I have an idea too. I think we should fix the f*cking system in the first place. If people are being fed, clothed, and sheltered in this country of enormous wealth, our taxes are being misspent in the first place. It should stop going to corporate subsidies and instead the real people who need it.
I'd rather waste some extra money on lazy slackers, than deprive good people who really DO want to get ahead, any opportunity at all.
I don't know anything about Canadian tribes or policy (except that I think Canada has had a much better native american policy - basically, "they were here first, let's try to give em what they want and stay out of their way", as opposed to the US's "if they ain't 'civilized' they shouldn't exist"), so take this with a large lump of salt.
I think you are missing the point that perhaps many native american nations want nothing to do with Western "modernization" and capitalist exploitation. They've sustained themselves for millenia with their own economic and social systems. They don't need the white man to "learn 'em" how to make money from casinos. These are the "fish" we are just giving them. "Hey, your society is in shit, well let's give you a casino so we can reinforce stereotypes while giving all us white folks a nice place to gamble" Besides the fact that it is a direct affront to their sovereignty. And at this point I am really sounding out of my place, so perhaps I should just shut up and hear what the real indigenous people around here think about this.
"That's your personal ethics. Are you willing to impose them on the others?"
Um yes.
"Are you willing to convert them into law?"
Yes, I believe "Laws" are what imposing ethics onto people is called.
"Now that's a bullshit argument. If you are dealing with computer security at work, this is your job and how intense it is has nothing to do with posting bugfixes for your project which you do in your spare time. If you tell me all your spare time is taken by cleaning up cracked boxes, I'll tell you that (1) I don't belive you, and (2) you should learn to prioritize your time."
Who said anything about work? I thought this was for his wife or something? And in any case, just because you are PAID to do a job, doesn't mean it is ok for people to burn your time unnecessarily. If I'm preventing somebody from getting real work done, then I *should* be ignored.
"So? An inept clerk at a store is stealing my time."
Well, not really. He, and the store, is providing YOU a service. If you don't like that service go to a different store. If anything, the inept clerk is stealing the company's time by pissing you off.
"A person who stopped me to ask for directions is stealing my time."
Yes. Because you are not mandated to provide that service to him. Are we perhaps getting it now?
"Windows' registry being fucked up steals my time and a lot of it."
Yup, bitch to MS or switch operating systems. Same deal as the inept clerk. You just now have an inept OS.
"IRS steals huge chunks of my time every April."
Ditto. Bitch to government and try to change the situation.
"My point is that engaging in activities has costs, and one of those costs is time. If you are running a publicly-accessible server, time to secure it and deal with vandals is one of the costs."
Of course, but that doesn't make it acceptable for vandals to eat up your time. You have to weigh the benefit of the service to the cost of maintanence. Apparently the service the wife was providing just cost too much in security risk.
"Do you want to live in a society where being caught at portscanning will lead to same results?"
No, but are you saying that cracking into a system (secure or not), and destroying data or using it as a base for DOS attacks is acceptable? I sure as hell hope not. If you do that you *should* be thrown in jail (albiet probably with not so large a sentence as many of the criminals that have been made "examples" of *cough* Mitnick *cough*)
Exactly. But how do these problems differ from general programming problems? E.g., if I have a multithreaded application, I still have to consider deadlocking. Of course a shared space doesn't magically solve these problems. You will just have to create new semantics with the space implementation of a "shared" resource to prevent deadlocking, just as you would in a normal program.
Javaspaces still seems very vaporous and Sun really wants it tied to JINI. If you are interested in using message-passing/persistent storage mechanism like a Tuple space, check out IBM's TSpaces at alphaWorks: http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/tspaces
It's real, robust and free (beer), and has a lot of active development, and they are very open to outside suggestions (in fact they ask for bugs/suggestions before releases). This is not vapor, and I can vouch that it is the core of at least one production enterprise application here.
Right now the hippie/baby-boomer crowd are driving around in SUV's, drinking lattes, and buying only "organic" foods. And just think who they were thirty years ago.
