Ummm no. Have you read Cryptonomicon? Neal Stevenson has a bit of a dig at the creationists when his character is faced with that "it's just a theory" crap at a cocktail party. I'm going from memory here, but as I remember it his argument was as such:
In the sea around a certain part of Japan there are people who have fished the waters for over 400 years. During that time they have caught millions and millions of crabs, but they always throw back the ones that look like a samurai. At first they would only have to throw back one a month, but as the years went by the population of samurai crabs outstripped the population of other crabs and today almost every crab you catch in this part of Japan looks like a samurai. If this is what 400 years (mere instant compared to the age of the earth) of artificial selection can achieve, there is no doubt that natural selection over a period of billions of years is responsible for all the diversity of life that we see around us. Evolution is not just a thery, it's an observed fact.
My apologies to Mr Stevenson if I'm misquoted him (which I most certainly have).
Well if you're all for non-elitism then why is it you think it is OK for there to be these "Developers" who have a say over what is included and what is not? Are they not the elite? Why can't we all just share patches and include whatever the hell *we* want?
Why does open source have to design a UI the same way proprietary software does? Can't we give control of how this stuff looks to a userbase of tweakers and then do some survival-of-the-fittest collaboration to arrive at the defaults for the next person who downloads the app? I can imagine such a process:
Everyone tweaks their own copy of the app to their liking.
People who think they have done something smart/cool press the 'publish' button after making their change.
They review the change and enter a brief description (for example: "close all" shouldn't be so close to "close").
Satisfied with their patch they press the 'upload' button.
Other users review the change (say in the morning when they start their browser or whatever)
If they like it they accept the change.
Changes that have been accepted by some large amount of people become the default when users download the app.
Even when I speak to people who do development all day long they still talk about users and developers as if they're two different people. Even when they're talking about themselves they do it. I'm guilty of it myself: I use Mozilla, but I work on Boomerang. Fact is, no matter how much I value my freedom to modify Mozilla, I've probably done it once in the whole time I've been using it. (My Mozilla doesn't have "Close All Other Tabs" right below "Close Tab" cause I accidentially clicked it one too many times.) Why is this? It's because it's just too much hard work to go-and-get-the-source-code that it's easier to just put up with bugs and poor ui decisions, and just hope it gets fixed in the next release. This is especially funny for Mozilla and FireFox cause a large part of them is written in Javascript, meaning you already have the source code. Unfortunately, the effort required to get from noticing an annoyance to finding the right file:line to make a change is still too much. Can anyone think of any way to ease this translation? It'd be really cool if I could hold down alt and middle click on a menu to get a javascript editor focused on the bit of code responsible for the thing I want to fix. Then we can add to that editor a button that says 'email patch'. How many millions of developers-as-users would contribute to projects like Mozilla if this was the case?
Not only are they Above The Law, but they're also Hard To Kill and I think it's obvious that these kids are Marked For Death now that the army is Out For Justice. So remember, if you mess with the army your parent's basement may well be Under Siege and you'll be standing On Deadly Ground.
It's really funny to see lawyers misuse legal jargon. It's not illegal, it's unlawful. You agreed to a terms of service, and by violating those terms of service you are in breach of contract. They can sue you, they can't call the police and have you arrested.
That said, if they then ban you and you continue to play under a fake account or something similar, you are now illegally accessing a computer system, and that you will do time for (probably more than a rapist does on average too).
First, if you were a spy for Sony and you had access to Apple's secrets, it would be because you had signed an NDA with Apple, or you had commited some other crime. If someone from Apple came to Sony and offered to sell what they know so Sony could use it in a competing product, Sony would be liable should they accept the offer, cause they make competing products.
As for the right to a free press, we're talking about the mini-mac here, so it's not like it's of freedom dashing importance. But what if it were something else? Say someone was to overhear a Microsoft rep saying they were going to pay Apple to make Quicktime slower than Windows Media Player. Don't we, the public, have a right to know? Wouldn't you want such an agreement to "get out"? Now what happens if any newpaper that publishes it can be sued by Apple/Microsoft? What happens if journalists can be forced to turn in informants?
