If it were about an implementation only, then there would be no conflict between independent inventers who tackle the same problem in different implementations.
Were you trying to imply that a RAND license is somehow compatible with GPL? Even Royalty-Free, which is a small subset of RAND not, is frequently not compatible with GPL, and RAND usually means with royalties of about any possible size (which can be zero, but there is no reason to believe it will be). RAND does not mean that the royalties will be reasonable to you or most developers who need to use it.
1. Performance? My experimentation 6 months ago with compute/object-intensive code showed a fully-optimized GCJ only getting 30% the speed of the latest Sun JVM.
2. Popular applications? Can Jakarta Tomcat with JSP, etc., a common open source Java-based web server be run on it? If not, there is a clear list of what it is missing.
3. Web applications sandbox? How about loading untrusted applications over the internet and running them in a security sandbox?
4. Is GTK or QT really ready to be the free cross-platform Java standard for UI? Is there licensing preventing bundling of IBM's Eclipse UI toolkit with GCJ? Is relicensing under GPL possible?
GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java) works on any platform supported by GCC. It is a great implementation of Java.
Yes. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Sun's proprietary approach or coding to Sun's java standards, but this seems at the moment to be the most-promising way of providing a usable Java. My own experiments a few months back were quite disappointing with respect to speed -- native compiled Java via GCJ running with about 30% of the speed of Sun's jdk.
I wonder if anyone has even tried running, for example, Tomcat + jsp on top of it. If that can be done reasonably, it has reached a very significant milestone.
The only important missing thing is AWT/Swing, but you can use SWT (the Eclipse toolkit), which most people think provides better performance.
If it is clear / easy (especially from a licensing perspective) to use SWT with GPL software, this would be a gain, not a loss, in my opinion. I do not mind leaving swing and awt applications behind.
Another important milestone would be being able to launch web-downloaded apps/applets within a sandbox with these UI libraries, etc. functional.
I haven't tried, but I think you can use Sun's Java library if you conpile it to native with GCJ.
I think there might be severe licensing problems doing that.
Um? Whatever you think of java, it's pretty usefull for people on less-used operating systems to have cross-platform software. Don't have to wait for a port.
It is people on more-used/Sun-endorsed operating systems who don't have to wait for a port of Java.
People on less-used operating systems are likely to be supported by GCC, so they could have ported the app themselves, but do not have a compatible Java version, and porting Java means starting from scratch and incompatibility bugs, because Java is not open source.
Bush is opportunistic, and I really don't like him, but he didn't directly order or participate in the Twin Towers attack. Whether his ineptitude allowed it to happen or not is debateable.
Among the least-disputed facts is the great friendship between Bush and the Saudis, that, among other things, led him to give permission for all Saudis including close relatives of Osama to leave when all Americans trying to fly were grounded and continue to be treated hostilly. We could go on about numerous issues like supporting the Pakistanis in the face of obvious evidence that they have proliferated WMDs to all our worst enemies, etc. while claiming to lead a war to eliminate WMDs. Is this all attributable just to ineptitude? I think he is committing real crimes against the people, and is not above some sort of indirect involvement at least in the twin towers attack.
Sun should try to get outside their stupid box a bit more. Net will eventually bury Java for people who like the proprietary mind set because Microsoft can copy faster than Sun. Proprietary is not for me, and open source will be forced to produce something more-open to innovation. Sun would rather sue than let someone else do something that they have no experience or vision to do themselves with Java.
Your contradictions in priority are exactly the reason people should be free to do what they need to with the Java engine, or find / create something better.
It is an extended discussion, although novices obviously give such a simplistic answer.
It should be obvious that it was completely impossible in 1995 and a number of years after that, which killed the project at the time, which would not have been the case had distributing a forked distribution with our own modifications been an alternative.
To make a good, intelligent loader, it would need to tie in to a much greater extent to surrounding code than simple overloading of public methods allows, and is likely to require native modifications.
Such a thing really needs to be built into a distribution so every application that tries to launch itself intelligently does not have to have special privileges, etc.
