Yes, but considering how demonic most people consider the IRS...
Imagine this. You bill a client and they send you $320 beyond the amount you billed them, because they misunderstood your invoice. Do you return the money?
If yes, does that really correlate with the reputation you've gained for being hellspawn?
If no, aren't you surprised that the IRS did?
Money magically disappears in the hands of private citizens all the time. The IRS doesn't always deserve the hatred it apparently inspires.
Less than half? Interesting. The numbers for the rest of the world are astonishingly different.
Re:i don't believe the RIAA is so clueless..
on
Napster Not To Blame
·
· Score: 1
And believe it or not, some companies go out of business when their services are too expensive or simply suck ass. The music industry as a business shouldn't be immune to this.
So, can we give them what they want with a sunset provision and let them, and their lobbying money, die off like the dinosaurs they are? Poof, Voila, the bad law disappears and everyone is happy. Suddenly the digital age is back in full swing.
Or are you not confident that their business model is toast? Or will it take rampant copyright infringement to euthanize the dinosaurs? If you have to infringe on their materials for their business model to fail, doesn't that imply that it would succeed without the infringement?
If you're using wget or a proxy to re-write your referer, doesn't that imply that you're a human retrieving the content wilfully, as opposed to a human who just clicked on a random link from someone else's site. Rewriting based on referer is still a valid method for avoiding other people's deep links - there are just ways around it that require manual intervention. Kind of like using someone's "search" feature to find something on their site...
a) You accuse the "Open Source community" of needing to grow up and stop whining. You take potshots about casual clothing.
b) You have taken out an overbroad patent in a field with massive prior art.
You, sir, need to grow up and smell the coffee. We are not idiots; we are not against innovation; we are not children. We are against the abuse of the patent system, because it destroys our livelihood; We are against those who would extend the realm of intellectual property to cover their abuses, whether by precedent or legislation, because it destroys our livelihood.
You, sir, are one of the many who have chosen to, in some little way, try to destroy our livelihood. If you are surprised that you have made enemies, you are a fool.
Well, I expect it's because these Diesel Engines already exist, whereas a full-scale solar energy system in the Mojave would be a major undertaking. That would require taxation, budget cuts, or Federal block grants. (Or private companies.) Taxation and budget cuts get people thrown out of legislatures, block grants for this sort of thing are nowhere to be found with our last 20 years of Presidency, and private companies run the numbers and discover that polluting one way (fossil fuels) is much cheaper for them than using less-polluting solar cells at current market rates. (Keep in mind, this is because of our subsidy of fossil fuels, in the distant past (19th century) and now. Weird how an energy subsidy ends up in the defense budget, isn't it?)
So, since private industry won't touch it, and there's no state rep with the appropriate pork to gain, there's no initiative.
Now, there is something cool about the fact that these are diesel (if I read correctly) and not natural gas. There has recently been instituted a biodiesel program in Berkeley. They're having good numbers - the Biodiesel they're making now is about as expensive as Petroleum Diesel would be without subsidy (about $2.00/gallon) and increasing demand can only lower that. It would be great to see the deep-fat-friers of all of those restaurants in San Fran powering the state. Biodiesel pollutes less than Petroleum Diesel! Woohoo! Still have to figure out what to do about NOx, though.
Well, you're a little extreme in your predictions for me. I understand the need to be both vigilant and loud, but there's also this concept of prioritization. Palladium sucks, doesn't do what's advertised, and will lock content away from open sourcers at the very least. On the other hand, if we could get our congresscritters to legislate that all DRM must recognize the concepts of the end-of-life of intellectual property and fair use, we make a major win. That makes the job of DRM manufacturers hundreds, maybe thousands of times harder. I don't like my rights being 'managed,' so I'm all for that.
The cool thing about Linux and other really-really-really open source things, though, is that it won't die. It basically can't. We'd have to get the majority of technological cultures in the world to legislate against the unauthorized use of compilers and FPGAs, and that's not going to happen anytime soon - most of them aren't that stupid, and some of them have already embraced open-source software.
I think it much more likely that Linux and other really-really-really open source things will be left behind at some point by a closed source offering on some totally new and alien hardware (read: not a dumbed-down PC, and not Windows anything) and Linux (or your favorite x-and-such) is going to become passe because the PC is passe. The ideals that create this body of software won't die, though, and then we can start again, with new and even cooler hardware.
So what I'm saying is: don't be afraid that Linux is going to be killed in one fell swoop by Palladium. It doesn't just run on PCs, after all. But yes, we do need to make sure that our voice is loud and clear when it comes to policy, or it may be hard for US to do what we want with our computers.
Hoom hom. Well, I think you miss part of the point, actually. If there's one thing RMS did that makes him a saint and a genius, it's the GPL. Why? Because it both builds a community and keeps the community's work from being sold off like every other commons.
BSD raises the bottom line - every unix-like operating system MUST provide the same functionality as a BSD with source available. And they CAN! Because the source is available, and they can take it and run with it.
The GPL (or some variant thereof) is the only way to produce a high-quality free operating system with software that can't just be co-opted and resold by Microsoft (or Sun, or IBM, or...)
The GPL forces those who would use the code to play nicely, or at least more nicely than BSD.
My hypothesis (to match yours) is that if the GPL style license hadn't come along, we unix-users might just be using BSD - but it wouldn't be free, as in speech OR beer.
