From what I can tell, the only thing they are giving back is some glue code to make KHTML run on Cocoa.
Linux will do all the giving, and Apple will do all the taking. I can't see how this will be anything but bad news for Linux. Apple gets to use anything that is written for Linux, and Linux gets to get sued for using anything Apple does.
And I'm still waiting for Apple to release the source code to their GNU Chess port, dammit.
Go back to your post and substitute the words "Software Engineering" for each occurance of English or Economics. If my analogy fails for English or Econ, it fails for Software as well.
An assignment involving software engineering has one of two results: either the program runs, or it does not. No such crucible exists for English or Economics, for if it did, we would see computers speaking perfect English and our economy would be perpetually vibrant and growing.
This is my last post on the subject. It may be that we'll just have to agree to disagree.
The philosophy of science crowd is talking about the theoretical limits of knowledge, applications which might best be seen realized given hundreds or thousands of participants all engaged in the pursuit of some kind of truth.
When grading a student, there is no such onslaught of human potential. There is only one teacher, and he must grade many students.
I also think your analogy falls down when you try to compare the quality of work performed by a student in, say, English class with a complex system as the philosophy of science crowd would define it. So much of what is English must necessarily be subjective; it's syntax surely is known but the variety of possible semantics is essentially unbounded. You seem to be suggesting that there is a means by which art can be critically evaluated that is equally applicable regardless of the work and equally valid regardless of the viewer. I'm sorry, but that's just not possible.
And again, it isn't the quality of the argument alone that is important in engineering, the argument must be correct as well, and there is a bulletproof method of ascertaining whether the argument is correct that no other discipline can lay claim to.
You've got a lot going for you being in the position of teaching economics, but surely what you do not have is the ability to discern the wheat from the chaff in your class with anything approaching absolutely certainty. If you did, if such a distinction were possible, we'd take it out of your classroom and apply it to the nation's economy, gaining real and positive results, and ending any and all controversies on the subject.
In economics, all you can go on is whether or not the argument is well-presented or not.
In engineering, not only does it have to be well-presented, but it has to work too.
Now, I am not saying that this means that people in engineering are smarter than people in economics. I am only saying that it is easier to discern good engineers from bad engineers than it is to do the same with economists.
There's no reason to get your gander up. The question isn't whether or not engineers are smarter than economists, or whether engineers are better people than economists.
That said, I think there is something to say for working at endeavors that continually provide feedback as to what works and what doesn't. I don't know if this applies to all engineering, but it certainly does to software engineering. I genuinely believe that software engineers are unique amongst all of the other professions in that we have an opportunity to gauge in concrete terms whether or not our efforts are successful, and that this in turn acts as both deterrent to poor software engineers and incentive to good software engineers.
I can't count the number of times my suppositions about how a piece of code should operate were smashed on the rocks of reality when the program simply refuses to run. What on earth could economists point to that would engender a simliar discipline?
Take your English example for instance. Yes, there may be a fact or two the student need demonstrate mastery over, but on the whole the grade is based on things apart from that; composition, or interpretation of the works of another. These things are very much subjective, and a teacher with an eye towards improving the "quality" of his instruction can more easily award the higher grade than his counterpart in engineering.
This certainly applie to economics as well. Again, you have a formula or two you must profess competency, but the rest is all voodoo.
Physics and the hard sciences are much better examples, however note I didn't say *everything* else was bullshit, only *almost* everything else. But even physics today suffers from a major bullshit quotient, as we delve into matters so theoretical that no experiments exist that can prove or disprove the theory.
Which means that any answer can be seen as being correct.
There are real criteria that can be used to discover whether an engineering student knows his stuff, or doesn't.
Contrast that with almost everything else, where it's all basically bullshit. Almost any answer can be seen as being correct.
Ergo, grade inflation. We want our schools to do better, so the rabid idiots in charge dole out higher grades when they can, which is easy to do in the liberal arts, but next to impossible in engineering (at least without engaging in outright fraud.)
For instance, with movies like LoTR, nobody says they have to release it on VHS/DVD. Just show it in the theatre. Get your $10 per ticket. Peter Jackson's right to make a buck can peacefully co-exist with my right to cheaply make copies of my data and without government (or Hollywood) lording over my hard drive.
Letting people profit from drugs isn't all positive, there are some very dark sides to this as well.
Consider too the pharmaceutical industry's compromise with the U.N. over nations too poor to pay for I.P. drugs. The U.N. is now making the rounds telling countries that herbal and native medicines are bad, and that they should be phased out in favor of the new, expensive stuff.
