I tend to think that it's BS. Not merely on the face of it, but it seems that the company's lawyers are overwilling to justify their own existence. I'm surprised that it happened in France rather than the US; French civil law is extremely conservative in both judgements and damages.
Consider the recent judgement against tobacco companies in France. Where in the US the settlement was in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the French settlement ended up in the record books - at around 150k$US.
What points to question this work is that most science (even back in the nineteenth century) is built off the back of other, older science. Even those scientists viewed as mavericks, such as Louis Pasteur, built off a considerable weight of work - they just took it in unexpected directions.
This science doesn't seem terribly indebted to other scientists, which makes me mistrust the theory. This doesn't mean that he is necessarily wrong, but that the effect of Mills cells is almost certainly caused by a different means (unsurprisingly, this is the explanation for cold fusion - energy created through a chemical reaction rather than a nuclear one).
I would be suspicious of Mills, and rightly so. The article doesn't touch on Mills' background for his entire working life - the twenty-odd years between graduation from Harvard Medical School and today are a blank. What has led him to this point? What research has he done in the interim? That he is very smart is without contest, but the very smart are apt to make mistakes of equal grandeur. Look at Ramanujan, who made important discoveries in modern mathematics but also made equally great errors in prime numbers. Like Ramanujan, Mills seems to have a great difficulty and impatience with the scientific method, and it is this that should make us most suspicious of his hypotheses.
The main cause for contention with respect to the GPL is its ideological leaning. More specifically, it's seen as anti-business. Which, to a certain extent, it is.
RMS sees the interests of the developer and the corporation as, while not entirely orthogonal, at least not congruent. For that matter, I agree with him: if my company loses money on my employment, I'm out on my ass. My good judgement can be overridden at every turn. Any work that I do on their time, whether incorporated into client work or not, is their property. (I wonder if this post is their property, since I'm doing it at work - most likely, it is).
Is the GPL unenforceable? As much as any license, I presume. The power of a license dispute is that it almost invariably ties up the code in question prior to the suit being resolved. Given that the time between product revisions is much shorter than the time to go to trial, the business logic against using GPL'ed code surreptitiously is impeccable.
Look at the dispute between Symantec and McAfee. McAfee had to do a white-room rewrite of their antivirus software - *twice* - to avoid it being contaminated by a hundred-odd lines stolen by a programmer who had previously worked at Symantec. This was much cheaper and faster, believe it or not, than going out and litigating the matter to a settlement.
While free software advocates may not have the resources to reverse-engineer each and every possible violator, the stick is so much bigger than the carrot as to make it very difficult to rationalize using GPLed code on a systematic basis. I'm sure that small fragments have been grafted in by individual programmers, out of convenience or laziness, but violations are most likely to be individual, not organizational. (Of course, this was the case with McAfee, too).
I think (the eternal IMHO) that the major advantage that a PA-RISC port presents is not blinding speed on the desktop or price-performance, but access to a family of mission-critical hardware. Linux, developed on PC's and ported to a wide range of workstation hardware, has historically been short on big iron. Access to PA-RISC hardware, whether legacy or new machines, will go a long way towards remedying that deficit.
If people (myself among them) spoke out against linux's reliability on commodity hardware, no one can question the reliability and stability of HP's unix hardware. It would be easy to sell me on a HP unix box running Linux - or at least, it would be, if I was still doing that kind of stuff.
First of all, good move, Thawte. They've successfully maximized shareholder value. In other words, they've sold out at the right time. Verisign, having grabbed a lot of the big names, will probably go on to increase its market share; Thawte, having failed to, may be at the peak of its value - especially when, not if, the net stock bubble collapses.
Bad move, Verisign. First of all, the net stock bubble is called a bubble for a reason. However, when acquiring other companies, you should buy for value or make acquisitions strategically. Does Thawte own anything, other than marketshare, that Verisign doesn't already have? In most mergers and buyouts, the purchaser usually ends up losing equity when the euphoria wears off. I doubt that this will be an exception to the rule.
I can deplore Microsoft's mania in acquisitions, but more often than not they acquire intelligently - taking out possible competitors, buying into new technologies. They don't acquire just for the hell of it. Paradoxically, they have too much money to do that.
Bad move, for the global net. Thawte is a South African company, and so the purchase takes an international venture with global reach and sucks it into the gaping maw of Silicon Valley. Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with the valley. It's just that something sticks in my craw with one location dominating an entire industry.
Bad move, for everyone. A 200-lb gorilla in any industry is bad for business. A 200-lb gorilla in the security industry is worse. The security industry is based on trust (or at least mistrust):-), and a 200-lb gorilla, with enough marketshare, can drive the market into inferiority and incompetence quite easily. Look at the consumer operating system market if you don't believe me:-).
