How about we sell our boxes on ebay, and then send the money to make sure some kids down there eat tonight?
Go for it! Charity, like Linux development, works when we each do what we want. If you feel called upon to sell your box and use that money to buy food for the hungry, that's great.
The folks in the story have identified a need (for data infrastructure) that they can fill, and they are filling that need. I can only assume that they have looked a bit, and decided that this need is the most pressing need that *they* *can* fill.
I am using Dillo on a 486 with 12MB of RAM. It is a Debian Woody box, using the 2.4.x kernel, with Blackbox for a window manager. The machine is NOT fast, and I can't run anything concurrent with Dillo or I start swapping, but Dillo is the only browser (other than lynx) that doesn't start me swapping by itself.
If I could just get another 16MB of RAM for that old machine, it would be pretty nice. It's an old Dell Latitude, and cheap enough that I can tote it about without worries. The 486 makes for great battery life.
... destroyed with the release of Emacs, as you might have noticed. By releasing a text editor that also could control your toaster...
This is a common mistake. Emacs is not a text editor, but an operating system, which uses (optimally) a unix for a bios.
Seriously, emacs is an integrated development environment, for the dialect of lisp in which it is written, and most other languages, computer and human. The one thing it does, well, is act as a front end for all the applications which "Do only one thing, but do it well!". It is a frontend for gdb, for gcc, for gcl, for Maxima, for an HP-28-like symbolic calculator, for aspell, and for LaTeX, and for bibtex, and for R, and SAS, and for dif, and for a whole slew of things I can't think of right now. It gives a consistant user interface to all of them.
Suppose they decide next to block sites that offer illegal copies of music, movies, and software?
Yep. That's why I said ``when, not if''. The good people of PA will have to put a stop to this someday. It would be nice if they could keep the kiddie-porn stuff off the net, but I'm afraid that when the state goes too far, the courts will strike down the entire law.
I don't see anything in the GPL saying that you can't forbid redistribution...
I do. Look here:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions.
You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
What part of that is hard to understand? You have no right redistribute GPLed software unless you accept, and abide by, the GPL:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
If UL gives you the software with source and binaries, then they have obeyed the GPL. If you sign the NDA, you waive your redistribution rights.
If UL requires you to sign the NDA, they are violating the GPL, and have no right to redistribute. You, on the other hand, do have the right to redistribute the GPLed code they gave you:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.
However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
The right way is a supeona the ISP asking for a list of customers who have downloaded kiddie porn...
I agree. But. It is possible to stumble onto icky stuff by accident; when you click a link it's not always clear where you'll go. What if you click on the kiddie-porn equivalent of a goatse.cx link? Are you now a criminal as well as disgusted?
Notice that nothing has been taken off the web. You simply can't get to these things via an ISP which does business in PA. Folks who use other ISPs (say, someone in the Netherlands) can still satisfy their perverse desires.
In PA you are now a little less likely to stumble onto this particular sickness by accident, and that actually sounds kind of nice. When (I think ``if'' is too optimistic) the state of PA decides that something else should get the same treatment, we'd better be ready to slap some sense into them. In this country, we can hope to make that work, and the ACLU will probably take some time off from defending us from religion to do it for us. I think panic is premature.
It just makes me feel artifically intellectually superior to them, and I no longer want to spend my time conversing. Of course, there's always the chance that my assumptions are correct...
Actually, I find it handy when folks write that way. When I see terrible spelling, bad grammar and bad punctuation, I can safely assume that I don't actually have to read the post. It can save a lot of time.
I'm not superior because my grammar is better; their grammar is worse because they are uninteresting.
No one speaks Chaucerian or Shakespearian or even Coleridge-ian anymore!
Are you sure about that? ``No one talks the way Chaucer did'' I'll go along with. Shakespeare's English would sound pretty archaic today. No one ever talked the way Colridge wrote, but educated people still talk the way he talked.
