The GPL is no longer available to developers of Second Life clients, because Linden Lab has added new restrictions on a developer's freedom to develop and distribute, and those restrictions are not GPL-compliant.
Lindens have to choose one, either GPL licensing, or removing the developer restrictions on developers given in the document linked from the Slashdot summary. They can't have both simultaneously, the GPL doesn't allow it.
Don't confuse this with Linden's right to dictate the terms of their service, which they of course have. The conflict with the GPL is not in their restrictions on the USAGE of a modified client, but in their imposing restrictions on the freedom to develop and distribute it.
The GPL doesn't care about usage, it is only concerned with the freedom to develop and distribute.
The beauty of the GPLed client is that users and developers can choose which servers to point their clients at--and pick the ones that have terms they agree wtih.
Unfortunately, no. The sources can no longer be licensed under GPL, because Linden's new policy conflicts with GPLv2's clause 6:
"You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
This is literal wording taken from the GPLv2 license, and is further reinforced in the GPLv2 FAQ.
Linden Lab is imposing massive further restrictions on developer recipients of their code, making it completely impossible for them to distribute the code without accepting those restrictions. This restriction of the ability to distribute code is not permitted by the GPL (of any version).
GPL cannot be used to grant fewer freedoms than the GPL specifies. That's a core term of the license.
The freedom to develop and distribute cannot be impeded while you license under the GPL.
Sadly, Valve is living in the past, a past in which computers were weak and booted each game from floppy instead of running an operating system, so that nothing but the game-controlled environment would be running. Those days are long gone.
Computers today are powerful enablers of their owners' wishes, and that includes personal game automation tools of many kinds, not only aimbots but also keyboard remappers and command scripting, extra radars, drop discovery scanners, damage rate calculators, quest handlers, and many other things. It also includes many kinds of accessibility aids for those with impaired eyesight, hearing or limb mobility problems, allowing the disabled to play games which would otherwise be beyond their physical abilities without such aids. And it's not just extra software that extends the capabilities of game players, but add-on hardware as well, such as special gaming keyboards, joysticks, and other dedicated controllers. All of this falls into a single category: making the whole computer an empowering extension of its user.
Valve (and other game providers) don't seem able to cope with this new situation, and blindly continue with their "anyone using computer assist is a cheat" rhetoric while the world changes around them. It's attempting to sweep back the tide, and it won't work any more than DRM will work.
The correct response to this changing environment is to consider the whole computer as the "player", not just the human sitting at a dumb keyboard and mouse. This impacts on how games must be written. Everything in the game client must be considered accessible to the player, and everything which the player must not be able to access must be hidden on the game servers. The interface between this "extended player" and the controlled environment of the game must be the network, with no secret game data sent to the client until such a time when the game allows it to be known.
Game developers are loath to write games in this fashion, firstly because it slows the games down unless the developers are clever, and secondly because it's harder to write and susceptible to network problems. Well that's tough, it's not optional in today's world if you insist on controlling the game environment. It's a delusion to think that there is a level playing field anyway --- hardcore gamers with hotrod gaming machines and 100Mbps broadband links have bought themselves a powerful advantage compared to the casual player (let alone compared to the player with disabilities), yet somehow Valve doesn't see this as "cheating"?
There never was a level playing field. Game companies need to come to terms with that, and work with modern gamers instead of against the march of technology. "Game developers as Luddites" would be a funny saying if unfortunately it weren't so true in many cases.
Get with it Valve. You can do better than this. Warfare and gaming and virtually all of modern existence is now automated, and it would be nice if you accepted that your gaming worldview needs some modernizing, as do your coding practices.
Trying to accommodate the demands of each foreign country's governments on a case-by-case basis in order to do business in their countries is an extremely dangerous game to play. You can rationalize away small losses of freedom as "fitting in with national conditions", but there is nothing to stop "fitting in" going all the way to directly supporting dictatorships and the worst kind of abuses of human rights.
When you don't have fixed principles, you have no principles at all.
Some will say "Google does have a fixed principle: to make money." The trouble is, that is not a principle about human rights, it's a principle that expressly allows human rights to be negotiated away. In effect, it's a principle to do evil against people in order to do well for profits.
Google needs to get its head sorted out before this starts to go really bad. Because it will.
While it's nice to hear of new species being discovered, 94 is not a large number in this context, and you certainly don't need to travel all round the globe to find new species. They're everywhere around us, in every nook and cranny of the biosphere, in the air and inside rocks (even a few miles down), living on the surface of larger organisms and also inside. Even our bodies are hosts to unknown species --- like all higher animals, we're really just mobile habitats for smaller forms of life, and wherever there is life, there is unknown life as well.
We've catalogued roughly 1.4 million species, but biologists estimate that 10 to 30 million are still unknown to science. This page from University of Michigan gives a detailed breakdown of the state of our species catalogue circa 2006. It puts TFA's study into perspective rather well.
