Freedom of speech means freedom to speak about things that others may consider "hate speech". Those people would have been innocent of any crime at all in the U.S.
Wrong. The US has much stronger protection of speech./. just ran a story about how an ISP was fined for not removing "hate speech" from their servers fast enough.
just lumped in with whatever everyone else does, it shouldn't be on display as the critical patient
Hmm... the article linked from/. certainly does seem to be trying to have it both ways. The person who contributed the article may not share the views of Theo, who operates strictly with a "no strings attached" policy.
I certainly see what you're saying: the idea of a no-strings-attached endowment does not work when they are making promises about the future, in this case OpenSSH. In that case they are creating implied strings themselves. I guess they might say that sometimes people worthy of an endowment still need to do a little self-promotion, which in this case involves highlighting their most widely used work (again, OpenSSH).
But from the project's POV, they have basically one group of tightly-connected people. It's really hard to break down their work and still maintain the same environment that fostered this unique project in the first place.
in need of a cash transfusion
I laughed when I read that. You probably used the word correctly, but the first thing I thought of when I read that was "Oh no! OpenBSD is being funded by tainted Canadian Dollars. We need an emergency transfusion of clean United States Dollars -- stat.".
What you're talking about is an organizational nightmare for a small group like OpenBSD. If you come in with $10,000 you get to decide how it's spent in great detail. If you come in with $10, your donation is going to be pooled with a lot of other donations, and spent in a more general way.
In a relatively small project, you're supporting a group of developers who work closely together. If you like the products this group produces, then you donate. If not, you don't. If you tell them to break down their time into "OpenSSH time" and "OpenBSD time", you're affecting their daily work, which is not good for the project.
You're thinking about it too much like a business. These things are made by hackers who want to make good products under some kind of endowment, not have some kind of boss constantly telling them what to work on. Some things are better accomplished with bosses and strict accounting (like picking up your garbage every week), and some things are better accomplished when there is no boss and no accounting.
It looks like OpenSSH has worked out pretty well under the no-boss model (as a product anyway, as a business maybe not). There are many projects that are run in a more businesslike way. "Donate" to those (if you still want to call it that); they'd be happy to let you attach all kinds of strings if you donate enough.
We're still talking about OpenSSH, right? Shouldn't we be a little more careful before we hand over the security of the entire F/OSS movement to [insert organization here]?
OpenBSD has built up a reputation over a long time. I'm sure there are other competent organizations, but I don't want OpenSSH to just be "up for grabs".
I am of similar mind. I've heard he's an ass, and I don't really care. What I want to know is, is there some technical problem with OpenBSD? A lot of the comments on this page, and especially this thread, seem to have the attitude that they would rather OpenBSD just died, with the possible exception of OpenSSH. What is this "agenda" people are talking about?
I've never been an OpenBSD user, but I've always looked at it as a core part of the F/OSS community. They do pre-emptive code audits (very rare for any organization) to improve security, and a lot of those improvements go directly into other projects. I would imagine that FreeBSD wouldn't have quite the security reputation it does today without OpenBSD, and I am a happy FreeBSD user. And they do OpenSSH, which I use many times per day, and is also very security sensitive. I don't know if we want anyone else to develop OpenSSH.
Companies who use OSS don't donate. They see it as throwing money away.
I've contributed here and there, especially when a project asks for it. One problem with some projects is that there's not much of a way to donate, or it hasn't been used in a long time and people are surprised when a small donation comes in. Once I bought a PostgreSQL T-Shirt, and it never showed up. I assume the money went to the right place, but it seems strange that they'd be so disorganized about it.
Most people don't care about $10-$50 here or there. If projects make it easy, they'd probably get donations at least from their real users.
Bottom line: OSS is a wonderful idea... like communism. You will find pockets where it works. But overall it falls on its face.
First off, communism is NOT a wonderful idea. At it's heart, it's central planning, and that just doesn't work. Nice thought, but bad idea. Second, OSS works exceptionally well. Think about how many people use OSS and benefit greatly, versus the relatively small investment of labor.
