It's seldom that a well reasoned analysis of the spam debacle makes it to the pages of the mainstream press, but the discussed article is well reasoned and quite to the point in emphisizing that this issue (unwanted advertising) is nothing new.
As for how widespread the spam problem is, I cannot really opine as to whether the problem deserves the kind of attention that it is getting, as I have had the same email address for well over three years, it is visible on several mailing lists and usenet, and "I have yet to recieve the floods of spam that I so poften see described here on/.
I'm not claiming to get no spam, as I do recieve two to three unsolicited comercial email adverts per month at my account, sometimes a few more (I once recieved six in one week), and this leads me to believe that there is probably something about one's user habits that either does or does not attract spam.
I'm also sure that one's email provider has an effect on how attractive that address is to spammers. I'm sure that GMX's anti-spam measures do make thier users less attractive to spammers (If you were a spammer, would you put much energy into spamming a domain of email users if you were certain that the domain admins were likely to adjust thier filters before your ad run was complete? or would you concentrate on those domains that left it up to thier users to face the onnslaught alone?)
Email providers would take common sense measures to protect thier users from the most obvious spam with poorly forged headers, email originating from unsecured proxies and open relays, large numbers of identical meassages targeting alphabet blocks of obviously generated addresses, and emails originating from known spam source IPs (not netblocks), as well as applying "learning" filters (Beyesian and/or whatever), allowing users to submit examples, but apparently few providers do this.
Why do people continue to use thier services?
Has anyone here abandoned an email address after it became such a spam magnet as to be nearly unusable?
Oh, and then we had to cover it up and obfuscate this bit of history with false reports of Iranian use of chemical weapons in this incident, denials that it happened, and denials that we knew about it.
And we all know that with the Business Software Allaiance as one of there is no possible way this could lead to the effective outlawing of Open Source (not allowed to contribute if you don't hold a license).
In all likelyhood, any government regulation over development or licensing scheme for developers will only lead to protecting the high profits of a few of the largest vendors and hurt everyone else in the industry.
How is killing 9,000 more of Hussein's victims justified by the crimes of his regime?
And before you bring up the 1983 gassing of an Iraqi village and adjacent Kurdish internment camp (during the war between Iraq and Iran), how about bringing charges against the American Military advisors who were on the ground with the Iraqi troops that day, or the American arms suppliers that sold the chemicals to Iraq, or the administration that was simultaneously supplying weopons to both sides of that war (to Iraq through France, and to Iran through Israel.
As for the killing of dissidents, what Western government do you think was the most active in promoting the practice of killing dissidents ("damn commies!") in Iraq and other Mid-East countries? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't Canada.
Take a bit of and think, perhaps learn a bit of history. There's more to current events than you can possibly learn watching Fox News.
hose in power choose to ignore the fact that the 'experts' might be wrong
The problem today is that the "experts" are expert only in maximising profits for thier investors. The problems that are often blamed on science are seldom the scientist's fault, but rather it is the actions of the engineers and thier investors that turns an aspect of nature (ie: which gene allows for or prevents the development of female carp) into an application without thinking through the possible consiquenses (the introduction of the daughterless trait into the native carp of Asian rivers by way of ships ballast discharge).
When Microsoft and Apple have incorporated DRM into every aspect of the OS, OSS will have everything to do with protecting Fair Use and preventing both government and corporate censorship.
Sounds like you've got a few issues there...
on
Make More Mistakes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
As a rabid business geek, I want to hit people who suggest openign their own comapny because they can code.
Why niot just wait and see if they fail on thier own? You might just discover that the code monkey in front of you not only knows how to code, but also knows enough accounting, law and management to be able to hire the rest that he needs to succeed. You business types sget so incredibly defensive over what you think of as your territory, but I guess that's part of what makes you a business type.
A business is no more writing code than selling cars is making a sandwich.
That's one of the poorest analogies I've ever heard. Did you mean to say "A software business is no more writing code than selling cars is building them? Perhaps not. That doesn't quite support your argument as well as your expensive transportation device to inexpensive foodstuffs analogy.
I don't care what you make/do/sell... there's a LOT more to any successful business than non-business people
I can only hope that it was a mistake that you did not complete the sentance with the word realize, because then you would have made the most true statement that I have ever seen in any one of your countless and usually inane/. postings. I'll get to that at the end of this post.
you writing OSS projects that never see the light of day in your bedroom is NOT a business
What programmer working on OSS projects thinks of thier coding as a business? If it were a business, then they'd be doing it at the office. If the project doesn't see the "light of day", then it's not very Open Source, is it? Just because you are proud of your business doesn't mean that others are envious of you (perhaps other business types, but I doubt that you generate much envy no matter who the person is). Most OSS developers are under no illusion that they are running a software business, or that they would want to. If they thought that they wanted to sell software, I doubt that they would have chosen OSS for thier projects. If they do run a business that involves developing OSS software, I'm pretty sure that software sales are not where they intend to make thier money.
