I think this quote from their Oracle VM FAQ is more telling:
Recognizing enterprise customers' demand for fully supported server virtualization, Oracle now offers Oracle VM backed by a world-class support organization, as well as a full suite of Oracle product certifications.
In other words: they recognize that customers want virtualization. But, they don't want to support running on just any hypervisor. Doing so places them in the position of having to rely on another company's software product to run well, which is just not a good idea from Oracle's point of view. The solution? Take an open-source solution and tweak it to their own specifications. Since they have control, they're not dependent on anyone else for good performance.
They claim to do Windows virtualizaiton, but the fact is that without paravirtualied Windows drivers, any performance is going to royally stink. I'd be surprised if they invest the time to actually make those work.
What would be a good idea for them in the long run, I think, is to allow their management tool to integrate with some others -- RedHat's or XenSource's, for example -- so that customers can manage all their servers from one console, while taking advantage of Oracle's specialized distro.
I don't see what the big deal is either -- it seems exactly like demanding keys or combinations to safes to gather evidence. If your safe isn't safe from subpoena, why should you think your hard drive is?
I wonder what knowledge we're going to lose as the world does lose those last language speakers.
If the only people who "know" that knowledge are the handful of people who currently speak that language, how do "we" (the rest of the world) benefit much from their knowledge right now?
If you've never personally spoken that language, I submit that either:
You're gaining nothing from their knowing it, or
The idea can be translated into English.
English may need to be somewhat changed to receive the idea; but that can be done. Consider, for instance, the concept of "mu" as an answer to a yes-or-no question, which is alleged to mean, "Your question cannot be answered as asked because it depends upon false assumptions." (I.e., "Have you stopped beating your wife?" "Mu. I have never beaten my wife.")
This seems to presume that there's some compelling reason to leave Xen and go to VMWare. If that's the case, why didn't they just go to VMWare in the first place? They've been hiring...
Could it be that what they're calling the "VMkernel" is actually just the hypervisor? I.e., just like Xen?
The way Xen works now is that Xen boots, then starts dom0, which is a Linux kernel containing all of the device drivers. Perhaps VMWare just does it backwards -- loads Linux, then has Linux load in the hypervisor.
There was (and perhaps is) a similar thing for Linux, that would allow you to boot into Windows, and then run this program and boot Linux. The program (as I understand it) would basically load the Linux kernel into memory, then jump to the start address.
Suppose now, that Linux didn't have its own boot-time code, but relied on this method always to execute. Would it still be fair to call Linux a "derived work" of Windows?
According to a computer documentation class I took (i.e., writing tech manuals), optimal numbers of letters per line for reading is 50-70. With 80 characters per line, most lines will wrap around to be on the high end of that range. As far as readability is concerned, 128 would be "right out".
Anyone know how many average characters per line old-school typewriters had?
Is there one where Company A releases code under GPL, Company B releases a derived project under a closed license and the case went to court?
If the GPL has never gone to court in this way, it's for the same reason that continental ballistic missiles have never been used in combat. No one doubts that continental ballistic missiles could blow the face off half the planet, so it never escalates that far.
The threat of copyright law (because if you don't have the GPL, all you have is someone else's IP and no license to use it) it is substantial enough that anyone who actually consults a lawyer will try to avoid taking it to court.
You frequently have to write your own scripts to make it work in such situations, but this requires a very good - arguably completely unnecessary - understanding of what's going on behind the scenes.
You seem to be complaining that the Xen hypervisor doesn't do anything with networking. That's not what a hypervisor is for. Setting up virtual networks is outside the scope of a hypervisor; that's why you need other tools. It would be like complaining 10 years ago that Linux worked fine for process management, but that it was a pain to set up networking, that you needed to edit all kinds of scripts and nonsense. That's got nothing to do with the kernel, but with the lack of supporting tools to make configuration easy. Just like the graphical tools needed to be developed for networking and other configuration for Linux, the tools for management still need to be created for Xen.
VMWare has been developing their management interfaces and infrastructure for 6-7 years now. Don't be surprised that RedHat, XenSource, Virtual Iron, et al don't have parity after less than a year of working on it.
