Fundamentally FOSS and financial trading software are incompatible concepts. IE if you develop any software product of tangible use and value then it does not make sense for the author to leave it as a free product - when you can be making money out of it (and generally substantial amounts).
Surely that should go for any software, not just financial trading software? GNU/Linux is a product of enormous tangible use and value. It's still free - even though commercial UNIX distributions in the early nineties cost a fortune.
This was the pattern we saw. Many developers had started projects with good intentions, and as training exercises for themselves etc. but then after that they usually branched off to create a commercial product, or were hired by a financial institution which usually includes confidentiality in the contract.
Isn't this exactly what the GPL is for? So that even if the original author goes commercial, the original software remains free and the community can fork the code at that point?
Meh... it's 2008. Who manually types in domain names anymore? I'll admit, it took me a while to start omitting the "http://www..." part, but as soon as I switched to Firefox, I very quickly gave up on typing out full or even partial domain names. I fully abuse Firefox's "awesome bar" to get me where I want without having to remember whether the site I need used a.org,.cc,.com, or.net, whether there were deliberate misspellings or additional words in the domain name, or other such arbitrary designations.
It's a sad truth that some people still use Internet Explorer. While we all feel sorry for them and hope they get better, in the meantime we must make allowances for their disability.
Somehow the idea that it's not physical media makes it impossible to steal.
That's about the shape of it, yeah. Stealing is taking the property of another person, without their consent, and with the intention of permanently depriving them of it.
Making a perfect copy of the property of another person is a completely different thing. It's not so much that it's not physical property, though - if I copy your car, I haven't stolen it, even though I haven't paid either you or the original car manufacturer for the privilege - it's just that copying physical property is technologically rather difficult right now. I want my Star Trek replicator, dammit!
Oh dear. Try reading/b/, as long as you can bear it anyway. It's liberal in the sense that anything goes except cp. Most of the time they're just posting pictures of cats on fire, of course, but when identifiable political views are stated, it's mostly extreme nationalist militarism and race hate. Possibly in jest, but you never really know.
So either Anonymous doesn't know what they are doing, or they are really McCain supporters and want to torpedo Obama's campaign and get four more years of Neocons in the White House?
Also look at the supposed text by the person from Anonymous. They use proper capitalization everywhere except for the group the supposedly represent. Why no capital A? Its Always a Capital A. But this person screws it up twice in the same text? They weren't in a hurry, they just didn't fake it correctly.
Of course it wasn't Anonymous. ebaumsworld did it.
Second, Scientology gets the benefit of watching/gloating as the Secret Service does all the heavy lifting in uncovering these guys. I'm pretty sure that when the Feds are done with these guys, the one thing they won't be is anonymous.
You think they're the same people? Anonymous isn't an organisation. It's a meme complex, nothing more. It's a collective term used for the posters on a variety of independent imageboards sharing a common culture of in-jokes, comic references, stock trolls and memes. Some Anons protest scifags; others crack email accounts; others go on Habbo Hotel dressed as Samuel L. Jackson and announce that the pool's closed; others grief furries on Second Life; others go to online memorials for teen suicides and declare the dead kid an hero. Although actually, it's usually ebaumsworld doing that stuff and not Anonymous at all.
It's actually very unlikely that the Anonymous we're dealing with here have anything to do with the Scientology campaign. That's mostly moved off the chans to its own dedicated forums now. Most of the sentiment among the Anonymous mainstream is that protestfags are part of the cancer that is killing/b/.
As a joke I always use "Wilhelm II" as my avatar on every forum I am a member of. Nobody knows who "the guy with the weird moustache" is. Nobody is offended because it happened before any of us lived. The shockeffect is gone. 40 million people DIED in that war and I bet not even 1% can tell you who fought who.
Most people at the time probably weren't too clear on who was fighting who. That war was a confused mess. As I understand it, a Bosnian shot an Austrian, so Austria declared war on Serbia, so Russia declared war on Austria, so Germany declared war on Russia, and knowing that would mean that France declared war on them they decided to declare war on France as well because doing them first fitted in better with their railway timetables, and Belgium too because they were in the way, so Britain declared war on Germany, and then everyone proceeded to kill each other for a few years.
And the leaders of that war weren't celebrities. Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were all larger-than-life figures. Memorable. Charismatic. The leaders of WW1 were nowhere near so media-friendly.
I don't get the hate for Christopher Tolkien. Without his work, we would have The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - nothing else at all. We would know the Elder Days only through the fragments of half-forgotten legend we hear in the Third Age - occasional cryptic references to the Eldar of the West, to Numenor, to Gondolin and the swords they made for the wars with the goblins, to Beren and Lúthien... We'd never have heard the full tales.