Makes you sort of wonder who we will grow up to be in a few decades. I do believe there is a paradoxical reduction in socialization with use of computers/the internet. One the one hand you have the ability to communicate with many many more people, and much more easily. But on the other hand, you never really "know" these as well as you can a real physical human. I'm talking about the psychological implication of not being able to associate a face, a body, a human, with a person you are communicating with. Just as TV changed the "situational geography" I'm sure the use of computers and the net is remapping our psychological communication patterns.
My personal pet theory is that as we increase the ways in which people can communicate, the communications become less meaningful. It's almost as if one is suffocating from too *much* oxygen. If we are so completely barraged by communications, what is our ability to actually maintain meaningful state accross those communications. Our communication and social abilities are only finite. We are designed to be familiar with communicating with perhaps a clan-sized population. All of a sudden the potential population with which we can develop relationships mushrooms to millions and billions. Can *all* of those relationships maintain their traditional weight and meaning? Or will handles and personas flash by without any persistent association?
The extreme of this little hypothesis has us in some sterile world in which our real communications are limited to being a person-behind-the-counter for each other. When I go to the grocery store I interact briefly with CashierPerson. When I go to the bank I interact briefly with TellerPerson. But these are all meaningless interactions. I might as well be talking to a robot. Or requesting information from a majordomo or listserv. As the industrial revolution commoditized our physical bodies, it is scary to think that the telecommunications revolution might commoditize our minds and spirits.
Why the hell is the dns system privatized anyway? I mean, the internet is at *least* part of national infrastructure, and more logical international. Why doesn't some UN department run this? Why is the internet, almost a public service, in the hands of a couple corporations in the first place? Shouldn't NATIONS be the ones voting for TLDs for their country, etc?
I was just thinking how tedious it must be to actually have to do manual, biological experiments, waiting for the subjects to mature and reproduce over and over before being able to obtain any results. Then I was thinking, could we not do the same in a computer simulation. I mean, we do know *what* the cells do, even if we don't know *why* yet, right? Couldn't we "create" a subject in a simulation and just let it grow from there? Yes, that would probably take tons of CPU.
Following that, I was just thinking, well, if we had a simulated organism, what's preventing us from given it some inputs and seeing how it reacts? We'd have an artificial organic intelligence:)
(This has been a test of the Aaron-is-thinking-aloud system. You will now return to your regularly scheduled programming.)
Don't people see where all this is leading! For christ's sake! Sure, first it's the criminal mice and sterilization experiments. Then it's the diseased and insane mice. Then it's mice who have "unfavorable" political views. Then the old or retarded mice. Soon every mouse which does not fit the ideal are told they are being evacuated, put on cattle cars, lined up at the camp, told they'll see the rest of their family after "clean up" (Oh sure!). Father mice will have to make up a story to their kids that this is all a game and in the end they will win a tank! Oh boy!
Haven't we learned ANYTHING from history? If you do nothing when they come for everybody else, who will help you when they come for you? PLEASE, stop the madness!
"If you want to draw the parallel your way, a revolt would consist of killing random citizens and government leaders in order to free the people. Stealing from artists is not the way to bring about change."
The point is that "stealing" for artists hurts THEM very little, but the RECORD COMPANIES a lot, because the record companies are getting fat off exploiting artists.
The CORRECT analogy would be not to buy sweatshop labor-produced clothing, to which your rebuttal would be "Stealing from sweatshop employees is not the way to bring about change". Poor sweatshop employees, they don't deserve their $0.01 / hour *stolen* from them. Sure. The way to make change IS to defy the status quo.
I know, it's really a shame. Some of the coolest people are really the most colorful. Hawaiian shirts, crushed velvet hats, whatever. I get a big kick out of that stuff. Actually I have a couple of nice Indonesian batik shirts with designs on them that would probably be considered "effeminate". Funny how only the US is so screwed up and uptight about that stuff.