This seems to be one of his main disappointments, in fact -- specifically, that RHEL 5 doesn't have pretty management interfaces. (The only mention of XenSource and Virtual Iron's management interfaces seems to be to re-emphasize that RHEL's GUI is really bad.)
The Xen hypervisor is an engine, not a car. Xen is in some ways similar to where Linux was in the late '90s -- the kernel worked great, but the GUI was way behind. And the fact is that corporate customers need a complete solution, not just a great "engine". The number of cool features of the OSS Xen is really astounding -- but without a convenient way to manage it for mere mortals, it's not that much use to most IT folks. And getting that functionality, along with other functionality that IT folks might need (like say, storage management) into a useful GUI is a very difficult proposition, and not at all related to the virtualization technology itself.
One could assume that because parking lots are slow-driving zones that drivers have more time to react to situations.
I would have modded this "interesting", but hardly "insightful". People drive slowly because parking lots are a little bit of anarchy and you never know when someone is going to do something stupid.
Ever drive straight through a green light? Why don't you slow down and make sure that no one else is going through the other way? Because of the rules. Get rid of stoplights, and all intersections become stop signs. Get rid of all traffic rules, and no one can drive faster than parking-lot speed anywhere. Would you dare to drive 70 mph on a freeway if you knew that there may be crackpots driving the opposite direction?
(That said, when a light first turns green, I still look for idiots who are racing to try to make it through the other way.)
As for me, I'll take the rules. But even if it could be shown that more rules means more accidents, it hardly generalizes to "more rules are always worse".
For a business class I took recently, I had to read an article from the Harvard Business Review written in 1969. The strange thing about the article was that it talked about fuel cells as a potential replacement for gasoline which was "just around the corner". I had to keep going back and checking that it really was written in 1969 and never revised.
So some of the hyped technologies *right now* have been hyped before.
One of the other interesting things about this class is the way it defines innovation: not as a development of new technology, but as the practical application of technology to people's lives (and more particularly, the creation of new business: either new products, new servies, or new ways of doing things). Peter Drucker identified seven sources of this kind of "innovation", of which new technology was only one.
Actually, the license wasn't for the copyrighted material -- it was for the patents. "We can't stop you from buying this for $0.50. If you buy it that way, you own it, and you can do what you like with it. But, you can't use any of our patents in the process. Oh, by the way, the only things that will play the music on this piece of vinyl use our patents."
If this had been today, there would have been the ACCA (Analog Century Copyright Act) that would have made it illegal to "traffic goods" used to play it without the original patents.
The article misses a huge loss that MS will take if it ever releases anything remotely open-source. Not something technical, but something under "marketing". It will lose the idea that closed-source is better in a vast majority of their markets.
You're talking as though the command were an attempt to build up a detailed moral code from nothing to a set of philosophy students. Take it in context. The fact is that this command was given to a huge group of people that had been slaves of another nation, and were now starting their own nation (see "Prince of Egypt" for an entetaining similitude of the historical context). Most people have an intuitive sense for what is "murder" and what is "justified killing" under most circumstances. Giving a detailed philosophical manifesto at that point was unnecessary, and probably would have lost their attention. If you read the books of Exodus and Leviticus, it's clear that laws were given and clarified as new situations came up.
Not unlike the US constitution. Not every detail of exactly what "freedom of the press", "right to privacy", or "right to an attourney" was spelled out in detail when it was written. As various cases have come up, the courts have clarified exactly what many of those sentences mean. For example, "right to an attourney" means that if the defendant can't afford an attourney, the government has to pay one for him; and "right to privacy" means that a woman can ask a doctor to kill a child developing in her womb without the government's interference (according to Roe v Wade, anyway).
Some people come to the Grand Canyon, and say "Wow, look at this big hole, I wonder how it was made" and try to put together a theory to explain it (and other similar geological features). Creationists then come and say "Wow, look at this big hole, I wonder how it was made in keeping with the idea the earth is 6,000 years old".
You forgot someone else: Scientists come and say, "Wow, look at this big hole, I wonder how it was made keeping with the idea that nothing ever interferes with natural processes?"