I think you just described the question which is the whole reason for copyright. Nobody knows how useful any creative work is. It can only be measured by demand. And demand is hard to measure without artificially limitng the supply. F/OSS software does not artificially limit the supply at all, so it's very hard to tell the difference between a novel program, and a worthless pile of code that was just developed to get the tax credit.
You can see similar problems with the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts, not National Education Association). Sometimes people get paid money to do crazy sculptures that make most people recoil in disgust.
It's not that I don't allow margins. It's just that nobody has any idea what the margins are. Any estimate anyone would give about the costs or benefits would be off by orders of magnitude.
Anything may have a point of no return. If we let an animal go extinct, we may have missed out on something that could cure cancer. But animals go extinct all the time, with and without the involvement of humans. I am willing to pay some price to prevent extinction, but I am not willing to pay any price to keep every animal in the world from going extinct. Sure, there are programs that try to balance out some flora and fauna with minimal expense. But when you talk about oil you're talking about policies that could break multi-trillion dollar economies.
So, no, not at any price. I'm not giving a bunch of environmentalists a blank check on a trillion dollar account. That's irresponsible.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that global warming is happening, and that it's bad. Does that mean that we can effectively do something about it at a reasonable price? Maybe. But no blank checks coming from me.
A fair point. But property rights are just as important as other rights, and need to be protected. We don't make special exceptions against racism in free speech, and we shouldn't with property rights either.
I'm not sure I understand your point. There already are taxes on oil, at least indirectly. I don't care whether GWB wants higher taxes or not, or universal taxes on oil or not. We shouldn't raise the tax on oil arbitrarily. Solid figures are required for a good policy decision. And solid figures are what we are missing.
I wasn't making a legal argument as much as a logical one. Perhaps I should have been more clear. It's clearly illegal for a loan officer to deny someone a loan based on skin color. But logically, it's similar to denying someone advertising visibility on your website for some arbitrary reason.
Personally, if it's your property, I don't think you owe anyone any explanation for what you do with it. You don't really own property unless you can deny others access to it.
easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, [its] economy
You seriously believe that Clinton, or anyone else, can accurately predict the benefits of reducing global warming?
A lot of these energy ideas are happening in the free market, without government increasing taxes on oil. Some people want that to happen faster, but have no solid figures. We can't make arbitrary policies.
Well... option 1) is what the US have been doing for the past 10 years or so. Satisfied with the results?
It doesn't matter whether I'm "satisfied" or not. What matters is whether a better option exists. If we're past the point of no return on this global warming, then it produces 0 benefit to try to stop it.
but why would we want to wait until all the t's are crossed and all the i's are dotted
I can turn that question around and ask why we should jump to conclusions and assume that arbitrarily punitive oil taxes would lead to any actual benefit.
On an individual level there are lots things (ranging from small to ambitious) that can be done in and about the home.
As energy gets more expensive, more people will do those things. I'm pretty energy efficient right now. I have no idea whether it helps though, or how much.
What more information would you need to get started?
Information that could be used to craft economically sound policy. We need cost-benefit analysis, and that seems to me to be as difficult as predicting the weather. That's the problem.
I've got no problem with investment in alternative energy. I have a problem when people start arbitrarily declaring oil "bad" and that we must place arbitrary taxes on it. Cheap oil will be pulled out of the ground and burned pretty much no matter what the US does.
If we do enact any policy, it better be based on sound cost-benefit analysis of the expected result. And I don't think anyone really knows those figures at all.
If the government would let people build more nuclear plants, I don't think coal would be competitive. I live near several nuclear power plants, and I wouldn't mind living near more.
price reflects the true cost,
Again, nobody knows what those "true costs" are. Are you suggesting you can accurately place a dollar figure on something as complex as global warming? Is $1.00 a gallon too much or too little? Why or why not?
This is the entire problem here. Nobody knows the costs. If we reduce our oil consumption this year by 10%, will that help at all? How much will it help? The cheap oil will still sit in the ground, and likely still be consumed by someone in the near future. So it's still released in the atmosphere.