Actually, over on plastic, we had a recent discussion about being on sex offender lists. The point was made that sex offender lists often include people who flashed someone 40 years ago and got caught. However, they're branded with the big 'A' (or is it 'P' these days?) wherever they go, in spite of the fact that these lists didn't exist back then. People think they're pedophiles when they might just have been sleeping with their underage girl/boy friend. Great.
So, with that in mind - is keeping blacklists (or greylists, really) of people a good idea at all? We like to pretend that they keep us 'safer' - but I bet the sixty-year-old gay man (prosecuted under one of those 'unenforced' state sodomy laws) who's driven out of his neighborhood with cries of 'think of the children!' isn't feeling any safer as a result of the existence of these lists.
I think you're failing to see the point of open source gaming in general.
Open source software does not usually lend itself to the massive production costs necessary to create a game. There's just no way, except ID's way. These people are not ID; they're building a game for love, not for money. (Although they may just get some money out of it. We'll see.)
So, they're crafting an engine for handling an 'old' Warcraft II style interface, and you're bitching that it's not polished in general.
Now, take some of your polish complaints, and apply them to the original Warcraft, or Warcraft II. But it doesn't have X! But the default AI for troops is SO AWFUL! But this! But that!
You can't fix the problems you see in Warcraft II - like the fact that Lan mode just magically doesn't work on my network in the Battle Net Edition. I bought software that DOESN'T DO WHAT I WANT, and my options are to a) suffer. IF FreeCraft doesn't do what you want.. you can make it better. Maybe I can add Total Annihilation-esque AI to a Warcraft-esque engine so that I don't have to micromanage my troops quite as badly as I do in say, Starcraft.
This isn't a 'released game' - this is a stable release of a game engine that the developers proclaim finally works well enough that the first game written for it is fun.
So, you can go ahead and beg for Warcraft 3 from Blizzard, with the pseudo-3d interface that adds NOTHING to the game, and the graphics that are virtually impossible to resolve as a result of bad gamma correction and the confusing attempt at 3d.
I expect that Freecraft will eventually provide for a host of better games than that. And if I can't see, because the person who tweaked the engine is an idiot, I can go change it.
For an example of an open source project that doesn't get the 'polish' points but still trumps the original games, see freeciv. You know why freeciv rocks? Because the network play ACTUALLY WORKS. Civ3 developers apparently realized that every network-enabled civilization series clone, from Civnet to Alpha Centauri, has had TERRIBLE network support. So they just left it out.
And, the things that Civ3 added to the gameplay that people actually ENJOY can be added as options to freeciv with alarming speed. So the graphics aren't the best in the universe. As soon as I win the lottery, I'll hire an art house to do some better graphics for it. In the meantime, I will still play this wonderful game.
Hello, I just had to respond, because while your point is good, I think it misses something.
Television isn't two way. Therefore, if you pay a bill for something, it's content. You may only pay enough to cover infrastructure costs, but you can't use that infrastructure for anything but obtaining content. It's like paying for RedHat - a CD/coaster isn't worth $xx to me. The content (Linux Distro, Manual, Support) generates the sale, and therefore is the product.
When I pay for internet access, I pay for the ability to send and receive information to various people and places. That's why the Asymmetric ISP sucks for most geeks - we recognize that this medium ISN'T TV, and we don't want it to act like TV. I can't SSH to my friend's TV, even if TW let SSH travel over their cable lines.
Internet connectivity compares more effectively to the phone. If you'd like to discuss the wonders of telemarketing, and how it's a small price to pay for having a phone, I don't think anyone would like to listen to you.;) We're trying to regulate them out of existence, because they are taking advantage of a two-way medium.
Of course, the Slashdot ads are a bit more like Pizza Hut's hold "music" being advertising. After all, we 'call' them. Telemarketers == Spam.
(-1 Incoherent) Because television is not a two way medium, any payment for television constitutes payment for content. The fact that we are also being given ads is just icing for the cable companies. We are not "stealing" content when we don't watch the ads.
[...]just because our current set of scientific theories don't explain everything says nothing about science's ability to explain everything, which seems to be your argument. Just because I don't know something today doesn't mean I can't learn something new tomorrow.
Which is an argument for the possibility of 'supernatural' (ie. unexplained) phenomena. Also, please recognize that you make a statement of faith when you assume that the belief that your philosophical basis for dealing with the world around you will be able to account for all possible things. It's a cop-out. I could just say, 'Well, god will provide an answer when I need to know' and it would be just as rational. (God has provided "answers" in the past, ala Bible. Science has provided "answers" in the past, ala empiricism.)
Just remember, kids - one of these days, the sun won't rise!
Now, supernatural does NOT mean that there is not a logical, rational, 100% scientific explanation for it. There is a logical, rational, 100% scientific explanation for everything. And I do mean *everything*. However, we have not (yet) developed the science to explain 99.999% of it.
And I'm just supposed to take your word for that? What are you, some kinda science-as-a-religion person? Would that make you a Scientologist?;)
Actually, I'm not with you on number 1 or number 2.
Radio - see UWB. SETI may be able to find UWB transmissions out there, but what about the next stage in our EM transmission technology? At what point does SETI discover that they've been listening to the galaxy-wide-ultra-net all along?;) And, even worse, what if it's not EM? What if we're using something quanta based in the next 50 years? That means that we'll have had radio transmissions coming from this planet for maybe 300 years before we start to change our tech. (I'm including the concept that we still use radio for many things for another century or so after we start mass-producing other less obtrusive technology.)
