Lets be clear, no market, including the labour market, suffers a "shortfall".
Hang on a minute there! If there is a demand for 1,000,000 programmers and there are only 100,000 qualified programmers, then there is a shortfall. Sure, the market will fix it over time by raising the price of the scarce resource, thus lowering demand, and eventually increasing the supply. But that doesn't change the fact that right now there's a shortfall.
Would it be possible to pass a law making it illegal to prevent people from exercising their fair use rights? I would think such a law would curb the worst excesses of current legislation. Hopefully such a law would be uncontroversial; after all, it's not really a much of a right if someone can prevent you from exercising it, is it?
I can hardly imagine the deprivation of a resource our people have used for scarcely a few centuries to be that catastrophic an event.
It's not just the loss of the oil. To me, the big question is: where would the carbon go? If the bacteria just distort the hydrocarbon molecules somehow, OK. But if the bugs break down the hydrocarbon and release, say, carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it would be like we burned all the world's oil reserves at once. You think we've got a global warming problem now?
If you were to design a language from the ground up, what features would you include and why?
Here are a few design points, just to get started:
It would allow me to write code the way I want to think about it, rather than forcing me to follow clumsy idioms. This means it must be a very high level language allowing for many diverse kinds of abstractions. Life it too short to program in assembler or C or even C++.
It would allow me to say as much or as little as I like about the interfaces between the parts of the program (at the level of procedures and modules), and would check to make sure I'm using the interfaces according to my declarations if I've given them, or at least consistently if I haven't. Type checking is sometimes not enough, and sometimes too much!
It would not force me to pay attention to details I am not interested in, but would allow me to look at the details when I want to. Why do we tend to assume that the programmer has to type in everything that someone looking at the program wants to read? 30 years ago assemblers produced listings showing the source code with extra information (like assigned addresses and cross reference listings). Why can't compilers now produce listings with inferred types and other useful dataflow annotations?
Most importantly, the language would be designed to make it easy to reason about what the program is doing, easy to automatically analyze the program's behaviour (important for the preceding points), and easy to manipulate the program (eg, taking a chunk of code, replacing it with a reference to a new procedure, and generating a definition for the new procedure using the removed code; try doing that in C++).
Why? I guess because these are features whose absence from existing langauges I find most frustrating, and I think would do the most good for program reliability and programmer productivity.
There are only two choices. Either a person will control her own
destiny, or she will rely on the government. I choose self.
Sometimes you're better off letting the government decide. Take the military budget. Suppose each person were allowed to decide how much money they would give to defend the country. Total freedom: a voluntarily funded military. How much would you give? Most people would probably not give much. The tiny amount (relatively speaking) you could give wouldn't make much difference in the amount spent on defending the country. Trouble is, of course, everyone else would think the same way, and no one would give much. And the military would sink into oblivion.
Everyone (well, most people) would agree this is bad. But if no one else was willing to put in much for the military, would you? I would certainly want to be sure that everyone else was chipping in before I would. The only way to achieve that is for someone to force everyone to pay their share. But then, of course, there will be disagreements about how much is enough, and how to spread the burden. We as a society have to make these decisions together. That's what governments are for: making and enforcing these decisions.
So if the question is how much you should spend on your house or whether you go to church on Sunday, by all means, decide for yourself. But when your decisions affect other people, such as carrying a gun or smoking a cigarette in public or publicly displaying pornographic images, you need to be willing to let society, as represented by the government, restrict your freedoms.
If you're concerned about the government taking your money to fund health insurance, that's a tougher call. I'd look at it this way, though: I know I want to be taken care of if I have a medical problem. I'd rather be able to decide who treats me, how, and how much money I devote to this, but I'd be willing to give up some of that in order to save some money. The Canadian system is much more cost effective than the US system, and many in the US (particularly those in employer-funded HMOs) don't get those choices, anyway. And the advantage of having everyone in the same system is that when it gets messed up, the government fixes it or gets thrown out of office. If an HMO or private insurer gets messed up, the people that suffer (the patients) aren't usually the people who pay for the insurance (their employers), so they're not in a very good position to press for improvement.
With the exception of omitting an entire machine
(or precinct!), no human error is possible, it's 100% electronic.
Just one question: how do you know your vote was correctly counted? With paper ballots, you can witness the whole vote tallying process, because it's physical. You can recount the paper ballots manually if there's a question about the machines.