Real cost-benefit analysis is important. Not hand waving and arbitrary, out-of-your-ass figures. You can make global warming sound scary, I'm sure. And it is scary, you're right. But we shouldn't put our economy on hold for some completely made up tax, that's based on nothing other than "we should reduce our consumption of fossil fuels".
That's the whole problem I was talking about. How quickly is "as quickly as possible"? We could cap the oil wells, and decide not to use any existing oil products starting tomorrow. But everyone knows that's a bad idea.
So what is a good idea? What's happening right now is the "gradual" approach, more investment is going into alternative fuel sources that may be cheaper in the long run than fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are becoming more expensive. There will be a point when fossil fuels are no longer cost-effective.
It seems a little strange that we're facing two problems at once, and one seems to solve the other. If we're running out of cheap oil, then we're going to stop releasing it into the atmosphere. So what does the Kyoto protocol, or something like it, really accomplish? Does it just punitively deny the United States access to the cheap oil remaining, in favor of other nations? What is the result?
I have a hard time believing that we're not going to make use of the remaining cheap oil, so why bother slowing it down a little?
I know what you said was a joke, but there's a real issue here. Most people believe global warming is happening, and most people believe that a part of that warming is caused by humans. It doesn't really matter if it's caused by humans or not, if a natural cycle throws the environment out of whack it's just as bad as if humans do.
The question is what to do about it. We can: (1) Totally ignore it. (2) Put our entire economy on hold.
Or anything in between. To determine what we should do requires a lot more information than we actually have. What's the extent of the damage? How much of that damage will be prevented if we do something now? How much of our economy will be affected by doing something?
I don't think that's a fair statement to make about John Roberts. If you followed his confirmation hearings I think you'd agree.
With Sam Alito, only time will tell. I think he'll be a good justice, but you could be right. After a few decisions we'll know whether he's putting his political viewpoints above the Constitution.
I don't know much about the Congressional laws surrounding Gitmo-like camps, but it doesn't seem to be unconstitutional. Just as the Constitution does not rule people outside our borders, it does not protect those outside our borders. If the president is breaking Congressional laws, then that's certainly a difficult issue. The President is Commander in Chief of all armed forces, and it is a military-run prison camp. I don't claim to be an expert (merely one who has read the Constitution's plain English language), but I think the issue is a little more complicated than your simple summary. Does Congress have authority to control prison camps operating outside our borders? If so, what part of the Constitution says so?
And even if GWB does select people based on loyalty, that doesn't mean they are loyal. There is no real way to tell if someone is loyal or not. And generally speaking, loyalty is more conditional than people like to think. The justices are appointed for life, and rule as they see fit, whether the president likes it or not.
Conservative justices are generally thought to be strict constructionists. That would imply that they would assume the government did not have the power to request that unless it was spelled out in the Constitution.
From watching John Roberts a little, I would classify him as a strict constructionist, but not nearly like Scalia or Thomas. Alito, I just don't know.
The justices that are more likely to side against GOOG would be someone like Kennedy or Souter. But that's just my prediction.
The big secret is that Scalia and Thomas are the friends of liberals and conservatives alike. Of course they are an enemy to the Democrats, but a friend to anyone with libertarian leanings. Remember Kelo vs. New London where a local government tried to use Eminent Domain to take property from the individuals and transfer it to a private company? The justices that voted against it (minority) were: Rhenquist, Scalia, Thomas, and O'Connor. The justices that thought that a private company should be able to take away land from individuals for private benefit were: Souter, Breyer, Stevens, Ginsberg, and Kennedy.
Oracle gives you a LOT of power. I've heard complaints about it, but I've never heard that it couldn't do something if you work at it long enough. I don't have experience with it myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom of speech means freedom to speak about things that others may consider "hate speech". Those people would have been innocent of any crime at all in the U.S.
Canadians have as much free speech as anyone
/. just ran a story about how an ISP was fined for not removing "hate speech" from their servers fast enough.
Wrong. The US has much stronger protection of speech.
just lumped in with whatever everyone else does, it shouldn't be on display as the critical patient
/. certainly does seem to be trying to have it both ways. The person who contributed the article may not share the views of Theo, who operates strictly with a "no strings attached" policy.