Damn Right. In my middle/high school we had a computer network. Guess what? It was only used to play pirated network games, experiment with virii, BIOS passwords, and other nasty stuff, and just generally give the poor underpaid admin way to many headaches. The computer is only needed in the classroom as far as it can be a supplement. Just like a pull-down map. It can be a learning aid. But people shouldn't pretend that it is the teacher and subject itself.
Well it's good to hear something like this. I've sort of been of the opinion that it is BOTH hardwiring AND social pressure. But it's impossible to know until you try to remove one or the other influence. I wonder if in absence of social pressure would a female still in general choose traditionally "female" careers (proving that there is at least a little "hardwiring"). It would also be interesting to see what would happen to a male if given the same type of social pressure (teach him how to cook and take care of children, etc.). But in that case we'd probably be ending up calling him a panzy or wussy. There is definately a lot of social pressure on males. Just witness the rising trend in male body dismorphia disorder, previously pretty much only occuring in females. If there actually is any "right" way to be, neither males nor females in this country have really attained it. I guess it all goes back to being a "well balanced" person. A guy who doesn't feel his masculinity threatened if he has to take care of the children, or put on an aprin and bake some cookies, and a women who doesn't feel her femininity threatened if she plays rugby or works in a traditionally "male" field.
Funny, I just watched the Green party convention yesterday and there was Nader speaking out against unethical, power-mongering corporations. He mentioned those that go overseas and displace native foods with their "fat and sugar pumps" *cough* McDonalds *cough*.
After Bradley was thrown off a cliff in favor of Al really-I'm-not-a-piece-of-wood Gore, leaving me with a choice between the lesser of two evils (isn't it always?), I was looking around at other parties. To my surprise, the Green party really encompasses a lot of what Slashdot and the net is about with respect to law and policy. The Green party, it seems to me, is really against rampant unethical corporate greed, and the awful wake it leaves, especially in government corruption, and putting power back in the people's hands (*really*...not just saying "I feel your pain").
Whether he knows it or not (he said he doesn't use computers), Nader's speech and the Green party's philosophy is in *lockstep* with net issues: corporatization, privacy invasion, incrementally stripping freedoms from people. It was very refreshing to find someone who has a record of fighting and winning on these issues was running for president, as opposed to the conventional black hole mind drain of "guns or babies" politics ("Hey, my opponent eats babies for breakfast. Vote for me!").
Don't people see where all this is leading! For christ's sake! Sure, first it's the criminal mice and sterilization experiments. Then it's the diseased and insane mice. Then it's mice who have "unfavorable" political views. Then the old or retarded mice. Soon every mouse which does not fit the ideal are told they are being evacuated, put on cattle cars, lined up at the camp, told they'll see the rest of their family after "clean up" (Oh sure!). Father mice will have to make up a story to their kids that this is all a game and in the end they will win a tank! Oh boy!
Haven't we learned ANYTHING from history? If you do nothing when they come for everybody else, who will help you when they come for you? PLEASE, stop the madness!
Ok, I'm not a cryptographer, but I do a lot of infrastructure work that relies on Kerberos. And I have somewhat come to this conclusion:
Any security system which puts trust in a fundamentally untrusted client, is flawed.
So...How would encrypting the stupid MP3 180 times, as opposed to 1 time, help prevent against the user just copying the MP3 to their friend? ("Hey, if we make our boat hull out of two foot thick lead it will never be punctured! We'll never sink! Yay!")
Ok, will somebody who is familiar with NASA fill me in here. Do astronauts in space always communicate with the space center in Houston? Is Houston the standard one used for communications or something? The only reason I ask is that if that is not the case, it seems awfully stupid to me that movies depicting spacecraft which take off from some non-Houston center, say, Cape Canaveral, (*cough* Armageddon *cough*), always have everybody talking back to Houston. "Houston, this. Houston, that. Roger, Houston" It makes me want to hear Houston say back "Goddamnit, shut up!...you took off from Cape Canaveral idiot: talk to them damnit!".