This is a long discussion of design, your answer is a non-starter, and the class loader is just one part missing of many that needs to be thyere in a dfistribution.
Oh, god, like you are so damned important. Sun is being whined at by thousands of people, each with a different "but I want this" and "but I want that." Do you think Sun are omnipotent and can do it all?
Thanks for making the argument for me. With that sort of argument, you probably work for Sun. It progresses as Sun wants it to progress, not as it's users need it to progress. It will not be effective for many general purposes such as the one the parent of my original response proposed until someone who understands the domain is able to take ownership enough to provide what is necessary.
Look at Java and how it has come along over the years. It has always been progressing and in very non-trivial ways (the JRE has a full-blown software MIDI subsystem for cripes sake). Just because your little corner in the world hasn't been peed on, yet, doens't make Sun incompetent or evil.
Certainly it has been "peed on" by Sun, who then sits back and claims victory wondering why no one uses Java Start (if you call today's following success, I guess you are in denial). That is what leads many to believe that Sun will never do it right or well, even though Java zealots claim Java does it all very well. You could make the same argument about emacs having made so much progress over all the years, but that still does not make it suitable to most tasks even though it can be used for nearly any task.
When Midi becomes more important than how a web application launches and myriad other failures in their client strategy, I would suspect there are still domain experts better than the ones Sun hired who could do a better job in a non-proprietary environment.
Honestly, De Icaza is one of the few free software/OSS activist with really clear ideas on the subject and some objectivity.
Really? Honestly? I think real vision would be recognizing the technologies such as XUL when they originally appear in open source, not waiting for Microsoft to corrupt them to say we should copy what Microsoft is doing. He is a Microsoft watcher, which does not make him a visionary.
If you have to install a 7 meg browser (mozilla) to make your application work why not just ship an application that updates itself over the network?
That would be an option if Java were free, so that the appropriate initiatives could be undertaken to have a decent way to run web applications.
Starting back in 1995, various companies asked for a number of features in Java necessary for launching web applications efficiently over the web -- licensees of Java paying Sun the big bucks. I was in one of these companies. Sun has never gotten what it would take to make Java a serious advantage for applications that trickle down to the desktop over the web.
There are many examples of things that would be needed and were repeatedly requested, that I have never seen materialize -- for example (one of many) a really-intelligent class loader that understands how to make applications work instantaneously and reliably over the web. The design doesn't seem that hard, but it is very different from anything that Sun has undertaken. I and other people made presentations to Sun, and they ignored it all, being a server company. Without free software, that leaves no options. This was 9 years ago, and Sun still has not figured most of it out. Companies cannot wait for Sun to get it.
As it is, I couldn't care less whether Sun or Microsoft wins, because it is 6 of one or half a dozen of the other, they will be limited by their own lack of vision. Licensees of Java were ripped off, believing they would be helped by Sun for all the money they paid.
It isn't that companies are not willing to pay. It is that Sun isn't willing to deliver even to those who pay who see how to bring Java out of the box where it is now (and have seen since the beginning).
It is not a new idea, but it seems like the best-suited ones for the jobs are clearly not the corrupt, power hungry politicians able to run for the position.
Any citizen, chosen at random, might well make a better candidate than those who can head up the political machines required to get elected.
"Congratulations, you have been chosen to be the next President of the United States. The secret service will arive sometime today."
Also give out random cash prizes to make sure that those who would not normally aspire to hold office will show up at the polls.
Give "Government of the People" a new credibility.
It would save us all a lot of grief, and I do not see how it could be fundamentally much worse, unless the beaurocracy had the ability to keep thus-selected leaders under their thumbs.
I would be appalled by any web site that assumed that everyone runs with the Microsoft media player installed. Fortunately, I find the alternatives supported by most respectable web sites, and I will install most alternatives as required.
** It is unethical to use unlicensed Microsoft software -- just because it is unlicensed does not change that it is from Microsoft **
I disagree. A non-trivial patent does not deny access to an invention, it explicitly details an invention -- the trade-off being that the inventor will reap the profits from that invention for a set period of time.
