I see your point of view, and share it. Sometimes political correctness is taken to far. But if you think about it, although it seems to have very little derogatory value these days, you can imagine that it is somewhat rude, at the very least. If I were from east asia, I would not like to be called a "Yellow". Hey, get out the Yellow Vote! These days not everybody is defined by their skin color - many people are of several ethnicities, and differing backgrounds. So it makes a bit more sense to just be a little more prudent and instead of calling somebody a White, or a Black, or a Yellow, or a Red (or what have you), instead refer to them by their actual ethnicity, or original nationality. Sure, it's a fine distinction, but I think it is best to err on the side of respect. I don't care *what* they would like to be called, but just as I don't want people calling me by my skin color (or any other arbitrary attribute; I'm probably "white" by the way) I respect other people's sensitivities. That said, I'm sure most people are thick skinned enough to not really care.
I've been thinking about portable assembly for a while now. Sometimes you want to get as low level as you can, but also want to be portable. It would at least be an interesting academic project (somebody must've done this already) to attempt to abstract most essential assembly instructions to a virtual set, which can then be translated to a closely matching native set, at compile-time. So you get more or less the strength of assembly programming, with the nice feature of portability and common syntax and operations, etc.
The Crusoe chip, and the Java VM, are taking us more and more towards dynamic compilation/execution environments, already. I think some type of portable assembly would be cool. (I guess you could write raw bytecode, but you still wouldn't be able to compile that natively...perhaps somebody just needs to write a bytecode->native compiler (I think Symantec and several others already have))
Amazing, they guy was actually going to give them his "invention" for "free", and then *charge* other schools for using it! Hey! Unicorns exist, and I'll give you the privilage of printing that as fact for *free*, but I'll charge other schools. Better get in while you can!
I agree. The poster is essentially proving that the abuse of patents to exclude others for an inordinately long amount of time, has resulted in people NOT innovating because they'd have to fight or be subject to the existing patents. The solution then is to *shorten* the lifespan of these patents so that Xerox, or NASA, couldn't financially harm anybody trying to use those inventions (that is what is essentially being said here: an exlusive patent is the "guarantee" of not being sued for infringement; that is just a vicious cycle).
Wake up call Thalia: abortion is de-facto prohibited in most places anyway. Try finding an abortion doctor. You will probably have to drive hours and hours, then brave a gauntlet of foaming prolifers. Ob/gyns that perform this procedure (amongst myriad others) are picketed, driven out of communities, slandered, hunted and murdered. So what if Roe v. Wade is upheld? Why vote for another business-as-usual corporate politician who will carefully walk the middleground, both appeasing pro-lifer's with some "moral stance" and fostering an antagonistic environment, and appeasing pro-choicers with the token Roe v. Wade.
Both Bush and Gore suck. Gore might suck slightly less on this issue, but they both suck. Instead of voting for the lesser of evils, how about voting for the better of goods.
Look, when a small child is raped there is an obvious victim. In abortion, if the fetus is aborted before the scientifically agreed upon determination of life ("brain waves"), there is no victim. On the other hand, if this is outlawed, their *will* be victims. Women will be robbed of their right of control over their own bodies. This is used in many third world countries to oppress women, because they are *not* allowed a choice.
Ok, let's analyse this. There are three possibilities:
1) Memo is fake
2) Memo was purposefully leaks to influence open source in some way
3) Memo was real
In cases 1 and 2, I think the obvious response is to disregard the memo. If 2, we certainly don't want to try to do the opposite of what the memo might suggest us to do. In fact, the best plan is to just ignore it, nullifying any effect it may have had.
If 3, then there are two subcases:
1) He's right
2) These are the ramblings of a king whose civilization is crumbling
In both of these cases we should probably reanalyse what we are doing and redouble our efforts, to reduce duplicating work, and to increase productivity. He's right: Open Source/Free Software cannot define itself by what it is *isn't*. Once the "what it isn't" (closed, proprietary development in general, Microsoft in specific) disappears, Open Source/Free Software still needs a reason to exist. For Open Source that reason is to create high quality software which is easily modifiable and customizable by users. For Free Software that reason is to create programs whose code is legally unencumbered so that the "freedom" of using said software is ensured for everybody.