In other words, drugs that have seen maybe five years of human use are being preferred over herbs that have been used over millenia.
Did you know that fully 20% of pharmaceutical drugs have to either be pulled from the marketplace or have their regimens radically altered because patients suffer severe consequences as a result?
Movies are about to be a lot cheaper to make. Very soon there will be no real difference between what Hollywood uses to shoot and edit video and what the kid next door is using.
It's like writing before and after Gutenburg.
And in any case, nobody says you have to put your movie on VHS or DVD. Why not just show it in the theater and leave it at that?
As for drugs, do you seriously mean to suggest that the present system is in any way satisfactory at all? With all of the tremendous promise pharmaceuticals hold for our better health, do you really believe that noone would engage in their pursuit were it not for money?
More than half of this research is tax-payer subsidized in any case.
And no nation is going to honor IP law when their citizens are dropping like flies. It is an essentially unenforcable law if peoples' only choice is its violation or death.
Classical stuff was written in a much different society.
Yes. A society unburdened by copyright.
Your software examples are interesting. I'm not a graphics artist, but I have to believe a large part of why Photoshop is the standard is due to its roots as a Mac application. This is simply what artists are familiar with.
I hear very good things about Open Office too.
For how long has the open source movement been popular? I would argue that GiMP and Open Office will improve faster than their commercial equivalents... that when you look at the amount of time each has had to mature that there is no doubt that open source is superior.
And why not compare OpenBSD with Windows? Or GNU Linux with Jaguar? In many ways the open source OS's outshine their commercial counterparts.
Digital technology has made copyright moot in not one but two important ways.
The first is that content can be replicated with perfect fidelity for little or no cost.
The second is that copyright simply is not needed. The intent was to encourage people to produce works of science and useful arts, but history has shown that that is simply not necessary. People produce such works even without the promise that the state will use violence to ensure their compensation.
Just look at the open source revolution. Compare the quality of open source software with that of its copyrighted commercial equivalent.
Or compare the quality of literature and art before today's abuse of copyright with the pure shit that saturates our existance today.
Copyright is as archaic as slavery. It is as absurd to give ownership of a sequence of bits to an individual as it is to give ownership of an individual to another individual. And ironically, the very same Constitution originally gave sanction to both.
I saw a news item the other day that referred to you as legendary. Legendary! You're a script kiddie who was so stupid that he actually got caught, and yet here we are feting you like you're Linus Torvalds or something.
The Chicaksaw (a Native American nation) were here first, but nobody expects the United States to dissolve and give back the land to the Native Americans.
Nobody expects Israel to dissolve. Just stay within your borders, the same as we expect from every single other nation on the planet. Stop invading other peoples' land and demolishing their homes. Stop killing their people.
And we do give land back to the Native Americans. As much as we should? Hardly. But there's another factor at play here: time. The land stolen from Native Americans was done by Americans who are now long dead. Not so with the Israelis.
Your position seems to be that simply because people have stolen land from others in the past that it is OK to do so now and in the future. Clearly, that is an unacceptible position. It's embarrassing that anybody even needs to be told this.
But, I've also often noticed that, among a lot of people today, it's "cool" to be anti-Israel.
I suppose it never occurred to you that a lot of people think it sucks when a mighty military power subjects a defenseless people to a brutal occupation, taking their lives and stealing their land in the process. Do you think that might have something to do with it?
Do you understand that a significant chunk of the money I pay in taxes is diverted to Israel every year so they can engage in these brutal exercises? And that they are only able to get this money by virtue of their having bribed our Congress into being so generous with my money? That the reason Israel possesses this mighty military machine is almost entirely due to the aid it receives from America? That most if not all of the news we get from our media here is so hopelessly biased against the Palestinians that I now have to rely on foreign news organizations to keep me informed on what is really happening there?
"Cool" has nothing to do with it.
Atrocities have been comitted on both sides.
Since Sharon's trip to the Temple Mount the number of Palestinian dead exceeds that of Israeli dead by a ratio of nearly 3-to-1. That fact, coupled with the naked aggression on the part of the Israelis by occupying Palestinian lands by force and demolishing Palestinian homes clearly places the atrocities Israel commits in a different class altogether than those committed by the Palestinians.
Great Britian, who had mandate over the land, gave it to the Zionists for a homeland.
Why not stick to the matter of Israelis stealing land beyond what was "given" to them by Great Britain, the matter that is foremost in peoples' minds, the matter that so provokes the Palestinians.
