The Censor sits
Somewhere between
The scenes to be seen
And the television sets
With his scissor purpose poised
Watching the human stuff
That will sizzle through
The magic wires
And light up
Like welding shops
The ho-hum rooms of America
And with a kindergarten
Arts and crafts concept
Of moral responsibility
Snips out
The rough talk
The unpopular opinion
Or anything with teeth
And renders
A pattern of ideas
Full of holes
A doily
For your mind
Mason Williams The Mason Williams Reading Matter, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1964
About three years ago, Forbes ran an article on 64 bit computing in which they claimed that a 64 bit computer could address 64! bytes of memory. That same article called Unix a programming language and had several other silly inaccuracies. Be wary, your PHB will soon be asking for a demo.
When the neutrons get absorbed into the walls, they wreck so much havok on the material that the walls aren't really walls anymore; they're more like cottage cheese. That is a serious problem.
There was talk about creating some type of liquid wall that could absorb the neutrons and then be continuosly replaced, but I personally believe that this problem will ultimately be solved with transparent aluminium.
Bzzzt. I used to own one. It consisted of a dorm sized refridge with tap and CO2. Very nice integrated unit that worked quite well. I gave it away to a friend who is way deeper into home brew than I was. Sure, you can buy an 18 wheeler truck, but that doesn't mean that you can't buy a 4 cyl Toyota for personal hauling for a whole lot cheaper. Go google yourself. A 1/4 keg model starts around $600. A pro 5 keg model can be had new for $2300. This is conceptually something like the difference between the refridgerator in your kitchen and the walk in cooler in a restaurant. Also keep in mind that setup is an added cost. Much of what a bar will have to pay is the cost of custom construction to build the unit into the bar itself.
I'm not going to trust my personal finances to a company that refuses to release their code under the GPL. Who knows what kind of data this software is gathering...
I agree with this. The authors of my financial software have no business snooping on data that is the business of myself and the financial institutions that hold my assets. But there are other problems with closed source financial software:
1. I'm afraid of proprietary data storage formats. I want the ability to push/pull/backup/restore my personal financial data using tools that are not provided by the application. I may want to change financial applications in the future and that means I have to be able to convert from one format to another. Yes, there are standards for financial interchange, but often that means that you cannot move ALL of the data since the standard may not cover every aspect of the data (e.g. a transaction that puts a debit in a checking account and matches it with a debit in a budget account. Sure you can move the checking data, but can you move the budgetary data as well?).
2. I want to fully understand how the reports are generated. There are many ways of calculating the "profit" from an investment. I want to see the calculations and be able to modify them if I don't like the formula used by the application. Didn't MS Excell have problems like this with some of its formulas at one time? Financial formulas must be auditable.
3. I may want to extend the application by adding data fields that the application does not have or put constraints on data that the application does not enforce (mostly important for taxable vs. non-taxable investment accounts).
The problem though is that once the law is in the books, it's the letter of the law that matters.
That's too simple. While the letter of the law is clearly quite important, the legislative intent of the law is given a lot of weight when the law is interpreted by the courts.
Brave assertions. Any facts to back them up? Or even some reasoning?
What assertions? Your quote includes two questions and an opinion. The opinion is based on the simple premise that more choices are better than fewer choices. No GPL and only proprietary sales to Gov't gives the Gov't fewer choices than both proprietary sales and GPL. Forcing the Gov't to use only GPL'd software gives the Gov't fewer choices than allowing both proprietary sales and GPL where appropriate.
Both extremes, the GPL only and the proprietary only, are equally inane. Microsoft seems to be calming down a bit since they learned that their anti GPL FUD was hurting them. Time for the GPL advocates to learn the same lesson.
As for Gov't funded R&D, I believe that that should be released under a BSD style license. That gives anyone the widest possible latitude to use the research results in the widest possible way. In the US, I believe that something similar is already done with patents from research at Federal Labs. Aren't such patents automatically put into the Public Domain? The BSD license is essentially a Public Domain license with an absolution from any liability clause.
"Policymakers should not make rigid intellectual property licensing choices a precondition for eligibility for procurement, nor should they discriminate between developers that choose to license their intellectual property on commercial terms, and developers that choose not to charge licensing fees...."