Hmm... the article linked from
I certainly see what you're saying: the idea of a no-strings-attached endowment does not work when they are making promises about the future, in this case OpenSSH. In that case they are creating implied strings themselves. I guess they might say that sometimes people worthy of an endowment still need to do a little self-promotion, which in this case involves highlighting their most widely used work (again, OpenSSH).
But from the project's POV, they have basically one group of tightly-connected people. It's really hard to break down their work and still maintain the same environment that fostered this unique project in the first place.
in need of a cash transfusion
I laughed when I read that. You probably used the word correctly, but the first thing I thought of when I read that was "Oh no! OpenBSD is being funded by tainted Canadian Dollars. We need an emergency transfusion of clean United States Dollars -- stat.".
What you're talking about is an organizational nightmare for a small group like OpenBSD. If you come in with $10,000 you get to decide how it's spent in great detail. If you come in with $10, your donation is going to be pooled with a lot of other donations, and spent in a more general way.
In a relatively small project, you're supporting a group of developers who work closely together. If you like the products this group produces, then you donate. If not, you don't. If you tell them to break down their time into "OpenSSH time" and "OpenBSD time", you're affecting their daily work, which is not good for the project.
You're thinking about it too much like a business. These things are made by hackers who want to make good products under some kind of endowment, not have some kind of boss constantly telling them what to work on. Some things are better accomplished with bosses and strict accounting (like picking up your garbage every week), and some things are better accomplished when there is no boss and no accounting.
It looks like OpenSSH has worked out pretty well under the no-boss model (as a product anyway, as a business maybe not). There are many projects that are run in a more businesslike way. "Donate" to those (if you still want to call it that); they'd be happy to let you attach all kinds of strings if you donate enough.
We're still talking about OpenSSH, right? Shouldn't we be a little more careful before we hand over the security of the entire F/OSS movement to [insert organization here]?
OpenBSD has built up a reputation over a long time. I'm sure there are other competent organizations, but I don't want OpenSSH to just be "up for grabs".
I am of similar mind. I've heard he's an ass, and I don't really care. What I want to know is, is there some technical problem with OpenBSD? A lot of the comments on this page, and especially this thread, seem to have the attitude that they would rather OpenBSD just died, with the possible exception of OpenSSH. What is this "agenda" people are talking about?
I've never been an OpenBSD user, but I've always looked at it as a core part of the F/OSS community. They do pre-emptive code audits (very rare for any organization) to improve security, and a lot of those improvements go directly into other projects. I would imagine that FreeBSD wouldn't have quite the security reputation it does today without OpenBSD, and I am a happy FreeBSD user. And they do OpenSSH, which I use many times per day, and is also very security sensitive. I don't know if we want anyone else to develop OpenSSH.
Companies who use OSS don't donate. They see it as throwing money away.
I've contributed here and there, especially when a project asks for it. One problem with some projects is that there's not much of a way to donate, or it hasn't been used in a long time and people are surprised when a small donation comes in. Once I bought a PostgreSQL T-Shirt, and it never showed up. I assume the money went to the right place, but it seems strange that they'd be so disorganized about it.
Most people don't care about $10-$50 here or there. If projects make it easy, they'd probably get donations at least from their real users.
Bottom line: OSS is a wonderful idea... like communism. You will find pockets where it works. But overall it falls on its face.
First off, communism is NOT a wonderful idea. At it's heart, it's central planning, and that just doesn't work. Nice thought, but bad idea. Second, OSS works exceptionally well. Think about how many people use OSS and benefit greatly, versus the relatively small investment of labor.
Out of buying a CD or shirt or something, how much goes to the project? Do they have a breakdown?
I have about $50, and I'd like to pre-order a CD. But if only half goes to the project I might as well just donate it and download the thing later.
For example, what are the qualification criteria?
I think you just described the question which is the whole reason for copyright. Nobody knows how useful any creative work is. It can only be measured by demand. And demand is hard to measure without artificially limitng the supply. F/OSS software does not artificially limit the supply at all, so it's very hard to tell the difference between a novel program, and a worthless pile of code that was just developed to get the tax credit.