I'd also like to point out "billg"'s comment:
...artificial concepts as "Free Software" and "Open Source?"
I think Jefferson would disagree with billg's interpretation of intellectual property. In fact, selling and owning ideas are what is artificial, and only supported through artificial laws so that people have incentive to create and innovate.
Anyway, when is the Mardi Gras? I didn't get a flyer...
I thought the whole point of taxing *speculation* wasn't to stick it to Da Man, but instead to *disincentivize* wild speculation which may lead to wild variances and instability in the market (*cough* tech sector *cough*). With the introduction of so many day traders, who are not investing in their own personal belief in companies, but instead playing mind games to find out where the herd is going, we see a lot more ups and downs. As a country we don't like this (as we've decided we don't like smoking), so we tax it.
Actually, although he probably meant it in jest, and I thought it was funny when he said it, if you think about it, perhaps we should be taxing food that's bad for you too;) After all, lifestyle and diet related diseases are the #1 killer (aren't they? high blood pressure/heart disease, cancer which could potentially be linked to diet, etc. etc.)
Hey, slashdot, let's play a game. It's called I carefully preview my message, and then you munge it up even though it appears correctly in preview; then I hit submit, and it gets screwed up.
Ok, please remember that some of these quotes are coming from much longer essays, and speeches, and that you may be picking up the wrong vibe, or not getting the tone in which these were said. So I urge you instead to check out www.votenader.org, read over all the blurbs on the issues, and perhaps even catch some audio or text of his speeches. Nader is often facetious and lightheartedly pokes fun, so don't interpret everything that is said off the cuff literally without finding the context in which it was said. Perhaps some of these things need tags around them - but, hey, there's good reason to rant these days.
Yes, well when shit happens those in power are more often on the producing end. They are *supposed* to err on the side of the rights of citizens. Saying "shit happens" is a cop out. We employ these people with our tax dollars.
The X-Files may be an interesting half hour, but reality is more scary than fiction. The FBI has had its fingers in most of the major scandals and incidents in our country's history.
Ask them for Killgallen's files: she supposedly was about to publish a tell-all on the JFK assassination. She got caught up with a "mysterious stranger" from out of town and died, surprise, from apparent overdose of barbituates, all her research magically disappearing. Ask why, when Anna Mae Aquash was found in a ditch on the side of the road wrapped in a blanket, with her hands cut off and a bullet in the back of her head, the called it death from "exposure" and didn't investigate further. Yeah, exposure to a nine millimeter bullet in the back of the head. Ask them for their Monroe or Lenny Bruce file.
The FBI has been quietly spying on and brutalizing the American people, and then covering its own ass, since its inception. As a citizen you should be outraged that this organization continues on like this (FOIA my ass).
(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
Um, if it effectively controlled access wouldn't this law be *unnecessary*? It's like putting some gum on a chest to "lock" it in place, then when somebody "circumvents" your access control device, running to the government and saying "hey, they're not allowed to circumvent my anti-circumvention device - make a law!". I mean, why don't they just make a law that says nobody can circumvent anything they don't want them to, and just do away with the tedious practice of actually designing and implementing controls?
Ok, let's see: you were a self-styled alcohol-swilling outcast who managed to get employed in a startup which let people smoke marijuana at lunchtime and threw big parties in which everybody snorted crack and got money thrown at them by suits. And you expected this to last *how* long?
Does anybody else working in a non-marijuana-smoking-cocaine-snorting-party-throw ing company think that this tale is a bit removed from reality? I don't sit at my keyboard thinking "You know, they don't let me smoke marijuana here, or live under my desk...I feel cheated".