"Makes one long for the good-old-days of 3% student loans, doesn't it?"
No it doesn't.
A civilized nation should provide free education to the highest level each person wishes to attain, because that's part of believing that the nation's most most important resource is its people.
But when a government just wants dumb consumers, then it's a very different matter.
No amount of CO2 cutbacks is going to stop climate change and the sea levels rising, even if CO2 emissions dropped to zero tomorrow. The relevant time constants are from hundreds to thousands of years.
This pretty much highlights how it's all primarily a media circus and political game. The science is lost entirely in the noise.
You have to remember how product marketting works in companies. It's not a rational process, but involves someone tabling an idea that catches the imagination of a bunch of droids who quite literally know almost nothing and aren't capable of producing anything themselves --- that's why they're in Marketting after all.
As a result, technical issues don't matter, but identifiable feature points and catchy slogans do. Factual details of Linux are totally off the agenda, while "Linux Inside" might work, and a cute penguin on the box might too. In contrast, actually talking about Linux or open source is as horrifying as talking about the voltage levels on a USB connector -- it becomes "technical" rather than just a feature point or icon on a box. It's not their world.
Give the marketeers something that matches their M.O.. A few slogans would be a good start.
Having read the article, it's clear that the designer has no idea how virtual worlds and especially Second Life (SL) and its many clones like Opensim work. He's making up a legal theory about virtual property and artist rights in virtual worlds that simply doesn't exist, yet. It's wishful thinking.
If he created something in the physical world, the law provides him with some default protections, for good or for bad, and he still has those protections now. If he wanted permanence of his works, he should have held onto his own copies, not given away his backups --- that's his own negligence, nobody else's.
The following is how virtual worlds of the Second Life type work, condensed: If you make some object privately, nobody can see it. When you place your object into the virtual world, in order for others to see it the world has to make copies of it and send those copies to everyone in the region, so that everyone present can see your object rendered in their clients. Everybody gets a copy of your object: copying and distribution is an inherent part of the implementation.
Under such an architecture, real-life artist's restrictive expectations and control-freakism over distribution of their creations just doesn't work. This artist didn't understand the nature of the medium for which he was creating. And while he'll probably try to bring lawyers and the DMCA into it, that whole area is a complete unknown in the context of virtual worlds at present. Judges don't know and can't know how it works either (they're still catching up with how the Internet works anyway), and past legal precedent is largely inapplicable as it would break the worlds.
What's more, all of this is changing continually and at an increasing pace too, and nobody knows where it's going --- the 3D metaverse is still an extremely fuzzy evolving concept. The only thing that's very clear already is that virtual goods do not obey the same rules as physical goods, and so applying current real-world laws to the virtual situation is (i) broken by design, (ii) obsolete before it even starts, and (iii) not enforceable.
In addition, both the clients and the Opensim SL-lookalike world are open sourced, which is one reason why the pace of development is so huge, yet it also means that the guarantees are even fewer. It's important to understand this if you're going to work in the area. The artist is making up a case out of ignorance here.
The interviewer's questions did lack some tact and diplomacy, but they also contained some good insights that Stroustrup dismissed out of hand just because they weren't phrased in a politically-sensitive way.
To my mind, Stroustrup is focussed more on maintaining a good diplomatic position than on producing a good language. The "best" C++ language is not the one that causes the least friction in the committee.
And he is completely and utterly unable to see C++'s continued descent into becoming an unlearnable language.
Maybe he needs to experience first-hand the collapse of a few commercial projects and the loss of time, effort and money through C++ complexity in order to shake up his wishful thinking a bit. Perhaps he's too close to the coal face to see the larger picture. Complexity causes failure.
Programming in the large isn't about being clever. It's about being unclever, and hence producing maintainable code. That hasn't yet sunk in for our dear Bjarne.
'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made content free. Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites,' Murdoch said.
I think that the poor guy has been misquoted. What he really must have meant was:
'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, and it has made news free. Accordingly we intend to close down.'
What freedom would that be? Software that is BSD licensed is free without restrictions whereas the GPL does restrict the use of code to only other GPL'ed software and requires that you provide the source to any distributed derivatives. That is a restriction on freedom.
The only extra "freedoms" provided by BSD are asymmetric freedoms, namely those that increase the freedom of one party at the expense of another. The GPL provides only symmetric freedoms, so that everyone benefits equally.
The classic example is that BSD allows an open-source, community-developed app to be taken, modified, and sold without revealing the modified source code. This benefits the seller (with money) without benefitting the community that originated the code (with updates), so it's asymmetric. What's more, the gain by one party has to be compared against the size of the community that gains nothing from the hidden modifications, which exacerbates the degree of imbalance of freedoms.
