"Obviously in a clueful, uncorrupt legal system Sendmail would have to be secure against patent infringement suits from Microsoft, simply because of its primordial venerability."
This is absurd. Just because Sendmail itself is over 20 years old doesn't mean that all the code in it is over 20 years old. If process XYZ was patented 5 years ago, and the Sendmail code to do XYZ was added 3 years ago, then Sendmail doesn't have any special protection against infringment and it can't serve as its own prior art.
But that's just exactly the point. The net was a much more heterogenous and complicated place twenty years ago. Sendmail from its inceptions was designed to do far more complicated things than modern mailers need to do, and there is nothing (apart from authenticate senders) which modern mailers need to be able to do which Sendmail could not do twenty years ago. Sendmail hasn't been innovating? No, you're right, it hasn't. It is the one, gnarly, ancient, turing equivalent mailer, capable of routing any mail over any protocol. There's nothing else in the MTA space even one quarter as sophisticated - because these days there's no longer any need for mailers to be so sophisticated.
Yes, Sendmail is much older than any MS mail system. Yes, Sendmail is ancient, obscure, cranky and historically buggy. That's not the point. The point is that Sendmail provides copper bottomed prior art for all other Internet or multi-protocol mail transfer agents, and, as the dominant MTA of today's world, prevents Microsoft imposing new delivery and authentication protocols without negotiating with Open Source.
Obviously in a clueful, uncorrupt legal system Sendmail would have to be secure against patent infringement suits from Microsoft, simply because of its primordial venerability. However, if Microsoft could find a lever to attack Sendmail, then all other open source mail transport agents would almost certainly fall too. You'd better hope the courts are clueful and uncorrupt, and that Sendmail can afford to pay defence lawyers.
Microsoft's patents on the start bar configuration, logos and other interface technology have made it very difficult to develop competitive operating systems, or even for students to develop operating systems of their own.
Well, I can see why that got modded as funny. Since when was a GUI an essential part of an operating system? It's at best a layer on top, and if you haven't sufficiently abstracted the API that you can't easily change either to a different GUI or to a completely different user interaction model then frankly you haven't done the job.
Software of today can run on a variety of different hardware, but there is a degree of similarity between the different types of hardware that probably won't exist between todays computers and those available a hundred years from today, much less two.
When I was a young programmer, I was shown a water quality analysis program used by an English water authority that some colleagues of mine at ICL were particularly proud of. Not that they'd written it. It was running on an ICL 2900 series mainframe running VME. But the software wasn't written for a 2900 series, so it actually ran on ICL 1900 emulator, running MOPS. But the software didn't run on a 1900 series, so the emulated 1900 was running an emulator of an older English Electric computer whose designation I've forgotten. But the software wasn't written for the English Electric computer, so the English Electric emulator running on the the 1900 emulator running on the 2900 was running an emulator of the world's first commercial computer, LEO, for which the software was actually written.
When I saw this program in 1985 it was already thirty years old; it was still being used because it was still useful. If it is still in use it will be fifty years old, and (as 2900s are now very rare) is probably running under a further layer of emulation on an x86.
Any Turing equivalent machine can, in principle, emulate any other Turing equivalent machine. Of course, true Turing equivalence requires unlimited memory, so in practical terms it's only possible to emulate machines which have less memory than the machine that's doing the emulating. But it's reasonable to suppose that the machines of 100 years in the future will have at least as much horsepower and at least as much memory as the machines of today. So they will be able to emulate the machines of today.
A program written today may not be able to fully exploit the user interface features of a machine of two hundred years hence, any more than a BBC emulator can exploit the full graphics resolution of a modern workstation. But what a modern workstation can do is a superset of what the BBC Micro could do, so it can be emulated without compromise.
In other words, hardware compatibility is a non-issue in making software which will last and which will remain useful.
I have a Java class, ShuffleWidget, which I often use when assessing search engines because its name is unique and so all the results tend to come from my site (or places that refer to my site). Plugging this into the new MSN search does, indeed, bring back pages from my site, but, interestingly, not the ShuffleWidget page itself, despite the fact that according to my logs, "msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)" has scanned the page on an almost daily basis throughout June. Google by contrast brings the ShuffleWidget page back as it's second hit.