Wouldn't it be something like Negligent Homicide? I mean, murder connotes the intent to kill. If it was actually accidental, even though through another illegal act, I would think that would be mitigating.
"After, aren't we saying that open-source is superior as an economic model?"
No. Perhaps open-source advocates are. But open-source != free software. Stallman's position is that free software is better morally and ethically, not economically. In fact free software may very well be worse economically, but like other things like foreign aid, and social welfare, it is the Right Thing to do. However, coincidentally, free software under the moniker "open source" has actually turned out to support a decent economic model. This is what open source activists trumpet. However, to free software, this is a secondary and beneficial side-effect, not the main reason. The point is that Free Software is Good. Not that Open Source can make us Rich and Famous.
In any case, I don't know if I'm really in either camp. I'm just an observer;) It seems to me they are both flip sides of the same coin...because Open Source is economically feasible it allows us to make Good Free Software.
Bellandorf announced Collab.net at JavaOne...but hadn't SourceForge been around for a while then? Why splinter? Why not just concentrate on what's already there?
The question answers itself. Sure, there may be a *physical* maximum carrying capacity on earth. But since frequency is cycles / time...we just have to find more clever ways of pumping data back and forth faster. If we ever fill the carrying capacity of T1-Earth...we'll have to start sending data over *faster*. So theoretically, Time is the limiting factor.
Um, wasn't the main theme of Frankenstein that of man being afraid of what he does not understand?
But anyway, yeah, I think the US is one of the least prepared societies to deal with something like this. Drug companies spend billions trying to figure out how to put hair back on the head of a fat lazy american while africans are dying of AIDs in the droves because they can't afford the $600/month drugs when they only make about $1/month. We should concentrate on applying the technology to the problems at hand instead of trying to get rich designing superbabies.
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I believe the point of using 80386s in the shuttle was 1) they were old and "proven" and 2) they are much simpler.
Reliability is job #1.
But I don't doubt that economy notwithstanding Russians could whup our ass in space travel.
I have an idea too. I think we should fix the f*cking system in the first place. If people are being fed, clothed, and sheltered in this country of enormous wealth, our taxes are being misspent in the first place. It should stop going to corporate subsidies and instead the real people who need it.
I'd rather waste some extra money on lazy slackers, than deprive good people who really DO want to get ahead, any opportunity at all.
"There are people starving next door. Let's stop giving them fish and start teaching them how to fish."
Or perhaps even just ALLOWING them to fish.
I don't know anything about Canadian tribes or policy (except that I think Canada has had a much better native american policy - basically, "they were here first, let's try to give em what they want and stay out of their way", as opposed to the US's "if they ain't 'civilized' they shouldn't exist"), so take this with a large lump of salt.
I think you are missing the point that perhaps many native american nations want nothing to do with Western "modernization" and capitalist exploitation. They've sustained themselves for millenia with their own economic and social systems. They don't need the white man to "learn 'em" how to make money from casinos. These are the "fish" we are just giving them. "Hey, your society is in shit, well let's give you a casino so we can reinforce stereotypes while giving all us white folks a nice place to gamble" Besides the fact that it is a direct affront to their sovereignty. And at this point I am really sounding out of my place, so perhaps I should just shut up and hear what the real indigenous people around here think about this.
"That's your personal ethics. Are you willing to impose them on the others?"
Um yes.
"Are you willing to convert them into law?"
Yes, I believe "Laws" are what imposing ethics onto people is called.
"Now that's a bullshit argument. If you are dealing with computer security at work, this is your job and how intense it is has nothing to do with posting bugfixes for your project which you do in your spare time. If you tell me all your spare time is taken by cleaning up cracked boxes, I'll tell you that (1) I don't belive you, and (2) you should learn to prioritize your time."
Who said anything about work? I thought this was for his wife or something? And in any case, just because you are PAID to do a job, doesn't mean it is ok for people to burn your time unnecessarily. If I'm preventing somebody from getting real work done, then I *should* be ignored.
"So? An inept clerk at a store is stealing my time."