Because the GPL provides symmetric freedoms, it maximizes fairness automatically. You may say that "BSD is more free", but the additional freedoms are entirely anti-fair, so it's hard to call them actual "freedoms". "Taking liberties" comes a lot closer.
There is a simple example from the physical world that illustrates this well: a murderer is "more free" if he is allowed to murder people at will, without being put in jail --- indeed, one might shout "There is less freedom if murderers are locked up in jail!". However, that would only be true from the murderer's point of view taken in isolation, whereas from the community's point of view there is more freedom (people not being murdered) if he is restrained in jail.
The BSD vs GPL issue is similar. You can call BSD "more free" than GPL only if you focus solely on the additional "freedoms" that it provides to people who wish to diminish the freedom of others. This is true only when viewed from that narrow perspective. It is not true when viewed from the wider perspective of symmetric community freedoms.
This makes arguments about "which license is more free" quite senseless, because they are not comparing like with like. GPL is a license which maximizes community freedoms and fairness, while BSD maximizes the freedom of one (mainly corporates) while reducing the freedoms and fairness in the community.
This astronomic loss of biodiversity isn't so much about high-profile rhinos and tigers and cute pandas, but about the almost unseen microbiota and microfauna throughout the biosphere, upon which all of our food and even our own bodies depend. It very rarely makes the news (not sexy enough), but we may not pull out of this one.
Apparently we don't need a big rock to hit us at all. We seem to be totally self-sufficient at achieving extinction.
But it seems kind of silly to just fold up tents until some reasonably blue-sky software meets production goals.
That's pragmatic advice to safeguard Adeona (I agree), but most of the responses here seem to have interpreted your advice to also mean dropping any interest in OpenDHT, because you called it "blue-sky"(which possibly suggests that "it's not gonna happen").
I think that a working Distributed Hash Table that is also scalable would be an immensely valuable resource to the community, and would end up underpinning many other projects besides Adeona. The legions of FOSS comprise not only coders but also many visionary designers and competent researchers as well, so I think we can do better than just leave OpenDHT to sink or swim without help.
How about fostering some more research-oriented work on OpenDHT (if the current design isn't a viable one) instead of abandoning it as the mood seems to be at the moment?
The book that I wrote is mine. It's content belongs to me. Period.
You're quite wrong. The book belonged to you (period), until the moment when you published it. Note the root of that word, pub-, it's very important.
From that moment in time, the book became part of public culture, progressively less and less yours and more and more a part of the public mind as its community of readers expands. And eventually, when it passes into the public domain, the work will not be yours at all, despite the fact that you will still be its author. See, there's a difference.
For a writer, you're curiously unaware of the relationship between a written work and the minds of readers. A book isn't the paper it's written on, but the words and ideas contained within. When a person reads your book, those words and ideas are inevitably donated to that reader, every last bit of them (the paper is irrelevant). Dwell on that a while, because you don't appear to have absorbed the implications.
For each person who reads your work, your "codified super insightful knowledge" (as you put it) becomes ever less exclusive, and if you are really popular then your exclusive hold over that knowledge drops close to nil: your work has become part of popular culture, and gained a momentum of its own. You are then no longer its owner but merely its author, and your earnings from it will be far more a product of the work's cultural significance than of your publisher's marketting. It will no longer be a "product", but an element of culture with earnings as a side effect.
You might wish to reflect a little on this essay from Baen: http://www.baen.com/library/ . As long as you are at war with your readers, I predict a future of hand-wringing and unhappiness.
The science of extra-solar planet detection is very interesting, but speculation about surface conditions that might exist doesn't reflect the science at all, it's just fodder for the media and bloggers.
The only things we know are extremely rough estimates of orbital parameters and mass, although the host star is well characterised. The speculation is conjuring up quite specific images in people's minds, and while fun, they're not justified. It's leading people without an astronomy background astray.
TFA didn't really phrase the paragraph about waste elimination too well.
It's not so much that "leaching out of harmful substances into the bloodstream" is a problem. The real issue is devising a process for the yeasts that produces only normal metabolic waste. Given that, waste elimination is really easy, since the body has terrific mechanisms for locking up toxins and circulatory systems for eliminating them.
As many others have pointed out, the name "jet pack" conveys entirely the wrong meaning. Jet packs are by implication untethered, with the "pack" containing everything required by the jet. So we need a more appropriate name to convey that the pack is tethered, and that the jet is pulling something on the end of its tether along.
Well the answer is obvious: this is a JET CART, because the jet takes the place of a horse and is pulling the cart (boat) along. Naturally the horse is tethered to the cart, and it can't get any further from the cart than the length of its tether (pipe) --- the name conveys the right meaning exactly.
With a bit of flexibility from readers, this could even be taken as a car analogy.;-)
And therefore Apple's patent is invalid, as it fails the test of not closing off the only way of doing something.