It seems they've some work to do in ordering their search results.
I've used Linux and the various GNU products, even some BSD based ones, and I'm sitting here, using Windows XP Pro. Why? XP Pro offers me an ease of use that Linux, even with KNOPPIX, Fedora, Debian, Gentoo, and variants thereof (and I continually use new Linux distros every year or so) fail to provide.
You know what? I'm sitting here in front of a Debian box. I have a Win XP box on the same KVM switch, but I only ever use it for testing programs. It's a lot better than previous versions of windows but it still doesn't do the things I need and it's user interface isn't any better (in fact, in many ways it's worse) so I see no reason to change.
You know what? It's a matter of what you're used to. The Windows XP GUI is OK in a so so sort of way, but then so is KDE and I expect Gnome is OK too these days. The trouble with Windows is that it assumes a GUI answers all problems. It doesn't. When it comes to system administration, pointy clicky tools just don't cut it.
Just a reminder to every developer next time you try to implement a feature in your program, don't forget to search all existing patents and patent applications for possible violations.
That is physically impossible. There are many millions of patents, all written in deliberately obscure language. Because of the obscure language even carefully crafted searches are unlikely to come up with a good proportion of relevant to irrelevant matches. For a single developer or even a small team or company staying on the right side of patent law is impossible - the proportion of time you'd have to spend searching patents as opposed to doing anything productive would be wholly uneconomic. Actually it's impossible for a big company either, but big companies have arsenals of their own obscure patents to barter with, as has been repeatedly documented.
The patent system is, and has been for a long time, primarily a system to protect big companies against small ones and particularly to protect them against disruptive technologies - what used to be called 'innovation'.
That's why not only software patents but in fact all patents are a bad thing - bad for the individual, bad for the economy, and bad for innovation. They are simply another means of protecting vested interests.
I used not to use Windows because it wasn't good enough in all sorts of ways - botched memory management; poor security model; poor reliability. All those things have gradually improved over the years and now Windows is reasonably robust and reasonably reliable. But Linux is very robust and very reliable, and does all the things I need it to do. So I don't have any need or reason to change.
"Up until now leveraging Java came with some measure of proprietary vendor lock-in," he conceded..
"Getting the OS-focused Java community behind a unified framework for J2EE apps is going to help Java to compete better against.NET," Dietzen said. "Workshop brings drag-and-drop to Java just as PowerBuilder brought it to the client/server world," he observed.
Last time I evaluated WebLogic it just wasn't very good - not nearly as good as the stack of Open Source tools we already used. It may have improved... but in the meantime all the other toolsets have improved too. I will have a look at Beehive but I'd be very surprised if it makes me change my view, and I certainly don't see all the Struts and Geronimo and Cocoon and Jigsaw people suddenly deciding to dump their tool stacks and adopt a new one.
Re:I'm sure this is an excellent article...
on
Browser Wars Mark II
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· Score: 1
I'm still curious what browser this was, and guessing it was Opera.
Good question! Actually, I was using Konqueror, which is my usual browser. But Opera has the same behaviour. I had assumed Mozilla would too - older versions of Mozilla certainly did - but Mozilla 1.6 renders the text pale green on black, which is my default colours. Kudos to the Mozilla team!
Thinking about this, one feature I would like in any open source browser is a button on the toolbar which, when clicked, imposed my default stylesheet for just the current page, over-riding whatever stylesheet the page author had set. Equivalent to making my stylesheet !important for just the current page.
I'm sure this is an excellent article...
on
Browser Wars Mark II
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Unfortunately I can't read it, because the stylesheet specifies a foreground colour for the body text but no background colour, so I get black on black.
I'm 43 years old, and it has been common knowledge that smoking is bad for your health for my entire lifetime.