With electronic voting, it's all in invisible bits that can very easily and undetectably get lost, modified, misinterpreted, or drowned in fake votes.
I like the idea of electronic voting, but I'd want a few things before I trusted it:
Most importantly, the source code must be open. I want to look it over myself to be sure I trust it. It also should be simple, clean code. This will give me confidence in the tallying of the votes.
There must be some way for me to be assured that the source code I reviewed is what's actually
doing the tallying.
There must be a way for me to verify that my individual vote was counted, and that it was correctly interpreted. This will give me confidence that my vote was actually counted correctly.
It must be possible for me to challenge a vote. I should be able to randomly pick a vote and find out who cast it (without actually seeing who he or she voted for), so I can track him or her down and get them to verify that their vote was correctly interpreted. This will give me confidence that only valid voters voted.
In the light of the Palm Beach ballot troubles, someone with some clue in user interface design should examine the software to ensure that the HCI is well thought out.
It's impossible to draw even a bare majority of eligible voters to
participate in a presidential election any longer, or to blame them for
ignoring it. What rational person could be expected to pay attention to
these pre-installed nominees, programmed mediafests and
infomercials that masquerade as democratic gatherings?
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. People are disconnected and uninterested in politics because we feel our wishes and views don't matter. Perhaps around the periphery our votes might make a difference, but to the core issues that affect our lives, our wishes simply do not matter.
There are several reasons for this. The political reality is that wealthy interest groups -- mostly corporate interests, since they have the money -- usually get what they want. The mass media distill serious issues down to 15 second sound bites, rarely explain issues well enough for the populous can understand them, and often present them in such a way as to say "this is too complicated for you to understand." The two main political parties are not very democratic themselves.
But I think the central reason for voters' lack of interest is a feeling of impotence. We do not get to express our wishes, only to pick one of two pretty similar candidates. More importantly, we don't get to participate in finding the solutions to our problems. The very best we get is a choice between two candidates' solutions to problems.
It's frustrating to think of the wisdom possessed among the 100 million or so adult Americans -- or the 2 or 3 billion adult humans -- that is being completely ignored by the political system.
I'm not suggesting direct democracy, where everyone votes to choose among a few prepared solutions to a few carefully chosen problems. I'm suggesting involving ordinary people in finding the solutions to our problems. This is the idea of citizen consensus councils. Experience has shown that a group of ordinary citizens will often find novel solutions to problems.
On the question of whether technology can help, I think it can. I would offer slashdot itself as a model. The moderation by ordinary readers seems to be pretty effective at holding down the flame wars, and works pretty well to bring out consensus. I believe this sort of tool applied to politics could be very empowering. It would certainly need to be modified to:
allow 100 million people to participate
encourage and identify consensus, so that it could form the basis for policy decisions
allow discussions to go on for weeks or even months, so people wouldn't need to visit every day to get a chance to participate in the discussion of a particular topic of interest to them
avoid bias, to be inclusive (slashdot tends to reinforce bias by discouraging people with differing biases)
I believe a tool like this could eventually become a real force for inclusive democratic decision making.
To reconnect, we need to break free of the myth that a vote for a third party is a
wasted vote! If you dislike the Corporate Party's policies (Democrat or Republican), then voting for
them (and thereby vindicating the very policies you oppose) is a wasted vote.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid even if everyone did as you suggested, the effect would be small.
Here in Australia, we have a preferential voting system. When we vote, we arrange all the candidates in our order of preference. The way the vote counting works, if your top choice candidate gets very few votes, then your second choice is considered. Ultimately this means that people can vote for who they want, rather than picking the lesser of two evils.
To some extent, this system works. We have some politicians in parliment from other than the two or three main parties. Presumably this is because people feel that they can vote for who they want, rather than having to vote against who they don't want but fear will win. These "third party" politicians are sometimes able to stop the government from pushing through particularly bad laws. It is clearly better than the US system (I'm both a US and Australian citizen, so I can compare).
However, in practice, it doesn't make a lot of difference. The third party politicians will never be able to enact their policies, the best they can do is mitigate some of the disasters the government is trying to slip past, by inserting a few of their own policies around the edges. It's certainly better than nothing, but it's far from being a real solution.
Government is not run by a single individual. If through some miracle Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan were to be elected, he would not be able to make policy because he could not get his bills through congress. And if enough like-minded candidates got elected to congress... well, that's not going to happen. Only 1/3 of the senate is up for election now anyway.
