All licensees are free to obtain the source, distribute it, create derivitive works, etc. However only the copyright holder can sell a derivitive work. Why is that so hard to understand?
Nope. Go read the GPL. RMS specifically distinguishes between free as in "free beer", and free as in "freedom of speech". The GPL enforces the latter but not the former.
Asynchrony, no doubt filled to the brim with B-School grads, can concieve of no other system. Obviously, they think, these people work with money as their target.
I think that's unfair. They'd have to be completely blind not to realise that a lot of people don't do it for money.
I'm an example - an open source code who does it for fun and to make useful software. But I'd sure like to make money off open source so I don't have to code nasty proprietary stuff quite so much. Given the choice between a good web collaboration environment, and an equally good web collaboration environment with a chance of getting paid (not necessarily a big chance, but a chance nevertheless), I'd choose the latter. I think the risk of flamewars is worth chancing.
So by breaking a so-called "unjust" law you are just assuming that your opinion is better than the people which Americans elect to make these laws, which I would call arrogance of the worst kind. Your opinion is no more valid than any others, although in light of your inability to deal with other people's viewpoints I would perhaps say it is *less* valid than most.
I'm a moral relativist of a sort, but this is relativism of the stupidest sort. Imagine this conversation was being conducted in a repressive state like Indonesia. Would you still say criticising the rulers was arrogant? And identify the rulers views with people's views? Give me a break. You have got to be trolling.
And some opinions are more valid than others!! Scientifically-ground ones for one thing.
If they won't agree to it then they must not want what you have bad enough
Exactly. For low skilled jobs, employers view people as interchangeable. So what, exactly, are low-skilled employee's supposed to do? Answer me that! We can't all work in high-tech, you know. Some people have to do menial work. And why should they lose the privacy rights just because they lack economic bargaining power?
You're avoiding the issue. If that woman cannot afford to be picky about jobs, because her choices are very limited or non-existent, what happens to her right to privacy?
As a more serious example, the "ELIZA effect" (people's tendency to attribute consciousness to anything that emits natural language) has debunked the Turing test in many people's minds.
It's still better than any other test yet invented! All existing AI systems fail miserably at the Turing test. There's no evidence that human-level intelligence is even possible in a computer.
passing anti-firearms-rights laws is legislating morality.
Indeed it is. But, just ask yourself, what isn't? If something is illegal, but there's nothing morally wrong with it (from your point of view), then it's surely a bad law (from your point of view).
You might as well argue that anti-murder laws are "imposing morality". Of course they are, but so what?
But Freenet uses #accesses to measure popularity. Thrasher bots would be popular to artifically inflate popularity. But if everyone used them, you would have a small "tradgedy of the commons", as it would slow down things for everyone. Sort of an arms race.
What does this buy me? Only the best redundant file server in the history of the world.
Careful. RTFAQ. Your files will be dropped on the floor if you don't access them enough.
(How much is enough? If there is a large malicious request flood, could it be that no amount of "keep-alive" requests are enough to keep your files in existence?)
You might have argued the same way about Usenet, or the Web, or anything. Who's going to be able to afford to put up all these servers?
But effectively, all those millions of free (as in beer) webpages and free Usenet posts out there are riding on the coat-tails of the Internet money bandwagon. And with server costs, bandwidth etc. you're just getting better and better value for money, because of technological advances. (With molecular nanotech, you're going to get stupendous leaps forward in Internet capacity and tremendous drops in costs.)
Anyway, if this gets big, and ISPs can see added value in adding FreeNet to their list of services, they may eventually do so. The more interesting question is what will be the attempts to supress this technology, and will we win? - because there surely will be many, on many fronts.
Clearly the intent here is the "security" of the people. Nuclear bombs don't secure it. In fact, giving the people bombs is a bigger threat to their security than any foreign power today.
Correct. As Nick Bostrom has pointed out, there are surely more than one in a million insane people in the population, and a nuclear weapon could kill more than a million people (substitute more accurate numbers if you will, but you get the gist). Therefore, everyone possessing a nuclear weapon would lead to human extinction.
And you can't get out of that by saying "don't allow insane people to have one", because psychiatry isn't advanced enough yet to stop killers before they strike.
This is not merely academic - it may become very relevant in the future, when universal nanoassemblers will in principle be able to create biosphere-destroying weapons with relative ease and low cost. That means a ban on individual control over these assemblers, at the very least, is critical for the survival of humanity. Shared control, as happens now in theory with nuclear weapons, is much safer, because individual maniacs can be vetoed.
Perhaps the reason SETI hasn't detected anything yet, is because most civilisations destroy themselves upon reaching our level of technological advancement.
Paradigms per se have zilch to do with memory mangement.
Not true. If you use C and malloc rather than Java and "new", you have more memory management work to do. More possibility for mistakes - for something which, in many applications, just isn't worth manually coding.