I actually had one chick tell me a few months ago that my business is successsful because "I got lucky". That was the closest I ever came to hitting a woman.
It sounds like she was a little too close to the mark if she could elicit such a reaction from you. There's a little bit of luck involved in every successful business, usually being that the business person was lucky enough to have family that had the cash to fund thier business venture until it could carry on without support. It's mighty white of you not to hit that poor defensless woman. The fact that you considered committing an act of violence over what was very likely a jibe tells me a lot about your character.
Running a successful business is difficult in a way that almost no other undertaking is difficult, and the difficulties involved are more ambiguopus and unpredictable than are encountered in any technical field. But being an asshole is not neccissarily one of them.
If you want people to believe that you are as successful as you claim, then you'll have to stop pretending (to yourself, no-one else is buying it) that everyone wants to be you.
It would be hypocritical for open source software developers to accept compensation, of any form, for their work.
How disingenuous of you. It would only be hypocracy if the developer agreed to write horrible crap in return for money. There's absolutely nothing wrong with accepting cash for something you would likely have done for free anyway.
Besides, there's already a nice example of a Free Software developer accepting compensation for his work in RMS, who supported his work on EMACS in part by selling copies of the program and the source code.
Could we trust our governments if we knew everything they were saying and doing?
To equate exposing the inner workings of our governments and their intelligence services to the loss of privacy for the individual is disengenuous to say the least.
I have heard the argument that it is equivalent (Open government and loss of personal privacy), usually with the Monica Lewinski scandal as an example, but I cannot justify the actions of a media that would target Clinton over a blow job yet participate in hiding from the public what is known to have happened in Iran-Contra. The one is an issue between a man, his wife, and his mistress, the other is the direct defrauding of the American taxpayer, the breaking of federal laws that were implemented by the persons who later broke them, and justice for the people whom the funded acts of terrorism were committed against.
We, as citizens, should demand openess of our governments operations, and we should insist that this cannot be coupled with infringement on our own privacy. As taxpeyers, we have a right to know when our tax payment is funding wars that were social engineered into existance by our tax-supported intelligence operations for the benefit of intelligence community associated businesses (the Curry Company, the Carlyle Group, Haliburton, Wackenhut Services Corporation, and thier subsidiaries).
This is not the same as requesting that the private occurances of our individual lives be exposed to public scrutiny, although those who work directly for, or have contracted themselves to, the intelligence agencies and thier contracting companies might see this differently. IMHO, those who have made a decision to work in such feilds have traded away thier right to privacy as soon as their own actions and the actions of thier employers no longer are in support of the public good.
Privacy creates suspicion and mistrust.
Secrecy creates suspicion and mistrust. It is not privacy that is the issue here. The issue is that the lack of privacy is already here, and it is those persons who are using thier (government granted) access for profit that make arguments such as yours, as they are enjoyoing a limited monoply on thatr information. They publicly advocate privacy rights while supporting implementations of technology that will both eradicate privacy for private individuals while limiting access for those same people to information about the actions of government and large companies, such as centralized databases for our personal information.
Those same persons oppose the use of technology by private individuals to protect thier own privacy, such as the use strong encryption and PKE for personal communication, usually using "terrorism" as the catch all boogeyman in support of eradicating the privacy in our "private" lives.
Yet I agree with at least part of your facetious statements, in that I do believe that society would be better if government, law enforcement, and intelligence community actions were fully open. Those who chose to make thier living in those fields are in need of a little scrutiny (as is demonstrated by the last fifty years of U.S. history) by the people who's interest they are pretending to protect, and who's will they are pretending to represent.
Ansel Adams was often willing to give up a bit of his "eye" to technology, as is evident in his use of a densitometer when calibrating his exposure and development techniques, but I very much doubt that Minor White, who was also a Zone System devotee, would be enthralled by digital technology, but his method of applying the system varied signifigantly from that of Adams. He prefered for himself, and taught his students, to learn to see the zones in a scene with the eye, and to calibrate one's technique by eye.
I believe that the intent is not to give the voter a carry away reciept, but to have a printed record of what is being electronically tallied in order to enable effective recounts (this would prevent electronic tampering in both the voting machine and in the tallying system). I would hope that the process be designed so as to be mostly user-transparent for the generation of the record, and require only a single response (yes/no buttons) for voter verification and acceptance of the recorded vote.
I don't believe it would be necessary for any special skills to be involved in this process, unless the system was designed to require them, which would likely indicate a lack of sincerity on the part of the sytem designer.
I'll second that. The Pentax K-1000 is an incredibly sturdy metal-body camera, and the Asdahi Optical lenses are (were) relatively inexpensive.
I you already have a Nikon in the family, you might consider a Nikkormat or a Nikon FM-2 (or whatever its succsessor might be), which are also dependable metal-body cameras, and you can use any Nikon lenses that you might already have.