Why do we need lobbyists? We already have the best government money can buy.
But seriously, you can't blame the lobbyists. If it's legal for them to buy politicians, they will. Blaming them for using the system is like blaming a snake for biting you. That's what snakes do. They're just playing the game by its rules.
And you can't really blame the politicians for arranging the game so that they can be bought. It costs stacks of money to get into office. They have to get it from somewhere.
You also can't really expect politicians to seriously reform the system. After all, this is the system that got them there; if they reform it, it may well put someone else there in their place. And of course, lobbyists will only pay for politicians and bills that will allow them to continue to exercise the power of their dollars.
When you turn in an assignment, you hand
over the copyright of the assignment to the university.
That depends on which university. For example, the University of Melbourne, Australia, stopped claiming copyright on student work about five years ago.
But finally, it is absolutely imperative that it maintains all the benefits of the original AmigaOS
I think a new Amiga could afford to lose some (but not too many) of its original benefits and still be a killer machine. Cheap, fast PC hardware can make up for a lot. One of the real problems with the Amiga was always the cost of hardware expansion. Putting a few meg of RAM into an A3000 was nearly a mortgage-your-house kind of thing.
What a new Amiga absolutely cannot afford now is incompatibility with the rest of the world. I certainly wouldn't want to give up the software I've got on my GNU/Linux box to get a zippy new Amiga. There are certainly things the Amiga did better than Linux does, but there are also many things Linux does better. So rather than just a new Amiga, I'd like to see a system that starts with a Linux or BSD base and replaces a few of the things that aren't so good (X springs to mind). To the extent that this can be done with APIs that maintain compatibility with the replaced features, it should be possible to compile much of the huge stable of freely available *nix software to run under the new AmigaOS. For example, replacing X with a kernel-based graphics system that supported most or all of the XLib-level calls should be doable, and could support the majority of X apps. If its API also supported the old Amiga RKM calls, it could also run old Amiga apps, but that's really less important since there are a lot fewer of them.
I know what I'm asking for is a big job, but I think it's the only way. A new OS that was cleaner/faster/better than Linux or BSD, but would still run most *nix programs, would be something I would consider moving to. Something that would run all my old Amiga programs faster than ever before will just get a yawn from me.
I think many of the problems we have with privacy arise because we're not thinking about it correctly. My personal information is valuable, since people are willing to pay for it, and it comes from me (I supply it to people). Unfortunately, it's not mine, since governments do not consider it to be my property. If my personal data were legally considered to be my property, then every time I gave my personal information to someone, I could insist that they only use it in certain ways, not share it with others, delete it at a certain time, and even that they pay me for it. If I allowed users of my personal information to share it with others, I could also insist that they pass on with my data whatever restrictions I like. Basically, I could license my personal information to whomever I choose under whatever conditions I could negotiate.
This is not a total solution to the problem, however. The other major problem is one of imbalance of power. Perhaps I could look around for an internet shop that will accept my terms for the use of my personal information when I want to by a CD or a toaster, but I can't shop around for, say, another electricity supplier or another grantor of driver's licenses, as mentioned by an earlier poster. These organizations can decide to require pretty much anything of you, any you will have little choice but to comply. Therefore, there must be laws governing what information you can be required to provide, and on what terms. Perhaps such laws would not be so important in an actively competetive market, but in a monopoly or oligopoly, they are essential.
There really should be a standard library that acts as a dispatcher to many different encryption plug-in libraries. Of course, the API would have to be carefully crafted to encompass many different sorts of encryption algorithms.
There are a number of advantages of this approach, including:
reduced wheel reinvention
possibly better security, because the plugins would get more scrutiny, and because the interface abstraction could be designed to avoid some security pitfalls
the user would likely have more algorithms to chose from
encryption-supporting applications would avoid export restrictions, because they would not support encryption themselves, just use an existing shared library to do encryption. In fact, the library itself could be exported; only the plugins themselves would have export problems.
The Amiga had such a dispatcher library, which was widely supported and used. It was mainly designed for compression, but had several encryption plug-ins.
The LVMS sounds really good from the white paper, but it's a shame they place such stringent requirements on the underlying devices. In particular, they seem to require read/write access and random access, which would leave out CD-ROMs and tapes. Of course, many of the features the LVMS provides wouldn't make sense for such devices (I'd like to see someone put together a RAID from a bunch of tape drives!), but some do. The plug-in architecture could be really useful for these things, too.