You figure it by running a large sample for a short period of time, and then extrapolating the mean time according to a standard distribution.
Translation from statistician: you expect failures to follow a normal distribution, or bell curve. Let's say you run a thousand machines for a month or two as part of your testing. Even with a very long MTBF, you'll have a couple of failures.
You can also use component failure data to figure this out (what's the MTBF of the motherboard, of the processor and other critical components) but aggregating these numbers increases your errors somewhat.
As many people on slashdot seem to forget, software companies are companies first and producers of software second. It is regrettable that company such and such does not file a patent for everything patentable because this unwillingness endangers its survival as a company.
A company can, as another poster has suggested, merely publish and leave patents unfiled. This is all well and good, but not really feasible for a company not founded in the public interest. As much as I'd like more companies to be in the public interest, I know that they are and will continue to be a minuscule proportion.
For that matter, perhaps it's especially important for companies doing research (for example, the FSF) in the public interest to file patents - after all, lacking large bankrolls to pursue litigation, they have little to trade except their patent portfolio. Publishing without patenting does not diminish litigation or points of contention; it would merely make the lines shorter at the patent office. Litigitous companies would be no less litigitous; ones less so would remain less so.
A patent itself is in the public interest. Companies are induced to publicize their advanced work with the reward of monopoly for a period of time. This is entirely consonant with, if not wholly inclusive of, the goals of free software. What we should fight is companies which seek to keep their research secret and out of the hands of the public. Trade secrets unpublished or unpatented are the real alternative to patents, not the trade or academic press.
I believe that if you have a patent you're required to enforce it and protect it against violations and other infringements. Otherwise, you may be deemed to have surrendered or otherwise nullified it. That doesn't mean that they couldn't have licensed it to Barnes and Noble for a token sum, of course, but I fail to see why they'd want to.
A point made by John Walker (founder of Autodesk) in his Autodesk File (North American mirror) is that software companies are regrettably low on patents when compared to industrial or hardware companies of similar size. These patents are used defensively, in a cross-licensing scheme, if a violation is made.
Consider this example: company A uses technology possibly patented by company B. Company B sues. The lawyers will work out a deal where company B is licensed technologies of equal value from company A's patent portfolio - it may go all the way to a full exchange of licenses for all marketable technologies from both companies. Intel and Digital did this relatively recently.
The problem is that if company A doesn't have a strong or viable patent portfolio, it cannot protect itself against patent infringement suits. It may be required to actually shell out cash to settle a suit, which is against the interest of the shareholders (and may lead to the sacking of the management, besides).
While Bezos may be the largest single shareholder, he isn't the only one, and his share will decrease over time. Not to mention that he probably has no desire to lose his shirt in the short term, either.
I'm going to try very hard to not flame you but you're totally off base.
The cost figures you're quoting is the maximum, worst-case scenario for mental illness - say, if 20% of americans were paranoid schizophrenics, it might cost that much. Obviously (even to a foreigner), that's not so.
The treatment figures - well, drug therapy is actually a product of the 1950's. Yes, the fifties do seem a long way away, but they're not the middle ages. Perhaps a little remedial reading is in order.
Inpatient care is a transitory thing (1 or 2 weeks at a spell, maximum) for nearly all of the mentally ill. It's been like that since the late 1960's and 1970's, where a policy of deinstitutionalization was adopted.
The point is that you're creating a conspiracy to "take away our lives and our money" where none exists. Treating the mentally ill actually saves money; we lose massive amounts of economic productivity through illnesses like alcoholism, like depression or anxiety. True, many illnesses, such as schizophrenia, are only marginally treatable, but those represent a tiny fraction of the whole. What's more, those people are already treated at the state's expense.
Making the resources available to treat mental illness is an overall winner, not a loser. No doubt mental illness isn't as compelling as physical illness, but it's at least as important.
I think that people don't discuss the artistic license because it isn't ideologically motivated. The Artistic license strikes me as entirely pragmatic, allowing people to modify the work in question so long as they distinguish between their version and the standard version or make their modifications available. This discourages philosophical flamewars - not many people can argue with a pragmatic license, especially one which is so strongly concerned with rights of authorship and proper attribution.
The point of the GPL is not to discourage forks. So far as I know, and so far as I've read and reread, the point of the GPL is to encourage forks and code reuse. In other words, they have almost totally opposite goals. The Artistic license doesn't even touch on code reuse, which speaks volumes.
GPL authors can still make money ("to pay the bills") by rereleasing under an alternative, proprietary license. I'm not sure if that's possible under the Artistic license - for that matter, I don't think that that's necessary under the artistic license. Which one has the potential to be more profitable is up for argument, of course.