Yep, the key word in trade secret law is 'utilize'. To utilize a trade secret is to use it in the creation of a competing product. Publishing a trade secret (or anything, short of matters of national security) is not utilization.
And the idea that a journalist can be ordered to reveal his source of information is against the first ammendment. The usual way this happens is that the journalist goes to court and says he will protect his source to his dying breath. The judge either respects the first ammendment and let's him go or he holds him in contempt and the ruling is struck down by a higher court as a violation of the first ammendment. History is on Nick's side if he wants to stand up for himself.
As for the lawsuit against him personally, Apple should take better care of their trade secrets.
If you don't want people to publish your trade secrets, don't tell anyone. It's not Nick's problem, he didn't sign any NDAs. Hopefully he can afford a lawyer so the judge can fine Apple for filing a nuisance lawsuit (they are in California).
Nick never signed a contract with Apple. He has no responsibility to keep their secrets. If a court forces Nick to tell Apple who revealed their secrets then the free press is just another sacrafice to corporate america.
Please stop trying to restrict free speech. No bottom line is worth it. You used to be the cool, hip computer company that produced not just great hardware, but a vision of a better world. At the forefront of that better world was the right to a free press and the empowering notion of a single person, their computer and the truth. Now I can't help but feel that you're trying to crush that vision. For shame.
Yeah, but if Redhat actually offered the contracts to their customers from a registry of suppliers you wouldn't need advertising dollars, and why the hell is redhat making closed source stuff anyways.
Redhat and other commercial Linux vendors should pass people who want to stick with legacy distributions onto to independant contractors. There's many thousands of people who would love to support your Linux needs and get paid for it.
Something tells me that if you're making a vacuum cleaner you're not trying to make something intelligent and if you do so "accidentally" then you best kill it before doomsday comes knocking. What a silly conversation.
exactly, and if your vacuum cleaner did do that you'd return it to the store cause it was "acting funny" and they'd melt the fucker down and give you a new one.
Ever since I read about the potential of gene therapy I've held my breath for a successful application. All experimental treatments that involve gene therapy on humans have failed. A major blow came in January 2003, when the FDA placed a temporary halt on all gene therapy trials using retroviral vectors in blood stem cells. Kids getting leukemia from an experimental treatment, that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for gene therapy (even if they were french). Can these difficulties be overcome? Could this finally be the calling for gene therapy in adults? Or will gene therapy just become a replacement for genetic screening at the embrotic level (ala Frank Herbert's, The Eyes of Heisenberg).
Yep, as I look at the full page ad by HP in this PC magazine that says "Windows XP is the best choice for your home media needs" I really don't think HP is your friend. It's one thing to whole heartedly support open source (IBM), it's another to support it as a sideline.
nah, the do-gooders are the ones that want to give robots rights equivalent to a human as soon as some crackpot codes into them the ability to say "I don't want to be a slave".
Slashdot Mirror
In the sea around a certain part of Japan there are people who have fished the waters for over 400 years. During that time they have caught millions and millions of crabs, but they always throw back the ones that look like a samurai. At first they would only have to throw back one a month, but as the years went by the population of samurai crabs outstripped the population of other crabs and today almost every crab you catch in this part of Japan looks like a samurai. If this is what 400 years (mere instant compared to the age of the earth) of artificial selection can achieve, there is no doubt that natural selection over a period of billions of years is responsible for all the diversity of life that we see around us. Evolution is not just a thery, it's an observed fact.
My apologies to Mr Stevenson if I'm misquoted him (which I most certainly have).
Well if you're all for non-elitism then why is it you think it is OK for there to be these "Developers" who have a say over what is included and what is not? Are they not the elite? Why can't we all just share patches and include whatever the hell *we* want?
It could work.