Seeing as you are so "Insightful" I'd figure you'd be able to understand graduating benefits. This can be done in a sane manner. Perhaps some curve that discourages freeloading like you describe (perhaps your benefits decrease more slowly as you reach the asymptote, instead of drastically getting chopped down). No need for knee-jerk reactions.
Ok, here was my idea for a whizbang P2P architecture.
What do we need? Something relatively anonymous. Something relatively stealthy. Something relatively standard, familiar, easy to use.
So I says to myself FTP. Just hack on some extra functionality that allows pseudo-links to *other* FTP servers. Clients would traverse the filesystem and not know that they were actually getting listings from N servers away (much like Gnutella, but an FTP interface). Hey, why not slap on a new command, say, REVERT, which, when passed with a secret key, makes the FTP server revert into "dumb" normal FTP mode. Great.
So then I look up the FTP spec. And what do I realize? FTP *already has defined a seperation of control and data flow*. FTP *already theoretically supports proxying*. FTP *is* Gnutella effectively. Somebody please read the FTP spec, and implement a server which will transparently do proxying like this (the nested remote filesystem stuff would be nice too - not sure if that is specified by the RFC).
This has the nice added feature that any law that attempts to strike this down, will have to strike down the FTP protocol...it will then be laughed right out of court.
Browne does have a good argument on several issues, and really seems like a nice trustworthy guy on CSPAN, but his laissez-faire attitude towards the environment and free trade rub me the wrong way. There are just *some* things that can't be individualized to be prey for the tragedy of the commons. I believe the environment, and the plight of humans in general are two of those things. Amongst the myriad things you can do with your freedom, I don't think screwing over the shared environment or whole nations of people should be one of them.
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I see your point of view, and share it. Sometimes political correctness is taken to far. But if you think about it, although it seems to have very little derogatory value these days, you can imagine that it is somewhat rude, at the very least. If I were from east asia, I would not like to be called a "Yellow". Hey, get out the Yellow Vote! These days not everybody is defined by their skin color - many people are of several ethnicities, and differing backgrounds. So it makes a bit more sense to just be a little more prudent and instead of calling somebody a White, or a Black, or a Yellow, or a Red (or what have you), instead refer to them by their actual ethnicity, or original nationality. Sure, it's a fine distinction, but I think it is best to err on the side of respect. I don't care *what* they would like to be called, but just as I don't want people calling me by my skin color (or any other arbitrary attribute; I'm probably "white" by the way) I respect other people's sensitivities. That said, I'm sure most people are thick skinned enough to not really care.
I guess anybody who believes that gets what's coming to them, but it is still Not Nice (tm). Shoulda put a smiley or something.
Heh, and I voted against *both* of em ;)
I've been thinking about portable assembly for a while now. Sometimes you want to get as low level as you can, but also want to be portable. It would at least be an interesting academic project (somebody must've done this already) to attempt to abstract most essential assembly instructions to a virtual set, which can then be translated to a closely matching native set, at compile-time. So you get more or less the strength of assembly programming, with the nice feature of portability and common syntax and operations, etc.
The Crusoe chip, and the Java VM, are taking us more and more towards dynamic compilation/execution environments, already. I think some type of portable assembly would be cool. (I guess you could write raw bytecode, but you still wouldn't be able to compile that natively...perhaps somebody just needs to write a bytecode->native compiler (I think Symantec and several others already have))
Ok, so where do I sign up for the crack "Missile Defense" geek squad?
Amazing, they guy was actually going to give them his "invention" for "free", and then *charge* other schools for using it! Hey! Unicorns exist, and I'll give you the privilage of printing that as fact for *free*, but I'll charge other schools. Better get in while you can!
I agree. The poster is essentially proving that the abuse of patents to exclude others for an inordinately long amount of time, has resulted in people NOT innovating because they'd have to fight or be subject to the existing patents. The solution then is to *shorten* the lifespan of these patents so that Xerox, or NASA, couldn't financially harm anybody trying to use those inventions (that is what is essentially being said here: an exlusive patent is the "guarantee" of not being sued for infringement; that is just a vicious cycle).