Fingers moving about on a point-detection surface are inherently ambiguous in their meaning, and therefore only a heuristic method can handle the problem -- a deterministic algorithm cannot.
The USPTO will happily allow you to patent breathing, but that doesn't mean that it will stand up in court.
It will be interesting to see Apple try to defend their Imaginary Property on this issue.
The following might have some bearing on the recent changes at EMI.
The lead designer and CTO of Linden Lab (the creators of Second Life) Cory Ondrejka left them a year ago, and halfway through 2008 he joined EMI as a Senior VP in digital strategy. Link that with the fact that between himself and CEO Philip Rosedale, they created a world in which all world content belongs to the residents who create it, not to Linden Lab. What's more, they open-sourced the Second Life client, and they have worked very actively with the SL community at creating open protocols.
Inevitably, Cory Ondrejka will have taken some of that with him to EMI.
Such moves do suggest that EMI is on the path towards openness, and that they realize the world is changing dramatically. While that's a long way from making them non-evil, they are at least putting some distance between themselves and the main pack of dinosaurs.
The home recharge rate difficulties you outline don't really exist.
If mobile supercaps become affordable, then fixed home supercaps will be even cheaper, probably by a large factor because they can be much larger and heavier and less energy-dense. (You could even use lead acid batteries in the home charging station if that turns out cheaper.)
This means that your home AC supply can charge your home supercap station at whatever rate the mains wiring can stand (in particular, overnight when the electricity rates are cheaper), and then when the car comes home the home station just slams its stored power into the car's supercap at a huge rate and in a short time.
Transferring high power a very short distance is not a problem: just think very fat copper busbars and motorized conical high-area connections.
It's not only in the far east that such different subjects are sometimes juxtaposed for effect.
Don't forget our own utterly fantastic Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics on this side of the world, which really deserves a medal. If a blend of pop culture and highly mathematical science raises a smile at the same time as presenting some serious physics, maybe the approach isn't as barmy as it seems.
Also remember that we do something similar in computing too, for instance in Head First Design Patterns and other books in the series, which present their material through silly little stories. A lot of people seem to like that approach.
There's more than one way to skin a cat, and that seems to apply to technical literature too.
In my view, TFA has got it very wrong because the writer has romanticized a fictitious "lone scientist" into existence. In reality, so-called "lone scientists" never work or think alone at all, and they never have. Instead, scientific thinking always takes place within an international sea of ideas.
Throughout all of history, scientific progress has always occurred within a framework of communication between thinking people, and those thought processes arise out of education in the relevant subjects followed by extremely extensive reading and discussing of ideas with others. New scientific insight has never popped out of nothing by some sort of magic. Novel ideas arise only by alternative analysis of other people's published or communicated thoughts.
Instead of the lone scientist being at a disadvantage now versus large organized groups, the opposite may even be true because of the Internet. Never before have lone individuals had so much up-to-date information at their disposal (including research data), and never before have they had the means to communicate with others so easily. This suggests that the lone scientist has a lot going for him or her today, at least in part.
Science contains two parts however, a theoretical one and an experimental one, and there is no doubt that the experimental side of science benefits hugely from good funding. However, you need the germ of a new idea before you can turn it into a theory let alone test it, and new ideas don't spring up directly through funding --- it's a more complex relationship.
Large research groups certainly provide a good environment for high-bandwidth scientific discussion among peers in a scientific discipline, but even those scientists will be communicating with others worldwide, particularly through conferences and publications, and so they're still adding to the international sea of ideas which is the real bedrock of science. Things haven't really changed much.
Governments hate situations that they do not control, and this is true 10 times over for a government and defense establishment that has got very accustomed to exerting control everywhere, either through financial institutions or sometimes force of arms.
The Internet represents the "ultimate threat", a shadowland of unfettered freedom that they consider anarchy (ie. they don't control it, so it must be bad), and it's only a matter of time before they try to put it in shackles. That can't do that by clamping down on ordinary users without an excuse, so they invent fictitious enemies instead. It's a great M.O., as it's easy to scare monger, get media coverage, and then obtains funds to fight the War On mirage.
They failed in all the other War On X's, and they'll fail on this one too, but that doesn't matter in the slightest since it's a fiction anyway: while failing, they'll have sucked in tons of tax dollars and tightened their grip further, so it's a gain.
If the uploaded data is not available for download, but is only available to AWS applications running on Amazon's (paid for) compute service, then Amazon deserves nothing but contempt and an "Up yours" for this.
It seems that working for a living is out of fashion at Amazon. They expect people to supply them with resources so that they can charge them and others for their use. It's creative business bullshit, and not even remotely funny.