So why not provide a capability-based facility, which makes use of the capabilities of a device, without giving up on devices that don't have those capabilities? It would be good to bring *all* mountable devices under one LVMS with one consistent interface, even if it meant that not all devices could use all its features.
I agree that uninstallation is one of the important issues in package management. The debian package management facility handles this pretty well; I don't know about red hat or the BSD approach.
What debian doesn't do is keep track of which packages I selected directly, and which were only selected because they are required by other installed packages. This distinction is important, because a package I didn't select directly can be removed once the last package that depends on it is removed. I have no idea how many packages I have installed that I don't need or want, and there's no easy way to find out. Every so often I do a spring cleaning, but this is time consuming and would be intimidating for newbies. Having this handled automatically would make uninstallation simpler and more effective.
My other complaint about dpkg is really about its front ends. I'd like one that would do the following for me:
Show me how how many bytes I'd need to download, and how much disk space will be consumed, if I select a package. This should include dependent packages that aren't already installed or selected.
Give me an easy way to choose whether to load recommended and/or suggested packages as well as required ones, without having to look at them all.
Detect incompatibilities before I select a package! I sometimes select a new package, only to find that it requires a newer version of a package, while another package I have installed requires the old version. Sometimes I select a package, only to discover that some of its depencies are not available. The same goes for upgrades: I'd like the tool to figure out for me which packages I'm going to have to hold due to dependency conflicts, rather than forcing me to deal with them myself.
Allow me to check out what new packages have been added and select some of them without upgrading (only upgrading where required by dependencies). Upgrading should be a separate operation, which I may not want to do. I'd also like to be able to easily select a few packages to upgrade, without having to hold everything else. And I'd like to be offered some summary of what's changed in a package since my current version.
Provide some kind of motd-like facility which users can use to see what new packages have been installed lately, and what new features have been added to existing pacakges. I often see and select fun looking new packages using dselect, but by the time I'm finished installing, I can't remember what they were!
Provide a search facility based on keywords in package descriptions, not just package names. It can be difficult to find a package if you don't know its name.
I think these features would make debian's package facility quite efficient and friendly, even for newbies and people using the unstable release.
> Would you prefer that the package manager erased > [user config directories for removed apps] for > you? I think not.
No, removing a pacakge shouldn't remove any user's files, but it would make sense for each user to get a pop up dialog when they log in telling them that they have config files for uninstalled packages, and offering to remove them. It should explain what's happened and what the ramifications of removing the config files are. In addition to "yes, blow them away" and "no, keep them around", there should also be an "ask me again next time" option.
I wouldn't think such a facility would be difficult to add to, say, debian's package facility. Of course, there's not much chance of removing config files which users have chosen their own names and locations for.
Sure someone can frame you by planting an encrypted file for which you do not have the key on your computer. In fact, they could send you a file full of line noise, and claim that it's an encrypted plan to overthrow the government. But why bother? All they have to do is claim that that harmless looking.gif file on your hard disk contains a message hidden with steganography. I dare anybody to prove that there is no content hidden in some randomly chosen image on their hard disk.
It seems this law not only shifts the burden of proof onto the accused, but it burdens them with proving the unprovable.
Soon in the US the government will be able to get positioning data from mobile phones, so they'll be able to find and arrest all those Evil People misusing their phones. How long can it be before they develop the ability (using Artificial Intelligence) to monitor every conversation to make sure our communication infrastructure is not used for illegal or immoral purposes? They've been very successful avoiding the scourge of ubiquitous encryption, I'm sure they'll be able to keep this up.
Slashdot Mirror
Hang on a minute there! If there is a demand for 1,000,000 programmers and there are only 100,000 qualified programmers, then there is a shortfall. Sure, the market will fix it over time by raising the price of the scarce resource, thus lowering demand, and eventually increasing the supply. But that doesn't change the fact that right now there's a shortfall.
Would it be possible to pass a law making it illegal to prevent people from exercising their fair use rights? I would think such a law would curb the worst excesses of current legislation. Hopefully such a law would be uncontroversial; after all, it's not really a much of a right if someone can prevent you from exercising it, is it?