I'm not a geologist or an evolutionary biologist, but I have read enough evolutionist writings to know that many evolutionary scientists assume the non-existence of God (or at least, the non-interference of God in natural processes) as one of the fundamental definitions of what they call science. I think that's just as intellectually dishonest as the "Bible-only" Creationist.
FWIW, I don't see a necessary contradiction between the Biblical account and Genesis. At the same time, there are a lot of things about evolution that just don't make sense to me, and evolutionists who refuse to even consider the idea that something like God could have interfered in the natural order of things don't make me feel better about it.
On the other hand, "Thou Shalt Not Kill", so lets go throw plagues on the Egyptians (for one) does seem a bit of a sticking point.
If you read any modern translation, it says "Do not murder." There's a difference between murder and killing in English, and I'm told there are similar distinctions in the original Hebrew.
But I get your point; 'United States of Apathy' or 'United States of Amnesia'.
That wasn't really my point... my point was that lots of Americans believe strongly in things, but not all the same things. For instance, my wife is really pro-gun ("If more students on the V-Tech campus had guns, the killer would have been dead after the first shot..."). But most people I know don't have strong convictions on that particular point -- not enough that their voting decisions are strongly influenced by it.
If you look at it from a marketing perspective, there are thousands of unique little voting segments, no one of which dominates the political landscape. Because of the way our political system is set up, there is guaranteed to always be exactly two political parties. Therefore, each party has to "market" to different, sometimes contradictory voting segments; and most people, if they really looked at the platforms, would have to chose the lesser of two evils. (My two biggest personal issues in the 2000 election were abortion and the Microsoft anti-trust case. I couldn't vote both pro-life and anti-microsoft.)
I was responding to the OP, who said that "most people are not social conservatives". Yes, it's true that the "social conservative" segment is not a majority; but neither is any other segment.
The vast majority of Americans aren't strong believers in fiscal conservatism
The vast majority of Americans are not strong social liberals
The vast majority of Americans are not strong environmentalists
The vast majority of Americans are not laissez-faire free-market capitalists
The vast majority of Americans are not strongly pro-gun
The vast majority of Americans are not strongly anti-gun
The vast majority of Americans are not strongly anti-abortion
The vast majority of Americans are not strongly pro-abortion
In fact, I'd be willing to bet, that the vast majority of Americans are not (politically) like you, or the people you spend time with. (The same could be said of me and the people I spend time with.)
There are about a thousand different political viewpoints and voting segments. The fact that all of these groups do have an impact on the government shows that democracy is working. If it's true that "every politician banked on socons and lost their election bid", then either they weren't really as attractive to socons as they thought, or they should have paid more attention to some of the other groups.
Republicans are supposed to be political conservatives.
Here's a crazy idea: since a lot of people (their "base") are social conservatives, maybe the government (i.e., elected Republicans) should care about what they think?
I took a business class, and the way we were taught to think about it is, "Who captures the value?"
eBay's service creates value: connecting people who want to buy with people who want to sell in ways that they couldn't before. That connection creates value for both sellers and buyers, or they wouldn't use it. Now, if eBay were a philanthropic organization whose sole purpose of existence were to make that connection, then they wouldn't charge any fee above their own cost (in terms of servers, bandwidth, staffing, and so on), and the sellers and buyers would capture all of the extra value that eBay had created.
However, I don't think there is any philanthropic organization set up simply to promote selling and buying. So eBay's founders, and its shareholders, want to capture some of that value for themselves. That's how the vast majority of our economy runs.
And the fact is, that the vast majority of buyers and sellers on eBay are glad to pay eBay's fees (including looking at ads), because the value they get in return is well worth it.
IANAL, but if I understand copyright law properly, any creative work that you do above a certain threshold is subject to copyright. That's right, every post on Slashdot, every witty rejoinder, every random tune you hum, every ranting speech you go on when you have a fight with your SO -- all of it is automatically copyrighted to you, with no registration required.
t's true, these people may not understand exactly what it is on a low level, like what backbones are, what companies own them, what TCP/IP is, etc., but just like with airplanes, they know the important stuff: that it's a "network" connected to their computer that they can use to access email, websites, and other services.
