific method to his subject matter, which cannot be done to religious subjects, and the "Christian" deals in faith, which is not within the realm of discourse of science. The two cannot meet and apply validly at the same time.
When they do meet in one person (and you're definitely not on your own in that), then it is because both the scientist and the Christian have sacrificed strict consistency within their respective disciplines in order to be able to live together at the same address. It's a very common human compromise, but hopelessly invalid in any strong sense.
Actually, if the cartoon is to be believed, he's got attitude jets above the main thrust units. I wonder if they just tap into the pressure chambers of the main rockets or are self-contained? Probably the latter since they're shown still working after main jet cutoff.
I sure hope that he's modeled this. Personally I'd want to send up an unmanned version first!
Keeping the centre of gravity of the whole assembly below the thrust point is no guarantee of heading continually upwards at all, unless the upward progress is very slow or the rockets are either controllable in direction or in thrust. As I understand it, these peroxide units are neither.
Unless the thrusts are ideally balanced, he's just going to rise up, loop back down, and crash head first. (OK, more elaborate multi-turn loops are possible as well, but you get the idea.)
Although it's commendable that Bruce Perens and others are interested in the interaction between free/open-source software and the commercial and/or legal systems, we shouldn't infer from this that the relationship is stronger than it really is.
The success of free/open-source software is not dependent on its large-scale (or even small-scale) adoption by the commercial sector. The community is a totally independent organism with its own positive-feedback growth mechanisms, and at its most commercially-affected, all it does is take specifications from the commercial sector as additional input, occasionally. It certainly doesn't need to do so to survive and grow, and it certainly doesn't need the sanction of the courts for us to continue to use free software and contribute to its growth.
ESR was right to say that the commercial world would do well to adopt open-source practice, but that doesn't mean that there is a reciprocal dependency. In many respects, commercial interest just creates inertia which limits the natural growth potential of free software, in part for no other reason than that it tends to create big products which are then not easily built upon by the rest of the community. It's the pure RMSian meaning of "success" that gives the community its massive potential, a continuous cycle of enhance-or-reuse and redistribute without limit, and the commercial and legal worlds are simply not a part of it unless they drop the strings that they would otherwise attach to everything they release or try to control.
The short answer to the article then is, it doesn't really matter as far as the success of free/open-source software is concerned, even in the extremely unlikely event (as others have pointed out) that all court rulings go utterly against the GPL.
It's going to take more than just good documentation to keep Linux from developing out of control and spiralling down towards instability. Most non-trivial software heads in the general direction of loss of control as it grows, but operating systems are specially vulnerable to this syndrome because they are highly concurrent systems, and concurrency offers opportunity for problems to emerge with the greatest of ease.
For Linux to remain stable, one of two things are going to have to happen. Either extremely heavy-handed personal control by people with a supreme grasp of everything that's going on in the kernel and who won't be deflected from their straight and narrow path --- that's where we are now, so be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when knocking it. Or, fight the problem with technology and abandon the single monolithic unprotected space approach and partition the kernel into a large number of interacting but separate domains using the MMU plus well-specified and relatively stable internal interfaces. Needless to say, the second of these approaches would result in an utterly different kernel altogether, but at least it would have a longer life expectancy.
The current kernel is as brilliant as it is because of the brilliance of the people that are keeping it from falling apart under force of change. But there is a limit to human intellect, at least in the current pre-nanotech timeframe. The current developers should accept that, and work towards a kernel design that reduces dependency on their brilliance by providing an effective assortment of hardware-assisted guarantees. Learn from the user-space design of Unix. It's a good model.
I'd say that the main flaw in Penrose's argument stems from the fact that he seems to be seeking religion rather than searching for scientific (ie. testable) explanations.
I like well-written books that propose alternative theories, but they've got to have some sort of solid framework and internal consistency to be worth reading. The Emperor's New Mind was great as long as Penrose stuck to reviewing previous science, but appalling thereafter. I don't recall ever having read a popular science book containing so much handwaving, copouts, and defeatism. He's desperate to prove that scientific investigation is dead in the water when it comes to the mind, it seems to me. Put that together with some of the mystical mumbo jumbo that appeared liberally and it all starts to add up to a personal search for his God and The Reason He Must Exist.
The success of free/open-source software is not dependent on its large-scale (or even small-scale) adoption by the commercial sector. The community is a totally independent organism with its own positive-feedback growth mechanisms, and at its most commercially-affected, all it does is take specifications from the commercial sector as additional input, occasionally. It certainly doesn't need to do so to survive and grow.