It's not just the loss of the oil. To me, the big question is: where would the carbon go? If the bacteria just distort the hydrocarbon molecules somehow, OK. But if the bugs break down the hydrocarbon and release, say, carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it would be like we burned all the world's oil reserves at once. You think we've got a global warming problem now?
Here are a few design points, just to get started:
It would allow me to write code the way I want to think about it, rather than forcing me to follow clumsy idioms. This means it must be a very high level language allowing for many diverse kinds of abstractions. Life it too short to program in assembler or C or even C++.
It would allow me to say as much or as little as I like about the interfaces between the parts of the program (at the level of procedures and modules), and would check to make sure I'm using the interfaces according to my declarations if I've given them, or at least consistently if I haven't. Type checking is sometimes not enough, and sometimes too much!
It would not force me to pay attention to details I am not interested in, but would allow me to look at the details when I want to. Why do we tend to assume that the programmer has to type in everything that someone looking at the program wants to read? 30 years ago assemblers produced listings showing the source code with extra information (like assigned addresses and cross reference listings). Why can't compilers now produce listings with inferred types and other useful dataflow annotations?
Most importantly, the language would be designed to make it easy to reason about what the program is doing, easy to automatically analyze the program's behaviour (important for the preceding points), and easy to manipulate the program (eg, taking a chunk of code, replacing it with a reference to a new procedure, and generating a definition for the new procedure using the removed code; try doing that in C++).
Why? I guess because these are features whose absence from existing langauges I find most frustrating, and I think would do the most good for program reliability and programmer productivity.
There are alternatives to the X approach, at least in principle©
Under X, the application runs on one machine, and the display can happen on a different machine© This means that the intellegence is in a different place than the display, so every single graphical operation has to be transmitted from one to the other© Even at broadband speeds, this rules out serious graphics, and at modem speeds, almost everything is pretty painful©
A better approach would be to run the application locally, using remote procedure call for only the parts of the application that require real grunt work© This is a much more flexible model than the X model© At one end of the spectrum, you can run the program mostly locally, only occasionally doing something remotely; at the other end, you could do an X sort of thing where the program offloads everything but the actual display onto the remote machine© Where an application lies on this spectrum can be decided to minimize data communication or latency or just to simplify the code©
The catch, of course, is the need for two programs instead of one: the display and the compute server© And each of these has to be compiled for the appropriate CPU/OS combination© So some sort of architecture-independent executable file would be pretty much essential© Ideally, code would migrate transparently from the local display machine to the compute server© This is certainly a research topic, but it has been implemented in the Mozart system ¥see http://www©mozart-oz©org/ ¥Sorry, can't seem to create a hyperlink from the silly form interface©
Sometimes you're better off letting the government decide. Take the military budget. Suppose each person were allowed to decide how much money they would give to defend the country. Total freedom: a voluntarily funded military. How much would you give? Most people would probably not give much. The tiny amount (relatively speaking) you could give wouldn't make much difference in the amount spent on defending the country. Trouble is, of course, everyone else would think the same way, and no one would give much. And the military would sink into oblivion.
Everyone (well, most people) would agree this is bad. But if no one else was willing to put in much for the military, would you? I would certainly want to be sure that everyone else was chipping in before I would. The only way to achieve that is for someone to force everyone to pay their share. But then, of course, there will be disagreements about how much is enough, and how to spread the burden. We as a society have to make these decisions together. That's what governments are for: making and enforcing these decisions.
So if the question is how much you should spend on your house or whether you go to church on Sunday, by all means, decide for yourself. But when your decisions affect other people, such as carrying a gun or smoking a cigarette in public or publicly displaying pornographic images, you need to be willing to let society, as represented by the government, restrict your freedoms.
If you're concerned about the government taking your money to fund health insurance, that's a tougher call. I'd look at it this way, though: I know I want to be taken care of if I have a medical problem. I'd rather be able to decide who treats me, how, and how much money I devote to this, but I'd be willing to give up some of that in order to save some money. The Canadian system is much more cost effective than the US system, and many in the US (particularly those in employer-funded HMOs) don't get those choices, anyway. And the advantage of having everyone in the same system is that when it gets messed up, the government fixes it or gets thrown out of office. If an HMO or private insurer gets messed up, the people that suffer (the patients) aren't usually the people who pay for the insurance (their employers), so they're not in a very good position to press for improvement.