If you've any power of observation at all, the warnings on the packs are completely redundent. I watched my father smoke all through my childhood and have bronchitis every winter, and thought 'I'm not going to do that'... and I never have. I don't think
there were warnings on the packs in those day, but I could be wrong. Mind you, my little sister smoked. And she died of lung cancer at age 40.
This is a good question, but unfortunately it appears that the answer to this question is that people just will not do it (take their fat asses out of their SUV's) unless there is some catastrophic reason to do so...
There is a catastrophic reason for doing it. An absolutely catastrophic one. If we don't get good at using much less energy soon, we're going to have a very hard landing when the oil gets too expensive to pump. Think total melt-down of the economy. Even in the grain-rich United States, people can and will starve in huge numbers if the grain can't be moved economically from where it's grown into the cities.
I worked for a long time with people diagnosed as schizophrenics and still have many friends with the diagnosis (and I've had psychotic episodes myself so I may well be 'schizophrenic' although, thankfully, I've never been diagnosed with that label). And that experience has left me with very mixed feelings about the psychiatric services offered to people who have the diagnosis.
Be aware that the anti-psychotic drugs given to control schizophrenia, while they do help to keep the more peculiar symptoms under control, are highly toxic in themselves and cause spacticity and brain damage. When you see someone twitching and drooling in the street, they aren't twitching and drooling because they've got schizophrenia, they're twitching and drooling because they're taking drugs to control schizophrenia. Some people who have the diagnosis 'schizophrenia' also have problems sustaining relationships, but again I think this is related to medication. And finally at least some of the medication offered for schizophrenia causes progressive and permanent brain damage.
Don't worry about the popular perception that schizophrenics are 'dangerous', 'violent', or 'out of control'. It just isn't true. A very tiny group of people who have very severe paranoia are dangerous, but on the whole people of the type who get diagnosed as 'schizophrenic' are quiet and gentle and are dangerous only to themselves.
Most of the time, for most people who have schizophrenia, schizophrenia isn't a problem. Occasionally it will be a problem. They will experience things the people around them don't experience, and consequently there's a severe dissonance between reality as they experience it and reality as the people around them experience it. And this is very distressing - for everyone, but most of all for the person who is out of step. It is possible for people diagnosed as 'schizophrenic' to live successfully in the community without medication, but this requires a good deal of committment from the people around them to support them and stay with them through the difficult times. Schizophrenic episodes seem in my experience to be at least partly related to stress, so trying to keep stress levels low is a good strategy. Finally, with the best will in the world, if you are dealing with someone who has severe psychotic episodes there will be times when you can't cope and may have to call in the psychiatric services.
But do bear in mind that however concerned and professional they are the psychiatric profession really do not know what schizophrenia is. They don't know your sister as a person, only as a 'case'; and they don't love her. Their committment to her is is professional, not personal. If you and your family are prepared to put the committment in to supporting her through the difficult patches, there's no reason why your sister shouldn't live a mostly normal life, hold down a job provided it isn't too stressful, and form her own relationships.
My understanding is that the U.K. and many other European jurisdictions have similarly less-restrictive provisions. Consequently, the AdTI will have to be very careful in its promotion of this 'study' if they try to sell the book overseas. Mind, I'm sure that their lawyers will be very careful in the wording of their claims....
It's been published on the Internet, and I have read it here in Scotland.
Therfore, it's actionable in Scotland.
Note that under Scots law the defendent must prove the statement is true to use the defence of veritas; the appellant does not have to prove either that the statement was false or that malice was intended.
Re:SCOX at $5.15 - Where's the bottom
on
Groklaw Turns One
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I keep harping on it in my head because I'm thinking shoot - I knew I should have shorted them.
Think positive. There are more ways of killing a cat...
The failure of the SCO vs IBM case and/or the total collapse of SCO must lead to the market looking brighter for some other companies. Look, for example, at this. What would you predict will happen to RedHat's business when the SCO case collapses? What will happen to Novell's? What about other companies with a strategic cmmittment to Linux?
I would think any moderately intelligent people around here could easily put together a portfolioofcompanies whose stock is likely to rise when SCO goes down. And you can bask in the happy knowledge that you're supporting your friends, not gnawing the bones of your enemies.