Well, not really. He, and the store, is providing YOU a service. If you don't like that service go to a different store. If anything, the inept clerk is stealing the company's time by pissing you off.
"A person who stopped me to ask for directions is stealing my time."
Yes. Because you are not mandated to provide that service to him. Are we perhaps getting it now?
"Windows' registry being fucked up steals my time and a lot of it."
Yup, bitch to MS or switch operating systems. Same deal as the inept clerk. You just now have an inept OS.
"IRS steals huge chunks of my time every April."
Ditto. Bitch to government and try to change the situation.
"My point is that engaging in activities has costs, and one of those costs is time. If you are running a publicly-accessible server, time to secure it and deal with vandals is one of the costs."
Of course, but that doesn't make it acceptable for vandals to eat up your time. You have to weigh the benefit of the service to the cost of maintanence. Apparently the service the wife was providing just cost too much in security risk.
"Do you want to live in a society where being caught at portscanning will lead to same results?"
No, but are you saying that cracking into a system (secure or not), and destroying data or using it as a base for DOS attacks is acceptable? I sure as hell hope not. If you do that you *should* be thrown in jail (albiet probably with not so large a sentence as many of the criminals that have been made "examples" of *cough* Mitnick *cough*)
Exactly. But how do these problems differ from general programming problems? E.g., if I have a multithreaded application, I still have to consider deadlocking. Of course a shared space doesn't magically solve these problems. You will just have to create new semantics with the space implementation of a "shared" resource to prevent deadlocking, just as you would in a normal program.
Javaspaces still seems very vaporous and Sun really wants it tied to JINI. If you are interested in using message-passing/persistent storage mechanism like a Tuple space, check out IBM's TSpaces at alphaWorks: http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/tspaces
It's real, robust and free (beer), and has a lot of active development, and they are very open to outside suggestions (in fact they ask for bugs/suggestions before releases). This is not vapor, and I can vouch that it is the core of at least one production enterprise application here.
Right now the hippie/baby-boomer crowd are driving around in SUV's, drinking lattes, and buying only "organic" foods. And just think who they were thirty years ago.
Makes you sort of wonder who we will grow up to be in a few decades. I do believe there is a paradoxical reduction in socialization with use of computers/the internet. One the one hand you have the ability to communicate with many many more people, and much more easily. But on the other hand, you never really "know" these as well as you can a real physical human. I'm talking about the psychological implication of not being able to associate a face, a body, a human, with a person you are communicating with. Just as TV changed the "situational geography" I'm sure the use of computers and the net is remapping our psychological communication patterns.
My personal pet theory is that as we increase the ways in which people can communicate, the communications become less meaningful. It's almost as if one is suffocating from too *much* oxygen. If we are so completely barraged by communications, what is our ability to actually maintain meaningful state accross those communications. Our communication and social abilities are only finite. We are designed to be familiar with communicating with perhaps a clan-sized population. All of a sudden the potential population with which we can develop relationships mushrooms to millions and billions. Can *all* of those relationships maintain their traditional weight and meaning? Or will handles and personas flash by without any persistent association?
The extreme of this little hypothesis has us in some sterile world in which our real communications are limited to being a person-behind-the-counter for each other. When I go to the grocery store I interact briefly with CashierPerson. When I go to the bank I interact briefly with TellerPerson. But these are all meaningless interactions. I might as well be talking to a robot. Or requesting information from a majordomo or listserv. As the industrial revolution commoditized our physical bodies, it is scary to think that the telecommunications revolution might commoditize our minds and spirits.
Why the hell is the dns system privatized anyway? I mean, the internet is at *least* part of national infrastructure, and more logical international. Why doesn't some UN department run this? Why is the internet, almost a public service, in the hands of a couple corporations in the first place? Shouldn't NATIONS be the ones voting for TLDs for their country, etc?