Chaucer and Shakespeare both wrote in the vernacular, and it's no surprise that the vernacular has changed (of course, the Norman conquest exacerbated the change between Chaucer and Shakespeare). The speech of literate people, on the other hand, shouldn't change significantly from one century to another. Try reading the King James bible. Other than a few words which are no longer in current use, there is almost nothing in there which is not familiar, or at least easily comprehensible, today.
... look at how badly George W mutilites the language.
Thu US has managed to achieve the illusion of universal education without burdening most of the population with the necessity of learning. I don't know if Bush is naturally inarticulate, or simply uneducated. If his mutilation of English is really the best he can do, it's a sad commentary on the quality of the Ivy League. It may be that he knows how to express himself correctly, but can't do so in real time. That's a skill that is best learned young, and he may not have learned to organize his thoughts and express them coherently as a child.
... when is the last time in an office of any kind that someone phoned the manufacturer when a desktop box had a problem? Most people just try to hash it out themselves...
True. That's the hidden part of the TCO for Windows in particular, and PCs in general. When you count the cost of the unofficial support workers, who in real life are highly paid professionals and their only-slightly-less highly paid assistants, the cost of Windows, and PCs in general, is a lot higher than you thought.
Many times, in several offices, I've seen people who were very valuable to the company for their other skills piddling about with their cow orkers boxes, trying to overcome some stupid Windows problem. I've had to do it myself, because getting tech support is slow and painful for a windows network.
When you run xterms off compute servers, the user never has to fiddle with anything, and is hardpressed to break anything. That way, you don't have highly paid, highly (non-IT) skilled people wasting valuable time futzing about with a stupid PC that isn't quite right. Since everything boots and runs off the compute server, a call to tech support is a lot more productive, and it's the only answer.
For any office which is large enough to have a dedicated sysadmin, I think this sort of solution is going to be really good.
If you only want to cover yourself, to make it difficult for someone else to get a patent on the same idea and use it against you, filing it yourself might work. Be certain that your claims cover every way you might ever want to use your invention, plausible or not.
If your aim is to use your patent to gouge money out of others, better get a lawyer. He will probably think of things to claim that you wouldn't, and he will be much more likely to write them up so they will stand up in court.
Finally, if this is worth so little to you that the cost of having a patent attorney do the work isn't justifiable, is it really worth patenting at all?
Sorry, but nobody should have to sign away their life just to 'advance professionally'. And voluntary? Yeah, just like the kids that work in asian sweatshops. They do it cause they love it, right?
That's actually an excellent analogy. In both cases, they do it because it beats the alternative. In both cases, the solution is not to prevent them from taking the best (but still bad) alternative, but rather to provide better alternatives. That's hard, and doesn't make for good fund-raising soundbites, so it's hard to get folks to work in that direction.
In this case, an expanding economy with more jobs than workers would enable American workers to just say no to bad contracts. In the mean time, this decision goes a long way to even the balance of power between employers and employees in California. Outlawing non-compete agreements, on the other hand, would prevent mutually beneficial agreements along with the ones which were bad for the employees.
... there are much better (as decided by the UN) places to live and work...
``As decided by the UN''? Isn't this the outfit that put Syria in charge of human rights? If the UN doesn't like us, we must be doing something right. Seriously, the US gets a net inflow of immigrants from those ``better'' places, so I wouldn't take that UN drivel too seriously.
... rather than run a full mail server lets modify some mail server code to just accept mail and send it to the bit bucket.
That's clever. One possible problem might be that spammers would quickly learn to test your relay with a message, just to make sure that it didn't all go to/dev/null. I suppose that we'd have to set things up so that single emails got forwarded, and bulk emails didn't, just to avoid that. Now we really are running an open relay, though it isn't much good to spammers.
Another problem is that spammers might start automatically sending the same spams to the same lists via several different open relays. Thus, we might increase the volume of spam, at least in the early stages.
I agree that the ultimate solution to the spam problem isn't going to come from filtering at the email client. It's a social problem, and needs a social solution. Filtering by ISPs (on by default, but easily circumventable by knowledgeable users, maybe?) would help, and so would us telling our less-knowledgeable friends and relations NOT TO BUY FROM SPAMMERS!