That may work for the younger generation, who have grown up using the internet. They may have a more intuitive feel for what's actually happening, wrt communication, because they grew up with it -- sort of like "native intution" in speaking a language. But for people who are introduced to the internet as older adults, and who don't have the means or desire to learn the technical aspect of it, they don't really have a good idea how it works at all.
In fact, I can say categorically that there's not always a lot of understanding. My wife has her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. But if our internet connection goes down, she complains that "I still have three green bars" on the wireless connectivty, why can't I connect to gmail? Yes, love -- so your computer can talk to the router just fine, but the router can't talk over the internet. But no matter how many times I explain, it doesn't really sink in, and she soon forgets it.
I recently had some success explaining the internet to my grandmother. She and my mother (who live together) had been using a particularly slow dial-up, and I had talked them into getting broadband. My grandmother wanted to know if the SBC internet would still have google and her mail and everything.
So I drew a little picture for her -- the internet "cloud", with Amazon, Google, Juno, AOL, and SBC all connected to the cloud. Then I said that the internet is like telephones, except that instead of people talking to people, you have computers talking to computers. When you type in "www.amazon.com", your computer calls up a server at amazon and asks, "Hey, can i have the main web page." And amazon sends it back. Then when you click on something, the your computer calls up amazon again and asks for that web page. Then I said that SBC or dial-up over AOL are just different ways of connecting your computer to the internet, so that it can talk to servers like Amazon or Google.
At this point, she looked at me, and I could see the wheels of her sharp, 80-year old mind turning, coming to grips with the basic idea of what was going on.
Of course, my brother then wanted to explain about packets and routing and such, but I thought we could save that for another time.
Whenever something like this comes up, my father-in-law always says, "You know why in the wild west, the barfights are all people swinging punches and bottles and chairs, instead of shooting? Because they know that everyone in the place has a gun, and if one person pulls his gun out, there will be bullets flying everywhere. Your likelihood of not getting shot in that circumstance is just about nil."
Now, I don't like to get my information from movies, so I'm holding judgement on whether that's true or not. But he does have a point.
OK, so is this new party going to be pro-choice or pro-life? Try to be centrist on that one.
The fact is that there are about 1000 political issues: manufacturing vs labor, social liberals vs social conservatives, fiscal liberals vs fiscal conservatives, business vs environmentalism, pro-choice vs pro-life. Some people care about some things, some about other things. But the way our system is set up guarantees that all of the millions of different possible viewpoints have to be amalgamated into exactly two (2) political parties, leaving everyone to chose the least of two evils.
For example, in the 2000 election, I had the choice of either voting anti-abortion or anti-microsoft. Gore's administration would have finished the job Clinton's administration started, and MS would be three separate companies by now. But which is more important, stopping an abusive monopoly, or stopping the slaughter of innocent lives?
Slashdot Mirror
I think this quote from their Oracle VM FAQ is more telling:
In other words: they recognize that customers want virtualization. But, they don't want to support running on just any hypervisor. Doing so places them in the position of having to rely on another company's software product to run well, which is just not a good idea from Oracle's point of view. The solution? Take an open-source solution and tweak it to their own specifications. Since they have control, they're not dependent on anyone else for good performance.
They claim to do Windows virtualizaiton, but the fact is that without paravirtualied Windows drivers, any performance is going to royally stink. I'd be surprised if they invest the time to actually make those work.
What would be a good idea for them in the long run, I think, is to allow their management tool to integrate with some others -- RedHat's or XenSource's, for example -- so that customers can manage all their servers from one console, while taking advantage of Oracle's specialized distro.
I don't see what the big deal is either -- it seems exactly like demanding keys or combinations to safes to gather evidence. If your safe isn't safe from subpoena, why should you think your hard drive is?
If the only people who "know" that knowledge are the handful of people who currently speak that language, how do "we" (the rest of the world) benefit much from their knowledge right now?
If you've never personally spoken that language, I submit that either:
- You're gaining nothing from their knowing it, or
- The idea can be translated into English.