"Lately, concerns have emerged that policy makers, through government procurement policies, research funding or standards policies, may seek to favor one software development model over another."
Those seem like quite reasonable statements to me. Are you suggesting that policymakers should force the Gov't to purchase only GPL'd software? Or release Gov't funded R&D only under a GPL license? Either of those would be unacceptable and every bit as bad as preventing the Gov't from using GPL'd software as the pro MS zealots seem to want.
Pro Choice vs. Viral Licenses or is it Monopoly vs. Pro Freedom?
Both sides are becoming as obnoxious as the fanatics trying to co-opt the language in the Pro Choice vs. Anti Choice, uh, err, I mean, Pro Life vs. Anti Life abortion debate. No room for a middle ground. No sense that the other side might have some reasonable concerns that are worth listening to.
The amount of time I have to spend seperating recycleables from trash had better be very, very small or it isn't worth ny time to recycle. The city where I live has a voluntary recycling program where you actually have to pay extra to have your recycleables picked up at the curb or else take them to a pickup station yourself. My wife does the recycling in our household. Since my opportunity cost of recycling is $100/hr, I refuse to have anything to do with it.
The city where I live used to have a trash burning municipal power plant. It was shut down a few years ago because it dumped too much dioxen into the air. The cost of building filters was way more than the electricity produced plus landfill averted was worth. There is also the question of what to do with the resulting ash which is heavily contaminated with things like lead and mercury.
When it comes to business ethics, American companies aren't exactly the most shining examples...
Are you trying to tell us that French and German commercial interests have made no money selling dual use technologies to the Iraqis in the past 10 years? Do you really believe that the Swedish arms industry has stopped paying bribes to 3rd world defense ministers? Are you claiming that Swiss and Luxembourg banking establishments no longer welcome ill gotten gains or that the Japanese conglomerates are no longer the largests contributors to the campaign coffers of the LDP?
American companies are no better or worse in their business ethics than any other developed country's companies. Each company must be judged independently of others. And even those that/. readers hate the most can have progressive policies in some areas even while being total idiots in others. Which Mickey Mouse outfit is it that offers health benefits to same-sex partners and yet tries to bribe Congress into requiring copy protection in every digital device? If you look hard enough, you might find something good, useful, and progressive that SCO has done recently even while they are being total fools with the lawsuit. SuSE is probably still too young to have any skeletons in their closet, but give them 10 years and they'll do something evil.
Anyway, what I was actually saying to you was this: Thanks a lot of sabotaging our argument that universal censorship is
unneccessary, and that it is better to leave it up to parents to apply filters to protect their children.
You might still believe in security through obscurity (i.e. the idea that public policy makers can't figure out for themselves how meaningless parental filter systems are), but most of us understand how bogus that argument is. Universal censorship should properly be fought on civil liberties grounds without reference to the efficacy of other technologies.
You are absolutely right, I didn't really think along those lines. I was against the governments proposal to universally filter
the content, but now I can see that anything I can do as a parent would be counter-productive and that universal filtering is
the only realistic option.
As a parent myself, I think any parent who gives their child unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet is a fool; you
might end up raising a kid who's a combination of Benny Hill and Ted Bundy. Kids too young to understand the difference
between good/bad, normal/abnormal, etc don't need to be downloading hard-core pr0n, and faces-of-death pics.
When my mother was 12, she asked my Grandmother about something she did not understand in a mildly racy novel. My Grandmother threw a fit over what she was reading. My mother learned never to share what she was reading with her Mom.
When I was growing up, our next door neighbors had a lockout of some kind (pre v-chip) on their cable system to prevent their 12 year old daughter from seeing movies that they deemed too racy. When she wanted to see one that was locked, she came over to our house and watched it with my sister.
Bottom line: If you censor your kids viewing/reading/internet, they will find a way around it and you will lose the ability to discuss with them the ideas that they are picking up from those very sources that you are trying to control.
PS. Now that I am the parent of a 3 year old daughter, I do find myself censoring what she watches. Her favorite film is LOTR. But I've gotten tired of having to get up at 0300 in order to calm her down from a nightmare after she has watched it before going to bed. I am having a bit of a problem reconciling my liberal ideals with my need for undisturbed sleep.