No, the inventor is more often denied profits or even commercial use from his invention for a set period of time.
Take the invention of the television, clearly a non-trivial thing.
There were two obvious inventors, filing for a patent at nearly the same time.
One was granted, and the other was denied.
Not to mention the many others who were later denied the right to use this if they developed it or who may have done similar work before and lost rights.
This is what usually happens -- denial of access to your worn invention -- even if it is not always so dramatic and obvious as two people filing for patents nearly simultaneously. By it's design, it usually hurts far more researchers than it helps, because only one prevails, and that is not the best researcher, but the one with the most legal work.
It might not be perfectly solvable, but that does not mean there isn't a solution out there that is better than doing nothing.
The silence is deafening, please elaborate. The world cling to a system that is rife with abuse precisely because the big money can abuse it for monopoly power.
Let's look at the absolute best possible outcome, without worrying at all about implementation. In it, inventors and companies would:
The rest of your post is rambling without any discussion of a real solution that works. An accurate approach would first recognize that the current system does far more harm than good, and should be discarded.
For what it is worth, with respect to your program analogy, just because lots of people write programs with lots of bugs, does not mean that bug-free programs cannot be written. But they require great clarity of the abstract model, which is completely lacking in your discussion of how people can be awarded monopolies on ideas. With a model that is fundamentally flawed -- ownership of ideas -- every program written to implement the model will fail catastrophically.
Unless you want to live in a state-controlled truly socialist society, I don't see an alternative.
I think it is ludicrous to see no alternative to patents -- government granted monopolies -- other than a state-controlled socialist society.
If there have to be monopolies, they should be done with far more public interest and oversight, but I think abandoning such monopolies is far less harmful than maintaining them. Patents is far from a free society. Corporations need a new, less anti-competetive, less harmful business model that does not rely on a government grant of monopoly. That is all.
Most patents are a problem when you look deeply enough, because they always deny other inventors access to their work and they distort the purpose of the research to be to establish a monopoly instead of to be to solve a problem in the best way.
I think the best way to ensure that inventers are compensated for their work is to have good people or companies in a position to sponser projects that need to be done and problems that need to be solved.
If you mean what is the best way to ensure they are compensated for the value of the inventions they have to produce, then I insist that the problem is so unsolvable at so many levels that to attempt it is to create greater injustice. Are you going to make sure that an inventer properly goes back and compensates all those who were not compensated upon which his invention relies, as well as those who were prevented from benefitting because he had the best legal work?
Perhaps based upon superficial thinking, drug patents are good, but I think a very strong case can be made against them. They clearly warp the research, into looking for cures that can be monopolized instead of cures that work. Just because the research and development budget increases and the company spent lots of money does not mean that the market is better off with this sort of government-granted monopoly.
Certainly the people who cannot afford drugs because all the money has been splurged in trying to maintain competing monopolies instead of trying for the best service are disadvantaged by the patent systems.
It certainly is not always the most efficient research or the most effective cure that wins, because given the chance for patents, companies frequently will not develop or advocate something they cannot monopolize, whatever the merits.
While there are a great many thoughtful libertarians who oppose patents as a natural result of libertarian principles, as nearly as I can tell, the so-called Libertarian party at http://www.lp.org has lots of members who are patent attorneys and they somehow think patents are a good thing. I would be happy to cite lots of examples from their site.
And they trademarked "Libertarian" so it is time to think of a new term to refer to people who are libertarian in their thinking.
The X Window System may not have been in common use yet, but the term "window" was already in very common use for creating UIs. You can find code all over that shows this. Even Emacs called the concept a "Window" long before that time.
Microsoft has no right to claim "Windows" (or Office, which was in common use for Office Automation, etc.) and even less right to complain about Lindows or the X Window System. It should be "Microsoft Windows", and nothing shorter should be protectable, just like "X Window System" is protectable, but "Window System" should not be.