ESR was right to say that the commercial world would do well to adopt open-source practice, but that doesn't mean that there is a reciprocal dependency. In many respects, commercial interest just creates inertia which limits the natural growth potential of free software, in part for no other reason than that it tends to create big products which are then not easily built upon by the rest of the community. It's the pure RMSian meaning of "success" that gives the community its massive potential, a continuous cycle of enhance-or-reuse and redistribute without limit, and the commercial world is simply not a part of it unless they drop the strings that they would otherwise attach to everything they release.
The short answer to the article then is, it doesn't really matter as far as the success of free/open-source software is concerned. The only really relevant aspect to it is that greater awareness of these issues results in more money being available for community-aware developers in general, which for the most part is probably good.
The entire premise of associating skin tones with pornography is flawed. It's trivial to create a work that would be widely regarded as pornographic despite not showing ANY normal skin tones at all, or even any skin at all.
Pornography is not a property of images. It is a property of a culture, and of the value judgements that that culture makes about sex and nudity.
Imbued as we are with American values acquired through film, we tend to forget the above, but in Europe we're fortunate enough to have a million beaches where nudity is nothing special to bring back home the relativity of values. Nothing else makes the point so effectively.
That sudden eruption of madness from Bill Joy had a very obvious cause: he was sitting right next to John Searle! The madness of illogic is highly contagious.
(Ray Kurzweil was there as well, but his mind is at least 20 years ahead of those of the other two, so their Neanderthal pack rantings were just "Ughh, Ughh, Grunt!" to him.)
Despite all the hoopla and heat and large amounts of time being wasted by a lot of people on this issue, at the end of the day, what will happen is what people on the net want to happen. The genie's out of the bottle, and nothing short of a total international police state has any chance of putting the little people back "into their place". Men with guns will still try to exert the will of those in political and monetary power every now and then, but you can't successfully hold back the tide with the occasional sweep of a broom.
Nor can you do so with commandments from on high. The pronouncements of judges or of Moses himself won't make any real difference at all except in closing off one particular avenue or another. But there are infinite avenues to try.
Furthermore, only lawyers gain from the current focus on appealing to reason through the courts. It's doomed to failure simply because the courts are part of the establishment, whereas everyone associated with the net is a heinous outlaw.;-) Like supports like. Don't expect any acceptance of the new online reality from that quarter.
In that case we'll all be buying the Yopy instead of Webpads, since "third quarter of 2000" really means mid-2001 in the shops, earliest.
I wish these damn mobile computers didn't have to be made with colour displays for marketing reasons though, as the resulting poor battery life makes them almost unsuitable for their main target market. We need something between laptop power consumption and the Palm's three-months-on-two-AAAs frugality, say a week's use between charges. The Yopy's StrongArm is even more frugal than the Crusoe, but the colour LCD makes that irrelevant. Bleh.
I agree, but for a different reason. For Crusoe to take off in the mobile market, its inherent low power must not be compromised by power-guzzling components used around it, as in the case of the Webpad.
A mere 5-6 hours mobile use between charges is ridiculous for a truly mobile device, it's as bad as a laptop. Compare that to the 3 months on a pair of AAA batteries for the Palm -- it's no comparison at all. Crusoe-based webpads need to strike a happy medium to be useful, something like a week's use between charges, otherwise there'll be nothing special about Crusoe-based equipment and people will stick with tried-and-tested technology instead.
Somebody's got their basic premise wrong. Water is everywhere where hydrogen and oxygen concentrations and pressure/temperature allow and where other competing reactions don't predominate.
If the Acer really has a monochrome LCD as you say then it could be useful as a mobile support platform since it'll have usable battery life. In contrast, the Yopy's colour screen is going to make it mobile only as long as you take along the mains charger, ie. no more mobile than a laptop.
SF is a geeky thing, yet here we are bashing an SF film. For an analyst (which is what most column writers seek to be, and Jon certainly is), that makes for interesting fodder, so I'd have been most surprised if he hadn't seen it more than once as research for the item.