I you newbie photog is just starting out, and has never handled a camera, you might want to consider buying a "thow-away" fixed-focus camera because it will force them to think more about framing and getting close to the subject (crop in the lens, not in the darkroom), which are often the biggest hurdles that young photographers face, and are better addressed early on, so as to develop good habits, rather than later, when the student will be more concerned with exposure, depth of feild, and shutter speed.
The "antagonistism" in the gcc/ecgs fork was greatly exagerated, and did not actually exist in the project.
The ecgs project was an "expirimental" version of gcc that originally incorporated funcionality that would break gcc to the extent that it was uinapropriate to add those functions to gcc until major changes (that did not break anything) were made to gcc. The changes that were in the ecgs branch were eventually incorporated into gcc, which was the intention all along. Most of the ecgs maintainers continued support of thier portions of gcc throughpout the development of both branches.
Any appearance of conflict arose from the fact that certain Linux distruibutions chose to use ecgs as thier default compiler (against the warnings of the gcc project) early on, in order to appear "more advanced" than the other dists that were still defaulting to gcc.
There were (and still are) people who will grasp at any straw floating by in order to argue that this or that issue will be the death of Open Source. The reality is that the current drive for "standardization", and avoidance of conflicts, forking, and replication of efforts under differing methods is far more likely to cause an end of development on Open Source Software than anything else, as it is the wide variety of well developed ideas that drives OS development, not a misguided sense of "solidarity".
You make it sound like the "former glory" for any other country was any different. In most ancient societies...
Except, in the case of China, the "former glory" that is refered to lasted well into the Twentieth Century. This is the case with at least two of the examples you you name as well, but this still avoids the point of the statement you are responding to.
Mostly's post is not singling out China for the distinction of being a society that has traditionally lived under opressive forms of government, but is correcting an assumption inherent to a statement in the post he is replying to, namely the sentiment that China's peoples might "take back" a control over thier society that China's peoples have never enjoyed in the first place.
Perhaps the proper sentiment would be to wish that China's peoples wrest control from the current elite and establish a constitution that prevents the traditional inequities from occuring again.
An adaptation can be an homage, but it is essential for readers to realize that much of what can be conveyed in well crafted words will not necessarily translate well to the screen, such as the work of Thomas Hardy (although the film of "Far from the Madding Crowd" is incredible). Often the word "homage" is applied to a film when the filmmaker utterly fails to convey the style, underlying meaning, or even the same story of the original, as is the case with Cronenburg's adaptation (if you can call it that) of Burrough's "Naked Lunch".
Luckily there are novels that can translate well to the screen and it does seem that Tolkien's writing is particularly well suited for film (when treated by a competant filmmaker), as long as a reasonable attempt to be true to the original is made. I'd particularly enjoy seeing a new treatment of "The Hobbit" as the previous animated "Hobbit" was entertaining, it was still very much a cartoon.
BTW and OT, I must comment on your assesment as related in this statement:
The Third Man and the Graham Greene story novel on which it was based.
As much as I admire the work of Orson Welles, I'd have to disagree with you on this one point. The film made from Greene's script based on Greene's novel, IMHO, falls slightly short of the mark set by the novel, and where it does succeed, it does so due to Greene's insistance on keeping those details that Welles thought insignificant. Welles openly regretted agreeing to have Greene on the set while the film was being made, even though he later acknowledged that Greene's interventions were essential to conveying much of the subtle subtext that is essential to the story.
Since when is more college education the same as higher level skill?
It's not, it's a class distinction, as is the nature of the degree attained. Business majors get more respect than do engineers, management training recieves more respect than technical skill.
The university you attend is also a class distinction, such as architects that attend the University of Pennsylvania are given more respect and higher pay, than those who attended Penn State, regardless of the quality of the program.
This is becoming more and more the rule in the US, despite our attraction to the myth of a classless society. Soon, after all of the technical jobs are outsourced to other countries, the only way to get meaningful work here will be to attend an Ivy League school, and the rest of us will clean toilets, wait tables and do other menial tasks to serve those lucky enough to be born into "good families", unless all of those jobs have been given to immigrants, which is just as likely (you have no idea how much it bugs the "well born" to hear the help speaking proper English, it breeds doubts in thier mind about thier superiority).
It seems that SSC has registered the trademark, but did not do so until they were notified by the LinuxGazette people of the impending move.
Aparently SSC is claiming use of the trademark since 1996 (LinuxGazette issue 8), when they began providing hosting for the LinuxGazette volunteers. The LinuxGazette volunteers were using the trademark as early as 1995, and continued to do so after SSC so kindly offered to host the site for them.
IMHO, SSC should screw off. Providing a service to a volunteer org does not give you the right to dictate how they do business and especially does not give you ownership of the work that the org produces.
but it seems that the author missed several of the intervening years that have led to the current situation.