Real digital rights management would be a useful tool to track the nuances of many rights of all parties and not get into the always-flawed provider-biased enforcement at all. As such, there are many good applications of it.
But in the industry, it is a euphemism for copy protection, which has never, that I am aware of, been used to accurately manage digital rights, other than the DMCA's argument that whatever right the copy protection condescends to give you is all the right you should ever have.
A musket is a historical weapon that has no relevence to today. What about all of the school mascots with Roman spears or Tomahawks?
Tell that to the high-school kids in metal shop making primitive weapons that work just fine in gang warfare.
These things are symbols for us because at one time they were part of our values. Perhaps the politically correct find a Roman with a spear less violent. I do not..
Here is what I am trying to say, the school has a policy about glorifying violence. Intimidating clothing is part of it.
There are far more intimidating things done and worn by kids in school, and more-likely to happen than bringing an assault weapon to school. There are also certainly more single-shot hard-to-load weapons carried to school than assault weapons.
No one is going to put on a tricorn hat and go on a school rampage with a muzzle loader. So your argument is baloney.
So as long as they have a tricorn hat with their weaponry it is ok, because no one would wear a tricorn hat when killing people? Your argument makes so much more sense now:-)
However, people wearing shirts with the silhouette of a modern firearm might just be considered a intimidating. Our children go to school to learn, not be intimidated by classmates that act as though they might shoot people, or glorify violence with their fourteen year old understanding of the world. If you have a problem with that, I suggest you have some children before your reply, it might change your attitude.
I have children in school, and they have been repeatedly harassed by bullys, but never with an assault weapon. Taking the symbols off of their shirts seems like just removing the warning label, if it indeed was indicative of violent tendencies at all. It sounds like this school's approach is very superficial.
Should the school also allow shirts that say "I will strangle your mother if you look at me again"? After all, in this country you can say and express what you want!
No. That would seem to be a clear threat.
But they should be required to provide evidence that a musket-carrying soldier is an order of magnitude less intimidating than an assault weapon. Perhaps they should eliminate the problem and get rid of violent sports like football altogether, and other things that contribute to the jock mentality that seems to cause actual bullying and be rid of the violent mascots at the same time.
See?
I see that the problem and hypocracy remains.
In any society, even a free one, there is a responsibility, and a line to be drawn. Even in America there is a line. The line is a lot deeper than most countries, but there is still a line. That is to let other people live with freedom from tyranny, oppression, religion, and fear. Remember those?
Yes. But drawing the line will always be arbitrary, and obvious hypocricy such as this does not make the system credible.
I would give a different message in school. I am not sure what eliminating the symbols of modern weapons in schools does.
Anti-war speech is as likely to refer to symbols of violence as the pro-war neo-conservatives, as well as the traditional conservatives, who don't shoot anyone but believe that popular sovereinty includes the right to self defense.
Many are taught that the cross is a symbol of hatred, and most other symbols, too have roots in issues that are violent in nature. This is why crosses, muslim scarves, and other symbols were banned in schools in France. How did you arrive at the conclusion that your line is responsible, and that of others, who consider it unjustified abridgement of free speech, are not?
So, where do you draw the line? Just because you are Bill Gates or some other corporate criminal does not mean you should have more voice than others. Just because your father was a respected politician doesn't mean you deserve respect. Face it. Different people have different assets that are theirs to manipulate, justly or unjustly, and movie stars are clearly not the worst abusers.
You have not given your exact UI requirements. I do not excpect a single UI to meet all possible UI requirements, but I think a variety of simple, efficient UIs can run reasonably across these platforms, and where any such free UI is successful at addressing a new reasonably-popular set of requirements, it deserves inclusion in the free Java platforms people most people download.
Innovation and the correct balance will never occur through monopoly control of the environment. We waited many years since before jdk 1.0 to get simple awt font commands that worked the same on PC and Mac, and Sun never fixed it, even though we were licensees, and Sun has not gotten more responsive since then. A dictatorship they are, but benevolent only to those who have no urgent real-world requirements.