I was just thinking how tedious it must be to actually have to do manual, biological experiments, waiting for the subjects to mature and reproduce over and over before being able to obtain any results. Then I was thinking, could we not do the same in a computer simulation. I mean, we do know *what* the cells do, even if we don't know *why* yet, right? Couldn't we "create" a subject in a simulation and just let it grow from there? Yes, that would probably take tons of CPU.
:)
Following that, I was just thinking, well, if we had a simulated organism, what's preventing us from given it some inputs and seeing how it reacts? We'd have an artificial organic intelligence
(This has been a test of the Aaron-is-thinking-aloud system. You will now return to your regularly scheduled programming.)
Don't people see where all this is leading! For christ's sake! Sure, first it's the criminal mice and sterilization experiments. Then it's the diseased and insane mice. Then it's mice who have "unfavorable" political views. Then the old or retarded mice. Soon every mouse which does not fit the ideal are told they are being evacuated, put on cattle cars, lined up at the camp, told they'll see the rest of their family after "clean up" (Oh sure!). Father mice will have to make up a story to their kids that this is all a game and in the end they will win a tank! Oh boy!
Haven't we learned ANYTHING from history? If you do nothing when they come for everybody else, who will help you when they come for you? PLEASE, stop the madness!
"If you want to draw the parallel your way, a revolt would consist of killing random citizens and government leaders in order to free the people. Stealing from artists is not the way to bring about change."
The point is that "stealing" for artists hurts THEM very little, but the RECORD COMPANIES a lot, because the record companies are getting fat off exploiting artists.
The CORRECT analogy would be not to buy sweatshop labor-produced clothing, to which your rebuttal would be "Stealing from sweatshop employees is not the way to bring about change". Poor sweatshop employees, they don't deserve their $0.01 / hour *stolen* from them. Sure. The way to make change IS to defy the status quo.
"How does the fact that your government is screwing you over make it OK for you to revolt?"
"How does the fact that laws are unjust make it OK for you to break them?"
I know, it's really a shame. Some of the coolest people are really the most colorful. Hawaiian shirts, crushed velvet hats, whatever. I get a big kick out of that stuff. Actually I have a couple of nice Indonesian batik shirts with designs on them that would probably be considered "effeminate". Funny how only the US is so screwed up and uptight about that stuff.
Damn Right. In my middle/high school we had a computer network. Guess what? It was only used to play pirated network games, experiment with virii, BIOS passwords, and other nasty stuff, and just generally give the poor underpaid admin way to many headaches. The computer is only needed in the classroom as far as it can be a supplement. Just like a pull-down map. It can be a learning aid. But people shouldn't pretend that it is the teacher and subject itself.
Well it's good to hear something like this. I've sort of been of the opinion that it is BOTH hardwiring AND social pressure. But it's impossible to know until you try to remove one or the other influence. I wonder if in absence of social pressure would a female still in general choose traditionally "female" careers (proving that there is at least a little "hardwiring"). It would also be interesting to see what would happen to a male if given the same type of social pressure (teach him how to cook and take care of children, etc.). But in that case we'd probably be ending up calling him a panzy or wussy. There is definately a lot of social pressure on males. Just witness the rising trend in male body dismorphia disorder, previously pretty much only occuring in females. If there actually is any "right" way to be, neither males nor females in this country have really attained it. I guess it all goes back to being a "well balanced" person. A guy who doesn't feel his masculinity threatened if he has to take care of the children, or put on an aprin and bake some cookies, and a women who doesn't feel her femininity threatened if she plays rugby or works in a traditionally "male" field.
Funny, I just watched the Green party convention yesterday and there was Nader speaking out against unethical, power-mongering corporations. He mentioned those that go overseas and displace native foods with their "fat and sugar pumps" *cough* McDonalds *cough*.
After Bradley was thrown off a cliff in favor of Al really-I'm-not-a-piece-of-wood Gore, leaving me with a choice between the lesser of two evils (isn't it always?), I was looking around at other parties. To my surprise, the Green party really encompasses a lot of what Slashdot and the net is about with respect to law and policy. The Green party, it seems to me, is really against rampant unethical corporate greed, and the awful wake it leaves, especially in government corruption, and putting power back in the people's hands (*really*...not just saying "I feel your pain").