That leaves a resolution of 300 years out of (what is it this week?) 13 billion? I think one can see that 'skip past it rather quickly' is what we're doing. We can even claim we've only been "civilized" for a good 5000 years. Our species has only been around for something like 10000. If we're already finding alternatives to radio, what's the likelyhood that our highly advanced alien friends are still bothering to beam it at us?;)
As for #2, our concepts in physics are changing quite rapidly at this time. Between teleportation of quanta and attempts at opening wormholes, I think it's pretty safe to say that if we're successful with these things we'll have some pretty fast travel available in the (technologically) near future. And we're not even bothering with the anal probing - usually.;)
If you think otherwise, prove it. Don't post about how your uncle can dowse water, or how you saw your friend after he died, etc. Sit down and prove it; prove that there are phenomena that are attributable to paranormal forces.
Cross-posting from another board - Plastic. Someone had a point there, that I just want to re-iterate here:
Wouldn't proving that there are phenomena that are attributable to paranormal forces prove those phenomena are, in fact, results of natural forces?
Just using the loose definition "Paranormal Force" == "Unproven Force."
So, no. No one needs to prove this, because it is by (albeit loose) definition unprovable.
As for otherwise rational people behaving subrationally, check out my other recent post. I bet you think it's "subrational", too.;)
I understand scientific method, and I am aware of the ways that people fool themselves. I am familiar with diverse philosophies.
Don't be too cocky, people.;)
1) There are 'superstitions' which have been scientifically verified in their effect. For instance, aspects of Ayurvedic medicine are being vindicated in the recent past, mostly by bio-engineering companies that take data on particular 'medicinal' rices and use it to obtain patents. That doesn't mean that Astrology is an effective tool at predicting the future. It does, however, indicate that it is sometimes profitable not to ignore information obtained by some process other than the modern scientific method. (Another one I've heard about recently, but don't have as much knowledge of - the Chinese have been using Wormwood for many years to stop tumor growth and sometimes reduce it. I'm sure google can tell you more.)
2) There are scientific givens that have been proven false. Medicine and nutrition have good examples to examine; they are peer-reviewed like every other scientific field of endeavor, and yet it shocks me at times how quickly previous 'common knowledge' was mitigated by some sort of different finding, if not outright retracted.
In a longer time frame, our concepts of mechanics have been altered since their first inception... consider that quanta follow very very different rules. It doesn't prove Newton extremely wrong, but it sure as hell indicates that Newton would have been blowing smoke out his ass if he said, "This is it, it's all done now."
3) There are conditions under which modern scientific method fails to apply. Let's assume for a moment that some condition is extremely hard to reproduce. Maybe even mathematically provably hard. We'll say it's some quantum effect or other, and it only happens under very precise conditions, some of which we can't currently measure because we don't have appropriate instruments. A thing happens, and is empirically observed, but cannot be replicated at this time. Did it happen? Of course. To say that there can be no such event would be naive at best. We have had past instances of this.
4) There are conditions which cannot be measured and re-created by scientific method, because of some inherent quality of these conditions. The irony here is this - it's a statement of faith. This can't be backed up by scientific evidence. I happen to believe it. It can neither be proven true or false, except experientially. (Think 'anecdotally.')
Now, here's the kicker: To deny point #4 suggests faith in the converse - That all conditions can be measured and re-created by scientific method, regardless of the inherent qualities of these conditions. Not to say that science is a religion, but this hints at blind faith that the scientific method can provably describe all possible states that we experience. I say 'blind faith' - 'scientific' people denying their own experience are just as unwilling to see as people denying truly empirical data.
I personally believe that scientific methodology is a tool, and a great one. We can make computers and predict the movements of gases across the universe, and we can make statements about what we should eat and how we should live if we want to be healthy. It doesn't tell us much about how we should act or what we should value, and it doesn't tell us anything about things that cannot be predicted. So scientific knowledge is useful and grand, but there are more things in this world than are enumerated in your philosophy.;)
And yes, I believe that people can know things without scientifically acceptable reasons.
Hello. I'm gay. I've been called all sorts of fun things, by people both gay and straight.
The vast majority of them were not intending to offend me, and were capable of determining when I would be offended. Therefore, they didn't offend me - because they were dealing with me, personally, and not on a public forum. By all means, call me 'Big Gay Al' in person, because it's funny. Most gay people I know don't mind being called gay by just about anybody, but queer, fag, and especially faggot will raise some ire. Gay is almost as common as 'homosexual' and doesn't sound so fucking clinical - it's like calling someone straight instead of heterosexual. It's also one syllable, which makes it even yet still more convenient.
I never use faggot 'cuz of the whole origin being the people-burning thing.
With all that aside, I don't think anyone has a problem with the original poster saying that someone is gay. After all, call a spade a spade. I've said that gay and straight are used as antonyms, and I really don't expect anyone who's straight to get pissed off if I call them straight.
The problem with the original poster is that the jackass was willing to, in a public forum, use gay as an alternative word for stupid. Microsoft, as an organization, is not homosexual (that I know of. And I would know. I'm gay. I read the magazines.) He's not calling a spade a spade. He's calling a spade stupid. I'd be offended if I were a spade, and in this case, I am a "spade", and I'm offended.;)
You're welcome to call ME gay, just not MS. And you're not allowed to call me gay because I do something stupid. If you called someone an African-American every time you're pissed off at them, it doesn't let you off the hook - n* just burns more because of the historical associations. You're still equating being dark of skin with being an asshole, in that instance.