The fact that you state that "it is reasonable to be careful not to force one's beliefs on others" already shows that you have a meta-religious criterion for behavior and for evaluating "good" religious belief from "bad".
Actually, for my faith, there is no need for a meta belief to tell me that. My faith calls for volunteers, only. Thus, forcing my beliefs on others is generally pointless.
An exception to that would be the Islamicist fanatics, who believe that the Koran requires them to kill unbelievers (Jews who don't follow the law, including Christians, and Muslims who have left their faith.). It is perfectly in accord with my faith for my government to impose upon them my belief that they must not ACT on their belief.
(After all, if your religion says that it's good to force your beliefs on others, to what can you refer to justify *not* doing so?)
That's an excellent point. The Koran DOES call upon its believers to kill unbelievers, at least in the English translation ( don't have a citation at hand, but you'll find examples here, in the first few chapters at least). If you call yourself a Muslim, and don't follow Allah's word, are you a good Muslim? This whole mess probably seems confusing, and seems to require meta-religion, if you believe that all religions are equally valid.
I don't believe that all religions are equal, and I believe that where others deviate from my beliefs, they are wrong. That certainly doesn't mean that it would be right for me (or you!) to do any sort of harm to those who believe in them. At best, persecution would be counter-productive.
I know that people who called themselves Christians have used their religion to justify all sorts of nastiness. You won't find any justification to hate or harm any person in the new testament. You can't say that about the portions of the Koran I've read. If you read the Gospels, you'll find an incident in which one of Jesus's enemies asked him what was the most important of the commandments. Jesus's reply was: ``Love God, and love your neighbor. This is the law and the prophets.'' That pretty well sums up Christianity. God loves you, and he expects me to, also. Even if I don't like you, even if you're wrong.
Re:Gov is owned by Corporate America so...its WRON
on
Politicizing Science
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· Score: 1
I go along with your idea of supporting third parties and I agree that substantive differences between Democans and Republicrats are hard to spot. I usually vote Libertarian, since I think that they would do less harm (than most fringe groups) if elected, as long as they stuck to their platform.
The Repubs and the Democs have both been the party of big government for many years; certainly as long as I've been voting. One substantive distinction between them, which kept the Repubs out of power for many years, has been that the Repubs have been the ``me too, but less'' party. Their rhetoric ran along the lines of ``Your proposal is plainly immoral and unacceptable. We'll meet you half-way.'' Had Hitler's opposition in Nazi Germany followed this principle, they would have bravely stood up to Hitler, and compromised on killing only 3 million Jews (with an option for more later). Unsurprisingly, this has been ineffective. If you don't like the Democ's bad ideas, you couldn't be enthusiastic about the Repub's compromise, and if you did like the Democ's ideas, you couldn't be enthusiastic about the Repub's compromise.
Another substantive difference has been that the Repubs have been identified as ``conservatives'', and thus have been much more successful at pushing through socialist measures, and at conducting power grabs. Bush's homeland security fiasco is a current example of that.
The two halves of the big government party will never be able to represent those of us who value our freedom, and thus want less taxes, less government spending and fewer (and more carefully thought-out) regulations.
You identfied the big government partys as corporate sponsored, and there is some truth to that. The extremely rich, and the big corporations and trust funds which they control, see government as a way to plunder the rest of us, and they naturally see more government as more opportunity for plunder.
Since it really doesn't matter which representative of the big government party gets elected (they both champion the cause of ``business as usual''), I normally vote Libertarian (in the National Elections), or Independence Party (in some of the State elections).
I don't think that our leaders should let their personal religious beliefs guide what kind of research they support...
If you don't let your religious beliefs guide your life, and your daily actions, why do you have those beliefs? Do you have them? I submit that if you don't let your beliefs guide your actions, they aren't really your beliefs. No matter how much you might claim to admire them, if you don't follow them, they aren't yours, and you don't believe in them.