Christopher Tolkien isn't producing cheap cash-ins on his father's legacy. He compiled the Silmarillion, then spent decades writing and publishing detailed analyses of the reams of notes and fragmentary manuscripts that lay behind the legends, and finally tidied up the Narn i Hîn Húrin to a publishable form. And I for one am very glad that he did so.
I'd rather see the Infocom HHGTTG Sequel completed/released.
Not going to happen. A few fragments of code are all that exist, and there's no commercial market for such games in 2008, and both Infocom and Douglas Adams are dead. Write it yourself; there's a healthy subculture of interactive fiction writing even today, and the Inform language is actually not at all bad, all things considered.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
To most of us, a republic is any state without a king or queen. China is a republic. So is North Korea. A democracy is any state where power derives from an electoral mandate from the mass population. China and North Korea, despite being republics, are not democracies. Britain and Canada, despite being democracies, are not republics. The USA is both a republic and a democracy.
This notion of a republic being mutually exclusive to a democracy is... weird. I only ever hear it from Americans. It's not just because of how you've named the two factions of the ruling party, is it?
Yes, but apart from the roads, the hospitals, the civic security, law and order, education, and social welfare, what have the government ever done for us?
Why the hell don't we spend that $458 million on developing something useful like...i dunno...a battery the size of a suitcase that can recharge in 1 hour and power a car for 250 mile at 70mph?
Let's be really generous here and say you have the greenest car on earth and can get 50mpg at 70mph. That's 5 gallons of fuel, or 22 litres. That's already a respectable size for a suitcase. So if the most efficient car around running on hydrocarbon fuel can only just achieve your specifications, batteries haven't a prayer. I wish you luck with your research and development, but I don't think $458 million is going to achieve the order of magnitude improvement you seek.
Or a hydroxy generating system that can power a home generator?
Not sure what you mean by this, but if you mean what I think you mean then that's a perpetual motion machine. Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, then burning the gas to produce water again, can never give a net output of energy.
Or a solar panel that is cheap enough for the average home owner to install and power their entire home?
You may be surprised to learn that quite a lot of NASA's funding goes on photovoltaics research. Making them lighter and more efficient. They find it very useful for powering their spacecraft.
This is true. Minor party ideas can make their way into the mainstream: many of the past policies of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party have gone on to be adopted by the sensible parties and become law.
Would you trust a government-funded study showing cigarettes to be dangerous? It's just as much in the government's interests to promote regulation as it is in the tobacco industry's interests to make their product appear safe.
How does that work exactly? The government wants tax revenue and it wants votes, nothing else. Draconian regulation of tobacco reduces cigarette sales - otherwise what's the point? - and hence also reduces the tax revenue raised by that trade. And it upsets millions of voters who happen to enjoy smoking.
Things like this cause issues when some individual reads something on a blog and then cuts and pastes the contents of said blog into a classified report without confirming the information within or finding multiple independent sources. That said report then causes a snowball effect that has people crying wolf and running around and gives the actual skilled analysts problems
Things like this cause issues when some individual reads something in a minor journal of Middle Eastern affairs and then cuts and pastes the contents of said paper into a classified report, pausing to make a few edits like changing 'aiding opposition groups' to 'supporting terrorist organisations'. That said report then causes a snowball effect that has people crying wolf about weapons of mass destruction and starts a war.
I remember hearing about an interesting little scheme that the US / UK axis used to perpetrate. This is back when it was illegal for the US government to wiretap its own citizens, and the same in the UK. So instead the British eavesdropped on Americans' calls, and the Americans eavesdropped on Britons' calls, and then the two intelligence agencies simply compared notes.
Most end with the return of Richard I from the crusades who punishes his corrupt brother and the aristocrats who scored from the system he set up.
Funnily enough, the reason that Richard Coeur de Lion was taking so long to get back from the Crusades was that he had been captured by Austrians and held for ransom. An incredibly large ransom, which forced his mother Eleanor d'Aquitaine to raise the most enormous taxes. All that money Robin Hood kept nicking? Richard's ransom money. No wonder it took so long before the old bugger came home. Well, I say 'home'; he was French, didn't speak English, and hated England on the grounds that it was cold, and always raining; he saw the place chiefly as a source of funding for his overseas military adventures, to the extent that he claimed that he would have sold London if he could have found a buyer, and only ever spent six months of his ten-year reign actually in England.