Amazon, how about you PAY BACK for the privilege of having the datasets uploaded to you by hosting them freely for the Internet community, and only on the back of that you charge for local, higher-speed access by AWS applications? Or would that be too "fair" for an Amazon business practice?
Slashdot Mirror
I've detailed the issue in a prior post.
The GPL is no longer available to developers of Second Life clients, because Linden Lab has added new restrictions on a developer's freedom to develop and distribute, and those restrictions are not GPL-compliant.
Lindens have to choose one, either GPL licensing, or removing the developer restrictions on developers given in the document linked from the Slashdot summary. They can't have both simultaneously, the GPL doesn't allow it.
Don't confuse this with Linden's right to dictate the terms of their service, which they of course have. The conflict with the GPL is not in their restrictions on the USAGE of a modified client, but in their imposing restrictions on the freedom to develop and distribute it.
The GPL doesn't care about usage, it is only concerned with the freedom to develop and distribute.
Unfortunately, no. The sources can no longer be licensed under GPL, because Linden's new policy conflicts with GPLv2's clause 6:
"You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
This is literal wording taken from the GPLv2 license, and is further reinforced in the GPLv2 FAQ.
Linden Lab is imposing massive further restrictions on developer recipients of their code, making it completely impossible for them to distribute the code without accepting those restrictions. This restriction of the ability to distribute code is not permitted by the GPL (of any version).
GPL cannot be used to grant fewer freedoms than the GPL specifies. That's a core term of the license.
The freedom to develop and distribute cannot be impeded while you license under the GPL.
Sadly, Valve is living in the past, a past in which computers were weak and booted each game from floppy instead of running an operating system, so that nothing but the game-controlled environment would be running. Those days are long gone.
Computers today are powerful enablers of their owners' wishes, and that includes personal game automation tools of many kinds, not only aimbots but also keyboard remappers and command scripting, extra radars, drop discovery scanners, damage rate calculators, quest handlers, and many other things. It also includes many kinds of accessibility aids for those with impaired eyesight, hearing or limb mobility problems, allowing the disabled to play games which would otherwise be beyond their physical abilities without such aids. And it's not just extra software that extends the capabilities of game players, but add-on hardware as well, such as special gaming keyboards, joysticks, and other dedicated controllers. All of this falls into a single category: making the whole computer an empowering extension of its user.
Valve (and other game providers) don't seem able to cope with this new situation, and blindly continue with their "anyone using computer assist is a cheat" rhetoric while the world changes around them. It's attempting to sweep back the tide, and it won't work any more than DRM will work.
The correct response to this changing environment is to consider the whole computer as the "player", not just the human sitting at a dumb keyboard and mouse. This impacts on how games must be written. Everything in the game client must be considered accessible to the player, and everything which the player must not be able to access must be hidden on the game servers. The interface between this "extended player" and the controlled environment of the game must be the network, with no secret game data sent to the client until such a time when the game allows it to be known.
Game developers are loath to write games in this fashion, firstly because it slows the games down unless the developers are clever, and secondly because it's harder to write and susceptible to network problems. Well that's tough, it's not optional in today's world if you insist on controlling the game environment. It's a delusion to think that there is a level playing field anyway --- hardcore gamers with hotrod gaming machines and 100Mbps broadband links have bought themselves a powerful advantage compared to the casual player (let alone compared to the player with disabilities), yet somehow Valve doesn't see this as "cheating"?
There never was a level playing field. Game companies need to come to terms with that, and work with modern gamers instead of against the march of technology. "Game developers as Luddites" would be a funny saying if unfortunately it weren't so true in many cases.
Get with it Valve. You can do better than this. Warfare and gaming and virtually all of modern existence is now automated, and it would be nice if you accepted that your gaming worldview needs some modernizing, as do your coding practices.
Trying to accommodate the demands of each foreign country's governments on a case-by-case basis in order to do business in their countries is an extremely dangerous game to play. You can rationalize away small losses of freedom as "fitting in with national conditions", but there is nothing to stop "fitting in" going all the way to directly supporting dictatorships and the worst kind of abuses of human rights.
When you don't have fixed principles, you have no principles at all.
Some will say "Google does have a fixed principle: to make money." The trouble is, that is not a principle about human rights, it's a principle that expressly allows human rights to be negotiated away. In effect, it's a principle to do evil against people in order to do well for profits.
Google needs to get its head sorted out before this starts to go really bad. Because it will.
While it's nice to hear of new species being discovered, 94 is not a large number in this context, and you certainly don't need to travel all round the globe to find new species. They're everywhere around us, in every nook and cranny of the biosphere, in the air and inside rocks (even a few miles down), living on the surface of larger organisms and also inside. Even our bodies are hosts to unknown species --- like all higher animals, we're really just mobile habitats for smaller forms of life, and wherever there is life, there is unknown life as well.