English may need to be somewhat changed to receive the idea; but that can be done. Consider, for instance, the concept of "mu" as an answer to a yes-or-no question, which is alleged to mean, "Your question cannot be answered as asked because it depends upon false assumptions." (I.e., "Have you stopped beating your wife?" "Mu. I have never beaten my wife.")This seems to presume that there's some compelling reason to leave Xen and go to VMWare. If that's the case, why didn't they just go to VMWare in the first place? They've been hiring...
Could it be that what they're calling the "VMkernel" is actually just the hypervisor? I.e., just like Xen?
The way Xen works now is that Xen boots, then starts dom0, which is a Linux kernel containing all of the device drivers. Perhaps VMWare just does it backwards -- loads Linux, then has Linux load in the hypervisor.
There was (and perhaps is) a similar thing for Linux, that would allow you to boot into Windows, and then run this program and boot Linux. The program (as I understand it) would basically load the Linux kernel into memory, then jump to the start address.
Suppose now, that Linux didn't have its own boot-time code, but relied on this method always to execute. Would it still be fair to call Linux a "derived work" of Windows?
According to a computer documentation class I took (i.e., writing tech manuals), optimal numbers of letters per line for reading is 50-70. With 80 characters per line, most lines will wrap around to be on the high end of that range. As far as readability is concerned, 128 would be "right out".
Anyone know how many average characters per line old-school typewriters had?
If the GPL has never gone to court in this way, it's for the same reason that continental ballistic missiles have never been used in combat. No one doubts that continental ballistic missiles could blow the face off half the planet, so it never escalates that far.
The threat of copyright law (because if you don't have the GPL, all you have is someone else's IP and no license to use it) it is substantial enough that anyone who actually consults a lawyer will try to avoid taking it to court.
You seem to be complaining that the Xen hypervisor doesn't do anything with networking. That's not what a hypervisor is for. Setting up virtual networks is outside the scope of a hypervisor; that's why you need other tools. It would be like complaining 10 years ago that Linux worked fine for process management, but that it was a pain to set up networking, that you needed to edit all kinds of scripts and nonsense. That's got nothing to do with the kernel, but with the lack of supporting tools to make configuration easy. Just like the graphical tools needed to be developed for networking and other configuration for Linux, the tools for management still need to be created for Xen.
VMWare has been developing their management interfaces and infrastructure for 6-7 years now. Don't be surprised that RedHat, XenSource, Virtual Iron, et al don't have parity after less than a year of working on it.
This seems to be one of his main disappointments, in fact -- specifically, that RHEL 5 doesn't have pretty management interfaces. (The only mention of XenSource and Virtual Iron's management interfaces seems to be to re-emphasize that RHEL's GUI is really bad.)
The Xen hypervisor is an engine, not a car. Xen is in some ways similar to where Linux was in the late '90s -- the kernel worked great, but the GUI was way behind. And the fact is that corporate customers need a complete solution, not just a great "engine". The number of cool features of the OSS Xen is really astounding -- but without a convenient way to manage it for mere mortals, it's not that much use to most IT folks. And getting that functionality, along with other functionality that IT folks might need (like say, storage management) into a useful GUI is a very difficult proposition, and not at all related to the virtualization technology itself.
So perhaps the NY law requiring software for voting machines to be held in escrow should include the chip layout as well...
I would have modded this "interesting", but hardly "insightful". People drive slowly because parking lots are a little bit of anarchy and you never know when someone is going to do something stupid.
Ever drive straight through a green light? Why don't you slow down and make sure that no one else is going through the other way? Because of the rules. Get rid of stoplights, and all intersections become stop signs. Get rid of all traffic rules, and no one can drive faster than parking-lot speed anywhere. Would you dare to drive 70 mph on a freeway if you knew that there may be crackpots driving the opposite direction?
(That said, when a light first turns green, I still look for idiots who are racing to try to make it through the other way.)
As for me, I'll take the rules. But even if it could be shown that more rules means more accidents, it hardly generalizes to "more rules are always worse".
For a business class I took recently, I had to read an article from the Harvard Business Review written in 1969. The strange thing about the article was that it talked about fuel cells as a potential replacement for gasoline which was "just around the corner". I had to keep going back and checking that it really was written in 1969 and never revised.