But, funnily enough, he gets forgiven all this for (a) being suitably manly and heroic and fighting infidels abroad and (b) not being quite so bloody awful a king as his successor John.
pAt any rate, the whole business with Richard and John isn't in the earliest stories. That came later, when Robin's reputation was being rehabilitated a little, turning him into a nobleman in disguise fighting for the true king in a terribly romantic sort of way. Originally he was a commoner, a yeoman, a working-class hero, and definitely not earl of anything.
The bible. And when you take an oath, on what do you lay your hand?
I always found the idea of swearing on the Bible to be very amusing.
But I say unto you, swear not at all; neither by heaven for it is God's throne; Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.
-- Matthew 5:34-37
But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath: but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation.
It's mostly not Christian creationists - they remain a vanishingly small minority. It's Muslims - a substantial number of them do believe that rubbish. We're developing a population sector which believes in the literal truth of its holy book, and I suppose the Royal Society doesn't want to get firebombed for insulting the Prophet by suggesting that Adam and Eve never existed and so the Koran is a lie and Mohammed a fraud...
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Surely that should go for any software, not just financial trading software? GNU/Linux is a product of enormous tangible use and value. It's still free - even though commercial UNIX distributions in the early nineties cost a fortune.
This was the pattern we saw. Many developers had started projects with good intentions, and as training exercises for themselves etc. but then after that they usually branched off to create a commercial product, or were hired by a financial institution which usually includes confidentiality in the contract.
Isn't this exactly what the GPL is for? So that even if the original author goes commercial, the original software remains free and the community can fork the code at that point?
It's a sad truth that some people still use Internet Explorer. While we all feel sorry for them and hope they get better, in the meantime we must make allowances for their disability.
If the baker isn't willing to sell me a cake at the price I'm willing to pay, I don't have the right to go and bake my own cake to the same recipe?
That's about the shape of it, yeah. Stealing is taking the property of another person, without their consent, and with the intention of permanently depriving them of it.
Making a perfect copy of the property of another person is a completely different thing. It's not so much that it's not physical property, though - if I copy your car, I haven't stolen it, even though I haven't paid either you or the original car manufacturer for the privilege - it's just that copying physical property is technologically rather difficult right now. I want my Star Trek replicator, dammit!
Oh dear. Try reading /b/, as long as you can bear it anyway. It's liberal in the sense that anything goes except cp. Most of the time they're just posting pictures of cats on fire, of course, but when identifiable political views are stated, it's mostly extreme nationalist militarism and race hate. Possibly in jest, but you never really know.
So either Anonymous doesn't know what they are doing, or they are really McCain supporters and want to torpedo Obama's campaign and get four more years of Neocons in the White House?
Anonymous do it for the lulz. No other reason.
Of course it wasn't Anonymous. ebaumsworld did it.
You think they're the same people? Anonymous isn't an organisation. It's a meme complex, nothing more. It's a collective term used for the posters on a variety of independent imageboards sharing a common culture of in-jokes, comic references, stock trolls and memes. Some Anons protest scifags; others crack email accounts; others go on Habbo Hotel dressed as Samuel L. Jackson and announce that the pool's closed; others grief furries on Second Life; others go to online memorials for teen suicides and declare the dead kid an hero. Although actually, it's usually ebaumsworld doing that stuff and not Anonymous at all.
It's actually very unlikely that the Anonymous we're dealing with here have anything to do with the Scientology campaign. That's mostly moved off the chans to its own dedicated forums now. Most of the sentiment among the Anonymous mainstream is that protestfags are part of the cancer that is killing /b/.
Most people at the time probably weren't too clear on who was fighting who. That war was a confused mess. As I understand it, a Bosnian shot an Austrian, so Austria declared war on Serbia, so Russia declared war on Austria, so Germany declared war on Russia, and knowing that would mean that France declared war on them they decided to declare war on France as well because doing them first fitted in better with their railway timetables, and Belgium too because they were in the way, so Britain declared war on Germany, and then everyone proceeded to kill each other for a few years.
And the leaders of that war weren't celebrities. Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were all larger-than-life figures. Memorable. Charismatic. The leaders of WW1 were nowhere near so media-friendly.
Christopher Tolkien isn't producing cheap cash-ins on his father's legacy. He compiled the Silmarillion, then spent decades writing and publishing detailed analyses of the reams of notes and fragmentary manuscripts that lay behind the legends, and finally tidied up the Narn i Hîn Húrin to a publishable form. And I for one am very glad that he did so.