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If it were about an implementation only, then there would be no conflict between independent inventers who tackle the same problem in different implementations.
Is SWT free, so that it can be distributed with GCJ?
Were you trying to imply that a RAND license is somehow compatible with GPL? Even Royalty-Free, which is a small subset of RAND not, is frequently not compatible with GPL, and RAND usually means with royalties of about any possible size (which can be zero, but there is no reason to believe it will be). RAND does not mean that the royalties will be reasonable to you or most developers who need to use it.
In the present situation, that damage could be avoided by writing a License that, for example, specifically excludes 'any employee of Microsoft'.
Have you heard of the Microsoft stance on the GPL?
1. Performance? My experimentation 6 months ago with compute/object-intensive code showed a fully-optimized GCJ only getting 30% the speed of the latest Sun JVM.
2. Popular applications? Can Jakarta Tomcat with JSP, etc., a common open source Java-based web server be run on it? If not, there is a clear list of what it is missing.
3. Web applications sandbox? How about loading untrusted applications over the internet and running them in a security sandbox?
4. Is GTK or QT really ready to be the free cross-platform Java standard for UI? Is there licensing preventing bundling of IBM's Eclipse UI toolkit with GCJ? Is relicensing under GPL possible?
GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java) works on any platform supported by GCC. It is a great implementation of Java.
Yes. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Sun's proprietary approach or coding to Sun's java standards, but this seems at the moment to be the most-promising way of providing a usable Java. My own experiments a few months back were quite disappointing with respect to speed -- native compiled Java via GCJ running with about 30% of the speed of Sun's jdk.
I wonder if anyone has even tried running, for example, Tomcat + jsp on top of it. If that can be done reasonably, it has reached a very significant milestone.
The only important missing thing is AWT/Swing, but you can use SWT (the Eclipse toolkit), which most people think provides better performance.
If it is clear / easy (especially from a licensing perspective) to use SWT with GPL software, this would be a gain, not a loss, in my opinion. I do not mind leaving swing and awt applications behind.
Another important milestone would be being able to launch web-downloaded apps/applets within a sandbox with these UI libraries, etc. functional.
I haven't tried, but I think you can use Sun's Java library if you conpile it to native with GCJ.
I think there might be severe licensing problems doing that.
Um? Whatever you think of java, it's pretty usefull for people on less-used operating systems to have cross-platform software. Don't have to wait for a port.
It is people on more-used/Sun-endorsed operating systems who don't have to wait for a port of Java.
People on less-used operating systems are likely to be supported by GCC, so they could have ported the app themselves, but do not have a compatible Java version, and porting Java means starting from scratch and incompatibility bugs, because Java is not open source.
Bush is opportunistic, and I really don't like him, but he didn't directly order or participate in the Twin Towers attack. Whether his ineptitude allowed it to happen or not is debateable.
Among the least-disputed facts is the great friendship between Bush and the Saudis, that, among other things, led him to give permission for all Saudis including close relatives of Osama to leave when all Americans trying to fly were grounded and continue to be treated hostilly. We could go on about numerous issues like supporting the Pakistanis in the face of obvious evidence that they have proliferated WMDs to all our worst enemies, etc. while claiming to lead a war to eliminate WMDs. Is this all attributable just to ineptitude? I think he is committing real crimes against the people, and is not above some sort of indirect involvement at least in the twin towers attack.
Sun should try to get outside their stupid box a bit more. Net will eventually bury Java for people who like the proprietary mind set because Microsoft can copy faster than Sun. Proprietary is not for me, and open source will be forced to produce something more-open to innovation. Sun would rather sue than let someone else do something that they have no experience or vision to do themselves with Java.
Your contradictions in priority are exactly the reason people should be free to do what they need to with the Java engine, or find / create something better.
It is an extended discussion, although novices obviously give such a simplistic answer.
It should be obvious that it was completely impossible in 1995 and a number of years after that, which killed the project at the time, which would not have been the case had distributing a forked distribution with our own modifications been an alternative.