Free software is not capitalism, and it doesn't fit. Capitalism assumes that people want to be reimbursed in some way. Free software makes no logical sense, because people do it out of altruism and stupidity.
So what you're saying is capitalism doesn't fit with the way people are? It's broken, then. Fix it or scrap it.
Oh, and I notice that you gave up writing software to become a porn broker. There's an amusing put down about the dignity of labour to be written here, but it's shooting fish in a barrel.
If there were some issue of inherent rights here, then this right would last forever and making it end after the limited time would be immoral. (Your rights to your house don't expire after 14 years.)
You're right, they don't. In typical western democracies they expire in less than that. Here in Scotland, for example, if you leave a house abandoned and someone else has the use of it without your permission and without you doing anything about it for twelve years, it's legally theirs.
There is no fundamental right to property. The law protects property - and ought to protect property - only so far as it benefits the community.
Ideal communism (as opposed to Soviet and Chinese communism) doesn't allow for copyrights (it would fly straight in the face of the communal model of sharing), and while the GPL relies on copyright for keeping the source open, under communism you would have to share source code you write, since it belongs to the state for everyone's use, so both achieve the same noble end.
Under ideal communism there is no state. Workers who produce anything own both the means of production and the products which they produce - absolutely and without anyone else having any say. Workers are expected to share the fruits of their labour with anyone who needs it - but the exact mechanism by which this happens is lost in hand-waving.
Thus free software is as compatible with ideal communism as it is with ideal capitalism. It's really orthogonal to both, since both are rooted in exchange based economies and free software operates in a gift economy.
Re:Somebody help me out here. . .
on
The Confusion
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· Score: 1
Does Stephenson's expose of economic 'reality' take into account forces like the Masons, Knights-Templar, Rothschildes, the Jews and all that good stuff
Yes. And Quakers. And non-conformists. And alchmists. And Dutch nationalists. And MIT. And much, much more.
This is rich, deep and seriously hard work to read. It's a book for when you have a lot of time to read and aren't going to be distracted. I'm about halfway through Quicksilver and struggling a bit because it isn't an easy book to read in ten minute snatches in the midst of a busy life, but my opinion is that it's worth it.
I think the comparisons between Stephenson and Umberto Eco are fair, and I also think that Eco was the best writer of the twentieth century.
Your problem with Enoch Root's lifespan is tied up with the fact that that Rowling's book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the United States as 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'. 'Sorcerer's Stone' is, of course, meaningless, but in the world of Quicksilver, the Philosopher's Stone has particular meaning, and particular properties.
It's often a good thing to know some history.
[No, of course I'm not saying that Harry Potter is literature of the same class as Quicksilver]
Interfering busybodies do not have a right to go and 'rescue' people who are minding their own business in a wilderness. People have many reasons for going into wilderness areas but surely one of the most important is to get away from precisely this sort of intrusive nannying. If I want to take risks with my life that's my absolute and inalianable life - it's my life, not yours.
Of course, some people may want to be rescued. People who want to be rescued can take responsibility for their own lives by carrying an EPIRB. If you want to do something useful you could hire out EPIRBs. Then people who choose to can call for help wherever they happen to need it, and you don't waste time searching. People who want to be pulled out of the wilderness if they exceed some particular time limit can leave you a route plan and a time limit. People who don't leave a route plan and don't call for help probably don't want to be helped. They have a right not to be helped. Leave them alone and don't busybody.
When I go into the wilderness to get away from the stresses and idiocy of over-protective over-sanitized modern life the last thing I want is some officious self appointed idiot dropping out of a helicopter every ten minutes saying 'Hi guy! You havin' a good time? Just checkin' you're OK'.
People go into the wilderness to be alone. They have a right to. Leave them alone!