So some of the hyped technologies *right now* have been hyped before.
One of the other interesting things about this class is the way it defines innovation: not as a development of new technology, but as the practical application of technology to people's lives (and more particularly, the creation of new business: either new products, new servies, or new ways of doing things). Peter Drucker identified seven sources of this kind of "innovation", of which new technology was only one.
Actually, the license wasn't for the copyrighted material -- it was for the patents. "We can't stop you from buying this for $0.50. If you buy it that way, you own it, and you can do what you like with it. But, you can't use any of our patents in the process. Oh, by the way, the only things that will play the music on this piece of vinyl use our patents."
If this had been today, there would have been the ACCA (Analog Century Copyright Act) that would have made it illegal to "traffic goods" used to play it without the original patents.
The article misses a huge loss that MS will take if it ever releases anything remotely open-source. Not something technical, but something under "marketing". It will lose the idea that closed-source is better in a vast majority of their markets.
You're talking as though the command were an attempt to build up a detailed moral code from nothing to a set of philosophy students. Take it in context. The fact is that this command was given to a huge group of people that had been slaves of another nation, and were now starting their own nation (see "Prince of Egypt" for an entetaining similitude of the historical context). Most people have an intuitive sense for what is "murder" and what is "justified killing" under most circumstances. Giving a detailed philosophical manifesto at that point was unnecessary, and probably would have lost their attention. If you read the books of Exodus and Leviticus, it's clear that laws were given and clarified as new situations came up.
Not unlike the US constitution. Not every detail of exactly what "freedom of the press", "right to privacy", or "right to an attourney" was spelled out in detail when it was written. As various cases have come up, the courts have clarified exactly what many of those sentences mean. For example, "right to an attourney" means that if the defendant can't afford an attourney, the government has to pay one for him; and "right to privacy" means that a woman can ask a doctor to kill a child developing in her womb without the government's interference (according to Roe v Wade, anyway).
You forgot someone else: Scientists come and say, "Wow, look at this big hole, I wonder how it was made keeping with the idea that nothing ever interferes with natural processes?"
I'm not a geologist or an evolutionary biologist, but I have read enough evolutionist writings to know that many evolutionary scientists assume the non-existence of God (or at least, the non-interference of God in natural processes) as one of the fundamental definitions of what they call science. I think that's just as intellectually dishonest as the "Bible-only" Creationist.
FWIW, I don't see a necessary contradiction between the Biblical account and Genesis. At the same time, there are a lot of things about evolution that just don't make sense to me, and evolutionists who refuse to even consider the idea that something like God could have interfered in the natural order of things don't make me feel better about it.
If you read any modern translation, it says "Do not murder." There's a difference between murder and killing in English, and I'm told there are similar distinctions in the original Hebrew.
That wasn't really my point... my point was that lots of Americans believe strongly in things, but not all the same things. For instance, my wife is really pro-gun ("If more students on the V-Tech campus had guns, the killer would have been dead after the first shot..."). But most people I know don't have strong convictions on that particular point -- not enough that their voting decisions are strongly influenced by it.
If you look at it from a marketing perspective, there are thousands of unique little voting segments, no one of which dominates the political landscape. Because of the way our political system is set up, there is guaranteed to always be exactly two political parties. Therefore, each party has to "market" to different, sometimes contradictory voting segments; and most people, if they really looked at the platforms, would have to chose the lesser of two evils. (My two biggest personal issues in the 2000 election were abortion and the Microsoft anti-trust case. I couldn't vote both pro-life and anti-microsoft.)
I was responding to the OP, who said that "most people are not social conservatives". Yes, it's true that the "social conservative" segment is not a majority; but neither is any other segment.
The same could be said of anything:
In fact, I'd be willing to bet, that the vast majority of Americans are not (politically) like you, or the people you spend time with. (The same could be said of me and the people I spend time with.)
There are about a thousand different political viewpoints and voting segments. The fact that all of these groups do have an impact on the government shows that democracy is working. If it's true that "every politician banked on socons and lost their election bid", then either they weren't really as attractive to socons as they thought, or they should have paid more attention to some of the other groups.