I often see this idea that we should check our beliefs at the door, so to speak, and behave as if we believe nothing, when we enter the public sphere. That idea is nonsense! It is reasonable to be careful not to force one's beliefs on others, but that shouldn't cause one to abandon his own beliefs. Anyone who will abandon the things that are important to him, to obtain or retain power, is unfit to exercise that power.
This kind of unreasoning antipathy to IP smacks of someone who thinks corporate lawyers invented it 5 minutes ago...
It wasn't five minutes ago, but intellectual ``property'' [1] as it exists today is very recent. It is certainly less than 100 years old.
The important point is that art, literature and science proceded for centuries without I``P'', and reasonable people today are making the argument that our current copyright and patent laws are, on balance, impeding the progress of art, literature and science. Look in a recent issue of Forbes (the Socialist Tool) for some non-techincal discussion of that.
[1] Intellectual Property, like flying pigs, simply can't be found in nature. It is a construct of government, allowed but not required in the US by our constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
Go for it! Charity, like Linux development, works when we each do what we want. If you feel called upon to sell your box and use that money to buy food for the hungry, that's great.
The folks in the story have identified a need (for data infrastructure) that they can fill, and they are filling that need. I can only assume that they have looked a bit, and decided that this need is the most pressing need that *they* *can* fill.
If I could just get another 16MB of RAM for that old machine, it would be pretty nice. It's an old Dell Latitude, and cheap enough that I can tote it about without worries. The 486 makes for great battery life.
This is a common mistake. Emacs is not a text editor, but an operating system, which uses (optimally) a unix for a bios.
Seriously, emacs is an integrated development environment, for the dialect of lisp in which it is written, and most other languages, computer and human. The one thing it does, well, is act as a front end for all the applications which "Do only one thing, but do it well!". It is a frontend for gdb, for gcc, for gcl, for Maxima, for an HP-28-like symbolic calculator, for aspell, and for LaTeX, and for bibtex, and for R, and SAS, and for dif, and for a whole slew of things I can't think of right now. It gives a consistant user interface to all of them.
Didn't SAP open the Addabas data base which used to be in StarOffice? Is that usable with Openoffice?
Yep. That's why I said ``when, not if''. The good people of PA will have to put a stop to this someday. It would be nice if they could keep the kiddie-porn stuff off the net, but I'm afraid that when the state goes too far, the courts will strike down the entire law.
I do. Look here:
What part of that is hard to understand? You have no right redistribute GPLed software unless you accept, and abide by, the GPL: If UL gives you the software with source and binaries, then they have obeyed the GPL. If you sign the NDA, you waive your redistribution rights.If UL requires you to sign the NDA, they are violating the GPL, and have no right to redistribute. You, on the other hand, do have the right to redistribute the GPLed code they gave you:
Unless I'm reading the GPL wrong,You are.
I agree. But. It is possible to stumble onto icky stuff by accident; when you click a link it's not always clear where you'll go. What if you click on the kiddie-porn equivalent of a goatse.cx link? Are you now a criminal as well as disgusted?
Notice that nothing has been taken off the web. You simply can't get to these things via an ISP which does business in PA. Folks who use other ISPs (say, someone in the Netherlands) can still satisfy their perverse desires.
In PA you are now a little less likely to stumble onto this particular sickness by accident, and that actually sounds kind of nice. When (I think ``if'' is too optimistic) the state of PA decides that something else should get the same treatment, we'd better be ready to slap some sense into them. In this country, we can hope to make that work, and the ACLU will probably take some time off from defending us from religion to do it for us. I think panic is premature.
Actually, I find it handy when folks write that way. When I see terrible spelling, bad grammar and bad punctuation, I can safely assume that I don't actually have to read the post. It can save a lot of time.
I'm not superior because my grammar is better; their grammar is worse because they are uninteresting.
Are you sure about that? ``No one talks the way Chaucer did'' I'll go along with. Shakespeare's English would sound pretty archaic today. No one ever talked the way Colridge wrote, but educated people still talk the way he talked.