Also, remember that Jon Katz is a writer, so he must have some sympathy for other writers when their novels get messed up, which by all accounts this one certainly did. I haven't seen the film yet, but I've read the novel 3 or 4 times over many years (I read a lot of SF, good and bad, and if it's on my shelf then it gets reread) and it's as readable as most 2nd-class SF, neither outstandingly good nor outstandingly bad, and I don't have a problem with long books, only with short ones. As others have said, it's an up-front hard-SF book that should have been ideal for an all-action movie, so if the end result was unadulterated crap then the blame must go squarely on the director, screenplay writers and producer.
The blame can't be placed on the studio though --- all they care about is box-office success. Whether it's total bollocks or not is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
You ask: If I'm against "Them", I would much rather have a government that has to pretend to care about me than a corporation that has no such obligations or conceits. If I'm with "Them", I'd choose a government as well -- they're far less fickle. What's there to prefer about corporations?
For as long as there is a separate state and judicial presence, corporations can't apply coercion at the point of a gun. That makes them weaker in practice despite being all-pervasive in theory. In contrast, the state has no such limits, and that means that the day you discover you are not PC mainstream, you will have no refuge. In contrast, in the diverse "mess" that is the US, that very mess provides a measure of support.
It seems to me that the point you're making is something like: "If you're swift/strong/smart then you can work to your best advantage by riding on top of totalitarian political systems, making them work for you by being influential, belonging to the power structure, or simply being in their good books." Well sure, and the same applies in the US system, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do, neither personally nor for society at large. In the long run, when your mainstream position is no longer palatable to you, you'll regret supporting a regime where diversity is dissuaded.
You write: The US is fucking anarchy, with no benefit going to the swift or the strong or the smart.
The US is not an anarchy nor anything remotely approaching it. The US is an inefficient corporate totalitarianism, and it's only its inefficiency that gives its citizens a reasonable amount of freedom. Unfortunately that inefficiency is rapidly disappearing because it gives corporatism headaches and so laws are being adjusted to streamline corporate controls. That's the road towards a Big Brother if there ever was one (albeit corporate), and freedom of the press is one of the few barriers in its way.
If only the US was an anarchy. Then you'd see "benefit going to the swift or the strong or the smart", as you put it, assuming that you were talking about individuals. Instead, the benefit is currently going to the power organizations, which is the exact opposite of anarchy. Learn and think about terms before repeating state political rhetoric.
It's not as simple as you portray.
It's very easy to make a logical case for strong, even totalitarian government. In theory it can deliver many things that are often considered worthwhile goals, like efficient organization, reduced crime, and long-range planning.
Unfortunately, other worthwhile goals like individual freedom and diversity are sacrificed when you go down that road, and more often than not it's a road that you cannot easily leave.
That's why you're misguided in supporting the status quo in its headlong rush towards total population control. Those easy wins against crime which you so appreciate do not come free, and in due course, you will regret choosing to cut down those messy rain forests to make way for efficient modern living and industrialization, to make an analogy.
Individual lofty goals may seen incongruous and ineffective against power politics, but they're the only things that stand between our current relative freedoms and the state-corporate totalitarianism that's just over the next hill. I'm just glad that there are still people around with the personal integrity to continue the fight for lofty intangibles like freedom of the press, despite the odds against.
Alas, this whole area is heading in the direction of law and the courts, and there's nothing they hate more than vigilantism.
Whatever we may think of the arguments ourselves, aiken_d makes a strong case why blame for spam cannot be transitive: if Ibill is RBL'd, then so should the electricity and water boards, supermarkets, McDonalds and everyone else that supplies the spammers with indirect support. It's all a matter of degree, and you can bet your life that the courts will not see Ibill as being in the spamming business any more than those who indirectly support (say) the financial (banks and the US Treasury!) or stationary needs of spammers. It's not transitive.
Nerds like mecha design, and traditionally anime features a lot of it, or at least the large SF sub-genre does. It's quite pervasive, from nano to mega gadgets and worlds and universes, to the mechanization of the mind and soul, as well as advanced science as magic.
But yes, those that don't relate to anime ought to be able to filter it out.
That was such a grossly silly and utterly uninformed assessment of anime that it'd be funny if it wasn't so tragic to read it here on Slashdot, a place where people didn't used to accept journalistic fud. But times change.
The medium is not the message, nor vice versa. You can express any message in any medium, and I don't hear you say "[film/Internet/TV] is child porn" despite the fact that each of these mediums occasionally features an item with those qualities. And so it is with anime. The vast majority of it doesn't even feature sex, let alone with children, so your remarks are utterly ridiculous.