We've catalogued roughly 1.4 million species, but biologists estimate that 10 to 30 million are still unknown to science. This page from University of Michigan gives a detailed breakdown of the state of our species catalogue circa 2006. It puts TFA's study into perspective rather well.
No it doesn't.
A civilized nation should provide free education to the highest level each person wishes to attain, because that's part of believing that the nation's most most important resource is its people.
But when a government just wants dumb consumers, then it's a very different matter.
No amount of CO2 cutbacks is going to stop climate change and the sea levels rising, even if CO2 emissions dropped to zero tomorrow. The relevant time constants are from hundreds to thousands of years.
This pretty much highlights how it's all primarily a media circus and political game. The science is lost entirely in the noise.
You have to remember how product marketting works in companies. It's not a rational process, but involves someone tabling an idea that catches the imagination of a bunch of droids who quite literally know almost nothing and aren't capable of producing anything themselves --- that's why they're in Marketting after all.
As a result, technical issues don't matter, but identifiable feature points and catchy slogans do. Factual details of Linux are totally off the agenda, while "Linux Inside" might work, and a cute penguin on the box might too. In contrast, actually talking about Linux or open source is as horrifying as talking about the voltage levels on a USB connector -- it becomes "technical" rather than just a feature point or icon on a box. It's not their world.
Give the marketeers something that matches their M.O.. A few slogans would be a good start.
Having read the article, it's clear that the designer has no idea how virtual worlds and especially Second Life (SL) and its many clones like Opensim work. He's making up a legal theory about virtual property and artist rights in virtual worlds that simply doesn't exist, yet. It's wishful thinking.
If he created something in the physical world, the law provides him with some default protections, for good or for bad, and he still has those protections now. If he wanted permanence of his works, he should have held onto his own copies, not given away his backups --- that's his own negligence, nobody else's.
The following is how virtual worlds of the Second Life type work, condensed: If you make some object privately, nobody can see it. When you place your object into the virtual world, in order for others to see it the world has to make copies of it and send those copies to everyone in the region, so that everyone present can see your object rendered in their clients. Everybody gets a copy of your object: copying and distribution is an inherent part of the implementation.
Under such an architecture, real-life artist's restrictive expectations and control-freakism over distribution of their creations just doesn't work. This artist didn't understand the nature of the medium for which he was creating. And while he'll probably try to bring lawyers and the DMCA into it, that whole area is a complete unknown in the context of virtual worlds at present. Judges don't know and can't know how it works either (they're still catching up with how the Internet works anyway), and past legal precedent is largely inapplicable as it would break the worlds.
What's more, all of this is changing continually and at an increasing pace too, and nobody knows where it's going --- the 3D metaverse is still an extremely fuzzy evolving concept. The only thing that's very clear already is that virtual goods do not obey the same rules as physical goods, and so applying current real-world laws to the virtual situation is (i) broken by design, (ii) obsolete before it even starts, and (iii) not enforceable.
In addition, both the clients and the Opensim SL-lookalike world are open sourced, which is one reason why the pace of development is so huge, yet it also means that the guarantees are even fewer. It's important to understand this if you're going to work in the area. The artist is making up a case out of ignorance here.
The interviewer's questions did lack some tact and diplomacy, but they also contained some good insights that Stroustrup dismissed out of hand just because they weren't phrased in a politically-sensitive way.
To my mind, Stroustrup is focussed more on maintaining a good diplomatic position than on producing a good language. The "best" C++ language is not the one that causes the least friction in the committee.
And he is completely and utterly unable to see C++'s continued descent into becoming an unlearnable language.
Maybe he needs to experience first-hand the collapse of a few commercial projects and the loss of time, effort and money through C++ complexity in order to shake up his wishful thinking a bit. Perhaps he's too close to the coal face to see the larger picture. Complexity causes failure.
Programming in the large isn't about being clever. It's about being unclever, and hence producing maintainable code. That hasn't yet sunk in for our dear Bjarne.
I think that the poor guy has been misquoted. What he really must have meant was:
This has a much closer fit with reality.
The only extra "freedoms" provided by BSD are asymmetric freedoms, namely those that increase the freedom of one party at the expense of another. The GPL provides only symmetric freedoms, so that everyone benefits equally.
The classic example is that BSD allows an open-source, community-developed app to be taken, modified, and sold without revealing the modified source code. This benefits the seller (with money) without benefitting the community that originated the code (with updates), so it's asymmetric. What's more, the gain by one party has to be compared against the size of the community that gains nothing from the hidden modifications, which exacerbates the degree of imbalance of freedoms.
Because the GPL provides symmetric freedoms, it maximizes fairness automatically. You may say that "BSD is more free", but the additional freedoms are entirely anti-fair, so it's hard to call them actual "freedoms". "Taking liberties" comes a lot closer.