I've actually already read Postrel. Interesting book, although I'm not sure if I agree wholeheartedly.
Back to HGP. I happen to disagree with the assertion that genetic manipulation would be progress. Social progress, that is; it's certainly technological progress. When we start genetic engineering, even on a limited scale, we move into a position where we risk entrenching these differences in social and political life. (Look at Heinlein's Beyond this horizon for an interesting point of view on a society living with genetic engineering). A society of ubermenschen - even worse, a society ruled by ubermenschen - is a dangerous society for all.
I'm not voicing this opinion from a position of ignorance, either. My little brother does genetic research and my mother's been involved in medical research as well.What I am doing is thinking of the consequences - damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead is all well and good, but you can't base a society on that kind of attitude. Especially when they're your own torpedoes.
Believe it or not, progress will occur even without genetic manipulation. We, as a society, have turned away from social disasters in the past. There's no reason we couldn't do it here.
Well, I rather think that there are different reasons for the 50's era virtues. If you've looked at American demography, more than half of Americans live in a suburban or "edge" city rather than within a core city.
Most people move out into the suburbs for two main reasons: firstly, cheap land and larger houses. Secondly, to "escape the inescapable", to control the influences to which they or their children are exposed. These suburbs promote independence rather than teamwork and isolation rather than community; it's no surprise that american libertarianism was born in the suburbs. In essence, suburbanites seek to control and pay for their personal environment; it's only natural that they should pay for only the government they want or use.
Bringing this back to the possibility of genetic manipulation, this is a further act of control, not just of the social element but of the human element. Ironically, just as urbanites pay for suburban sprawl (while surburban taxes are marginally higher, the cost of building new services for low density suburbs more than overtakes this), the benefit of genetic engineering will be confined to the rich but the research which made it possible has been paid for by all.
If you're interested in the political ramification of urban issues (as it seems you may be), you might want to read Stephen Dale's Lost in the Suburbs (Stoddart, 1999), from which I plagiarize freely:).
Remember that Brave New World preceded 1984 by nearly 20 years. Both are products of their time: Huxley's work born from the Roaring 20's and Orwell's born from the dark years of Spain and World War II - 10 years where the world had more or less fallen into fascism. Even Britain and the US tended towards it, especially in their ruling classes.
Both BNW and 1984 represent a state of complete and utter stasis, where no progress is possible. Where one is a utopia and one a dystopia, you can't define BNW by "happiness" and 1984 by "unhappiness". They both end up in essentially the same position, which is a perpetuation of the present into the future. Both are run by true believers, whether Mustapha Mond or O'Brien. While Orwell's proletariat is utterly disregarded and duped, Huxley's is infantilized. This may be "progress", but is it really any different?
The problem with genetic engineering to enhance fitness (whether intellectual or physical) is that it will entrench existing class differences. As such, we will slowly but surely move towards political (class) stasis. Orwell's genius was in realizing that the proletariat did not need to be infantilized, with the attendant effort; it could be merely put to work, fed lies, and left to its own devices.
Genetic engineering of the upper class (and it will be confined to the upper class) re-entrenches that; while there may be political movement, while one member of the upper class or another wins power, there is no actual change. Then again, that might describe the modern world, too. The question is: do you want more of it or less?
In my experience, JavaScript is an excellent way to pass some of the server-side processing on to the client, not to mention all the client-side tricks which can make your job much easier.
I'd personally like to do mostly script-free sites, or at least offer script-free alternatives, but clients simply will not pay for that - it's their business to address the great majority of browsers, and that quite often means neglecting alternative browsers (or any other than the strict mainstream) and users who customize their browser config.
In other words, it's a no-win situation for an architect to suggest - "you want to spend how much money addressing the needs of how few users?". You start losing proposals if you end up playing technology pedant like this, and unfortunately consulting is the game of winning, not losing, proposals.
A lot of the cutting-edge UI stuff relies on javascript, but the core functionality shouldn't. IMHO, of course. But clients pay for as much eye-candy as they can afford, and because it tends to attract repeat visitors it is a strategy that works. I disapprove of it on personal and puritanical grounds, but it does pay the rent:).
The big problem with cookies, I think, is that they're misused. You should maintain state, not useful information, using cookies. They're perfect for stuff like a session ID, a user ID, that kind of thing, which does not need to be kept secure.
Credit card numbers should either be kept in a back-end database, or (preferably) not at all. I'd prefer it happen the latter way. I like net commerce as a bright idea (both generic and in the IBM-branded net.commerce) and have even worked on some commercial sites, but that's part of the problem: you don't want schmoes like me safeguarding your credit card:).