Slashdot Mirror
But that's just exactly the point. The net was a much more heterogenous and complicated place twenty years ago. Sendmail from its inceptions was designed to do far more complicated things than modern mailers need to do, and there is nothing (apart from authenticate senders) which modern mailers need to be able to do which Sendmail could not do twenty years ago. Sendmail hasn't been innovating? No, you're right, it hasn't. It is the one, gnarly, ancient, turing equivalent mailer, capable of routing any mail over any protocol. There's nothing else in the MTA space even one quarter as sophisticated - because these days there's no longer any need for mailers to be so sophisticated.
Yes, Sendmail is much older than any MS mail system. Yes, Sendmail is ancient, obscure, cranky and historically buggy. That's not the point. The point is that Sendmail provides copper bottomed prior art for all other Internet or multi-protocol mail transfer agents, and, as the dominant MTA of today's world, prevents Microsoft imposing new delivery and authentication protocols without negotiating with Open Source.
Obviously in a clueful, uncorrupt legal system Sendmail would have to be secure against patent infringement suits from Microsoft, simply because of its primordial venerability. However, if Microsoft could find a lever to attack Sendmail, then all other open source mail transport agents would almost certainly fall too. You'd better hope the courts are clueful and uncorrupt, and that Sendmail can afford to pay defence lawyers.
Well, I can see why that got modded as funny. Since when was a GUI an essential part of an operating system? It's at best a layer on top, and if you haven't sufficiently abstracted the API that you can't easily change either to a different GUI or to a completely different user interaction model then frankly you haven't done the job.
When I was a young programmer, I was shown a water quality analysis program used by an English water authority that some colleagues of mine at ICL were particularly proud of. Not that they'd written it. It was running on an ICL 2900 series mainframe running VME. But the software wasn't written for a 2900 series, so it actually ran on ICL 1900 emulator, running MOPS. But the software didn't run on a 1900 series, so the emulated 1900 was running an emulator of an older English Electric computer whose designation I've forgotten. But the software wasn't written for the English Electric computer, so the English Electric emulator running on the the 1900 emulator running on the 2900 was running an emulator of the world's first commercial computer, LEO, for which the software was actually written.
When I saw this program in 1985 it was already thirty years old; it was still being used because it was still useful. If it is still in use it will be fifty years old, and (as 2900s are now very rare) is probably running under a further layer of emulation on an x86.
Any Turing equivalent machine can, in principle, emulate any other Turing equivalent machine. Of course, true Turing equivalence requires unlimited memory, so in practical terms it's only possible to emulate machines which have less memory than the machine that's doing the emulating. But it's reasonable to suppose that the machines of 100 years in the future will have at least as much horsepower and at least as much memory as the machines of today. So they will be able to emulate the machines of today.
A program written today may not be able to fully exploit the user interface features of a machine of two hundred years hence, any more than a BBC emulator can exploit the full graphics resolution of a modern workstation. But what a modern workstation can do is a superset of what the BBC Micro could do, so it can be emulated without compromise.
In other words, hardware compatibility is a non-issue in making software which will last and which will remain useful.
If you think PERL is God, you are an ass.
Yes, but give a monkey PERL, and he can do serious damage.
It seems they've some work to do in ordering their search results.
You know what? I'm sitting here in front of a Debian box. I have a Win XP box on the same KVM switch, but I only ever use it for testing programs. It's a lot better than previous versions of windows but it still doesn't do the things I need and it's user interface isn't any better (in fact, in many ways it's worse) so I see no reason to change.
You know what? It's a matter of what you're used to. The Windows XP GUI is OK in a so so sort of way, but then so is KDE and I expect Gnome is OK too these days. The trouble with Windows is that it assumes a GUI answers all problems. It doesn't. When it comes to system administration, pointy clicky tools just don't cut it.
<quote> a charge of $2,139,000 related to the impairment of goodwill and intangible assets </qoute>
That is physically impossible. There are many millions of patents, all written in deliberately obscure language. Because of the obscure language even carefully crafted searches are unlikely to come up with a good proportion of relevant to irrelevant matches. For a single developer or even a small team or company staying on the right side of patent law is impossible - the proportion of time you'd have to spend searching patents as opposed to doing anything productive would be wholly uneconomic. Actually it's impossible for a big company either, but big companies have arsenals of their own obscure patents to barter with, as has been repeatedly documented.