But if you still have an open mind, let the medium itself do the convincing. Watch the wonderfully produced DVD set Tenchi Muyo Ultimate Edition (a hilarious comedy with wonderful characters) and the Ghost in the Shell DVD (a beautiful and pensive thriller), and try to find a trace of child porn in them.
Having said that, if a person sees children in films and instantly thinks "child porn" then maybe it's time to wonder not about the films but about the person that's watching them. Under that kind of skewed judgement, all anime, all of childrens' TV and a hell of a lot of other things are also tarred. It's a ridiculous assessment.
The medium isn't the message.
For a rollout of that size, I'd say that you need two key things: first, either a network or CDR-based install from a cut-down release tailored to your business environment, with all options pre-selected, and secondly, the seemingly trivial but massively important separation of system and user areas, each in their own filestore.
The first is important because one of your major costs is going to be support --- this will skyrocket if you use standard distro CDs because they're all based on interactive user choice in varying degrees, and corporate handholding costs money.
The second is important because without the separation, upgrading will become a nightmare over time --- again, this will increase your support costs. In fact, consider seriously the possibility of not holding any user data on the workstations at all, but on a central filestore instead. That simplifies data backup as well as workstation upgrading, because then you can regard workstation state as throwaway.
No, a scientist wearing his genuine Scientist hat cannot "believe" in the existence of God because the scientific method itself cannot test for the existence of God. Nor can the scientific method test the notion of "belief", and possibly it can't even test "inner voices" or "divine intervention", so there's a double or triple barrier here.
Furthermore, the scientist's own thoughts and beliefs as a human being are not relevant in the slightest in this process, and if he does apply them to argue otherwise then he is corrupting the scientific model that he supposedly supports.
Having said that, it is not uncommon to find the two areas coming together in one man, humans being human. The important thing is to recognize when this happens, accept it as a product of the human condition, and treat it as one would any other inconsistent position.
Science is based on the belief that the world can be understood by humanity.
You're totally wrong. Science doesn't make any attempt whatsoever to understand the world, because it does not have the tools to do so. All it does is to create models that yield testable predictions, and then to test the behaviour of reality by direct physical probing to see if the provoked response is anywhere close to the predicted one. If there is a good match then the model is said to be consistent with reality, but that does not mean that reality is anything like the model at all. We have no means of determining that, because we have no way of looking inside reality, but only of testing her behaviour from the outside.
And that's why the scientific method is so powerful. A model can look like X at one point in time and like Y at another, and no scientist cares a damn as long as the models yielded predictions that were usefully close to how reality responded to the test probes at each point in time. That's why progress is so rapid in Science: old dogma can be thrown away with impunity. We could never do that if we thought for an instant that the structure of a model truly depicts the actual structure of reality --- we couldn't throw away The Truth! Not a cat's chance in hell of that happening though, especially considering that a lot of Science's models are riddled with holes. But that doesn't matter --- as long as the predictions are close enough then we can make use of them and get reality to work for us in our TVs and microwave ovens. But that doesn't mean that we have any idea at all what reality really looks like inside.
Admittedly sometimes we talk about what goes on in models as if we're talking about reality herself, but that's just shorthand. No genuine scientist that is true to the scientific method would claim otherwise. Unfortunately there are a few quacks around, and a few that have forgotten the fundamental premises of their discipline, but that's true in any sphere of endeavour.
I know what you mean, but strictly speaking it's not a valid statement.
You cannot be a scientist and a Christian at the same time. The "scientist" is not a scientist unless he applies the scientific method to his subject matter, which cannot be done to religious subjects, and the "Christian" deals in faith, which is not within the realm of discourse of science. The two cannot meet and apply validly at the same time.
When they do meet in one person (and you're definitely not on your own in that), then it is because both the scientist and the Christian have sacrificed strict consistency within their respective disciplines in order to be able to live together at the same address. It's a very common human compromise, but hopelessly invalid in any strong sense.
Actually, if the cartoon is to be believed, he's got attitude jets above the main thrust units. I wonder if they just tap into the pressure chambers of the main rockets or are self-contained? Probably the latter since they're shown still working after main jet cutoff.
I sure hope that he's modeled this. Personally I'd want to send up an unmanned version first!
Keeping the centre of gravity of the whole assembly below the thrust point is no guarantee of heading continually upwards at all, unless the upward progress is very slow or the rockets are either controllable in direction or in thrust. As I understand it, these peroxide units are neither.