God, I'm posting twice, and on a blackout day! Weird!
The only thing you mentioned that even _vaguely_ comes close to OS integration is the bit about context menus, and, if the method is actually documented, anyone can do that. Not everyone does that, mostly because there's no point in writing an office suite for Windows. (Or a web browser, or a chat client, or a firewall, or a virus scanner, or any software, for that matter. Writing general-use software for Windows is a dead end, since, if it's useful to them, they'll just buy it after trashing your stock price.)
The "OS/Application integration" that people are bitching about is mostly related to things like IE being the primary shell, or it replacing massive numbers of basically unrelated DLLs. Microsoft didn't do this for any good reason - they scattered code throughout the underlying system in an attempt to make it impossible to remove IE. Netscape never had that chance, because they didn't write the OS. How would you like it if your Linux box came with EMACS significantly implemented in the standard C library? How about if you're a VI fan?
IE's weirdness isn't the only time they've done this sort of integration. Word has often been a testing ground for new and undocumented API calls for Windows that seem to be adept at making it crash. However, the IE integration is the only time in recent memory that a specific competitor got to cry foul, because it was such an obviously targetted tactic, rather than making their software appear 'better' by taking advantage of API only Microsoft knows about.
So, again - your points are valid, but they're orthagonal to the topic of OS integration. Anyone with the sufficient time and skillset to create the suite of applications you use could also integrate them in a similar manner. That is not true of the underlying undocumented APIs with their tendrils all throughout your system.
Sorry for breaking the blackout, but I don't post much anyway.
I don't mean consumers 'chose' dos back in 1981
I'm glad you don't mean that, because they didn't.
Once upon a time, a great (as in expansive) monopoly know as I.B.M. produced a small (as in micro) computer they called the P.C.
This great (as in expansive) monopoly known as I.B.M. obtained, rather than created, an operating system for the P.C. This "Disk Operating System" was obtained from a company now on trial for illegal abuse of a monopoly position.
However, Big Blue didn't bother to obtain an EXCLUSIVE license from this tiny company. Why not? Because they were producing a proprietary computer which only they could create, and they were selling this 'PC-DOS' with the computer and rolling the price of the software into the price of the package as a whole. (Sound familiar?) Even if MS tried to sell DOS, who would they sell it to? All of IBM's customers had PC-DOS already.
Enter Compaq. Reverse Engineer the PC Bios, court declares it legal, and BOOM. Microsoft has a market. A big one.
Consumers didn't choose Microsoft; IBM did. However, Microsoft has been leveraging this initial monopoly position the entire time they've been listed in a stock exchange. They didn't even innovate about the business methods of creating their monopoly; they copied IBM's old tricks with alarming consistency. And the initial monopoly wasn't built - it was inherited, with a lot of luck. If Compaq had designed their OWN computer, MS would still be peddling BASIC and nothing else.
And, just as an aside, more dirt: a) rumour is MS (Bill and Paul) purchased DOS from some poor sap for a very small amount of money while informing him that they were doing him a favor by taking it off his hands. b) MS-Windows (3.1, I think) gave a happy undecipherable error when it encountered a wrong version string. You know, like "DR-DOS x.x."
As these examples show, many of their poor business practices have been haunting us for quite a while.
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
on
GPL's Strength
·
· Score: 1
Ah, but therein lies the rub. There's case law that says that's an infringement, but there's legislated law that says it's not. Can't find the link now, but someone posted a link to the Cornell Law Library's copy of the computing-specific copyright modifications, and according to congress, making copies into ram is not violating copyright.
Oh, yeah, and - making copies of install disks to repair other computers isn't illegal, either. You just have to get rid of them once the malfunctioning computer is up and running. So, they've explicitly made an exception for the 'I have to reinstall windows, but they didn't give me a useable CD' situation.;)
Wish I could find the link. Oh well. Tried google and it didn't come up immediately. (That's unusual!)
Other people were replying, but no one had quite made it to this point when I read them. So.
The government should not compete with companies. No, not usually anyway.
No, really. It's not that the government of this country competes with businesses - it's that the government of this country has a symbiosis that encourages greater economic growth. As a result of publically funded research, private companies receive a step-up in their own R&D. It's a community model, actually.
The major problem with GPL'ing all government code is that these businesses can't incorporate this produced code into their own work without releasing it. This forces them to open-source things that may have already existed. While it's nice to have open source software around, I don't want the government forcing code open, or closed.
I personally would really like to see an LGPL style government license, mostly because there should be a balance struck between GPL and BSD for the government's case. BSD'ing code creates things like... BSD. I like BSD and all, but the words 'fork happy' come to mind. (Not talking about the free ones. Talking about all of them, EVER.)
Also, there's some part of me that feels that companies SHOULDN'T be able to get away with stealing the code/research/doctoral student wholesale.;)
So yes, to recap. The government does encourage business, both by being a consumer (should they choose to go with Microsoft's solution? should they hire a consulting company to build something appropriate?) but also by funding research (ala BSD, in an indirect way.;) These are two different areas of policy and while I'd like the latter to be a little less give-it-away-and-have-fun-with-it, the former needs to be a reasonable decision made with all options in mind.