Just one question: how do you know your vote was correctly counted? With paper ballots, you can witness the whole vote tallying process, because it's physical. You can recount the paper ballots manually if there's a question about the machines. With electronic voting, it's all in invisible bits that can very easily and undetectably get lost, modified, misinterpreted, or drowned in fake votes.
I like the idea of electronic voting, but I'd want a few things before I trusted it:
When your voting card looks like:
[] Adolf Hitler
[] Joseph Stalin
what do you do? Somehow, not voting seems like the least offensive choice.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. People are disconnected and uninterested in politics because we feel our wishes and views don't matter. Perhaps around the periphery our votes might make a difference, but to the core issues that affect our lives, our wishes simply do not matter.
There are several reasons for this. The political reality is that wealthy interest groups -- mostly corporate interests, since they have the money -- usually get what they want. The mass media distill serious issues down to 15 second sound bites, rarely explain issues well enough for the populous can understand them, and often present them in such a way as to say "this is too complicated for you to understand." The two main political parties are not very democratic themselves.
But I think the central reason for voters' lack of interest is a feeling of impotence. We do not get to express our wishes, only to pick one of two pretty similar candidates. More importantly, we don't get to participate in finding the solutions to our problems. The very best we get is a choice between two candidates' solutions to problems.
It's frustrating to think of the wisdom possessed among the 100 million or so adult Americans -- or the 2 or 3 billion adult humans -- that is being completely ignored by the political system. I'm not suggesting direct democracy, where everyone votes to choose among a few prepared solutions to a few carefully chosen problems. I'm suggesting involving ordinary people in finding the solutions to our problems. This is the idea of citizen consensus councils. Experience has shown that a group of ordinary citizens will often find novel solutions to problems.
On the question of whether technology can help, I think it can. I would offer slashdot itself as a model. The moderation by ordinary readers seems to be pretty effective at holding down the flame wars, and works pretty well to bring out consensus. I believe this sort of tool applied to politics could be very empowering. It would certainly need to be modified to:
I believe a tool like this could eventually become a real force for inclusive democratic decision making.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid even if everyone did as you suggested, the effect would be small.
Here in Australia, we have a preferential voting system. When we vote, we arrange all the candidates in our order of preference. The way the vote counting works, if your top choice candidate gets very few votes, then your second choice is considered. Ultimately this means that people can vote for who they want, rather than picking the lesser of two evils.
To some extent, this system works. We have some politicians in parliment from other than the two or three main parties. Presumably this is because people feel that they can vote for who they want, rather than having to vote against who they don't want but fear will win. These "third party" politicians are sometimes able to stop the government from pushing through particularly bad laws. It is clearly better than the US system (I'm both a US and Australian citizen, so I can compare).
However, in practice, it doesn't make a lot of difference. The third party politicians will never be able to enact their policies, the best they can do is mitigate some of the disasters the government is trying to slip past, by inserting a few of their own policies around the edges. It's certainly better than nothing, but it's far from being a real solution.
Government is not run by a single individual. If through some miracle Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan were to be elected, he would not be able to make policy because he could not get his bills through congress. And if enough like-minded candidates got elected to congress ... well, that's not going to happen. Only 1/3 of the senate is up for election now anyway.
Why do we need lobbyists? We already have the best government money can buy.
But seriously, you can't blame the lobbyists. If it's legal for them to buy politicians, they will. Blaming them for using the system is like blaming a snake for biting you. That's what snakes do. They're just playing the game by its rules.
And you can't really blame the politicians for arranging the game so that they can be bought. It costs stacks of money to get into office. They have to get it from somewhere.
You also can't really expect politicians to seriously reform the system. After all, this is the system that got them there; if they reform it, it may well put someone else there in their place. And of course, lobbyists will only pay for politicians and bills that will allow them to continue to exercise the power of their dollars.
That depends on which university. For example, the University of Melbourne, Australia, stopped claiming copyright on student work about five years ago.
But finally, it is absolutely imperative that it maintains all the benefits of the original AmigaOS
I think a new Amiga could afford to lose some (but not too many) of its original benefits and still be a killer machine. Cheap, fast PC hardware can make up for a lot. One of the real problems with the Amiga was always the cost of hardware expansion. Putting a few meg of RAM into an A3000 was nearly a mortgage-your-house kind of thing.