Unless the thrusts are ideally balanced, he's just going to rise up, loop back down, and crash head first. (OK, more elaborate multi-turn loops are possible as well, but you get the idea.)
Although it's commendable that Bruce Perens and others are interested in the interaction between free/open-source software and the commercial and/or legal systems, we shouldn't infer from this that the relationship is stronger than it really is.
The success of free/open-source software is not dependent on its large-scale (or even small-scale) adoption by the commercial sector. The community is a totally independent organism with its own positive-feedback growth mechanisms, and at its most commercially-affected, all it does is take specifications from the commercial sector as additional input, occasionally. It certainly doesn't need to do so to survive and grow, and it certainly doesn't need the sanction of the courts for us to continue to use free software and contribute to its growth.
ESR was right to say that the commercial world would do well to adopt open-source practice, but that doesn't mean that there is a reciprocal dependency. In many respects, commercial interest just creates inertia which limits the natural growth potential of free software, in part for no other reason than that it tends to create big products which are then not easily built upon by the rest of the community. It's the pure RMSian meaning of "success" that gives the community its massive potential, a continuous cycle of enhance-or-reuse and redistribute without limit, and the commercial and legal worlds are simply not a part of it unless they drop the strings that they would otherwise attach to everything they release or try to control.
The short answer to the article then is, it doesn't really matter as far as the success of free/open-source software is concerned, even in the extremely unlikely event (as others have pointed out) that all court rulings go utterly against the GPL.
It's going to take more than just good documentation to keep Linux from developing out of control and spiralling down towards instability. Most non-trivial software heads in the general direction of loss of control as it grows, but operating systems are specially vulnerable to this syndrome because they are highly concurrent systems, and concurrency offers opportunity for problems to emerge with the greatest of ease.
For Linux to remain stable, one of two things are going to have to happen. Either extremely heavy-handed personal control by people with a supreme grasp of everything that's going on in the kernel and who won't be deflected from their straight and narrow path --- that's where we are now, so be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when knocking it. Or, fight the problem with technology and abandon the single monolithic unprotected space approach and partition the kernel into a large number of interacting but separate domains using the MMU plus well-specified and relatively stable internal interfaces. Needless to say, the second of these approaches would result in an utterly different kernel altogether, but at least it would have a longer life expectancy.
The current kernel is as brilliant as it is because of the brilliance of the people that are keeping it from falling apart under force of change. But there is a limit to human intellect, at least in the current pre-nanotech timeframe. The current developers should accept that, and work towards a kernel design that reduces dependency on their brilliance by providing an effective assortment of hardware-assisted guarantees. Learn from the user-space design of Unix. It's a good model.
I'd say that the main flaw in Penrose's argument stems from the fact that he seems to be seeking religion rather than searching for scientific (ie. testable) explanations.
I like well-written books that propose alternative theories, but they've got to have some sort of solid framework and internal consistency to be worth reading. The Emperor's New Mind was great as long as Penrose stuck to reviewing previous science, but appalling thereafter. I don't recall ever having read a popular science book containing so much handwaving, copouts, and defeatism. He's desperate to prove that scientific investigation is dead in the water when it comes to the mind, it seems to me. Put that together with some of the mystical mumbo jumbo that appeared liberally and it all starts to add up to a personal search for his God and The Reason He Must Exist.
Bleh, a very disappointing read.
The success of free/open-source software is not dependent on its large-scale (or even small-scale) adoption by the commercial sector. The community is a totally independent organism with its own positive-feedback growth mechanisms, and at its most commercially-affected, all it does is take specifications from the commercial sector as additional input, occasionally. It certainly doesn't need to do so to survive and grow.
ESR was right to say that the commercial world would do well to adopt open-source practice, but that doesn't mean that there is a reciprocal dependency. In many respects, commercial interest just creates inertia which limits the natural growth potential of free software, in part for no other reason than that it tends to create big products which are then not easily built upon by the rest of the community. It's the pure RMSian meaning of "success" that gives the community its massive potential, a continuous cycle of enhance-or-reuse and redistribute without limit, and the commercial world is simply not a part of it unless they drop the strings that they would otherwise attach to everything they release.
The short answer to the article then is, it doesn't really matter as far as the success of free/open-source software is concerned. The only really relevant aspect to it is that greater awareness of these issues results in more money being available for community-aware developers in general, which for the most part is probably good.