Chaucer and Shakespeare both wrote in the vernacular, and it's no surprise that the vernacular has changed (of course, the Norman conquest exacerbated the change between Chaucer and Shakespeare). The speech of literate people, on the other hand, shouldn't change significantly from one century to another. Try reading the King James bible. Other than a few words which are no longer in current use, there is almost nothing in there which is not familiar, or at least easily comprehensible, today.
Thu US has managed to achieve the illusion of universal education without burdening most of the population with the necessity of learning. I don't know if Bush is naturally inarticulate, or simply uneducated. If his mutilation of English is really the best he can do, it's a sad commentary on the quality of the Ivy League. It may be that he knows how to express himself correctly, but can't do so in real time. That's a skill that is best learned young, and he may not have learned to organize his thoughts and express them coherently as a child.
To whom should we turn in our friendly neighborhood Homeland Obscurity orifice? Who in the world would want it?
True. That's the hidden part of the TCO for Windows in particular, and PCs in general. When you count the cost of the unofficial support workers, who in real life are highly paid professionals and their only-slightly-less highly paid assistants, the cost of Windows, and PCs in general, is a lot higher than you thought.
Many times, in several offices, I've seen people who were very valuable to the company for their other skills piddling about with their cow orkers boxes, trying to overcome some stupid Windows problem. I've had to do it myself, because getting tech support is slow and painful for a windows network.
When you run xterms off compute servers, the user never has to fiddle with anything, and is hardpressed to break anything. That way, you don't have highly paid, highly (non-IT) skilled people wasting valuable time futzing about with a stupid PC that isn't quite right. Since everything boots and runs off the compute server, a call to tech support is a lot more productive, and it's the only answer.
For any office which is large enough to have a dedicated sysadmin, I think this sort of solution is going to be really good.
It means that you are obnoxiously obsessed with trivial details. Or that you are the goatse.cx guy.
If your aim is to use your patent to gouge money out of others, better get a lawyer. He will probably think of things to claim that you wouldn't, and he will be much more likely to write them up so they will stand up in court.
Finally, if this is worth so little to you that the cost of having a patent attorney do the work isn't justifiable, is it really worth patenting at all?
And voluntary? Yeah, just like the kids that work in asian sweatshops. They do it cause they love it, right?
That's actually an excellent analogy. In both cases, they do it because it beats the alternative. In both cases, the solution is not to prevent them from taking the best (but still bad) alternative, but rather to provide better alternatives. That's hard, and doesn't make for good fund-raising soundbites, so it's hard to get folks to work in that direction.
In this case, an expanding economy with more jobs than workers would enable American workers to just say no to bad contracts. In the mean time, this decision goes a long way to even the balance of power between employers and employees in California. Outlawing non-compete agreements, on the other hand, would prevent mutually beneficial agreements along with the ones which were bad for the employees.
``As decided by the UN''? Isn't this the outfit that put Syria in charge of human rights? If the UN doesn't like us, we must be doing something right. Seriously, the US gets a net inflow of immigrants from those ``better'' places, so I wouldn't take that UN drivel too seriously.
That's clever. One possible problem might be that spammers would quickly learn to test your relay with a message, just to make sure that it didn't all go to /dev/null. I suppose that we'd have to set things up so that single emails got forwarded, and bulk emails didn't, just to avoid that. Now we really are running an open relay, though it isn't much good to spammers.
Another problem is that spammers might start automatically sending the same spams to the same lists via several different open relays. Thus, we might increase the volume of spam, at least in the early stages.
I agree that the ultimate solution to the spam problem isn't going to come from filtering at the email client. It's a social problem, and needs a social solution. Filtering by ISPs (on by default, but easily circumventable by knowledgeable users, maybe?) would help, and so would us telling our less-knowledgeable friends and relations NOT TO BUY FROM SPAMMERS!
Actually, for my faith, there is no need for a meta belief to tell me that. My faith calls for volunteers, only. Thus, forcing my beliefs on others is generally pointless.