In the beginning, the developers also were required to administrate the machines they were developing on and for. Shortly after that, as there were more deployments, there were folks who's primary task was system administrator, and they would perform development tasks according to the needs of the organization and in order to make thier own jobs much easier, then came the network administrators, who would also develop software according to the needs of the org, and in order to make thier own jobs much easier. Then it all went to shit as the marketing department realized that there was money to be made, they began asking for needless software with dubious need and poorly thought out devlopment requirements that could be used marketing fodder. The administrators became notorious for (rightly) defending defending thier turf and saying "not on my network. not on my system."
So the role of developer was born, a person with skill in writiong code with the willingness to write program asked using whatever programing language specified without any objection whatsoever, regardless of the technical merit of the spec, the need for the program, or the overall effect on the system, as long as they were paid. All applications were written in whatever the language of the day happened to be, and fufilled the purpose of whatever the flavor of the month dioctated. What had been elegantly designed systems that specifically fufilled the needs of the user using existing tools (most often transparently) whenever possible, using custom (or community) designed software whenever necessary, and requiring the least amount of system rescources possible, now became incomprehensible morasses of rediculously complex dependancies, multiples of propietary protocols that replicated each others capabilities but were "incompatible" with systems that served the exact same purpose, huge collections of libraries all addressing the same needs and differing only in what would justify the high cost of the (propietary) product, and an absolute disregard for any sense of of efficient and elegant network, system, or application design.
The design process has been divorced from the persons who use the apps, maintain the systems, and have the best knowledge of the needs of the given organization. Software development is now managed by sales people, marketing divisions, and corporate executives, most of whom have little real knowledge of the IT feild other than what they read in Gartner's artcles, and will accept the advice of a "consultant" before even considering asking one of thier own employees. These are the people who believe that the best developers are teenagers, that ".net" is the "way of the future", and that when a sales person tells him that thier product achieves something never before accomplished, or that it provides capabilities available nowhere else, they believe this.
Now the developers are crying that they don't have domain administrator rights on the network, or that they cant write to directories that they have no reason to be writing to in the first place. They bitch when the network has been infected by yet another virus, but complain when the administrator strips all VB script attachments from thier emails. They bitch about how much work they have, about thier hours, and about thier pay, but drop to thier knees for any manager that brings them yet another impossible to implement product idea or project that serves very little purpose (other than as something that might sell). They bitch that the admins are fscking around all day without understanding that this means all is well on the network and the admins have done thier jobs well.
This is the problem in the development world, and it is being addressed by Open Source. True, there may be some job loss a
The logical opposite of gerrymandering is automating the process to provide politically balanced districts,
No, the logical opposite of gerrymandering would be to have districts that are drawn according to population density and geographical boundries with no consideration of the race, ecconomic status, or political affiliation of the voters in the districts. Any other method cannot help but fail to represent the true make up of the country.
Any consioderation other than the number of people and where they are living is, in my mind, absurdly manipulative and undermines the purpose of political districting in a representative democracy. Politics seems to be more and more like a sporting event, where the voters are more concerned with being affiliated with the "winning team" than with whether or not thier representatives are acting in the best interest of thier constituents.
Open Source does mean that the source code to the software is open for review and use by anyone who cares to honor the license.
2) Correct, sort of.
Some Open Source licenses require that you distribute the code to any programs that you distribute (key-word: distribute). If the software is licensed under the GPL, this means that if your changes are for internal use at your company only, then there is no requirement to distribute the developed code, but if you are going to distribute (give away or sell) the programs, then you must make the source code available to anyone who recieves a copy of the program from you.
Other Licenses are less restrictive, such as the BSD license. If you base your product on the BSD license, you may relicense your version of the program however you see fit, but under some instances you must acknowledge that some of the product is based on BSD licensed software and include a copy of the license with your product.
There are other Open Source licensing schemes, such as the Artistic License, which have thier own restrictions (or lack of them) on development and distribution. If you are truly interested, I suggest that you make use of Google and research the full range of Open Source licensing before you choose one in particular for the basis of a project, or before you base a product on software governed by one of these licenses.
3) Incorrect, mostly.
If your intention is to make your money from selling copies of programs, then perhaps you should not build your project on Open Source software. If your intention is to provide a service that requires this software, then there is no reason that you should not choose Open Source, as you can still restrict access to the source code by not distributing the software.
4) By building programs that specific institutions and individuals need for thier organisations, which is how most programmers make thier livings anyway. No-one will get to be the next Bill Gates, but at least the rest of us wont have to deal with software vendor reps or pay through the nose for a product that we are not permitted to fix.
My only alternative is to commission (aka pay IT consultants to develop the software).
You hire them on a "work for hire" basis and the code is yours. You only need to distribute the source if you are distributing the application.
If you are intending to sell or distribute the software, and also intend to prevent your customers from also distributing that software, then perhaps Open Source is not for you.
The licenses do not govern the use or development of the software, but only the distribution of the software. If you don't like the requirements, you should base your project on something else.
Slashdot Mirror
It's seldom that a well reasoned analysis of the spam debacle makes it to the pages of the mainstream press, but the discussed article is well reasoned and quite to the point in emphisizing that this issue (unwanted advertising) is nothing new.
/.