So, before you get on a high horse and say "look at how evil Israel is", yadda yadda yadda, remember that boths sides are to blame. *Both* sides. Not one, not the other.
Nice try. Israel is the aggressor. Israel is brutalizing a defenseless people. It's amazing that anybody would even try to spin it any other way. The fact that they are is a testament to the tremendous influence Jews have in American media.
In 1996 alcohol was responsible for 110,640 deaths. This doesn't include deaths from drunk driving or alcohol-inspired violence.
So, approximiately 100,000 dead vs. potentially 1,000,000 saved.
I don't know. I still think they should've published the data. If they were really concerned about the unhealthy effects of alcohol they could have then published that data too.
The really sobering news in that article was that they knew in 1972 that alcohol could help people at risk for cardiovascular disease but the government forbid publication of the study.
In other words, they suppressed information that would have reduced the number of people who died from this disease.
The total number of dead worldwide may be in the hundreds of millions.
I'm glad to see the slashdot editors consider this news, even if they didn't bother giving it its own berth. Good thing nobody introduced a new MP3 player today.
Slashdot Mirror
WebCore and JavaScriptCore are the glue code I am referring to. Read the descriptions on the page.
Unless Apple open sources Cocoa, I can't see how this is giving back to anybody but Apple.
Looking at this page would seem to say otherwise.
From what I can tell, the only thing they are giving back is some glue code to make KHTML run on Cocoa.
Linux will do all the giving, and Apple will do all the taking. I can't see how this will be anything but bad news for Linux. Apple gets to use anything that is written for Linux, and Linux gets to get sued for using anything Apple does.
And I'm still waiting for Apple to release the source code to their GNU Chess port, dammit.
Go back to your post and substitute the words "Software Engineering" for each occurance of English or Economics. If my analogy fails for English or Econ, it fails for Software as well.
An assignment involving software engineering has one of two results: either the program runs, or it does not. No such crucible exists for English or Economics, for if it did, we would see computers speaking perfect English and our economy would be perpetually vibrant and growing.
This is my last post on the subject. It may be that we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Remember, we're talking about the classroom here.
The philosophy of science crowd is talking about the theoretical limits of knowledge, applications which might best be seen realized given hundreds or thousands of participants all engaged in the pursuit of some kind of truth.
When grading a student, there is no such onslaught of human potential. There is only one teacher, and he must grade many students.
I also think your analogy falls down when you try to compare the quality of work performed by a student in, say, English class with a complex system as the philosophy of science crowd would define it. So much of what is English must necessarily be subjective; it's syntax surely is known but the variety of possible semantics is essentially unbounded. You seem to be suggesting that there is a means by which art can be critically evaluated that is equally applicable regardless of the work and equally valid regardless of the viewer. I'm sorry, but that's just not possible.
And again, it isn't the quality of the argument alone that is important in engineering, the argument must be correct as well, and there is a bulletproof method of ascertaining whether the argument is correct that no other discipline can lay claim to.
You've got a lot going for you being in the position of teaching economics, but surely what you do not have is the ability to discern the wheat from the chaff in your class with anything approaching absolutely certainty. If you did, if such a distinction were possible, we'd take it out of your classroom and apply it to the nation's economy, gaining real and positive results, and ending any and all controversies on the subject.
You're making my point.
In economics, all you can go on is whether or not the argument is well-presented or not.
In engineering, not only does it have to be well-presented, but it has to work too.
Now, I am not saying that this means that people in engineering are smarter than people in economics. I am only saying that it is easier to discern good engineers from bad engineers than it is to do the same with economists.
There's no reason to get your gander up. The question isn't whether or not engineers are smarter than economists, or whether engineers are better people than economists.
That said, I think there is something to say for working at endeavors that continually provide feedback as to what works and what doesn't. I don't know if this applies to all engineering, but it certainly does to software engineering. I genuinely believe that software engineers are unique amongst all of the other professions in that we have an opportunity to gauge in concrete terms whether or not our efforts are successful, and that this in turn acts as both deterrent to poor software engineers and incentive to good software engineers.
I can't count the number of times my suppositions about how a piece of code should operate were smashed on the rocks of reality when the program simply refuses to run. What on earth could economists point to that would engender a simliar discipline?
I think you're wrong.
Take your English example for instance. Yes, there may be a fact or two the student need demonstrate mastery over, but on the whole the grade is based on things apart from that; composition, or interpretation of the works of another. These things are very much subjective, and a teacher with an eye towards improving the "quality" of his instruction can more easily award the higher grade than his counterpart in engineering.