Here's a crazy idea: since a lot of people (their "base") are social conservatives, maybe the government (i.e., elected Republicans) should care about what they think?
I took a business class, and the way we were taught to think about it is, "Who captures the value?"
eBay's service creates value: connecting people who want to buy with people who want to sell in ways that they couldn't before. That connection creates value for both sellers and buyers, or they wouldn't use it. Now, if eBay were a philanthropic organization whose sole purpose of existence were to make that connection, then they wouldn't charge any fee above their own cost (in terms of servers, bandwidth, staffing, and so on), and the sellers and buyers would capture all of the extra value that eBay had created.
However, I don't think there is any philanthropic organization set up simply to promote selling and buying. So eBay's founders, and its shareholders, want to capture some of that value for themselves. That's how the vast majority of our economy runs.
And the fact is, that the vast majority of buyers and sellers on eBay are glad to pay eBay's fees (including looking at ads), because the value they get in return is well worth it.
IANAL, but if I understand copyright law properly, any creative work that you do above a certain threshold is subject to copyright. That's right, every post on Slashdot, every witty rejoinder, every random tune you hum, every ranting speech you go on when you have a fight with your SO -- all of it is automatically copyrighted to you, with no registration required.
That may work for the younger generation, who have grown up using the internet. They may have a more intuitive feel for what's actually happening, wrt communication, because they grew up with it -- sort of like "native intution" in speaking a language. But for people who are introduced to the internet as older adults, and who don't have the means or desire to learn the technical aspect of it, they don't really have a good idea how it works at all.
In fact, I can say categorically that there's not always a lot of understanding. My wife has her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. But if our internet connection goes down, she complains that "I still have three green bars" on the wireless connectivty, why can't I connect to gmail? Yes, love -- so your computer can talk to the router just fine, but the router can't talk over the internet. But no matter how many times I explain, it doesn't really sink in, and she soon forgets it.
I recently had some success explaining the internet to my grandmother. She and my mother (who live together) had been using a particularly slow dial-up, and I had talked them into getting broadband. My grandmother wanted to know if the SBC internet would still have google and her mail and everything.
So I drew a little picture for her -- the internet "cloud", with Amazon, Google, Juno, AOL, and SBC all connected to the cloud. Then I said that the internet is like telephones, except that instead of people talking to people, you have computers talking to computers. When you type in "www.amazon.com", your computer calls up a server at amazon and asks, "Hey, can i have the main web page." And amazon sends it back. Then when you click on something, the your computer calls up amazon again and asks for that web page. Then I said that SBC or dial-up over AOL are just different ways of connecting your computer to the internet, so that it can talk to servers like Amazon or Google.
At this point, she looked at me, and I could see the wheels of her sharp, 80-year old mind turning, coming to grips with the basic idea of what was going on.
Of course, my brother then wanted to explain about packets and routing and such, but I thought we could save that for another time.
Whenever something like this comes up, my father-in-law always says, "You know why in the wild west, the barfights are all people swinging punches and bottles and chairs, instead of shooting? Because they know that everyone in the place has a gun, and if one person pulls his gun out, there will be bullets flying everywhere. Your likelihood of not getting shot in that circumstance is just about nil."
Now, I don't like to get my information from movies, so I'm holding judgement on whether that's true or not. But he does have a point.
OK, so is this new party going to be pro-choice or pro-life? Try to be centrist on that one.
The fact is that there are about 1000 political issues: manufacturing vs labor, social liberals vs social conservatives, fiscal liberals vs fiscal conservatives, business vs environmentalism, pro-choice vs pro-life. Some people care about some things, some about other things. But the way our system is set up guarantees that all of the millions of different possible viewpoints have to be amalgamated into exactly two (2) political parties, leaving everyone to chose the least of two evils.
For example, in the 2000 election, I had the choice of either voting anti-abortion or anti-microsoft. Gore's administration would have finished the job Clinton's administration started, and MS would be three separate companies by now. But which is more important, stopping an abusive monopoly, or stopping the slaughter of innocent lives?