An exception to that would be the Islamicist fanatics, who believe that the Koran requires them to kill unbelievers (Jews who don't follow the law, including Christians, and Muslims who have left their faith.). It is perfectly in accord with my faith for my government to impose upon them my belief that they must not ACT on their belief.
(After all, if your religion says that it's good to force your beliefs on others, to what can you refer to justify *not* doing so?)
That's an excellent point. The Koran DOES call upon its believers to kill unbelievers, at least in the English translation ( don't have a citation at hand, but you'll find examples here, in the first few chapters at least). If you call yourself a Muslim, and don't follow Allah's word, are you a good Muslim? This whole mess probably seems confusing, and seems to require meta-religion, if you believe that all religions are equally valid.
I don't believe that all religions are equal, and I believe that where others deviate from my beliefs, they are wrong. That certainly doesn't mean that it would be right for me (or you!) to do any sort of harm to those who believe in them. At best, persecution would be counter-productive.
I know that people who called themselves Christians have used their religion to justify all sorts of nastiness. You won't find any justification to hate or harm any person in the new testament. You can't say that about the portions of the Koran I've read. If you read the Gospels, you'll find an incident in which one of Jesus's enemies asked him what was the most important of the commandments. Jesus's reply was: ``Love God, and love your neighbor. This is the law and the prophets.'' That pretty well sums up Christianity. God loves you, and he expects me to, also. Even if I don't like you, even if you're wrong.
The Repubs and the Democs have both been the party of big government for many years; certainly as long as I've been voting. One substantive distinction between them, which kept the Repubs out of power for many years, has been that the Repubs have been the ``me too, but less'' party. Their rhetoric ran along the lines of ``Your proposal is plainly immoral and unacceptable. We'll meet you half-way.'' Had Hitler's opposition in Nazi Germany followed this principle, they would have bravely stood up to Hitler, and compromised on killing only 3 million Jews (with an option for more later). Unsurprisingly, this has been ineffective. If you don't like the Democ's bad ideas, you couldn't be enthusiastic about the Repub's compromise, and if you did like the Democ's ideas, you couldn't be enthusiastic about the Repub's compromise.
Another substantive difference has been that the Repubs have been identified as ``conservatives'', and thus have been much more successful at pushing through socialist measures, and at conducting power grabs. Bush's homeland security fiasco is a current example of that.
The two halves of the big government party will never be able to represent those of us who value our freedom, and thus want less taxes, less government spending and fewer (and more carefully thought-out) regulations.
You identfied the big government partys as corporate sponsored, and there is some truth to that. The extremely rich, and the big corporations and trust funds which they control, see government as a way to plunder the rest of us, and they naturally see more government as more opportunity for plunder.
Since it really doesn't matter which representative of the big government party gets elected (they both champion the cause of ``business as usual''), I normally vote Libertarian (in the National Elections), or Independence Party (in some of the State elections).
If you don't let your religious beliefs guide your life, and your daily actions, why do you have those beliefs? Do you have them? I submit that if you don't let your beliefs guide your actions, they aren't really your beliefs. No matter how much you might claim to admire them, if you don't follow them, they aren't yours, and you don't believe in them.
I often see this idea that we should check our beliefs at the door, so to speak, and behave as if we believe nothing, when we enter the public sphere. That idea is nonsense! It is reasonable to be careful not to force one's beliefs on others, but that shouldn't cause one to abandon his own beliefs. Anyone who will abandon the things that are important to him, to obtain or retain power, is unfit to exercise that power.
It wasn't five minutes ago, but intellectual ``property'' [1] as it exists today is very recent. It is certainly less than 100 years old.
The important point is that art, literature and science proceded for centuries without I``P'', and reasonable people today are making the argument that our current copyright and patent laws are, on balance, impeding the progress of art, literature and science. Look in a recent issue of Forbes (the Socialist Tool) for some non-techincal discussion of that.
[1] Intellectual Property, like flying pigs, simply can't be found in nature. It is a construct of government, allowed but not required in the US by our constitution.