They're doing this to curb P2P fun (among other things,) right? And P2P is already a competitor to the 'on demand' model proposed.
What if it's not cost effective for Time Warner to roll out an on-demand service in the next few years? What if it doesn't "increase shareholder value?" What if they're afraid that it will get copied and passed around the net on the same free services they're trying to shut down?
No need to panic! We'll just do our best to make it unreasonable for a large portion of the userbase to use the only distribution method currently plausible for these large files!
(-1 Incoherent.) In other words, they're shutting down P2P not because the bandwidth is expensive, but because they don't want to roll out on-demand anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but considering how demonic most people consider the IRS...
Imagine this. You bill a client and they send you $320 beyond the amount you billed them, because they misunderstood your invoice. Do you return the money?
If yes, does that really correlate with the reputation you've gained for being hellspawn?
If no, aren't you surprised that the IRS did?
Money magically disappears in the hands of private citizens all the time. The IRS doesn't always deserve the hatred it apparently inspires.
Less than half? Interesting. The numbers for the rest of the world are astonishingly different.
So, can we give them what they want with a sunset provision and let them, and their lobbying money, die off like the dinosaurs they are? Poof, Voila, the bad law disappears and everyone is happy. Suddenly the digital age is back in full swing.
Or are you not confident that their business model is toast? Or will it take rampant copyright infringement to euthanize the dinosaurs? If you have to infringe on their materials for their business model to fail, doesn't that imply that it would succeed without the infringement?
If you're using wget or a proxy to re-write your referer, doesn't that imply that you're a human retrieving the content wilfully, as opposed to a human who just clicked on a random link from someone else's site. Rewriting based on referer is still a valid method for avoiding other people's deep links - there are just ways around it that require manual intervention. Kind of like using someone's "search" feature to find something on their site...
a) You accuse the "Open Source community" of needing to grow up and stop whining. You take potshots about casual clothing.
b) You have taken out an overbroad patent in a field with massive prior art.
You, sir, need to grow up and smell the coffee. We are not idiots; we are not against innovation; we are not children. We are against the abuse of the patent system, because it destroys our livelihood; We are against those who would extend the realm of intellectual property to cover their abuses, whether by precedent or legislation, because it destroys our livelihood.
You, sir, are one of the many who have chosen to, in some little way, try to destroy our livelihood. If you are surprised that you have made enemies, you are a fool.
Well, I expect it's because these Diesel Engines already exist, whereas a full-scale solar energy system in the Mojave would be a major undertaking. That would require taxation, budget cuts, or Federal block grants. (Or private companies.) Taxation and budget cuts get people thrown out of legislatures, block grants for this sort of thing are nowhere to be found with our last 20 years of Presidency, and private companies run the numbers and discover that polluting one way (fossil fuels) is much cheaper for them than using less-polluting solar cells at current market rates. (Keep in mind, this is because of our subsidy of fossil fuels, in the distant past (19th century) and now. Weird how an energy subsidy ends up in the defense budget, isn't it?)
So, since private industry won't touch it, and there's no state rep with the appropriate pork to gain, there's no initiative.
Now, there is something cool about the fact that these are diesel (if I read correctly) and not natural gas. There has recently been instituted a biodiesel program in Berkeley. They're having good numbers - the Biodiesel they're making now is about as expensive as Petroleum Diesel would be without subsidy (about $2.00/gallon) and increasing demand can only lower that. It would be great to see the deep-fat-friers of all of those restaurants in San Fran powering the state. Biodiesel pollutes less than Petroleum Diesel! Woohoo! Still have to figure out what to do about NOx, though.
Well, you're a little extreme in your predictions for me. I understand the need to be both vigilant and loud, but there's also this concept of prioritization. Palladium sucks, doesn't do what's advertised, and will lock content away from open sourcers at the very least. On the other hand, if we could get our congresscritters to legislate that all DRM must recognize the concepts of the end-of-life of intellectual property and fair use, we make a major win. That makes the job of DRM manufacturers hundreds, maybe thousands of times harder. I don't like my rights being 'managed,' so I'm all for that.
The cool thing about Linux and other really-really-really open source things, though, is that it won't die. It basically can't. We'd have to get the majority of technological cultures in the world to legislate against the unauthorized use of compilers and FPGAs, and that's not going to happen anytime soon - most of them aren't that stupid, and some of them have already embraced open-source software.
I think it much more likely that Linux and other really-really-really open source things will be left behind at some point by a closed source offering on some totally new and alien hardware (read: not a dumbed-down PC, and not Windows anything) and Linux (or your favorite x-and-such) is going to become passe because the PC is passe. The ideals that create this body of software won't die, though, and then we can start again, with new and even cooler hardware.
So what I'm saying is: don't be afraid that Linux is going to be killed in one fell swoop by Palladium. It doesn't just run on PCs, after all. But yes, we do need to make sure that our voice is loud and clear when it comes to policy, or it may be hard for US to do what we want with our computers.