As for how widespread the spam problem is, I cannot really opine as to whether the problem deserves the kind of attention that it is getting, as I have had the same email address for well over three years, it is visible on several mailing lists and usenet, and "I have yet to recieve the floods of spam that I so poften see described here on
I'm not claiming to get no spam, as I do recieve two to three unsolicited comercial email adverts per month at my account, sometimes a few more (I once recieved six in one week), and this leads me to believe that there is probably something about one's user habits that either does or does not attract spam.
I'm also sure that one's email provider has an effect on how attractive that address is to spammers. I'm sure that GMX's anti-spam measures do make thier users less attractive to spammers (If you were a spammer, would you put much energy into spamming a domain of email users if you were certain that the domain admins were likely to adjust thier filters before your ad run was complete? or would you concentrate on those domains that left it up to thier users to face the onnslaught alone?)
Email providers would take common sense measures to protect thier users from the most obvious spam with poorly forged headers, email originating from unsecured proxies and open relays, large numbers of identical meassages targeting alphabet blocks of obviously generated addresses, and emails originating from known spam source IPs (not netblocks), as well as applying "learning" filters (Beyesian and/or whatever), allowing users to submit examples, but apparently few providers do this.
Why do people continue to use thier services?
Has anyone here abandoned an email address after it became such a spam magnet as to be nearly unusable?
I'm sorry our Military Advisors were there to help you do this, but the Iranians were our enemy and the Kurds were communist terrorists, so we just had to help you do this.
Oh, and then we had to cover it up and obfuscate this bit of history with false reports of Iranian use of chemical weapons in this incident, denials that it happened, and denials that we knew about it.
We do.
And we all know that with the Business Software Allaiance as one of there is no possible way this could lead to the effective outlawing of Open Source (not allowed to contribute if you don't hold a license).
In all likelyhood, any government regulation over development or licensing scheme for developers will only lead to protecting the high profits of a few of the largest vendors and hurt everyone else in the industry.
How is killing 9,000 more of Hussein's victims justified by the crimes of his regime?
And before you bring up the 1983 gassing of an Iraqi village and adjacent Kurdish internment camp (during the war between Iraq and Iran), how about bringing charges against the American Military advisors who were on the ground with the Iraqi troops that day, or the American arms suppliers that sold the chemicals to Iraq, or the administration that was simultaneously supplying weopons to both sides of that war (to Iraq through France, and to Iran through Israel.
As for the killing of dissidents, what Western government do you think was the most active in promoting the practice of killing dissidents ("damn commies!") in Iraq and other Mid-East countries? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't Canada.
Take a bit of and think, perhaps learn a bit of history. There's more to current events than you can possibly learn watching Fox News.
hose in power choose to ignore the fact that the 'experts' might be wrong
The problem today is that the "experts" are expert only in maximising profits for thier investors. The problems that are often blamed on science are seldom the scientist's fault, but rather it is the actions of the engineers and thier investors that turns an aspect of nature (ie: which gene allows for or prevents the development of female carp) into an application without thinking through the possible consiquenses (the introduction of the daughterless trait into the native carp of Asian rivers by way of ships ballast discharge).
I'm sorry I killed 9,000 Iraqi civilians, but they had weopons of mass destruction (or at least I thought they did).
OSS has nothing to do with this.
When Microsoft and Apple have incorporated DRM into every aspect of the OS, OSS will have everything to do with protecting Fair Use and preventing both government and corporate censorship.
As a rabid business geek, I want to hit people who suggest openign their own comapny because they can code.
/. postings. I'll get to that at the end of this post.
Why niot just wait and see if they fail on thier own? You might just discover that the code monkey in front of you not only knows how to code, but also knows enough accounting, law and management to be able to hire the rest that he needs to succeed. You business types sget so incredibly defensive over what you think of as your territory, but I guess that's part of what makes you a business type.
A business is no more writing code than selling cars is making a sandwich.
That's one of the poorest analogies I've ever heard. Did you mean to say "A software business is no more writing code than selling cars is building them? Perhaps not. That doesn't quite support your argument as well as your expensive transportation device to inexpensive foodstuffs analogy.
I don't care what you make/do/sell... there's a LOT more to any successful business than non-business people
I can only hope that it was a mistake that you did not complete the sentance with the word realize, because then you would have made the most true statement that I have ever seen in any one of your countless and usually inane
you writing OSS projects that never see the light of day in your bedroom is NOT a business
What programmer working on OSS projects thinks of thier coding as a business? If it were a business, then they'd be doing it at the office. If the project doesn't see the "light of day", then it's not very Open Source, is it? Just because you are proud of your business doesn't mean that others are envious of you (perhaps other business types, but I doubt that you generate much envy no matter who the person is). Most OSS developers are under no illusion that they are running a software business, or that they would want to. If they thought that they wanted to sell software, I doubt that they would have chosen OSS for thier projects. If they do run a business that involves developing OSS software, I'm pretty sure that software sales are not where they intend to make thier money.