There is a simple example from the physical world that illustrates this well: a murderer is "more free" if he is allowed to murder people at will, without being put in jail --- indeed, one might shout "There is less freedom if murderers are locked up in jail!". However, that would only be true from the murderer's point of view taken in isolation, whereas from the community's point of view there is more freedom (people not being murdered) if he is restrained in jail.
The BSD vs GPL issue is similar. You can call BSD "more free" than GPL only if you focus solely on the additional "freedoms" that it provides to people who wish to diminish the freedom of others. This is true only when viewed from that narrow perspective. It is not true when viewed from the wider perspective of symmetric community freedoms.
This makes arguments about "which license is more free" quite senseless, because they are not comparing like with like. GPL is a license which maximizes community freedoms and fairness, while BSD maximizes the freedom of one (mainly corporates) while reducing the freedoms and fairness in the community.
We had 5 major mass extinctions in the past, but the most recent one isn't in the past at all but is happening right now. It began slowly with the rise of Man, but ramped up exponentially with the industrial revolution. Compared to previous extinction events, it's by far the worst of them by many orders of magnitude.
This astronomic loss of biodiversity isn't so much about high-profile rhinos and tigers and cute pandas, but about the almost unseen microbiota and microfauna throughout the biosphere, upon which all of our food and even our own bodies depend. It very rarely makes the news (not sexy enough), but we may not pull out of this one.
Apparently we don't need a big rock to hit us at all. We seem to be totally self-sufficient at achieving extinction.
That's pragmatic advice to safeguard Adeona (I agree), but most of the responses here seem to have interpreted your advice to also mean dropping any interest in OpenDHT, because you called it "blue-sky"(which possibly suggests that "it's not gonna happen").
I think that a working Distributed Hash Table that is also scalable would be an immensely valuable resource to the community, and would end up underpinning many other projects besides Adeona. The legions of FOSS comprise not only coders but also many visionary designers and competent researchers as well, so I think we can do better than just leave OpenDHT to sink or swim without help.
How about fostering some more research-oriented work on OpenDHT (if the current design isn't a viable one) instead of abandoning it as the mood seems to be at the moment?
You're quite wrong. The book belonged to you (period), until the moment when you published it. Note the root of that word, pub- , it's very important.
From that moment in time, the book became part of public culture, progressively less and less yours and more and more a part of the public mind as its community of readers expands. And eventually, when it passes into the public domain, the work will not be yours at all, despite the fact that you will still be its author. See, there's a difference.
For a writer, you're curiously unaware of the relationship between a written work and the minds of readers. A book isn't the paper it's written on, but the words and ideas contained within. When a person reads your book, those words and ideas are inevitably donated to that reader, every last bit of them (the paper is irrelevant). Dwell on that a while, because you don't appear to have absorbed the implications.
For each person who reads your work, your "codified super insightful knowledge" (as you put it) becomes ever less exclusive, and if you are really popular then your exclusive hold over that knowledge drops close to nil: your work has become part of popular culture, and gained a momentum of its own. You are then no longer its owner but merely its author, and your earnings from it will be far more a product of the work's cultural significance than of your publisher's marketting. It will no longer be a "product", but an element of culture with earnings as a side effect.
You might wish to reflect a little on this essay from Baen: http://www.baen.com/library/ . As long as you are at war with your readers, I predict a future of hand-wringing and unhappiness.
The science of extra-solar planet detection is very interesting, but speculation about surface conditions that might exist doesn't reflect the science at all, it's just fodder for the media and bloggers.
The only things we know are extremely rough estimates of orbital parameters and mass, although the host star is well characterised. The speculation is conjuring up quite specific images in people's minds, and while fun, they're not justified. It's leading people without an astronomy background astray.
TFA didn't really phrase the paragraph about waste elimination too well.
It's not so much that "leaching out of harmful substances into the bloodstream" is a problem. The real issue is devising a process for the yeasts that produces only normal metabolic waste. Given that, waste elimination is really easy, since the body has terrific mechanisms for locking up toxins and circulatory systems for eliminating them.
As many others have pointed out, the name "jet pack" conveys entirely the wrong meaning. Jet packs are by implication untethered, with the "pack" containing everything required by the jet. So we need a more appropriate name to convey that the pack is tethered, and that the jet is pulling something on the end of its tether along.
Well the answer is obvious: this is a JET CART, because the jet takes the place of a horse and is pulling the cart (boat) along. Naturally the horse is tethered to the cart, and it can't get any further from the cart than the length of its tether (pipe) --- the name conveys the right meaning exactly.
With a bit of flexibility from readers, this could even be taken as a car analogy. ;-)
And therefore Apple's patent is invalid, as it fails the test of not closing off the only way of doing something.