Hoom hom. Well, I think you miss part of the point, actually. If there's one thing RMS did that makes him a saint and a genius, it's the GPL. Why? Because it both builds a community and keeps the community's work from being sold off like every other commons. BSD raises the bottom line - every unix-like operating system MUST provide the same functionality as a BSD with source available. And they CAN! Because the source is available, and they can take it and run with it. The GPL (or some variant thereof) is the only way to produce a high-quality free operating system with software that can't just be co-opted and resold by Microsoft (or Sun, or IBM, or...) The GPL forces those who would use the code to play nicely, or at least more nicely than BSD. My hypothesis (to match yours) is that if the GPL style license hadn't come along, we unix-users might just be using BSD - but it wouldn't be free, as in speech OR beer.
Actually, over on plastic, we had a recent discussion about being on sex offender lists. The point was made that sex offender lists often include people who flashed someone 40 years ago and got caught. However, they're branded with the big 'A' (or is it 'P' these days?) wherever they go, in spite of the fact that these lists didn't exist back then. People think they're pedophiles when they might just have been sleeping with their underage girl/boy friend. Great.
So, with that in mind - is keeping blacklists (or greylists, really) of people a good idea at all? We like to pretend that they keep us 'safer' - but I bet the sixty-year-old gay man (prosecuted under one of those 'unenforced' state sodomy laws) who's driven out of his neighborhood with cries of 'think of the children!' isn't feeling any safer as a result of the existence of these lists.
I think you're failing to see the point of open source gaming in general.
Open source software does not usually lend itself to the massive production costs necessary to create a game. There's just no way, except ID's way. These people are not ID; they're building a game for love, not for money. (Although they may just get some money out of it. We'll see.)
So, they're crafting an engine for handling an 'old' Warcraft II style interface, and you're bitching that it's not polished in general.
Now, take some of your polish complaints, and apply them to the original Warcraft, or Warcraft II. But it doesn't have X! But the default AI for troops is SO AWFUL! But this! But that!
You can't fix the problems you see in Warcraft II - like the fact that Lan mode just magically doesn't work on my network in the Battle Net Edition. I bought software that DOESN'T DO WHAT I WANT, and my options are to a) suffer. IF FreeCraft doesn't do what you want.. you can make it better. Maybe I can add Total Annihilation-esque AI to a Warcraft-esque engine so that I don't have to micromanage my troops quite as badly as I do in say, Starcraft.
This isn't a 'released game' - this is a stable release of a game engine that the developers proclaim finally works well enough that the first game written for it is fun.
So, you can go ahead and beg for Warcraft 3 from Blizzard, with the pseudo-3d interface that adds NOTHING to the game, and the graphics that are virtually impossible to resolve as a result of bad gamma correction and the confusing attempt at 3d.
I expect that Freecraft will eventually provide for a host of better games than that. And if I can't see, because the person who tweaked the engine is an idiot, I can go change it.
For an example of an open source project that doesn't get the 'polish' points but still trumps the original games, see freeciv. You know why freeciv rocks? Because the network play ACTUALLY WORKS. Civ3 developers apparently realized that every network-enabled civilization series clone, from Civnet to Alpha Centauri, has had TERRIBLE network support. So they just left it out.
And, the things that Civ3 added to the gameplay that people actually ENJOY can be added as options to freeciv with alarming speed. So the graphics aren't the best in the universe. As soon as I win the lottery, I'll hire an art house to do some better graphics for it. In the meantime, I will still play this wonderful game.
Television isn't two way. Therefore, if you pay a bill for something, it's content. You may only pay enough to cover infrastructure costs, but you can't use that infrastructure for anything but obtaining content. It's like paying for RedHat - a CD/coaster isn't worth $xx to me. The content (Linux Distro, Manual, Support) generates the sale, and therefore is the product.
When I pay for internet access, I pay for the ability to send and receive information to various people and places. That's why the Asymmetric ISP sucks for most geeks - we recognize that this medium ISN'T TV, and we don't want it to act like TV. I can't SSH to my friend's TV, even if TW let SSH travel over their cable lines.
Internet connectivity compares more effectively to the phone. If you'd like to discuss the wonders of telemarketing, and how it's a small price to pay for having a phone, I don't think anyone would like to listen to you. ;) We're trying to regulate them out of existence, because they are taking advantage of a two-way medium.
Of course, the Slashdot ads are a bit more like Pizza Hut's hold "music" being advertising. After all, we 'call' them. Telemarketers == Spam.
(-1 Incoherent) Because television is not a two way medium, any payment for television constitutes payment for content. The fact that we are also being given ads is just icing for the cable companies. We are not "stealing" content when we don't watch the ads.
No wonder it's GPL'd - it's based on that 'crashme' binary. ;)
Which is an argument for the possibility of 'supernatural' (ie. unexplained) phenomena. Also, please recognize that you make a statement of faith when you assume that the belief that your philosophical basis for dealing with the world around you will be able to account for all possible things. It's a cop-out. I could just say, 'Well, god will provide an answer when I need to know' and it would be just as rational. (God has provided "answers" in the past, ala Bible. Science has provided "answers" in the past, ala empiricism.)
Just remember, kids - one of these days, the sun won't rise!
And I'm just supposed to take your word for that? What are you, some kinda science-as-a-religion person? Would that make you a Scientologist? ;)
a) That's a pretty blanket statement there. How sure are you? Have you asked google? ;)
b) Well, since there isn't - go GET SOME! ;)
Radio - see UWB. SETI may be able to find UWB transmissions out there, but what about the next stage in our EM transmission technology? At what point does SETI discover that they've been listening to the galaxy-wide-ultra-net all along? ;) And, even worse, what if it's not EM? What if we're using something quanta based in the next 50 years? That means that we'll have had radio transmissions coming from this planet for maybe 300 years before we start to change our tech. (I'm including the concept that we still use radio for many things for another century or so after we start mass-producing other less obtrusive technology.)