Whether he knows it or not (he said he doesn't use computers), Nader's speech and the Green party's philosophy is in *lockstep* with net issues: corporatization, privacy invasion, incrementally stripping freedoms from people. It was very refreshing to find someone who has a record of fighting and winning on these issues was running for president, as opposed to the conventional black hole mind drain of "guns or babies" politics ("Hey, my opponent eats babies for breakfast. Vote for me!").
Don't people see where all this is leading! For christ's sake! Sure, first it's the criminal mice and sterilization experiments. Then it's the diseased and insane mice. Then it's mice who have "unfavorable" political views. Then the old or retarded mice. Soon every mouse which does not fit the ideal are told they are being evacuated, put on cattle cars, lined up at the camp, told they'll see the rest of their family after "clean up" (Oh sure!). Father mice will have to make up a story to their kids that this is all a game and in the end they will win a tank! Oh boy!
Haven't we learned ANYTHING from history? If you do nothing when they come for everybody else, who will help you when they come for you? PLEASE, stop the madness!
Ok, I'm not a cryptographer, but I do a lot of infrastructure work that relies on Kerberos. And I have somewhat come to this conclusion:
Any security system which puts trust in a fundamentally untrusted client, is flawed.
So...How would encrypting the stupid MP3 180 times, as opposed to 1 time, help prevent against the user just copying the MP3 to their friend? ("Hey, if we make our boat hull out of two foot thick lead it will never be punctured! We'll never sink! Yay!")
Ok, will somebody who is familiar with NASA fill me in here. Do astronauts in space always communicate with the space center in Houston? Is Houston the standard one used for communications or something? The only reason I ask is that if that is not the case, it seems awfully stupid to me that movies depicting spacecraft which take off from some non-Houston center, say, Cape Canaveral, (*cough* Armageddon *cough*), always have everybody talking back to Houston. "Houston, this. Houston, that. Roger, Houston" It makes me want to hear Houston say back "Goddamnit, shut up!...you took off from Cape Canaveral idiot: talk to them damnit!".
Wouldn't it be something like Negligent Homicide? I mean, murder connotes the intent to kill. If it was actually accidental, even though through another illegal act, I would think that would be mitigating.
"After, aren't we saying that open-source is superior as an economic model?"
;) It seems to me they are both flip sides of the same coin...because Open Source is economically feasible it allows us to make Good Free Software.
No. Perhaps open-source advocates are. But open-source != free software. Stallman's position is that free software is better morally and ethically, not economically. In fact free software may very well be worse economically, but like other things like foreign aid, and social welfare, it is the Right Thing to do. However, coincidentally, free software under the moniker "open source" has actually turned out to support a decent economic model. This is what open source activists trumpet. However, to free software, this is a secondary and beneficial side-effect, not the main reason. The point is that Free Software is Good. Not that Open Source can make us Rich and Famous.
In any case, I don't know if I'm really in either camp. I'm just an observer
Bellandorf announced Collab.net at JavaOne...but hadn't SourceForge been around for a while then? Why splinter? Why not just concentrate on what's already there?
So what's so great or different about Collab.net?
The question answers itself. Sure, there may be a *physical* maximum carrying capacity on earth. But since frequency is cycles / time...we just have to find more clever ways of pumping data back and forth faster. If we ever fill the carrying capacity of T1-Earth...we'll have to start sending data over *faster*. So theoretically, Time is the limiting factor.
Um, wasn't the main theme of Frankenstein that of man being afraid of what he does not understand?
But anyway, yeah, I think the US is one of the least prepared societies to deal with something like this. Drug companies spend billions trying to figure out how to put hair back on the head of a fat lazy american while africans are dying of AIDs in the droves because they can't afford the $600/month drugs when they only make about $1/month. We should concentrate on applying the technology to the problems at hand instead of trying to get rich designing superbabies.