To make a good, intelligent loader, it would need to tie in to a much greater extent to surrounding code than simple overloading of public methods allows, and is likely to require native modifications.
Such a thing really needs to be built into a distribution so every application that tries to launch itself intelligently does not have to have special privileges, etc.
This is a long discussion of design, your answer is a non-starter, and the class loader is just one part missing of many that needs to be thyere in a dfistribution.
Oh, god, like you are so damned important. Sun is being whined at by thousands of people, each with a different "but I want this" and "but I want that." Do you think Sun are omnipotent and can do it all?
Thanks for making the argument for me. With that sort of argument, you probably work for Sun. It progresses as Sun wants it to progress, not as it's users need it to progress. It will not be effective for many general purposes such as the one the parent of my original response proposed until someone who understands the domain is able to take ownership enough to provide what is necessary.
Look at Java and how it has come along over the years. It has always been progressing and in very non-trivial ways (the JRE has a full-blown software MIDI subsystem for cripes sake). Just because your little corner in the world hasn't been peed on, yet, doens't make Sun incompetent or evil.
Certainly it has been "peed on" by Sun, who then sits back and claims victory wondering why no one uses Java Start (if you call today's following success, I guess you are in denial). That is what leads many to believe that Sun will never do it right or well, even though Java zealots claim Java does it all very well. You could make the same argument about emacs having made so much progress over all the years, but that still does not make it suitable to most tasks even though it can be used for nearly any task.
When Midi becomes more important than how a web application launches and myriad other failures in their client strategy, I would suspect there are still domain experts better than the ones Sun hired who could do a better job in a non-proprietary environment.
Honestly, De Icaza is one of the few free software/OSS activist with really clear ideas on the subject and some objectivity.
Really? Honestly? I think real vision would be recognizing the technologies such as XUL when they originally appear in open source, not waiting for Microsoft to corrupt them to say we should copy what Microsoft is doing. He is a Microsoft watcher, which does not make him a visionary.
If you have to install a 7 meg browser (mozilla) to make your application work why not just ship an application that updates itself over the network?
That would be an option if Java were free, so that the appropriate initiatives could be undertaken to have a decent way to run web applications.
Starting back in 1995, various companies asked for a number of features in Java necessary for launching web applications efficiently over the web -- licensees of Java paying Sun the big bucks. I was in one of these companies. Sun has never gotten what it would take to make Java a serious advantage for applications that trickle down to the desktop over the web.
There are many examples of things that would be needed and were repeatedly requested, that I have never seen materialize -- for example (one of many) a really-intelligent class loader that understands how to make applications work instantaneously and reliably over the web. The design doesn't seem that hard, but it is very different from anything that Sun has undertaken. I and other people made presentations to Sun, and they ignored it all, being a server company. Without free software, that leaves no options. This was 9 years ago, and Sun still has not figured most of it out. Companies cannot wait for Sun to get it.
As it is, I couldn't care less whether Sun or Microsoft wins, because it is 6 of one or half a dozen of the other, they will be limited by their own lack of vision. Licensees of Java were ripped off, believing they would be helped by Sun for all the money they paid.
It isn't that companies are not willing to pay. It is that Sun isn't willing to deliver even to those who pay who see how to bring Java out of the box where it is now (and have seen since the beginning).
It is not a new idea, but it seems like the best-suited ones for the jobs are clearly not the corrupt, power hungry politicians able to run for the position.
Any citizen, chosen at random, might well make a better candidate than those who can head up the political machines required to get elected.
"Congratulations, you have been chosen to be the next President of the United States. The secret service will arive sometime today."
Also give out random cash prizes to make sure that those who would not normally aspire to hold office will show up at the polls.
Give "Government of the People" a new credibility.
It would save us all a lot of grief, and I do not see how it could be fundamentally much worse, unless the beaurocracy had the ability to keep thus-selected leaders under their thumbs.