That leaves a resolution of 300 years out of (what is it this week?) 13 billion? I think one can see that 'skip past it rather quickly' is what we're doing. We can even claim we've only been "civilized" for a good 5000 years. Our species has only been around for something like 10000. If we're already finding alternatives to radio, what's the likelyhood that our highly advanced alien friends are still bothering to beam it at us? ;)
As for #2, our concepts in physics are changing quite rapidly at this time. Between teleportation of quanta and attempts at opening wormholes, I think it's pretty safe to say that if we're successful with these things we'll have some pretty fast travel available in the (technologically) near future. And we're not even bothering with the anal probing - usually. ;)
Cross-posting from another board - Plastic. Someone had a point there, that I just want to re-iterate here:
Wouldn't proving that there are phenomena that are attributable to paranormal forces prove those phenomena are, in fact, results of natural forces?
Just using the loose definition "Paranormal Force" == "Unproven Force."
So, no. No one needs to prove this, because it is by (albeit loose) definition unprovable.
As for otherwise rational people behaving subrationally, check out my other recent post. I bet you think it's "subrational", too. ;)
Don't be too cocky, people. ;)
1) There are 'superstitions' which have been scientifically verified in their effect. For instance, aspects of Ayurvedic medicine are being vindicated in the recent past, mostly by bio-engineering companies that take data on particular 'medicinal' rices and use it to obtain patents. That doesn't mean that Astrology is an effective tool at predicting the future. It does, however, indicate that it is sometimes profitable not to ignore information obtained by some process other than the modern scientific method. (Another one I've heard about recently, but don't have as much knowledge of - the Chinese have been using Wormwood for many years to stop tumor growth and sometimes reduce it. I'm sure google can tell you more.)
2) There are scientific givens that have been proven false. Medicine and nutrition have good examples to examine; they are peer-reviewed like every other scientific field of endeavor, and yet it shocks me at times how quickly previous 'common knowledge' was mitigated by some sort of different finding, if not outright retracted.
In a longer time frame, our concepts of mechanics have been altered since their first inception... consider that quanta follow very very different rules. It doesn't prove Newton extremely wrong, but it sure as hell indicates that Newton would have been blowing smoke out his ass if he said, "This is it, it's all done now."
3) There are conditions under which modern scientific method fails to apply. Let's assume for a moment that some condition is extremely hard to reproduce. Maybe even mathematically provably hard. We'll say it's some quantum effect or other, and it only happens under very precise conditions, some of which we can't currently measure because we don't have appropriate instruments. A thing happens, and is empirically observed, but cannot be replicated at this time. Did it happen? Of course. To say that there can be no such event would be naive at best. We have had past instances of this.
4) There are conditions which cannot be measured and re-created by scientific method, because of some inherent quality of these conditions. The irony here is this - it's a statement of faith. This can't be backed up by scientific evidence. I happen to believe it. It can neither be proven true or false, except experientially. (Think 'anecdotally.')
Now, here's the kicker: To deny point #4 suggests faith in the converse - That all conditions can be measured and re-created by scientific method, regardless of the inherent qualities of these conditions. Not to say that science is a religion, but this hints at blind faith that the scientific method can provably describe all possible states that we experience. I say 'blind faith' - 'scientific' people denying their own experience are just as unwilling to see as people denying truly empirical data.
I personally believe that scientific methodology is a tool, and a great one. We can make computers and predict the movements of gases across the universe, and we can make statements about what we should eat and how we should live if we want to be healthy. It doesn't tell us much about how we should act or what we should value, and it doesn't tell us anything about things that cannot be predicted. So scientific knowledge is useful and grand, but there are more things in this world than are enumerated in your philosophy. ;)
And yes, I believe that people can know things without scientifically acceptable reasons.
The vast majority of them were not intending to offend me, and were capable of determining when I would be offended. Therefore, they didn't offend me - because they were dealing with me, personally, and not on a public forum. By all means, call me 'Big Gay Al' in person, because it's funny. Most gay people I know don't mind being called gay by just about anybody, but queer, fag, and especially faggot will raise some ire. Gay is almost as common as 'homosexual' and doesn't sound so fucking clinical - it's like calling someone straight instead of heterosexual. It's also one syllable, which makes it even yet still more convenient.
I never use faggot 'cuz of the whole origin being the people-burning thing.
With all that aside, I don't think anyone has a problem with the original poster saying that someone is gay. After all, call a spade a spade. I've said that gay and straight are used as antonyms, and I really don't expect anyone who's straight to get pissed off if I call them straight.
The problem with the original poster is that the jackass was willing to, in a public forum, use gay as an alternative word for stupid. Microsoft, as an organization, is not homosexual (that I know of. And I would know. I'm gay. I read the magazines.) He's not calling a spade a spade. He's calling a spade stupid. I'd be offended if I were a spade, and in this case, I am a "spade", and I'm offended. ;)
You're welcome to call ME gay, just not MS. And you're not allowed to call me gay because I do something stupid. If you called someone an African-American every time you're pissed off at them, it doesn't let you off the hook - n* just burns more because of the historical associations. You're still equating being dark of skin with being an asshole, in that instance.