It would be more cost effective if they let the customer download them and write them to CD themselves. $19.00 bucks? Give me a break!
This is the Smithsonian fer Christ's sake, not a giant record company. If the Feds have purchased the rights to these recordings, they should be giving the music away for free.
Unfortunately, the article did not elaborate on who owns the copyrights or why the Smithsonian is selling CDs for such an exhorbitant price.
Nope. I tried them both simultaneously. I use a direct connect with no proxy. It is quite consistent. netscape 6 is refused each time but ie and netscape 4 are just fine.
I have netscape 6.something (one of those that netscape released before Mozilla was at 1.0) under win2k on my laptop. Hotmail gave me a connection refused error when my wife tried to use it to access her hotmail account the other day. Netscape 4.7 under Linux works just fine with hotmail. In this case, since netscape 6 was so buggy anyway, I am inclined to give hotmail the benefit of the doubt. But still, any program remotely pretending to be anything close to a browser should be able to at least fetch the html that a site serves up even if it can't render it exactly the way the page designer expected.
You are only seeing a small piece of the puzzle. If everyone is putting their tax cut into savings, why would anyone borrow? The reason for borrowing is to buy capital goods to increase production in response to increased consumer demand. This is part of what I meant when I said that macro econ needed a better grounding in micro.
Go read up on modern rational expectations and neoclassical theory. Short story is that people are smart enough to understand that tax cuts will have to be made up for later and build those expectations into their current behavior thus negating the stimulus. These models were developed by more conservative economists who wanted macro econ to have a better grounding in micro econ than was provided by Keynesian based macro models. They are a major part of what is taught to first year grad students in economics.
Slashdot Mirror
The current problem of interest is always too big to run on the current generation of hardware.
The Censor sits
Somewhere between
The scenes to be seen
And the television sets
With his scissor purpose poised
Watching the human stuff
That will sizzle through
The magic wires
And light up
Like welding shops
The ho-hum rooms of America
And with a kindergarten
Arts and crafts concept
Of moral responsibility
Snips out
The rough talk
The unpopular opinion
Or anything with teeth
And renders
A pattern of ideas
Full of holes
A doily
For your mind
Mason Williams
The Mason Williams Reading Matter, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1964
About three years ago, Forbes ran an article on 64 bit computing in which they claimed that a 64 bit computer could address 64! bytes of memory. That same article called Unix a programming language and had several other silly inaccuracies. Be wary, your PHB will soon be asking for a demo.
When the neutrons get absorbed into the walls, they wreck so much havok on the material that the walls aren't really walls anymore; they're more like cottage cheese. That is a serious problem.
There was talk about creating some type of liquid wall that could absorb the neutrons and then be continuosly replaced, but I personally believe that this problem will ultimately be solved with transparent aluminium.
Bzzzt. I used to own one. It consisted of a dorm sized refridge with tap and CO2. Very nice integrated unit that worked quite well. I gave it away to a friend who is way deeper into home brew than I was. Sure, you can buy an 18 wheeler truck, but that doesn't mean that you can't buy a 4 cyl Toyota for personal hauling for a whole lot cheaper. Go google yourself. A 1/4 keg model starts around $600. A pro 5 keg model can be had new for $2300. This is conceptually something like the difference between the refridgerator in your kitchen and the walk in cooler in a restaurant. Also keep in mind that setup is an added cost. Much of what a bar will have to pay is the cost of custom construction to build the unit into the bar itself.
BS. They are just dorm size refridgerators with a tap.
Now if only Open Office would do the same thing...
I'm not going to trust my personal finances to a company that refuses to release their code under the GPL. Who knows what kind of data this software is gathering...
I agree with this. The authors of my financial software have no business snooping on data that is the business of myself and the financial institutions that hold my assets. But there are other problems with closed source financial software:
1. I'm afraid of proprietary data storage formats. I want the ability to push/pull/backup/restore my personal financial data using tools that are not provided by the application. I may want to change financial applications in the future and that means I have to be able to convert from one format to another. Yes, there are standards for financial interchange, but often that means that you cannot move ALL of the data since the standard may not cover every aspect of the data (e.g. a transaction that puts a debit in a checking account and matches it with a debit in a budget account. Sure you can move the checking data, but can you move the budgetary data as well?).