I actually had one chick tell me a few months ago that my business is successsful because "I got lucky". That was the closest I ever came to hitting a woman.
It sounds like she was a little too close to the mark if she could elicit such a reaction from you. There's a little bit of luck involved in every successful business, usually being that the business person was lucky enough to have family that had the cash to fund thier business venture until it could carry on without support. It's mighty white of you not to hit that poor defensless woman. The fact that you considered committing an act of violence over what was very likely a jibe tells me a lot about your character.
Running a successful business is difficult in a way that almost no other undertaking is difficult, and the difficulties involved are more ambiguopus and unpredictable than are encountered in any technical field. But being an asshole is not neccissarily one of them.
If you want people to believe that you are as successful as you claim, then you'll have to stop pretending (to yourself, no-one else is buying it) that everyone wants to be you.
It would be hypocritical for open source software developers to accept compensation, of any form, for their work.
How disingenuous of you. It would only be hypocracy if the developer agreed to write horrible crap in return for money. There's absolutely nothing wrong with accepting cash for something you would likely have done for free anyway.
Besides, there's already a nice example of a Free Software developer accepting compensation for his work in RMS, who supported his work on EMACS in part by selling copies of the program and the source code.
It seems you've got a good handle on this, so when can Openwares expect your patch for the vulnerability in thier patch?
Why does this remind me of President Bush's private meeting with Tony Blair?
Could we trust our governments if we knew everything they were saying and doing?
To equate exposing the inner workings of our governments and their intelligence services to the loss of privacy for the individual is disengenuous to say the least.
I have heard the argument that it is equivalent (Open government and loss of personal privacy), usually with the Monica Lewinski scandal as an example, but I cannot justify the actions of a media that would target Clinton over a blow job yet participate in hiding from the public what is known to have happened in Iran-Contra. The one is an issue between a man, his wife, and his mistress, the other is the direct defrauding of the American taxpayer, the breaking of federal laws that were implemented by the persons who later broke them, and justice for the people whom the funded acts of terrorism were committed against.
We, as citizens, should demand openess of our governments operations, and we should insist that this cannot be coupled with infringement on our own privacy. As taxpeyers, we have a right to know when our tax payment is funding wars that were social engineered into existance by our tax-supported intelligence operations for the benefit of intelligence community associated businesses (the Curry Company, the Carlyle Group, Haliburton, Wackenhut Services Corporation, and thier subsidiaries).
This is not the same as requesting that the private occurances of our individual lives be exposed to public scrutiny, although those who work directly for, or have contracted themselves to, the intelligence agencies and thier contracting companies might see this differently. IMHO, those who have made a decision to work in such feilds have traded away thier right to privacy as soon as their own actions and the actions of thier employers no longer are in support of the public good.
Privacy creates suspicion and mistrust.
Secrecy creates suspicion and mistrust. It is not privacy that is the issue here. The issue is that the lack of privacy is already here, and it is those persons who are using thier (government granted) access for profit that make arguments such as yours, as they are enjoyoing a limited monoply on thatr information. They publicly advocate privacy rights while supporting implementations of technology that will both eradicate privacy for private individuals while limiting access for those same people to information about the actions of government and large companies, such as centralized databases for our personal information.
Those same persons oppose the use of technology by private individuals to protect thier own privacy, such as the use strong encryption and PKE for personal communication, usually using "terrorism" as the catch all boogeyman in support of eradicating the privacy in our "private" lives.
Yet I agree with at least part of your facetious statements, in that I do believe that society would be better if government, law enforcement, and intelligence community actions were fully open. Those who chose to make thier living in those fields are in need of a little scrutiny (as is demonstrated by the last fifty years of U.S. history) by the people who's interest they are pretending to protect, and who's will they are pretending to represent.
Ansel Adams was often willing to give up a bit of his "eye" to technology, as is evident in his use of a densitometer when calibrating his exposure and development techniques, but I very much doubt that Minor White, who was also a Zone System devotee, would be enthralled by digital technology, but his method of applying the system varied signifigantly from that of Adams. He prefered for himself, and taught his students, to learn to see the zones in a scene with the eye, and to calibrate one's technique by eye.
I believe that the intent is not to give the voter a carry away reciept, but to have a printed record of what is being electronically tallied in order to enable effective recounts (this would prevent electronic tampering in both the voting machine and in the tallying system). I would hope that the process be designed so as to be mostly user-transparent for the generation of the record, and require only a single response (yes/no buttons) for voter verification and acceptance of the recorded vote.
I don't believe it would be necessary for any special skills to be involved in this process, unless the system was designed to require them, which would likely indicate a lack of sincerity on the part of the sytem designer.
I'll second that. The Pentax K-1000 is an incredibly sturdy metal-body camera, and the Asdahi Optical lenses are (were) relatively inexpensive.
I you already have a Nikon in the family, you might consider a Nikkormat or a Nikon FM-2 (or whatever its succsessor might be), which are also dependable metal-body cameras, and you can use any Nikon lenses that you might already have.