This certainly applie to economics as well. Again, you have a formula or two you must profess competency, but the rest is all voodoo.
Physics and the hard sciences are much better examples, however note I didn't say *everything* else was bullshit, only *almost* everything else. But even physics today suffers from a major bullshit quotient, as we delve into matters so theoretical that no experiments exist that can prove or disprove the theory.
Which means that any answer can be seen as being correct.
There are real criteria that can be used to discover whether an engineering student knows his stuff, or doesn't.
Contrast that with almost everything else, where it's all basically bullshit. Almost any answer can be seen as being correct.
Ergo, grade inflation. We want our schools to do better, so the rabid idiots in charge dole out higher grades when they can, which is easy to do in the liberal arts, but next to impossible in engineering (at least without engaging in outright fraud.)
Check out Netscape 2.02's Navigator Handbook, which was created in 1995! (look at the bottom of the page)
AOL was doing this shit back in the 1980's FOR GOD'S SAKE! Everything they had was dynamic content accessed via static buttons, including documents.
How about every single HyperCard stack ever made? A stack is a document. Did these idiots ever try clicking on any of the buttons in a stack?
FROM WHERE THE FUCK DO WE GET THESE GODDAMNED RETARDS?!?!?
That's Al Michaels.
You make some good points, but mine are better. :)
For instance, with movies like LoTR, nobody says they have to release it on VHS/DVD. Just show it in the theatre. Get your $10 per ticket. Peter Jackson's right to make a buck can peacefully co-exist with my right to cheaply make copies of my data and without government (or Hollywood) lording over my hard drive.
As for drugs...
Read this article from today's New York Times:
Drug Sales Bring Huge Profits, and Scrutiny, to Cancer Doctors
Then read this.
Letting people profit from drugs isn't all positive, there are some very dark sides to this as well.
Consider too the pharmaceutical industry's compromise with the U.N. over nations too poor to pay for I.P. drugs. The U.N. is now making the rounds telling countries that herbal and native medicines are bad, and that they should be phased out in favor of the new, expensive stuff.
In other words, drugs that have seen maybe five years of human use are being preferred over herbs that have been used over millenia.
Did you know that fully 20% of pharmaceutical drugs have to either be pulled from the marketplace or have their regimens radically altered because patients suffer severe consequences as a result?
Severe consequences including death?
Movies are about to be a lot cheaper to make. Very soon there will be no real difference between what Hollywood uses to shoot and edit video and what the kid next door is using.
It's like writing before and after Gutenburg.
And in any case, nobody says you have to put your movie on VHS or DVD. Why not just show it in the theater and leave it at that?
As for drugs, do you seriously mean to suggest that the present system is in any way satisfactory at all? With all of the tremendous promise pharmaceuticals hold for our better health, do you really believe that noone would engage in their pursuit were it not for money?
More than half of this research is tax-payer subsidized in any case.
And no nation is going to honor IP law when their citizens are dropping like flies. It is an essentially unenforcable law if peoples' only choice is its violation or death.
Classical stuff was written in a much different society.
Yes. A society unburdened by copyright.
Your software examples are interesting. I'm not a graphics artist, but I have to believe a large part of why Photoshop is the standard is due to its roots as a Mac application. This is simply what artists are familiar with.
I hear very good things about Open Office too.
For how long has the open source movement been popular? I would argue that GiMP and Open Office will improve faster than their commercial equivalents... that when you look at the amount of time each has had to mature that there is no doubt that open source is superior.
And why not compare OpenBSD with Windows? Or GNU Linux with Jaguar? In many ways the open source OS's outshine their commercial counterparts.
Digital technology has made copyright moot in not one but two important ways.
The first is that content can be replicated with perfect fidelity for little or no cost.
The second is that copyright simply is not needed. The intent was to encourage people to produce works of science and useful arts, but history has shown that that is simply not necessary. People produce such works even without the promise that the state will use violence to ensure their compensation.
Just look at the open source revolution. Compare the quality of open source software with that of its copyrighted commercial equivalent.
Or compare the quality of literature and art before today's abuse of copyright with the pure shit that saturates our existance today.
Copyright is as archaic as slavery. It is as absurd to give ownership of a sequence of bits to an individual as it is to give ownership of an individual to another individual. And ironically, the very same Constitution originally gave sanction to both.
I know about this, yeah, it really happened.