The only thing you mentioned that even _vaguely_ comes close to OS integration is the bit about context menus, and, if the method is actually documented, anyone can do that. Not everyone does that, mostly because there's no point in writing an office suite for Windows. (Or a web browser, or a chat client, or a firewall, or a virus scanner, or any software, for that matter. Writing general-use software for Windows is a dead end, since, if it's useful to them, they'll just buy it after trashing your stock price.)
The "OS/Application integration" that people are bitching about is mostly related to things like IE being the primary shell, or it replacing massive numbers of basically unrelated DLLs. Microsoft didn't do this for any good reason - they scattered code throughout the underlying system in an attempt to make it impossible to remove IE. Netscape never had that chance, because they didn't write the OS. How would you like it if your Linux box came with EMACS significantly implemented in the standard C library? How about if you're a VI fan?
IE's weirdness isn't the only time they've done this sort of integration. Word has often been a testing ground for new and undocumented API calls for Windows that seem to be adept at making it crash. However, the IE integration is the only time in recent memory that a specific competitor got to cry foul, because it was such an obviously targetted tactic, rather than making their software appear 'better' by taking advantage of API only Microsoft knows about.
So, again - your points are valid, but they're orthagonal to the topic of OS integration. Anyone with the sufficient time and skillset to create the suite of applications you use could also integrate them in a similar manner. That is not true of the underlying undocumented APIs with their tendrils all throughout your system.
I'm glad you don't mean that, because they didn't.
Once upon a time, a great (as in expansive) monopoly know as I.B.M. produced a small (as in micro) computer they called the P.C.
This great (as in expansive) monopoly known as I.B.M. obtained, rather than created, an operating system for the P.C. This "Disk Operating System" was obtained from a company now on trial for illegal abuse of a monopoly position.
However, Big Blue didn't bother to obtain an EXCLUSIVE license from this tiny company. Why not? Because they were producing a proprietary computer which only they could create, and they were selling this 'PC-DOS' with the computer and rolling the price of the software into the price of the package as a whole. (Sound familiar?) Even if MS tried to sell DOS, who would they sell it to? All of IBM's customers had PC-DOS already.
Enter Compaq. Reverse Engineer the PC Bios, court declares it legal, and BOOM. Microsoft has a market. A big one.
Consumers didn't choose Microsoft; IBM did. However, Microsoft has been leveraging this initial monopoly position the entire time they've been listed in a stock exchange. They didn't even innovate about the business methods of creating their monopoly; they copied IBM's old tricks with alarming consistency. And the initial monopoly wasn't built - it was inherited, with a lot of luck. If Compaq had designed their OWN computer, MS would still be peddling BASIC and nothing else.
And, just as an aside, more dirt: a) rumour is MS (Bill and Paul) purchased DOS from some poor sap for a very small amount of money while informing him that they were doing him a favor by taking it off his hands. b) MS-Windows (3.1, I think) gave a happy undecipherable error when it encountered a wrong version string. You know, like "DR-DOS x.x." As these examples show, many of their poor business practices have been haunting us for quite a while.
Oh, yeah, and - making copies of install disks to repair other computers isn't illegal, either. You just have to get rid of them once the malfunctioning computer is up and running. So, they've explicitly made an exception for the 'I have to reinstall windows, but they didn't give me a useable CD' situation. ;)
Wish I could find the link. Oh well. Tried google and it didn't come up immediately. (That's unusual!)
The government should not compete with companies. No, not usually anyway.
No, really. It's not that the government of this country competes with businesses - it's that the government of this country has a symbiosis that encourages greater economic growth. As a result of publically funded research, private companies receive a step-up in their own R&D. It's a community model, actually.
The major problem with GPL'ing all government code is that these businesses can't incorporate this produced code into their own work without releasing it. This forces them to open-source things that may have already existed. While it's nice to have open source software around, I don't want the government forcing code open, or closed.
I personally would really like to see an LGPL style government license, mostly because there should be a balance struck between GPL and BSD for the government's case. BSD'ing code creates things like... BSD. I like BSD and all, but the words 'fork happy' come to mind. (Not talking about the free ones. Talking about all of them, EVER.)
Also, there's some part of me that feels that companies SHOULDN'T be able to get away with stealing the code/research/doctoral student wholesale. ;)
So yes, to recap. The government does encourage business, both by being a consumer (should they choose to go with Microsoft's solution? should they hire a consulting company to build something appropriate?) but also by funding research (ala BSD, in an indirect way. ;) These are two different areas of policy and while I'd like the latter to be a little less give-it-away-and-have-fun-with-it, the former needs to be a reasonable decision made with all options in mind.
They're doing this to curb P2P fun (among other things,) right? And P2P is already a competitor to the 'on demand' model proposed.
What if it's not cost effective for Time Warner to roll out an on-demand service in the next few years? What if it doesn't "increase shareholder value?" What if they're afraid that it will get copied and passed around the net on the same free services they're trying to shut down?
No need to panic! We'll just do our best to make it unreasonable for a large portion of the userbase to use the only distribution method currently plausible for these large files!
(-1 Incoherent.) In other words, they're shutting down P2P not because the bandwidth is expensive, but because they don't want to roll out on-demand anything.
Maybe. ;)
Without ever looking at Microsoft's documentation. Ever heard of a 'reference implementation!'
MUHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAH! ;)