If you used some weird OO-style memory management in C, that would be a change of paradigm (in my book).
A fully garbage-collecting, memory-safe environment can be implemented beneath any language.
Hahahaha! Really? Show me one case where this has ever been done successfully for C, without implementing a full-blown virtual machine. And if it's so good, why aren't more people using it?
I'm not a big follower of Java, but how, exactly, do you design non-obsolescence?
You can't, of course - but then, there are some fairly basic assumptions, like a Von Neumann architecture, that nearly all computers have followed for decades.
Most existing OS's are bagged down with platform-specific assumptions - Win2000 is thus a real huge pain to port, even for MS with millions to throw away - they had great difficulty getting it out the door on time, let alone porting it! By contrast, Java is specifically designed to abstract away lots of platform-specific features - even down to the representation of strings and pointers. Thus, although the Java Linux ports are non-trivial, it's a case of port one program (the runtime environment) and hey presto, everything else runs without changing a line (in theory).
Furthermore, because MS makes loads of money off Windows licensing, they tend to plan obselecence to force users to upgrade. By stark contrast, Java Runtime Environments are generally free, and they promise rock-solid compatibility, so there is little incentive for Sun to go around breaking old code. (They do, of course - but only by accident - and, unlike Microsoft, they don't tend to call such incompatibilities "features", on the whole.)
Yes, this is a real pain, and can slow Forte down to a crawl esp. when other apps are running.
It happens because the garbage collector doesn't run until it nears the maximum allocated memory. By default, Forte is set to run with a maximum of 128Mb - which is ridiculous, it doesn't even need half that for small projects. Try editing your forte.sh file or whatever it's called, change the -Xmx128m option to read -Xmx64m (IIRC).
Taking away guns, dumbing down education, extorting powerful industries (like tobacco), micromanagement of peoples lives through excessively complex regulation and encouraging people to rat out their friends to the Party or Thought Police or whatever you call it, were and are all tactics of totalitarian regimes the world over, and are all being pushed heavily in the U.S.
Er, "extorting powerful industries (like tobacco)" sits very oddly in your list. Are we supposed to weep for the poor, victimised tobacco company executives?
Face it - they're a bunch of murderers. They knew for decades they were contributing to people's deaths, and they fought tooth and nail to allow their killing spree to continue without interference. They should be shot.
One of the most horrifying things about these school murders is that people get very distressed about them, but, by stark contrast, they don't seem to care about, or even be very aware of, the huge scale of corporate immorality in the world (like for example tobacco advertising) that collectively contributes to the death of millions of people worldwide.
An Open Letter to All Americans - Shadow of the Swastika - (Don't be fooled by the subtitle on the web page - it's not just about Hemp.) "A list of the corporations named include Du Pont, Standard Oil, and General Motors, all of which were proven to be conspiring with Nazi industrial cartels to eliminate competition world-wide and divide among themselves the Earth's industrial resources and commercial markets, for profitable exploitation. "
The Drug Story - Earth-shattering revelations about drugs and the sinister Rockefeller empire.
Yes, I know 99% of/. readers will dismiss this all as consipiracy-theory nonsense. But conspiracies and cartels are not impossible - they have existed, and just because a theory is a conspiracy theory is no reason, in and of itself, to reject it out of hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Go read the GPL. RMS specifically distinguishes between free as in "free beer", and free as in "freedom of speech". The GPL enforces the latter but not the former.
I think that's unfair. They'd have to be completely blind not to realise that a lot of people don't do it for money.
I'm an example - an open source code who does it for fun and to make useful software. But I'd sure like to make money off open source so I don't have to code nasty proprietary stuff quite so much. Given the choice between a good web collaboration environment, and an equally good web collaboration environment with a chance of getting paid (not necessarily a big chance, but a chance nevertheless), I'd choose the latter. I think the risk of flamewars is worth chancing.
I don't. I am subjectively criticising them. Values don't exist objectively as properties of actions or situations.
If they were not threatened, we would not even be having this discussion.
I'm a moral relativist of a sort, but this is relativism of the stupidest sort. Imagine this conversation was being conducted in a repressive state like Indonesia. Would you still say criticising the rulers was arrogant? And identify the rulers views with people's views? Give me a break. You have got to be trolling.
And some opinions are more valid than others!! Scientifically-ground ones for one thing.
Exactly. For low skilled jobs, employers view people as interchangeable. So what, exactly, are low-skilled employee's supposed to do? Answer me that! We can't all work in high-tech, you know. Some people have to do menial work. And why should they lose the privacy rights just because they lack economic bargaining power?
It's still better than any other test yet invented! All existing AI systems fail miserably at the Turing test. There's no evidence that human-level intelligence is even possible in a computer.