I would be appalled by any web site that assumed that everyone runs with the Microsoft media player installed. Fortunately, I find the alternatives supported by most respectable web sites, and I will install most alternatives as required.
** It is unethical to use unlicensed Microsoft software -- just because it is unlicensed does not change that it is from Microsoft **
I disagree. A non-trivial patent does not deny access to an invention, it explicitly details an invention -- the trade-off being that the inventor will reap the profits from that invention for a set period of time.
No, the inventor is more often denied profits or even commercial use from his invention for a set period of time.
Take the invention of the television, clearly a non-trivial thing.
There were two obvious inventors, filing for a patent at nearly the same time.
One was granted, and the other was denied.
Not to mention the many others who were later denied the right to use this if they developed it or who may have done similar work before and lost rights.
This is what usually happens -- denial of access to your worn invention -- even if it is not always so dramatic and obvious as two people filing for patents nearly simultaneously. By it's design, it usually hurts far more researchers than it helps, because only one prevails, and that is not the best researcher, but the one with the most legal work.
It might not be perfectly solvable, but that does not mean there isn't a solution out there that is better than doing nothing.
The silence is deafening, please elaborate. The world cling to a system that is rife with abuse precisely because the big money can abuse it for monopoly power.
Let's look at the absolute best possible outcome, without worrying at all about implementation. In it, inventors and companies would:
The rest of your post is rambling without any discussion of a real solution that works. An accurate approach would first recognize that the current system does far more harm than good, and should be discarded.
For what it is worth, with respect to your program analogy, just because lots of people write programs with lots of bugs, does not mean that bug-free programs cannot be written. But they require great clarity of the abstract model, which is completely lacking in your discussion of how people can be awarded monopolies on ideas. With a model that is fundamentally flawed -- ownership of ideas -- every program written to implement the model will fail catastrophically.
I think it is ludicrous to see no alternative to patents -- government granted monopolies -- other than a state-controlled socialist society.
If there have to be monopolies, they should be done with far more public interest and oversight, but I think abandoning such monopolies is far less harmful than maintaining them. Patents is far from a free society. Corporations need a new, less anti-competetive, less harmful business model that does not rely on a government grant of monopoly. That is all.
Most patents are a problem when you look deeply enough, because they always deny other inventors access to their work and they distort the purpose of the research to be to establish a monopoly instead of to be to solve a problem in the best way.
I think the best way to ensure that inventers are compensated for their work is to have good people or companies in a position to sponser projects that need to be done and problems that need to be solved.
If you mean what is the best way to ensure they are compensated for the value of the inventions they have to produce, then I insist that the problem is so unsolvable at so many levels that to attempt it is to create greater injustice. Are you going to make sure that an inventer properly goes back and compensates all those who were not compensated upon which his invention relies, as well as those who were prevented from benefitting because he had the best legal work?
Perhaps based upon superficial thinking, drug patents are good, but I think a very strong case can be made against them. They clearly warp the research, into looking for cures that can be monopolized instead of cures that work. Just because the research and development budget increases and the company spent lots of money does not mean that the market is better off with this sort of government-granted monopoly.
Certainly the people who cannot afford drugs because all the money has been splurged in trying to maintain competing monopolies instead of trying for the best service are disadvantaged by the patent systems.
It certainly is not always the most efficient research or the most effective cure that wins, because given the chance for patents, companies frequently will not develop or advocate something they cannot monopolize, whatever the merits.
And they trademarked "Libertarian" so it is time to think of a new term to refer to people who are libertarian in their thinking.
The X Window System may not have been in common use yet, but the term "window" was already in very common use for creating UIs. You can find code all over that shows this. Even Emacs called the concept a "Window" long before that time.
Microsoft has no right to claim "Windows" (or Office, which was in common use for Office Automation, etc.) and even less right to complain about Lindows or the X Window System. It should be "Microsoft Windows", and nothing shorter should be protectable, just like "X Window System" is protectable, but "Window System" should not be.