You can see similar problems with the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts, not National Education Association). Sometimes people get paid money to do crazy sculptures that make most people recoil in disgust.
It's not that I don't allow margins. It's just that nobody has any idea what the margins are. Any estimate anyone would give about the costs or benefits would be off by orders of magnitude.
Anything may have a point of no return. If we let an animal go extinct, we may have missed out on something that could cure cancer. But animals go extinct all the time, with and without the involvement of humans. I am willing to pay some price to prevent extinction, but I am not willing to pay any price to keep every animal in the world from going extinct. Sure, there are programs that try to balance out some flora and fauna with minimal expense. But when you talk about oil you're talking about policies that could break multi-trillion dollar economies.
So, no, not at any price. I'm not giving a bunch of environmentalists a blank check on a trillion dollar account. That's irresponsible.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that global warming is happening, and that it's bad. Does that mean that we can effectively do something about it at a reasonable price? Maybe. But no blank checks coming from me.
A fair point. But property rights are just as important as other rights, and need to be protected. We don't make special exceptions against racism in free speech, and we shouldn't with property rights either.
I'm not sure I understand your point. There already are taxes on oil, at least indirectly. I don't care whether GWB wants higher taxes or not, or universal taxes on oil or not. We shouldn't raise the tax on oil arbitrarily. Solid figures are required for a good policy decision. And solid figures are what we are missing.
I wasn't making a legal argument as much as a logical one. Perhaps I should have been more clear. It's clearly illegal for a loan officer to deny someone a loan based on skin color. But logically, it's similar to denying someone advertising visibility on your website for some arbitrary reason.
Personally, if it's your property, I don't think you owe anyone any explanation for what you do with it. You don't really own property unless you can deny others access to it.
At the very least, the US certainly has "jurisdiction".
The Amendment refers to a state's jurisdiction (on my reading). What state has jurisdiction over Gitmo?
failure to pay an extortion fee for rankings, etc.
Didn't other search engines do that before google existed?
Google is a private company. It has no obligation to endorse Kinderstart's company than any others.
The same logic could be used to say that a loan officer could refuse loans to people based on skin color.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just taking it to it's logical conclusion.
easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, [its] economy
You seriously believe that Clinton, or anyone else, can accurately predict the benefits of reducing global warming?
A lot of these energy ideas are happening in the free market, without government increasing taxes on oil. Some people want that to happen faster, but have no solid figures. We can't make arbitrary policies.
Well ... option 1) is what the US have been doing for the past 10 years or so. Satisfied with the results?
It doesn't matter whether I'm "satisfied" or not. What matters is whether a better option exists. If we're past the point of no return on this global warming, then it produces 0 benefit to try to stop it.
but why would we want to wait until all the t's are crossed and all the i's are dotted
I can turn that question around and ask why we should jump to conclusions and assume that arbitrarily punitive oil taxes would lead to any actual benefit.
On an individual level there are lots things (ranging from small to ambitious) that can be done in and about the home.
As energy gets more expensive, more people will do those things. I'm pretty energy efficient right now. I have no idea whether it helps though, or how much.
What more information would you need to get started?
Information that could be used to craft economically sound policy. We need cost-benefit analysis, and that seems to me to be as difficult as predicting the weather. That's the problem.
Economies are always in states of flux.
I've got no problem with investment in alternative energy. I have a problem when people start arbitrarily declaring oil "bad" and that we must place arbitrary taxes on it. Cheap oil will be pulled out of the ground and burned pretty much no matter what the US does.
If we do enact any policy, it better be based on sound cost-benefit analysis of the expected result. And I don't think anyone really knows those figures at all.
Not if we switch to cheap, dirty coal first.
If the government would let people build more nuclear plants, I don't think coal would be competitive. I live near several nuclear power plants, and I wouldn't mind living near more.
price reflects the true cost,
Again, nobody knows what those "true costs" are. Are you suggesting you can accurately place a dollar figure on something as complex as global warming? Is $1.00 a gallon too much or too little? Why or why not?