Indeed it is. But, just ask yourself, what isn't? If something is illegal, but there's nothing morally wrong with it (from your point of view), then it's surely a bad law (from your point of view).
You might as well argue that anti-murder laws are "imposing morality". Of course they are, but so what?
That's total and utter rubbish. What about use value?
Careful. RTFAQ. Your files will be dropped on the floor if you don't access them enough.
(How much is enough? If there is a large malicious request flood, could it be that no amount of "keep-alive" requests are enough to keep your files in existence?)
RTFAQ! They disappear.
But effectively, all those millions of free (as in beer) webpages and free Usenet posts out there are riding on the coat-tails of the Internet money bandwagon. And with server costs, bandwidth etc. you're just getting better and better value for money, because of technological advances. (With molecular nanotech, you're going to get stupendous leaps forward in Internet capacity and tremendous drops in costs.)
Anyway, if this gets big, and ISPs can see added value in adding FreeNet to their list of services, they may eventually do so. The more interesting question is what will be the attempts to supress this technology, and will we win? - because there surely will be many, on many fronts.
Correct. As Nick Bostrom has pointed out, there are surely more than one in a million insane people in the population, and a nuclear weapon could kill more than a million people (substitute more accurate numbers if you will, but you get the gist). Therefore, everyone possessing a nuclear weapon would lead to human extinction.
And you can't get out of that by saying "don't allow insane people to have one", because psychiatry isn't advanced enough yet to stop killers before they strike.
This is not merely academic - it may become very relevant in the future, when universal nanoassemblers will in principle be able to create biosphere-destroying weapons with relative ease and low cost. That means a ban on individual control over these assemblers, at the very least, is critical for the survival of humanity. Shared control, as happens now in theory with nuclear weapons, is much safer, because individual maniacs can be vetoed.
Perhaps the reason SETI hasn't detected anything yet, is because most civilisations destroy themselves upon reaching our level of technological advancement.
Not true. If you use C and malloc rather than Java and "new", you have more memory management work to do. More possibility for mistakes - for something which, in many applications, just isn't worth manually coding.
If you used some weird OO-style memory management in C, that would be a change of paradigm (in my book).
A fully garbage-collecting, memory-safe environment can be implemented beneath any language.
Hahahaha! Really? Show me one case where this has ever been done successfully for C, without implementing a full-blown virtual machine. And if it's so good, why aren't more people using it?
You can't, of course - but then, there are some fairly basic assumptions, like a Von Neumann architecture, that nearly all computers have followed for decades.
Most existing OS's are bagged down with platform-specific assumptions - Win2000 is thus a real huge pain to port, even for MS with millions to throw away - they had great difficulty getting it out the door on time, let alone porting it! By contrast, Java is specifically designed to abstract away lots of platform-specific features - even down to the representation of strings and pointers. Thus, although the Java Linux ports are non-trivial, it's a case of port one program (the runtime environment) and hey presto, everything else runs without changing a line (in theory).
Furthermore, because MS makes loads of money off Windows licensing, they tend to plan obselecence to force users to upgrade. By stark contrast, Java Runtime Environments are generally free, and they promise rock-solid compatibility, so there is little incentive for Sun to go around breaking old code. (They do, of course - but only by accident - and, unlike Microsoft, they don't tend to call such incompatibilities "features", on the whole.)
It happens because the garbage collector doesn't run until it nears the maximum allocated memory. By default, Forte is set to run with a maximum of 128Mb - which is ridiculous, it doesn't even need half that for small projects. Try editing your forte.sh file or whatever it's called, change the -Xmx128m option to read -Xmx64m (IIRC).
Er, "extorting powerful industries (like tobacco)" sits very oddly in your list. Are we supposed to weep for the poor, victimised tobacco company executives?
Face it - they're a bunch of murderers. They knew for decades they were contributing to people's deaths, and they fought tooth and nail to allow their killing spree to continue without interference. They should be shot.
One of the most horrifying things about these school murders is that people get very distressed about them, but, by stark contrast, they don't seem to care about, or even be very aware of, the huge scale of corporate immorality in the world (like for example tobacco advertising) that collectively contributes to the death of millions of people worldwide.
An Open Letter to All Americans - Shadow of the Swastika - (Don't be fooled by the subtitle on the web page - it's not just about Hemp.) "A list of the corporations named include Du Pont, Standard Oil, and General Motors, all of which were proven to be conspiring with Nazi industrial cartels to eliminate competition world-wide and divide among themselves the Earth's industrial resources and commercial markets, for profitable exploitation. "
The Drug Story - Earth-shattering revelations about drugs and the sinister Rockefeller empire.
Yes, I know 99% of /. readers will dismiss this all as consipiracy-theory nonsense. But conspiracies and cartels are not impossible - they have existed, and just because a theory is a conspiracy theory is no reason, in and of itself, to reject it out of hand.