Real digital rights management would be a useful tool to track the nuances of many rights of all parties and not get into the always-flawed provider-biased enforcement at all. As such, there are many good applications of it.
But in the industry, it is a euphemism for copy protection, which has never, that I am aware of, been used to accurately manage digital rights, other than the DMCA's argument that whatever right the copy protection condescends to give you is all the right you should ever have.
A musket is a historical weapon that has no relevence to today. What about all of the school mascots with Roman spears or Tomahawks?
Tell that to the high-school kids in metal shop making primitive weapons that work just fine in gang warfare.
These things are symbols for us because at one time they were part of our values. Perhaps the politically correct find a Roman with a spear less violent. I do not..
Here is what I am trying to say, the school has a policy about glorifying violence. Intimidating clothing is part of it.
There are far more intimidating things done and worn by kids in school, and more-likely to happen than bringing an assault weapon to school. There are also certainly more single-shot hard-to-load weapons carried to school than assault weapons.
No one is going to put on a tricorn hat and go on a school rampage with a muzzle loader. So your argument is baloney.
So as long as they have a tricorn hat with their weaponry it is ok, because no one would wear a tricorn hat when killing people? Your argument makes so much more sense now :-)
However, people wearing shirts with the silhouette of a modern firearm might just be considered a intimidating. Our children go to school to learn, not be intimidated by classmates that act as though they might shoot people, or glorify violence with their fourteen year old understanding of the world. If you have a problem with that, I suggest you have some children before your reply, it might change your attitude.
I have children in school, and they have been repeatedly harassed by bullys, but never with an assault weapon. Taking the symbols off of their shirts seems like just removing the warning label, if it indeed was indicative of violent tendencies at all. It sounds like this school's approach is very superficial.
Should the school also allow shirts that say "I will strangle your mother if you look at me again"? After all, in this country you can say and express what you want!
No. That would seem to be a clear threat.
But they should be required to provide evidence that a musket-carrying soldier is an order of magnitude less intimidating than an assault weapon. Perhaps they should eliminate the problem and get rid of violent sports like football altogether, and other things that contribute to the jock mentality that seems to cause actual bullying and be rid of the violent mascots at the same time.
See?
I see that the problem and hypocracy remains.
In any society, even a free one, there is a responsibility, and a line to be drawn. Even in America there is a line. The line is a lot deeper than most countries, but there is still a line. That is to let other people live with freedom from tyranny, oppression, religion, and fear. Remember those?
Yes. But drawing the line will always be arbitrary, and obvious hypocricy such as this does not make the system credible.
I would give a different message in school. I am not sure what eliminating the symbols of modern weapons in schools does.
Anti-war speech is as likely to refer to symbols of violence as the pro-war neo-conservatives, as well as the traditional conservatives, who don't shoot anyone but believe that popular sovereinty includes the right to self defense.
Many are taught that the cross is a symbol of hatred, and most other symbols, too have roots in issues that are violent in nature. This is why crosses, muslim scarves, and other symbols were banned in schools in France. How did you arrive at the conclusion that your line is responsible, and that of others, who consider it unjustified abridgement of free speech, are not?
So, where do you draw the line? Just because you are Bill Gates or some other corporate criminal does not mean you should have more voice than others. Just because your father was a respected politician doesn't mean you deserve respect. Face it. Different people have different assets that are theirs to manipulate, justly or unjustly, and movie stars are clearly not the worst abusers.
You have not given your exact UI requirements. I do not excpect a single UI to meet all possible UI requirements, but I think a variety of simple, efficient UIs can run reasonably across these platforms, and where any such free UI is successful at addressing a new reasonably-popular set of requirements, it deserves inclusion in the free Java platforms people most people download.
Innovation and the correct balance will never occur through monopoly control of the environment. We waited many years since before jdk 1.0 to get simple awt font commands that worked the same on PC and Mac, and Sun never fixed it, even though we were licensees, and Sun has not gotten more responsive since then. A dictatorship they are, but benevolent only to those who have no urgent real-world requirements.