This is the entire problem here. Nobody knows the costs. If we reduce our oil consumption this year by 10%, will that help at all? How much will it help? The cheap oil will still sit in the ground, and likely still be consumed by someone in the near future. So it's still released in the atmosphere.
Real cost-benefit analysis is important. Not hand waving and arbitrary, out-of-your-ass figures. You can make global warming sound scary, I'm sure. And it is scary, you're right. But we shouldn't put our economy on hold for some completely made up tax, that's based on nothing other than "we should reduce our consumption of fossil fuels".
That's the whole problem I was talking about. How quickly is "as quickly as possible"? We could cap the oil wells, and decide not to use any existing oil products starting tomorrow. But everyone knows that's a bad idea.
So what is a good idea? What's happening right now is the "gradual" approach, more investment is going into alternative fuel sources that may be cheaper in the long run than fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are becoming more expensive. There will be a point when fossil fuels are no longer cost-effective.
It seems a little strange that we're facing two problems at once, and one seems to solve the other. If we're running out of cheap oil, then we're going to stop releasing it into the atmosphere. So what does the Kyoto protocol, or something like it, really accomplish? Does it just punitively deny the United States access to the cheap oil remaining, in favor of other nations? What is the result?
I have a hard time believing that we're not going to make use of the remaining cheap oil, so why bother slowing it down a little?
I know what you said was a joke, but there's a real issue here. Most people believe global warming is happening, and most people believe that a part of that warming is caused by humans. It doesn't really matter if it's caused by humans or not, if a natural cycle throws the environment out of whack it's just as bad as if humans do.
The question is what to do about it. We can:
(1) Totally ignore it.
(2) Put our entire economy on hold.
Or anything in between. To determine what we should do requires a lot more information than we actually have. What's the extent of the damage? How much of that damage will be prevented if we do something now? How much of our economy will be affected by doing something?
I don't think that's a fair statement to make about John Roberts. If you followed his confirmation hearings I think you'd agree.
With Sam Alito, only time will tell. I think he'll be a good justice, but you could be right. After a few decisions we'll know whether he's putting his political viewpoints above the Constitution.
I don't know much about the Congressional laws surrounding Gitmo-like camps, but it doesn't seem to be unconstitutional. Just as the Constitution does not rule people outside our borders, it does not protect those outside our borders. If the president is breaking Congressional laws, then that's certainly a difficult issue. The President is Commander in Chief of all armed forces, and it is a military-run prison camp. I don't claim to be an expert (merely one who has read the Constitution's plain English language), but I think the issue is a little more complicated than your simple summary. Does Congress have authority to control prison camps operating outside our borders? If so, what part of the Constitution says so?
And even if GWB does select people based on loyalty, that doesn't mean they are loyal. There is no real way to tell if someone is loyal or not. And generally speaking, loyalty is more conditional than people like to think. The justices are appointed for life, and rule as they see fit, whether the president likes it or not.
Conservative justices are generally thought to be strict constructionists. That would imply that they would assume the government did not have the power to request that unless it was spelled out in the Constitution.
From watching John Roberts a little, I would classify him as a strict constructionist, but not nearly like Scalia or Thomas. Alito, I just don't know.
The justices that are more likely to side against GOOG would be someone like Kennedy or Souter. But that's just my prediction.
The big secret is that Scalia and Thomas are the friends of liberals and conservatives alike. Of course they are an enemy to the Democrats, but a friend to anyone with libertarian leanings. Remember Kelo vs. New London where a local government tried to use Eminent Domain to take property from the individuals and transfer it to a private company? The justices that voted against it (minority) were: Rhenquist, Scalia, Thomas, and O'Connor. The justices that thought that a private company should be able to take away land from individuals for private benefit were: Souter, Breyer, Stevens, Ginsberg, and Kennedy.
Interesting. That is cool.
Oracle gives you a LOT of power. I've heard complaints about it, but I've never heard that it couldn't do something if you work at it long enough. I don't have experience with it myself.