2. I want to fully understand how the reports are generated. There are many ways of calculating the "profit" from an investment. I want to see the calculations and be able to modify them if I don't like the formula used by the application. Didn't MS Excell have problems like this with some of its formulas at one time? Financial formulas must be auditable.
3. I may want to extend the application by adding data fields that the application does not have or put constraints on data that the application does not enforce (mostly important for taxable vs. non-taxable investment accounts).
The problem though is that once the law is in the books, it's the letter of the law that matters.
That's too simple. While the letter of the law is clearly quite important, the legislative intent of the law is given a lot of weight when the law is interpreted by the courts.
A Norwegian family that died in 1976 has the earliest proven case.
Brave assertions. Any facts to back them up? Or even some reasoning?
What assertions? Your quote includes two questions and an opinion. The opinion is based on the simple premise that more choices are better than fewer choices. No GPL and only proprietary sales to Gov't gives the Gov't fewer choices than both proprietary sales and GPL. Forcing the Gov't to use only GPL'd software gives the Gov't fewer choices than allowing both proprietary sales and GPL where appropriate.
Both extremes, the GPL only and the proprietary only, are equally inane. Microsoft seems to be calming down a bit since they learned that their anti GPL FUD was hurting them. Time for the GPL advocates to learn the same lesson.
As for Gov't funded R&D, I believe that that should be released under a BSD style license. That gives anyone the widest possible latitude to use the research results in the widest possible way. In the US, I believe that something similar is already done with patents from research at Federal Labs. Aren't such patents automatically put into the Public Domain? The BSD license is essentially a Public Domain license with an absolution from any liability clause.
Here are a few choice quotes:
"Policymakers should not make rigid intellectual property licensing choices a precondition for eligibility for procurement, nor should they discriminate between developers that choose to license their intellectual property on commercial terms, and developers that choose not to charge licensing fees...."
"Lately, concerns have emerged that policy makers, through government procurement policies, research funding or standards policies, may seek to favor one software development model over another."
Those seem like quite reasonable statements to me. Are you suggesting that policymakers should force the Gov't to purchase only GPL'd software? Or release Gov't funded R&D only under a GPL license? Either of those would be unacceptable and every bit as bad as preventing the Gov't from using GPL'd software as the pro MS zealots seem to want.
Pro Choice vs. Viral Licenses or is it Monopoly vs. Pro Freedom?
Both sides are becoming as obnoxious as the fanatics trying to co-opt the language in the Pro Choice vs. Anti Choice, uh, err, I mean, Pro Life vs. Anti Life abortion debate. No room for a middle ground. No sense that the other side might have some reasonable concerns that are worth listening to.
Are they going to call the re-release "Berke Breathed Again"?
The amount of time I have to spend seperating recycleables from trash had better be very, very small or it isn't worth ny time to recycle. The city where I live has a voluntary recycling program where you actually have to pay extra to have your recycleables picked up at the curb or else take them to a pickup station yourself. My wife does the recycling in our household. Since my opportunity cost of recycling is $100/hr, I refuse to have anything to do with it.
The city where I live used to have a trash burning municipal power plant. It was shut down a few years ago because it dumped too much dioxen into the air. The cost of building filters was way more than the electricity produced plus landfill averted was worth. There is also the question of what to do with the resulting ash which is heavily contaminated with things like lead and mercury.
When it comes to business ethics, American companies aren't exactly the most shining examples...
/. readers hate the most can have progressive policies in some areas even while being total idiots in others. Which Mickey Mouse outfit is it that offers health benefits to same-sex partners and yet tries to bribe Congress into requiring copy protection in every digital device? If you look hard enough, you might find something good, useful, and progressive that SCO has done recently even while they are being total fools with the lawsuit. SuSE is probably still too young to have any skeletons in their closet, but give them 10 years and they'll do something evil.