The entire premise of associating skin tones with pornography is flawed. It's trivial to create a work that would be widely regarded as pornographic despite not showing ANY normal skin tones at all, or even any skin at all.
Pornography is not a property of images. It is a property of a culture, and of the value judgements that that culture makes about sex and nudity.
Imbued as we are with American values acquired through film, we tend to forget the above, but in Europe we're fortunate enough to have a million beaches where nudity is nothing special to bring back home the relativity of values. Nothing else makes the point so effectively.
That sudden eruption of madness from Bill Joy had a very obvious cause: he was sitting right next to John Searle! The madness of illogic is highly contagious.
(Ray Kurzweil was there as well, but his mind is at least 20 years ahead of those of the other two, so their Neanderthal pack rantings were just "Ughh, Ughh, Grunt!" to him.)
Despite all the hoopla and heat and large amounts of time being wasted by a lot of people on this issue, at the end of the day, what will happen is what people on the net want to happen. The genie's out of the bottle, and nothing short of a total international police state has any chance of putting the little people back "into their place". Men with guns will still try to exert the will of those in political and monetary power every now and then, but you can't successfully hold back the tide with the occasional sweep of a broom.
;-) Like supports like. Don't expect any acceptance of the new online reality from that quarter.
Nor can you do so with commandments from on high. The pronouncements of judges or of Moses himself won't make any real difference at all except in closing off one particular avenue or another. But there are infinite avenues to try.
Furthermore, only lawyers gain from the current focus on appealing to reason through the courts. It's doomed to failure simply because the courts are part of the establishment, whereas everyone associated with the net is a heinous outlaw.
In that case we'll all be buying the Yopy instead of Webpads, since "third quarter of 2000" really means mid-2001 in the shops, earliest.
I wish these damn mobile computers didn't have to be made with colour displays for marketing reasons though, as the resulting poor battery life makes them almost unsuitable for their main target market. We need something between laptop power consumption and the Palm's three-months-on-two-AAAs frugality, say a week's use between charges. The Yopy's StrongArm is even more frugal than the Crusoe, but the colour LCD makes that irrelevant. Bleh.
You're looking at the Genesis 2000, which is another beast altogether: the CPU is listed as an "NS Geode GXLV 233MHz processor".
:-) It seems to compete directly with the Corel/Rebel Netwinder.
The lack of built-in video display in the G2K kinda limits its use as a webpad.
The Webpad in contrast *is* Crusoe and Linux-based, as is readily apparent from the link off www.mobilelinux.com.
I agree, but for a different reason. For Crusoe to take off in the mobile market, its inherent low power must not be compromised by power-guzzling components used around it, as in the case of the Webpad.
A mere 5-6 hours mobile use between charges is ridiculous for a truly mobile device, it's as bad as a laptop. Compare that to the 3 months on a pair of AAA batteries for the Palm -- it's no comparison at all. Crusoe-based webpads need to strike a happy medium to be useful, something like a week's use between charges, otherwise there'll be nothing special about Crusoe-based equipment and people will stick with tried-and-tested technology instead.
Somebody's got their basic premise wrong. Water is everywhere where hydrogen and oxygen concentrations and pressure/temperature allow and where other competing reactions don't predominate.
It's not rare at all.
If the Acer really has a monochrome LCD as you say then it could be useful as a mobile support platform since it'll have usable battery life. In contrast, the Yopy's colour screen is going to make it mobile only as long as you take along the mains charger, ie. no more mobile than a laptop.
SF is a geeky thing, yet here we are bashing an SF film. For an analyst (which is what most column writers seek to be, and Jon certainly is), that makes for interesting fodder, so I'd have been most surprised if he hadn't seen it more than once as research for the item.
Also, remember that Jon Katz is a writer, so he must have some sympathy for other writers when their novels get messed up, which by all accounts this one certainly did. I haven't seen the film yet, but I've read the novel 3 or 4 times over many years (I read a lot of SF, good and bad, and if it's on my shelf then it gets reread) and it's as readable as most 2nd-class SF, neither outstandingly good nor outstandingly bad, and I don't have a problem with long books, only with short ones. As others have said, it's an up-front hard-SF book that should have been ideal for an all-action movie, so if the end result was unadulterated crap then the blame must go squarely on the director, screenplay writers and producer.
The blame can't be placed on the studio though --- all they care about is box-office success. Whether it's total bollocks or not is irrelevant.