The patent system is, and has been for a long time, primarily a system to protect big companies against small ones and particularly to protect them against disruptive technologies - what used to be called 'innovation'.
That's why not only software patents but in fact all patents are a bad thing - bad for the individual, bad for the economy, and bad for innovation. They are simply another means of protecting vested interests.
I used not to use Windows because it wasn't good enough in all sorts of ways - botched memory management; poor security model; poor reliability. All those things have gradually improved over the years and now Windows is reasonably robust and reasonably reliable. But Linux is very robust and very reliable, and does all the things I need it to do. So I don't have any need or reason to change.
Last time I evaluated WebLogic it just wasn't very good - not nearly as good as the stack of Open Source tools we already used. It may have improved... but in the meantime all the other toolsets have improved too. I will have a look at Beehive but I'd be very surprised if it makes me change my view, and I certainly don't see all the Struts and Geronimo and Cocoon and Jigsaw people suddenly deciding to dump their tool stacks and adopt a new one.
Good question! Actually, I was using Konqueror, which is my usual browser. But Opera has the same behaviour. I had assumed Mozilla would too - older versions of Mozilla certainly did - but Mozilla 1.6 renders the text pale green on black, which is my default colours. Kudos to the Mozilla team!
Thinking about this, one feature I would like in any open source browser is a button on the toolbar which, when clicked, imposed my default stylesheet for just the current page, over-riding whatever stylesheet the page author had set. Equivalent to making my stylesheet !important for just the current page.
Unfortunately I can't read it, because the stylesheet specifies a foreground colour for the body text but no background colour, so I get black on black.
If you've any power of observation at all, the warnings on the packs are completely redundent. I watched my father smoke all through my childhood and have bronchitis every winter, and thought 'I'm not going to do that'... and I never have. I don't think there were warnings on the packs in those day, but I could be wrong. Mind you, my little sister smoked. And she died of lung cancer at age 40.
There is a catastrophic reason for doing it. An absolutely catastrophic one. If we don't get good at using much less energy soon, we're going to have a very hard landing when the oil gets too expensive to pump. Think total melt-down of the economy. Even in the grain-rich United States, people can and will starve in huge numbers if the grain can't be moved economically from where it's grown into the cities.
Be aware that the anti-psychotic drugs given to control schizophrenia, while they do help to keep the more peculiar symptoms under control, are highly toxic in themselves and cause spacticity and brain damage. When you see someone twitching and drooling in the street, they aren't twitching and drooling because they've got schizophrenia, they're twitching and drooling because they're taking drugs to control schizophrenia. Some people who have the diagnosis 'schizophrenia' also have problems sustaining relationships, but again I think this is related to medication. And finally at least some of the medication offered for schizophrenia causes progressive and permanent brain damage.
Don't worry about the popular perception that schizophrenics are 'dangerous', 'violent', or 'out of control'. It just isn't true. A very tiny group of people who have very severe paranoia are dangerous, but on the whole people of the type who get diagnosed as 'schizophrenic' are quiet and gentle and are dangerous only to themselves.
Most of the time, for most people who have schizophrenia, schizophrenia isn't a problem. Occasionally it will be a problem. They will experience things the people around them don't experience, and consequently there's a severe dissonance between reality as they experience it and reality as the people around them experience it. And this is very distressing - for everyone, but most of all for the person who is out of step. It is possible for people diagnosed as 'schizophrenic' to live successfully in the community without medication, but this requires a good deal of committment from the people around them to support them and stay with them through the difficult times. Schizophrenic episodes seem in my experience to be at least partly related to stress, so trying to keep stress levels low is a good strategy. Finally, with the best will in the world, if you are dealing with someone who has severe psychotic episodes there will be times when you can't cope and may have to call in the psychiatric services.