Fingers moving about on a point-detection surface are inherently ambiguous in their meaning, and therefore only a heuristic method can handle the problem -- a deterministic algorithm cannot.
The USPTO will happily allow you to patent breathing, but that doesn't mean that it will stand up in court.
It will be interesting to see Apple try to defend their Imaginary Property on this issue.
The following might have some bearing on the recent changes at EMI.
The lead designer and CTO of Linden Lab (the creators of Second Life) Cory Ondrejka left them a year ago, and halfway through 2008 he joined EMI as a Senior VP in digital strategy. Link that with the fact that between himself and CEO Philip Rosedale, they created a world in which all world content belongs to the residents who create it, not to Linden Lab. What's more, they open-sourced the Second Life client, and they have worked very actively with the SL community at creating open protocols.
Inevitably, Cory Ondrejka will have taken some of that with him to EMI.
Such moves do suggest that EMI is on the path towards openness, and that they realize the world is changing dramatically. While that's a long way from making them non-evil, they are at least putting some distance between themselves and the main pack of dinosaurs.
The home recharge rate difficulties you outline don't really exist.
If mobile supercaps become affordable, then fixed home supercaps will be even cheaper, probably by a large factor because they can be much larger and heavier and less energy-dense. (You could even use lead acid batteries in the home charging station if that turns out cheaper.)
This means that your home AC supply can charge your home supercap station at whatever rate the mains wiring can stand (in particular, overnight when the electricity rates are cheaper), and then when the car comes home the home station just slams its stored power into the car's supercap at a huge rate and in a short time.
Transferring high power a very short distance is not a problem: just think very fat copper busbars and motorized conical high-area connections.
It's not only in the far east that such different subjects are sometimes juxtaposed for effect.
Don't forget our own utterly fantastic Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics on this side of the world, which really deserves a medal. If a blend of pop culture and highly mathematical science raises a smile at the same time as presenting some serious physics, maybe the approach isn't as barmy as it seems.
Also remember that we do something similar in computing too, for instance in Head First Design Patterns and other books in the series, which present their material through silly little stories. A lot of people seem to like that approach.
There's more than one way to skin a cat, and that seems to apply to technical literature too.
In my view, TFA has got it very wrong because the writer has romanticized a fictitious "lone scientist" into existence. In reality, so-called "lone scientists" never work or think alone at all, and they never have. Instead, scientific thinking always takes place within an international sea of ideas.
Throughout all of history, scientific progress has always occurred within a framework of communication between thinking people, and those thought processes arise out of education in the relevant subjects followed by extremely extensive reading and discussing of ideas with others. New scientific insight has never popped out of nothing by some sort of magic. Novel ideas arise only by alternative analysis of other people's published or communicated thoughts.
Instead of the lone scientist being at a disadvantage now versus large organized groups, the opposite may even be true because of the Internet. Never before have lone individuals had so much up-to-date information at their disposal (including research data), and never before have they had the means to communicate with others so easily. This suggests that the lone scientist has a lot going for him or her today, at least in part.
Science contains two parts however, a theoretical one and an experimental one, and there is no doubt that the experimental side of science benefits hugely from good funding. However, you need the germ of a new idea before you can turn it into a theory let alone test it, and new ideas don't spring up directly through funding --- it's a more complex relationship.
Large research groups certainly provide a good environment for high-bandwidth scientific discussion among peers in a scientific discipline, but even those scientists will be communicating with others worldwide, particularly through conferences and publications, and so they're still adding to the international sea of ideas which is the real bedrock of science. Things haven't really changed much.
Governments hate situations that they do not control, and this is true 10 times over for a government and defense establishment that has got very accustomed to exerting control everywhere, either through financial institutions or sometimes force of arms.
The Internet represents the "ultimate threat", a shadowland of unfettered freedom that they consider anarchy (ie. they don't control it, so it must be bad), and it's only a matter of time before they try to put it in shackles. That can't do that by clamping down on ordinary users without an excuse, so they invent fictitious enemies instead. It's a great M.O., as it's easy to scare monger, get media coverage, and then obtains funds to fight the War On mirage.
They failed in all the other War On X's, and they'll fail on this one too, but that doesn't matter in the slightest since it's a fiction anyway: while failing, they'll have sucked in tons of tax dollars and tightened their grip further, so it's a gain.
If the uploaded data is not available for download, but is only available to AWS applications running on Amazon's (paid for) compute service, then Amazon deserves nothing but contempt and an "Up yours" for this.
It seems that working for a living is out of fashion at Amazon. They expect people to supply them with resources so that they can charge them and others for their use. It's creative business bullshit, and not even remotely funny.
Amazon, how about you PAY BACK for the privilege of having the datasets uploaded to you by hosting them freely for the Internet community, and only on the back of that you charge for local, higher-speed access by AWS applications? Or would that be too "fair" for an Amazon business practice?