Are you trying to tell us that French and German commercial interests have made no money selling dual use technologies to the Iraqis in the past 10 years? Do you really believe that the Swedish arms industry has stopped paying bribes to 3rd world defense ministers? Are you claiming that Swiss and Luxembourg banking establishments no longer welcome ill gotten gains or that the Japanese conglomerates are no longer the largests contributors to the campaign coffers of the LDP?
American companies are no better or worse in their business ethics than any other developed country's companies. Each company must be judged independently of others. And even those that
Anyway, what I was actually saying to you was this: Thanks a lot of sabotaging our argument that universal censorship is unneccessary, and that it is better to leave it up to parents to apply filters to protect their children.
You might still believe in security through obscurity (i.e. the idea that public policy makers can't figure out for themselves how meaningless parental filter systems are), but most of us understand how bogus that argument is. Universal censorship should properly be fought on civil liberties grounds without reference to the efficacy of other technologies.
You are absolutely right, I didn't really think along those lines. I was against the governments proposal to universally filter the content, but now I can see that anything I can do as a parent would be counter-productive and that universal filtering is the only realistic option.
You could try talking with your children...
As a parent myself, I think any parent who gives their child unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet is a fool; you might end up raising a kid who's a combination of Benny Hill and Ted Bundy. Kids too young to understand the difference between good/bad, normal/abnormal, etc don't need to be downloading hard-core pr0n, and faces-of-death pics.
When my mother was 12, she asked my Grandmother about something she did not understand in a mildly racy novel. My Grandmother threw a fit over what she was reading. My mother learned never to share what she was reading with her Mom.
When I was growing up, our next door neighbors had a lockout of some kind (pre v-chip) on their cable system to prevent their 12 year old daughter from seeing movies that they deemed too racy. When she wanted to see one that was locked, she came over to our house and watched it with my sister.
Bottom line: If you censor your kids viewing/reading/internet, they will find a way around it and you will lose the ability to discuss with them the ideas that they are picking up from those very sources that you are trying to control.
PS. Now that I am the parent of a 3 year old daughter, I do find myself censoring what she watches. Her favorite film is LOTR. But I've gotten tired of having to get up at 0300 in order to calm her down from a nightmare after she has watched it before going to bed. I am having a bit of a problem reconciling my liberal ideals with my need for undisturbed sleep.
1. Hire Tufts students to sell Cutco knives to Anti-Spammers.
2. Set up webcam to watch Anti-Spammers carve up Tufts students.
3. ???
4. Cleanup.
It would be more cost effective if they let the customer download them and write them to CD themselves. $19.00 bucks? Give me a break!
This is the Smithsonian fer Christ's sake, not a giant record company. If the Feds have purchased the rights to these recordings, they should be giving the music away for free.
Unfortunately, the article did not elaborate on who owns the copyrights or why the Smithsonian is selling CDs for such an exhorbitant price.
Furthermore, the technology that Sun pioneers has absolutely NOTHING to do with ANY Sony market.
Sony does seem to be using a lot of java.
Nope. I tried them both simultaneously. I use a direct connect with no proxy. It is quite consistent. netscape 6 is refused each time but ie and netscape 4 are just fine.
I have netscape 6.something (one of those that netscape released before Mozilla was at 1.0) under win2k on my laptop. Hotmail gave me a connection refused error when my wife tried to use it to access her hotmail account the other day. Netscape 4.7 under Linux works just fine with hotmail. In this case, since netscape 6 was so buggy anyway, I am inclined to give hotmail the benefit of the doubt. But still, any program remotely pretending to be anything close to a browser should be able to at least fetch the html that a site serves up even if it can't render it exactly the way the page designer expected.
You are only seeing a small piece of the puzzle. If everyone is putting their tax cut into savings, why would anyone borrow? The reason for borrowing is to buy capital goods to increase production in response to increased consumer demand. This is part of what I meant when I said that macro econ needed a better grounding in micro.
Go read up on modern rational expectations and neoclassical theory. Short story is that people are smart enough to understand that tax cuts will have to be made up for later and build those expectations into their current behavior thus negating the stimulus. These models were developed by more conservative economists who wanted macro econ to have a better grounding in micro econ than was provided by Keynesian based macro models. They are a major part of what is taught to first year grad students in economics.