Wake up call Thalia: abortion is de-facto prohibited in most places anyway. Try finding an abortion doctor. You will probably have to drive hours and hours, then brave a gauntlet of foaming prolifers. Ob/gyns that perform this procedure (amongst myriad others) are picketed, driven out of communities, slandered, hunted and murdered. So what if Roe v. Wade is upheld? Why vote for another business-as-usual corporate politician who will carefully walk the middleground, both appeasing pro-lifer's with some "moral stance" and fostering an antagonistic environment, and appeasing pro-choicers with the token Roe v. Wade.
Both Bush and Gore suck. Gore might suck slightly less on this issue, but they both suck. Instead of voting for the lesser of evils, how about voting for the better of goods.
Look, when a small child is raped there is an obvious victim. In abortion, if the fetus is aborted before the scientifically agreed upon determination of life ("brain waves"), there is no victim. On the other hand, if this is outlawed, their *will* be victims. Women will be robbed of their right of control over their own bodies. This is used in many third world countries to oppress women, because they are *not* allowed a choice.
1) Memo is fake
2) Memo was purposefully leaks to influence open source in some way
3) Memo was real
In cases 1 and 2, I think the obvious response is to disregard the memo. If 2, we certainly don't want to try to do the opposite of what the memo might suggest us to do. In fact, the best plan is to just ignore it, nullifying any effect it may have had.
If 3, then there are two subcases:
1) He's right
2) These are the ramblings of a king whose civilization is crumbling
In both of these cases we should probably reanalyse what we are doing and redouble our efforts, to reduce duplicating work, and to increase productivity. He's right: Open Source/Free Software cannot define itself by what it is *isn't*. Once the "what it isn't" (closed, proprietary development in general, Microsoft in specific) disappears, Open Source/Free Software still needs a reason to exist. For Open Source that reason is to create high quality software which is easily modifiable and customizable by users. For Free Software that reason is to create programs whose code is legally unencumbered so that the "freedom" of using said software is ensured for everybody.
I'd also like to point out "billg"'s comment:
I think Jefferson would disagree with billg's interpretation of intellectual property. In fact, selling and owning ideas are what is artificial, and only supported through artificial laws so that people have incentive to create and innovate.
Anyway, when is the Mardi Gras? I didn't get a flyer...
I thought the whole point of taxing *speculation* wasn't to stick it to Da Man, but instead to *disincentivize* wild speculation which may lead to wild variances and instability in the market (*cough* tech sector *cough*). With the introduction of so many day traders, who are not investing in their own personal belief in companies, but instead playing mind games to find out where the herd is going, we see a lot more ups and downs. As a country we don't like this (as we've decided we don't like smoking), so we tax it.
;) After all, lifestyle and diet related diseases are the #1 killer (aren't they? high blood pressure/heart disease, cancer which could potentially be linked to diet, etc. etc.)
Actually, although he probably meant it in jest, and I thought it was funny when he said it, if you think about it, perhaps we should be taxing food that's bad for you too
Hey, slashdot, let's play a game. It's called I carefully preview my message, and then you munge it up even though it appears correctly in preview; then I hit submit, and it gets screwed up.
Well, I guess THESE& lt;/a> guys are next.
Ok, please remember that some of these quotes are coming from much longer essays, and speeches, and that you may be picking up the wrong vibe, or not getting the tone in which these were said. So I urge you instead to check out www.votenader.org, read over all the blurbs on the issues, and perhaps even catch some audio or text of his speeches. Nader is often facetious and lightheartedly pokes fun, so don't interpret everything that is said off the cuff literally without finding the context in which it was said. Perhaps some of these things need tags around them - but, hey, there's good reason to rant these days.
Yes, well when shit happens those in power are more often on the producing end. They are *supposed* to err on the side of the rights of citizens. Saying "shit happens" is a cop out. We employ these people with our tax dollars.