Not going to happen. A few fragments of code are all that exist, and there's no commercial market for such games in 2008, and both Infocom and Douglas Adams are dead. Write it yourself; there's a healthy subculture of interactive fiction writing even today, and the Inform language is actually not at all bad, all things considered.
To most of us, a republic is any state without a king or queen. China is a republic. So is North Korea. A democracy is any state where power derives from an electoral mandate from the mass population. China and North Korea, despite being republics, are not democracies. Britain and Canada, despite being democracies, are not republics. The USA is both a republic and a democracy.
This notion of a republic being mutually exclusive to a democracy is... weird. I only ever hear it from Americans. It's not just because of how you've named the two factions of the ruling party, is it?
Yes, but apart from the roads, the hospitals, the civic security, law and order, education, and social welfare, what have the government ever done for us?
Let's be really generous here and say you have the greenest car on earth and can get 50mpg at 70mph. That's 5 gallons of fuel, or 22 litres. That's already a respectable size for a suitcase. So if the most efficient car around running on hydrocarbon fuel can only just achieve your specifications, batteries haven't a prayer. I wish you luck with your research and development, but I don't think $458 million is going to achieve the order of magnitude improvement you seek.
Or a hydroxy generating system that can power a home generator?
Not sure what you mean by this, but if you mean what I think you mean then that's a perpetual motion machine. Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, then burning the gas to produce water again, can never give a net output of energy.
Or a solar panel that is cheap enough for the average home owner to install and power their entire home?
You may be surprised to learn that quite a lot of NASA's funding goes on photovoltaics research. Making them lighter and more efficient. They find it very useful for powering their spacecraft.
Well, I don't see why it's needed. The Americans seem perfectly happy to do their own wiretapping nowadays.
This is true. Minor party ideas can make their way into the mainstream: many of the past policies of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party have gone on to be adopted by the sensible parties and become law.
How does that work exactly? The government wants tax revenue and it wants votes, nothing else. Draconian regulation of tobacco reduces cigarette sales - otherwise what's the point? - and hence also reduces the tax revenue raised by that trade. And it upsets millions of voters who happen to enjoy smoking.
And you thought you were joking.
Things like this cause issues when some individual reads something in a minor journal of Middle Eastern affairs and then cuts and pastes the contents of said paper into a classified report, pausing to make a few edits like changing 'aiding opposition groups' to 'supporting terrorist organisations'. That said report then causes a snowball effect that has people crying wolf about weapons of mass destruction and starts a war.
I remember hearing about an interesting little scheme that the US / UK axis used to perpetrate. This is back when it was illegal for the US government to wiretap its own citizens, and the same in the UK. So instead the British eavesdropped on Americans' calls, and the Americans eavesdropped on Britons' calls, and then the two intelligence agencies simply compared notes.
Yes, it's called 'whether or not you tell the truth about what it is you're doing'.
Right now I'd feel a lot better if it said 'the One Million Dollars is in a briefcase under James Randi's bed', to be quite honest with you.
Not the lottery, fine: the poker table, then, or blackjack.
Funnily enough, the reason that Richard Coeur de Lion was taking so long to get back from the Crusades was that he had been captured by Austrians and held for ransom. An incredibly large ransom, which forced his mother Eleanor d'Aquitaine to raise the most enormous taxes. All that money Robin Hood kept nicking? Richard's ransom money. No wonder it took so long before the old bugger came home. Well, I say 'home'; he was French, didn't speak English, and hated England on the grounds that it was cold, and always raining; he saw the place chiefly as a source of funding for his overseas military adventures, to the extent that he claimed that he would have sold London if he could have found a buyer, and only ever spent six months of his ten-year reign actually in England.
But, funnily enough, he gets forgiven all this for (a) being suitably manly and heroic and fighting infidels abroad and (b) not being quite so bloody awful a king as his successor John. pAt any rate, the whole business with Richard and John isn't in the earliest stories. That came later, when Robin's reputation was being rehabilitated a little, turning him into a nobleman in disguise fighting for the true king in a terribly romantic sort of way. Originally he was a commoner, a yeoman, a working-class hero, and definitely not earl of anything.
I always found the idea of swearing on the Bible to be very amusing.
-- Matthew 5:34-37
-- James 5:12
It's mostly not Christian creationists - they remain a vanishingly small minority. It's Muslims - a substantial number of them do believe that rubbish. We're developing a population sector which believes in the literal truth of its holy book, and I suppose the Royal Society doesn't want to get firebombed for insulting the Prophet by suggesting that Adam and Eve never existed and so the Koran is a lie and Mohammed a fraud...