What a new Amiga absolutely cannot afford now is incompatibility with the rest of the world. I certainly wouldn't want to give up the software I've got on my GNU/Linux box to get a zippy new Amiga. There are certainly things the Amiga did better than Linux does, but there are also many things Linux does better. So rather than just a new Amiga, I'd like to see a system that starts with a Linux or BSD base and replaces a few of the things that aren't so good (X springs to mind). To the extent that this can be done with APIs that maintain compatibility with the replaced features, it should be possible to compile much of the huge stable of freely available *nix software to run under the new AmigaOS. For example, replacing X with a kernel-based graphics system that supported most or all of the XLib-level calls should be doable, and could support the majority of X apps. If its API also supported the old Amiga RKM calls, it could also run old Amiga apps, but that's really less important since there are a lot fewer of them.
I know what I'm asking for is a big job, but I think it's the only way. A new OS that was cleaner/faster/better than Linux or BSD, but would still run most *nix programs, would be something I would consider moving to. Something that would run all my old Amiga programs faster than ever before will just get a yawn from me.
This is not a total solution to the problem, however. The other major problem is one of imbalance of power. Perhaps I could look around for an internet shop that will accept my terms for the use of my personal information when I want to by a CD or a toaster, but I can't shop around for, say, another electricity supplier or another grantor of driver's licenses, as mentioned by an earlier poster. These organizations can decide to require pretty much anything of you, any you will have little choice but to comply. Therefore, there must be laws governing what information you can be required to provide, and on what terms. Perhaps such laws would not be so important in an actively competetive market, but in a monopoly or oligopoly, they are essential.
There are a number of advantages of this approach, including:
The Amiga had such a dispatcher library, which was widely supported and used. It was mainly designed for compression, but had several encryption plug-ins.
The LVMS sounds really good from the white paper, but it's a shame they place such stringent requirements on the underlying devices. In particular, they seem to require read/write access and random access, which would leave out CD-ROMs and tapes. Of course, many of the features the LVMS provides wouldn't make sense for such devices (I'd like to see someone put together a RAID from a bunch of tape drives!), but some do. The plug-in architecture could be really useful for these things, too.
So why not provide a capability-based facility, which makes use of the capabilities of a device, without giving up on devices that don't have those capabilities? It would be good to bring *all* mountable devices under one LVMS with one consistent interface, even if it meant that not all devices could use all its features.
What debian doesn't do is keep track of which packages I selected directly, and which were only selected because they are required by other installed packages. This distinction is important, because a package I didn't select directly can be removed once the last package that depends on it is removed. I have no idea how many packages I have installed that I don't need or want, and there's no easy way to find out. Every so often I do a spring cleaning, but this is time consuming and would be intimidating for newbies. Having this handled automatically would make uninstallation simpler and more effective.
My other complaint about dpkg is really about its front ends. I'd like one that would do the following for me:
I think these features would make debian's package facility quite efficient and friendly, even for newbies and people using the unstable release.
> Would you prefer that the package manager erased
> [user config directories for removed apps] for
> you? I think not.
No, removing a pacakge shouldn't remove any user's files, but it would make sense for each user to get a pop up dialog when they log in telling them that they have config files for uninstalled packages, and offering to remove them. It should explain what's happened and what the ramifications of removing the config files are. In addition to "yes, blow them away" and "no, keep them around", there should also be an "ask me again next time" option.
I wouldn't think such a facility would be difficult to add to, say, debian's package facility. Of course, there's not much chance of removing config files which users have chosen their own names and locations for.
Sure someone can frame you by planting an encrypted file for which you do not have the key on your computer. In fact, they could send you a file full of line noise, and claim that it's an encrypted plan to overthrow the government. But why bother? All they have to do is claim that that harmless looking .gif file on your hard disk contains a message hidden with steganography. I dare anybody to prove that there is no content hidden in some randomly chosen image on their hard disk.
It seems this law not only shifts the burden of proof onto the accused, but it burdens them with proving the unprovable.
Don't worry, the government will protect you!
Soon in the US the government will be able to get positioning data from mobile phones, so they'll be able to find and arrest all those Evil People misusing their phones. How long can it be before they develop the ability (using Artificial Intelligence) to monitor every conversation to make sure our communication infrastructure is not used for illegal or immoral purposes? They've been very successful avoiding the scourge of ubiquitous encryption, I'm sure they'll be able to keep this up.
Soon we will be all be safe!