The X-Files may be an interesting half hour, but reality is more scary than fiction. The FBI has had its fingers in most of the major scandals and incidents in our country's history.
Ask them for Killgallen's files: she supposedly was about to publish a tell-all on the JFK assassination. She got caught up with a "mysterious stranger" from out of town and died, surprise, from apparent overdose of barbituates, all her research magically disappearing. Ask why, when Anna Mae Aquash was found in a ditch on the side of the road wrapped in a blanket, with her hands cut off and a bullet in the back of her head, the called it death from "exposure" and didn't investigate further. Yeah, exposure to a nine millimeter bullet in the back of the head. Ask them for their Monroe or Lenny Bruce file.
The FBI has been quietly spying on and brutalizing the American people, and then covering its own ass, since its inception. As a citizen you should be outraged that this organization continues on like this (FOIA my ass).
Um, if it effectively controlled access wouldn't this law be *unnecessary*? It's like putting some gum on a chest to "lock" it in place, then when somebody "circumvents" your access control device, running to the government and saying "hey, they're not allowed to circumvent my anti-circumvention device - make a law!". I mean, why don't they just make a law that says nobody can circumvent anything they don't want them to, and just do away with the tedious practice of actually designing and implementing controls?
Ok, let's see: you were a self-styled alcohol-swilling outcast who managed to get employed in a startup which let people smoke marijuana at lunchtime and threw big parties in which everybody snorted crack and got money thrown at them by suits. And you expected this to last *how* long?
w ing company think that this tale is a bit removed from reality? I don't sit at my keyboard thinking "You know, they don't let me smoke marijuana here, or live under my desk...I feel cheated".
Does anybody else working in a non-marijuana-smoking-cocaine-snorting-party-thro
They have enough money to higher decent security officers
Maybe if they would stop getting their security officers high this sort of thing wouldn't happen.
Microsoft has made a massive virtue of "making hard stuff easy" ;)
Well, they've made "hacking" a bit more easy.
Microsoft lives and dies by its stock value. I don't think there is any chance they'd jeopardize that on purpose.
Seeing as you are so "Insightful" I'd figure you'd be able to understand graduating benefits. This can be done in a sane manner. Perhaps some curve that discourages freeloading like you describe (perhaps your benefits decrease more slowly as you reach the asymptote, instead of drastically getting chopped down). No need for knee-jerk reactions.
Ok, here was my idea for a whizbang P2P architecture.
What do we need? Something relatively anonymous. Something relatively stealthy. Something relatively standard, familiar, easy to use.
So I says to myself FTP. Just hack on some extra functionality that allows pseudo-links to *other* FTP servers. Clients would traverse the filesystem and not know that they were actually getting listings from N servers away (much like Gnutella, but an FTP interface). Hey, why not slap on a new command, say, REVERT, which, when passed with a secret key, makes the FTP server revert into "dumb" normal FTP mode. Great.
So then I look up the FTP spec. And what do I realize? FTP *already has defined a seperation of control and data flow*. FTP *already theoretically supports proxying*. FTP *is* Gnutella effectively. Somebody please read the FTP spec, and implement a server which will transparently do proxying like this (the nested remote filesystem stuff would be nice too - not sure if that is specified by the RFC).
This has the nice added feature that any law that attempts to strike this down, will have to strike down the FTP protocol...it will then be laughed right out of court.
Browne does have a good argument on several issues, and really seems like a nice trustworthy guy on CSPAN, but his laissez-faire attitude towards the environment and free trade rub me the wrong way. There are just *some* things that can't be individualized to be prey for the tragedy of the commons. I believe the environment, and the plight of humans in general are two of those things. Amongst the myriad things you can do with your freedom, I don't think screwing over the shared environment or whole nations of people should be one of them.
Don't you know that all us Open-Source people are just communists? So naturally we'd be predisposed to the socialist McReynolds, not against him.