I you newbie photog is just starting out, and has never handled a camera, you might want to consider buying a "thow-away" fixed-focus camera because it will force them to think more about framing and getting close to the subject (crop in the lens, not in the darkroom), which are often the biggest hurdles that young photographers face, and are better addressed early on, so as to develop good habits, rather than later, when the student will be more concerned with exposure, depth of feild, and shutter speed.
The "antagonistism" in the gcc/ecgs fork was greatly exagerated, and did not actually exist in the project.
The ecgs project was an "expirimental" version of gcc that originally incorporated funcionality that would break gcc to the extent that it was uinapropriate to add those functions to gcc until major changes (that did not break anything) were made to gcc. The changes that were in the ecgs branch were eventually incorporated into gcc, which was the intention all along. Most of the ecgs maintainers continued support of thier portions of gcc throughpout the development of both branches.
Any appearance of conflict arose from the fact that certain Linux distruibutions chose to use ecgs as thier default compiler (against the warnings of the gcc project) early on, in order to appear "more advanced" than the other dists that were still defaulting to gcc.
There were (and still are) people who will grasp at any straw floating by in order to argue that this or that issue will be the death of Open Source. The reality is that the current drive for "standardization", and avoidance of conflicts, forking, and replication of efforts under differing methods is far more likely to cause an end of development on Open Source Software than anything else, as it is the wide variety of well developed ideas that drives OS development, not a misguided sense of "solidarity".
You make it sound like the "former glory" for any other country was any different. In most ancient societies...
Except, in the case of China, the "former glory" that is refered to lasted well into the Twentieth Century. This is the case with at least two of the examples you you name as well, but this still avoids the point of the statement you are responding to.
Mostly's post is not singling out China for the distinction of being a society that has traditionally lived under opressive forms of government, but is correcting an assumption inherent to a statement in the post he is replying to, namely the sentiment that China's peoples might "take back" a control over thier society that China's peoples have never enjoyed in the first place.
Perhaps the proper sentiment would be to wish that China's peoples wrest control from the current elite and establish a constitution that prevents the traditional inequities from occuring again.
An adaptation can be an homage, but it is essential for readers to realize that much of what can be conveyed in well crafted words will not necessarily translate well to the screen, such as the work of Thomas Hardy (although the film of "Far from the Madding Crowd" is incredible). Often the word "homage" is applied to a film when the filmmaker utterly fails to convey the style, underlying meaning, or even the same story of the original, as is the case with Cronenburg's adaptation (if you can call it that) of Burrough's "Naked Lunch".
Luckily there are novels that can translate well to the screen and it does seem that Tolkien's writing is particularly well suited for film (when treated by a competant filmmaker), as long as a reasonable attempt to be true to the original is made. I'd particularly enjoy seeing a new treatment of "The Hobbit" as the previous animated "Hobbit" was entertaining, it was still very much a cartoon.
BTW and OT, I must comment on your assesment as related in this statement:
The Third Man and the Graham Greene story novel on which it was based.
As much as I admire the work of Orson Welles, I'd have to disagree with you on this one point. The film made from Greene's script based on Greene's novel, IMHO, falls slightly short of the mark set by the novel, and where it does succeed, it does so due to Greene's insistance on keeping those details that Welles thought insignificant. Welles openly regretted agreeing to have Greene on the set while the film was being made, even though he later acknowledged that Greene's interventions were essential to conveying much of the subtle subtext that is essential to the story.
Since when is more college education the same as higher level skill?
It's not, it's a class distinction, as is the nature of the degree attained. Business majors get more respect than do engineers, management training recieves more respect than technical skill.
The university you attend is also a class distinction, such as architects that attend the University of Pennsylvania are given more respect and higher pay, than those who attended Penn State, regardless of the quality of the program.
This is becoming more and more the rule in the US, despite our attraction to the myth of a classless society. Soon, after all of the technical jobs are outsourced to other countries, the only way to get meaningful work here will be to attend an Ivy League school, and the rest of us will clean toilets, wait tables and do other menial tasks to serve those lucky enough to be born into "good families", unless all of those jobs have been given to immigrants, which is just as likely (you have no idea how much it bugs the "well born" to hear the help speaking proper English, it breeds doubts in thier mind about thier superiority).
But who had the trademark first,
That's the rub, so to speak.
It seems that SSC has registered the trademark, but did not do so until they were notified by the LinuxGazette people of the impending move.
Aparently SSC is claiming use of the trademark since 1996 (LinuxGazette issue 8), when they began providing hosting for the LinuxGazette volunteers. The LinuxGazette volunteers were using the trademark as early as 1995, and continued to do so after SSC so kindly offered to host the site for them.
IMHO, SSC should screw off. Providing a service to a volunteer org does not give you the right to dictate how they do business and especially does not give you ownership of the work that the org produces.
but it seems that the author missed several of the intervening years that have led to the current situation.