Even when I speak to people who do development all day long they still talk about users and developers as if they're two different people. Even when they're talking about themselves they do it. I'm guilty of it myself: I use Mozilla, but I work on Boomerang. Fact is, no matter how much I value my freedom to modify Mozilla, I've probably done it once in the whole time I've been using it. (My Mozilla doesn't have "Close All Other Tabs" right below "Close Tab" cause I accidentially clicked it one too many times.) Why is this? It's because it's just too much hard work to go-and-get-the-source-code that it's easier to just put up with bugs and poor ui decisions, and just hope it gets fixed in the next release. This is especially funny for Mozilla and FireFox cause a large part of them is written in Javascript, meaning you already have the source code. Unfortunately, the effort required to get from noticing an annoyance to finding the right file:line to make a change is still too much. Can anyone think of any way to ease this translation? It'd be really cool if I could hold down alt and middle click on a menu to get a javascript editor focused on the bit of code responsible for the thing I want to fix. Then we can add to that editor a button that says 'email patch'. How many millions of developers-as-users would contribute to projects like Mozilla if this was the case?
Not only are they Above The Law, but they're also Hard To Kill and I think it's obvious that these kids are Marked For Death now that the army is Out For Justice. So remember, if you mess with the army your parent's basement may well be Under Siege and you'll be standing On Deadly Ground.
And here I was thinking it was an attempt to recruit kids into the army.
The Smoking Gun.
Well at least it isn't Blizzard this time.
That said, if they then ban you and you continue to play under a fake account or something similar, you are now illegally accessing a computer system, and that you will do time for (probably more than a rapist does on average too).
As for the right to a free press, we're talking about the mini-mac here, so it's not like it's of freedom dashing importance. But what if it were something else? Say someone was to overhear a Microsoft rep saying they were going to pay Apple to make Quicktime slower than Windows Media Player. Don't we, the public, have a right to know? Wouldn't you want such an agreement to "get out"? Now what happens if any newpaper that publishes it can be sued by Apple/Microsoft? What happens if journalists can be forced to turn in informants?
Yep, the key word in trade secret law is 'utilize'. To utilize a trade secret is to use it in the creation of a competing product. Publishing a trade secret (or anything, short of matters of national security) is not utilization.
Roomba is barely as intelligent as a cockroach. And they're too damn noisy.
As for the lawsuit against him personally, Apple should take better care of their trade secrets.
If you don't want people to publish your trade secrets, don't tell anyone. It's not Nick's problem, he didn't sign any NDAs. Hopefully he can afford a lawyer so the judge can fine Apple for filing a nuisance lawsuit (they are in California).
Nick never signed a contract with Apple. He has no responsibility to keep their secrets. If a court forces Nick to tell Apple who revealed their secrets then the free press is just another sacrafice to corporate america.
Please stop trying to restrict free speech. No bottom line is worth it. You used to be the cool, hip computer company that produced not just great hardware, but a vision of a better world. At the forefront of that better world was the right to a free press and the empowering notion of a single person, their computer and the truth. Now I can't help but feel that you're trying to crush that vision. For shame.
Yeah, but if Redhat actually offered the contracts to their customers from a registry of suppliers you wouldn't need advertising dollars, and why the hell is redhat making closed source stuff anyways.
Redhat and other commercial Linux vendors should pass people who want to stick with legacy distributions onto to independant contractors. There's many thousands of people who would love to support your Linux needs and get paid for it.
Something tells me that if you're making a vacuum cleaner you're not trying to make something intelligent and if you do so "accidentally" then you best kill it before doomsday comes knocking. What a silly conversation.
exactly, and if your vacuum cleaner did do that you'd return it to the store cause it was "acting funny" and they'd melt the fucker down and give you a new one.
gene therapy isn't expensive, it just doesn't work.
Ever since I read about the potential of gene therapy I've held my breath for a successful application. All experimental treatments that involve gene therapy on humans have failed. A major blow came in January 2003, when the FDA placed a temporary halt on all gene therapy trials using retroviral vectors in blood stem cells. Kids getting leukemia from an experimental treatment, that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for gene therapy (even if they were french). Can these difficulties be overcome? Could this finally be the calling for gene therapy in adults? Or will gene therapy just become a replacement for genetic screening at the embrotic level (ala Frank Herbert's, The Eyes of Heisenberg).
Yep, as I look at the full page ad by HP in this PC magazine that says "Windows XP is the best choice for your home media needs" I really don't think HP is your friend. It's one thing to whole heartedly support open source (IBM), it's another to support it as a sideline.
nah, the do-gooders are the ones that want to give robots rights equivalent to a human as soon as some crackpot codes into them the ability to say "I don't want to be a slave".
Sounds reasonable.