But do bear in mind that however concerned and professional they are the psychiatric profession really do not know what schizophrenia is. They don't know your sister as a person, only as a 'case'; and they don't love her. Their committment to her is is professional, not personal. If you and your family are prepared to put the committment in to supporting her through the difficult patches, there's no reason why your sister shouldn't live a mostly normal life, hold down a job provided it isn't too stressful, and form her own relationships.
IANAL either, but my guess would be:
Note that under Scots law the defendent must prove the statement is true to use the defence of veritas; the appellant does not have to prove either that the statement was false or that malice was intended.
Think positive. There are more ways of killing a cat...
The failure of the SCO vs IBM case and/or the total collapse of SCO must lead to the market looking brighter for some other companies. Look, for example, at this. What would you predict will happen to RedHat's business when the SCO case collapses? What will happen to Novell's? What about other companies with a strategic cmmittment to Linux?
I would think any moderately intelligent people around here could easily put together a portfolio of companies whose stock is likely to rise when SCO goes down. And you can bask in the happy knowledge that you're supporting your friends, not gnawing the bones of your enemies.
Redhat v Microsoft is even more impressive over two years. It's interesting to note that RedHat are also doing much better than IBM.
So what you're saying is capitalism doesn't fit with the way people are? It's broken, then. Fix it or scrap it.
Oh, and I notice that you gave up writing software to become a porn broker. There's an amusing put down about the dignity of labour to be written here, but it's shooting fish in a barrel.
You're right, they don't. In typical western democracies they expire in less than that. Here in Scotland, for example, if you leave a house abandoned and someone else has the use of it without your permission and without you doing anything about it for twelve years, it's legally theirs.
There is no fundamental right to property. The law protects property - and ought to protect property - only so far as it benefits the community.
Under ideal communism there is no state. Workers who produce anything own both the means of production and the products which they produce - absolutely and without anyone else having any say. Workers are expected to share the fruits of their labour with anyone who needs it - but the exact mechanism by which this happens is lost in hand-waving.
Thus free software is as compatible with ideal communism as it is with ideal capitalism. It's really orthogonal to both, since both are rooted in exchange based economies and free software operates in a gift economy.
Yes. And Quakers. And non-conformists. And alchmists. And Dutch nationalists. And MIT. And much, much more.
This is rich, deep and seriously hard work to read. It's a book for when you have a lot of time to read and aren't going to be distracted. I'm about halfway through Quicksilver and struggling a bit because it isn't an easy book to read in ten minute snatches in the midst of a busy life, but my opinion is that it's worth it.
I think the comparisons between Stephenson and Umberto Eco are fair, and I also think that Eco was the best writer of the twentieth century.
Your problem with Enoch Root's lifespan is tied up with the fact that that Rowling's book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the United States as 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'. 'Sorcerer's Stone' is, of course, meaningless, but in the world of Quicksilver, the Philosopher's Stone has particular meaning, and particular properties.
It's often a good thing to know some history.
[No, of course I'm not saying that Harry Potter is literature of the same class as Quicksilver]
This is an exceptionally bad idea.
Interfering busybodies do not have a right to go and 'rescue' people who are minding their own business in a wilderness. People have many reasons for going into wilderness areas but surely one of the most important is to get away from precisely this sort of intrusive nannying. If I want to take risks with my life that's my absolute and inalianable life - it's my life, not yours.
Of course, some people may want to be rescued. People who want to be rescued can take responsibility for their own lives by carrying an EPIRB. If you want to do something useful you could hire out EPIRBs. Then people who choose to can call for help wherever they happen to need it, and you don't waste time searching. People who want to be pulled out of the wilderness if they exceed some particular time limit can leave you a route plan and a time limit. People who don't leave a route plan and don't call for help probably don't want to be helped. They have a right not to be helped. Leave them alone and don't busybody.
When I go into the wilderness to get away from the stresses and idiocy of over-protective over-sanitized modern life the last thing I want is some officious self appointed idiot dropping out of a helicopter every ten minutes saying 'Hi guy! You havin' a good time? Just checkin' you're OK'.
People go into the wilderness to be alone. They have a right to. Leave them alone!