In the beginning, the developers also were required to administrate the machines they were developing on and for. Shortly after that, as there were more deployments, there were folks who's primary task was system administrator, and they would perform development tasks according to the needs of the organization and in order to make thier own jobs much easier, then came the network administrators, who would also develop software according to the needs of the org, and in order to make thier own jobs much easier. Then it all went to shit as the marketing department realized that there was money to be made, they began asking for needless software with dubious need and poorly thought out devlopment requirements that could be used marketing fodder. The administrators became notorious for (rightly) defending defending thier turf and saying "not on my network. not on my system."
So the role of developer was born, a person with skill in writiong code with the willingness to write program asked using whatever programing language specified without any objection whatsoever, regardless of the technical merit of the spec, the need for the program, or the overall effect on the system, as long as they were paid. All applications were written in whatever the language of the day happened to be, and fufilled the purpose of whatever the flavor of the month dioctated. What had been elegantly designed systems that specifically fufilled the needs of the user using existing tools (most often transparently) whenever possible, using custom (or community) designed software whenever necessary, and requiring the least amount of system rescources possible, now became incomprehensible morasses of rediculously complex dependancies, multiples of propietary protocols that replicated each others capabilities but were "incompatible" with systems that served the exact same purpose, huge collections of libraries all addressing the same needs and differing only in what would justify the high cost of the (propietary) product, and an absolute disregard for any sense of of efficient and elegant network, system, or application design.
The design process has been divorced from the persons who use the apps, maintain the systems, and have the best knowledge of the needs of the given organization. Software development is now managed by sales people, marketing divisions, and corporate executives, most of whom have little real knowledge of the IT feild other than what they read in Gartner's artcles, and will accept the advice of a "consultant" before even considering asking one of thier own employees. These are the people who believe that the best developers are teenagers, that ".net" is the "way of the future", and that when a sales person tells him that thier product achieves something never before accomplished, or that it provides capabilities available nowhere else, they believe this.
Now the developers are crying that they don't have domain administrator rights on the network, or that they cant write to directories that they have no reason to be writing to in the first place. They bitch when the network has been infected by yet another virus, but complain when the administrator strips all VB script attachments from thier emails. They bitch about how much work they have, about thier hours, and about thier pay, but drop to thier knees for any manager that brings them yet another impossible to implement product idea or project that serves very little purpose (other than as something that might sell). They bitch that the admins are fscking around all day without understanding that this means all is well on the network and the admins have done thier jobs well.
This is the problem in the development world, and it is being addressed by Open Source. True, there may be some job loss a
The logical opposite of gerrymandering is automating the process to provide politically balanced districts,
No, the logical opposite of gerrymandering would be to have districts that are drawn according to population density and geographical boundries with no consideration of the race, ecconomic status, or political affiliation of the voters in the districts. Any other method cannot help but fail to represent the true make up of the country.
Any consioderation other than the number of people and where they are living is, in my mind, absurdly manipulative and undermines the purpose of political districting in a representative democracy. Politics seems to be more and more like a sporting event, where the voters are more concerned with being affiliated with the "winning team" than with whether or not thier representatives are acting in the best interest of thier constituents.
1) correct.
Open Source does mean that the source code to the software is open for review and use by anyone who cares to honor the license.
2) Correct, sort of.
Some Open Source licenses require that you distribute the code to any programs that you distribute (key-word: distribute). If the software is licensed under the GPL, this means that if your changes are for internal use at your company only, then there is no requirement to distribute the developed code, but if you are going to distribute (give away or sell) the programs, then you must make the source code available to anyone who recieves a copy of the program from you.
Other Licenses are less restrictive, such as the BSD license. If you base your product on the BSD license, you may relicense your version of the program however you see fit, but under some instances you must acknowledge that some of the product is based on BSD licensed software and include a copy of the license with your product.
There are other Open Source licensing schemes, such as the Artistic License, which have thier own restrictions (or lack of them) on development and distribution. If you are truly interested, I suggest that you make use of Google and research the full range of Open Source licensing before you choose one in particular for the basis of a project, or before you base a product on software governed by one of these licenses.
3) Incorrect, mostly.
If your intention is to make your money from selling copies of programs, then perhaps you should not build your project on Open Source software. If your intention is to provide a service that requires this software, then there is no reason that you should not choose Open Source, as you can still restrict access to the source code by not distributing the software.
4) By building programs that specific institutions and individuals need for thier organisations, which is how most programmers make thier livings anyway. No-one will get to be the next Bill Gates, but at least the rest of us wont have to deal with software vendor reps or pay through the nose for a product that we are not permitted to fix.
My only alternative is to commission (aka pay IT consultants to develop the software).
You hire them on a "work for hire" basis and the code is yours. You only need to distribute the source if you are distributing the application.
If you are intending to sell or distribute the software, and also intend to prevent your customers from also distributing that software, then perhaps Open Source is not for you.
The licenses do not govern the use or development of the software, but only the distribution of the software. If you don't like the requirements, you should base your project on something else.