I saw a news item the other day that referred to you as legendary. Legendary! You're a script kiddie who was so stupid that he actually got caught, and yet here we are feting you like you're Linus Torvalds or something.
How does that make you feel?
The Chicaksaw (a Native American nation) were here first, but nobody expects the United States to dissolve and give back the land to the Native Americans.
Nobody expects Israel to dissolve. Just stay within your borders, the same as we expect from every single other nation on the planet. Stop invading other peoples' land and demolishing their homes. Stop killing their people.
And we do give land back to the Native Americans. As much as we should? Hardly. But there's another factor at play here: time. The land stolen from Native Americans was done by Americans who are now long dead. Not so with the Israelis.
Your position seems to be that simply because people have stolen land from others in the past that it is OK to do so now and in the future. Clearly, that is an unacceptible position. It's embarrassing that anybody even needs to be told this.
But, I've also often noticed that, among a lot of people today, it's "cool" to be anti-Israel.
I suppose it never occurred to you that a lot of people think it sucks when a mighty military power subjects a defenseless people to a brutal occupation, taking their lives and stealing their land in the process. Do you think that might have something to do with it?
Do you understand that a significant chunk of the money I pay in taxes is diverted to Israel every year so they can engage in these brutal exercises? And that they are only able to get this money by virtue of their having bribed our Congress into being so generous with my money? That the reason Israel possesses this mighty military machine is almost entirely due to the aid it receives from America? That most if not all of the news we get from our media here is so hopelessly biased against the Palestinians that I now have to rely on foreign news organizations to keep me informed on what is really happening there?
"Cool" has nothing to do with it.
Atrocities have been comitted on both sides.
Since Sharon's trip to the Temple Mount the number of Palestinian dead exceeds that of Israeli dead by a ratio of nearly 3-to-1. That fact, coupled with the naked aggression on the part of the Israelis by occupying Palestinian lands by force and demolishing Palestinian homes clearly places the atrocities Israel commits in a different class altogether than those committed by the Palestinians.
Great Britian, who had mandate over the land, gave it to the Zionists for a homeland.
Why not stick to the matter of Israelis stealing land beyond what was "given" to them by Great Britain, the matter that is foremost in peoples' minds, the matter that so provokes the Palestinians.
So, before you get on a high horse and say "look at how evil Israel is", yadda yadda yadda, remember that boths sides are to blame. *Both* sides. Not one, not the other.
Nice try. Israel is the aggressor. Israel is brutalizing a defenseless people. It's amazing that anybody would even try to spin it any other way. The fact that they are is a testament to the tremendous influence Jews have in American media.
I was there once and the lady who insisted on pumping my gas for me then drops the gas cap on the ground, getting it all dirty.
God knows how much gunk got in the engine because of that.
Good thing it was a lease.
The real prequel to Star Wars
In 1996 alcohol was responsible for 110,640 deaths. This doesn't include deaths from drunk driving or alcohol-inspired violence.
So, approximiately 100,000 dead vs. potentially 1,000,000 saved.
I don't know. I still think they should've published the data. If they were really concerned about the unhealthy effects of alcohol they could have then published that data too.
The really sobering news in that article was that they knew in 1972 that alcohol could help people at risk for cardiovascular disease but the government forbid publication of the study.
In other words, they suppressed information that would have reduced the number of people who died from this disease.
Nearly one million people died in 1999 from cardiovascular disease.
That's one in every 2.5 deaths.
Fucking unbelievable.
This goes well with the news that the government suppressed research into the marijuana's effectiveness in treating cancer. Since the 1973 study talked about in the linked story, there have been three separate studies demonstrating that THC holds promise in reducing or eradicating tumors, but still the government virtually prohibits the research.
The total number of dead worldwide may be in the hundreds of millions.
I'm glad to see the slashdot editors consider this news, even if they didn't bother giving it its own berth. Good thing nobody introduced a new MP3 player today.
It's true for the script-kiddies who run these attacks too you know.
They'll get around to it.
I mean really... bible? Is /. going fundie on us?
Um, patenting every stupid little thing they can get away with isn't proof enough?
And where's the link that shows Amazon sticking up for our privacy? First I've heard of it.
For instance, the Tattered Cover is a great place to buy books on the Internet.
While Amazon does everything in their power to relieve you of choice, the Tattered Cover actually stands up for your rights.
Make Bezo get a real job.
Clone, clone, I engage,
And she sits and she comes when I say,
And seldom is heard,
You're a troll you fucking nerd,
And my hands are not swatted away