If Novell's CEO is having problems with credit cards kept in cookies, it isn't the fault of the medium but the way it's being used. If anything, we should adopt best practise standards which keep credit card numbers secure and press business software vendors, like IBM or MS, to do the same.
Of course, I suspect that it wasn't the fault of cookies at all; it was a cracked machine or even a shopclerk who swiped his card twice. But that's just my nasty, nasty suspicion.
I would think that juries can be in the best interests of either the crown (or the state, if you're an american) or the defendant, but in either case do not best serve justice as an abstract.
Juries can be corrupted by the crown by exploiting popular prejudice against the defendant. The defendant, on the other hand, can attempt what's known as jury nullification: seeking a mistrial by finding at least one juror sympathetic enough to disregard the letter of the judge's charge. If there are enough sympathetic jurors, you may even get an acquittal.
On the other hand, juries keep the court in touch with the local population. Most of the world, unlike the US, has an appointed, independent, and professional judiciary. This can let a judge drift into the clouds, knowing his job is secure; on the other hand the judge is not necessarily subject to mob appeal.
I would not be overly secure in the competence of trial judges. A recent review by the law society of upper canada revealed that of 100 warrants, 60-odd contained some kind of technical error but only 7 of those were rejected.
The existence of appellate courts, on the other hand, at least allows judicial errors to be put right. A trial judge can set aside a wrongful conviction (or a wrongful civil decision) by jury in some jurisdictions; that, at least, allows errors in the favour of the crown to be put right. Which, although unpopular, is how it should be.
That doesn't really follow; the US Constitution's protection of free speech already excludes malicious speech (lying, libelling, cheating, yelling fire in a crowded theatre). In other words, you have the right to speak, but you can easily move beyond the limits of that right.
What we should consider is that there is no right to anonymity. While US courts have ruled in favour of a right to privacy in that there is a part of our lives which is not part of the public sphere, and it is incorrect to place it in the public sphere. Anonymity is another matter entirely.
That said, anonymity may be the only way to protect free speech of unpopular opinions in certain situations. Consider the McCarthy era: communists had hypothetical free speech, but many of those who exercised it had their careers ruined by the voluntary organizations to which they belonged.
Free speech should not be protected only by the state and its agents, although perhaps that's the only way it can be effectively be protected. When it comes to one's private life, it becomes not a matter of speech but of taste.
Consider your example: someone says that Pepsi contains 5% goat urine. It may be protected speech, since goat urine's no doubt expensive and nobody could reasonably think that the cheapasses in Pepsi corporate management would fork over that much dough for pee. However, if you are identified as the formerly anonymouse goat urine man, don't count on advancing too far in your career at PepsiCo.
You can certainly make money from supplying the software in the first place. Your client can always redistribute by himself, but many clients, especially corporate/industrial ones, won't want to because your software represents a significant business advantage to them.
Shipping the source is hugely incidental. Trivial. Not really worth mentioning.
I hate it when members of my team write unmaintainable code. Frequently, when time's short or when people need help, I have to dive in, and I've found it difficult to get my bearings in code that I did the initial design for - difficult to see the forest for the trees, even when I planned out the forest.
Good practises in programming isn't just for academics; it's the epitome of professional code writing. A manager once tried to draw the definition of a hack and a real programmer by the completeness and bug-free state of their code. I think he's wrong. I think that a real hack writes code that no one can pick up. A real programmer writes code that anyone can pick up and fix or expand - whether it's complete at any one point or not.
Ah, the fabled red herring, second cousin to the well-battered straw man. A utility should do one thing, but not just one, atomic, thing. For example, there shouldn't be a million versions of ps, one for each option or combination of.
As for the unix philosophy or not: having modular and interoperable utilities is much more powerful than having one thing that does many things but works with nothing else.
More to the point, it's easier to develop something which does one thing well rather than everything and the kitchen sink. Everything and the kitchen sink applications usually suck heartily, no doubt because they're so hard to develop and maintain - I can't think of one that doesn't.
Perhaps that's what would attract someone now using Windows: the chance to discover instability and flakiness on another platform. As for me, no thanks.
Hmm. I don't know. I would consider the Unix philosophy of design to have two parts: modularity and interoperability. An application should be able to do one thing well, an application should be able to operate with other applications.
(No doubt Kernighan or Ritchie, if they read Slashdot, would consider this a gross oversimplification, but it's good enough for my purposes).
I would consider the bare bones of a browser to fit well within the unix paradigm: they implement a single standard, HTML, as defined by the W3C.
The ability to pair the application with other applications, for purposes to which the former application is not suited, as Konqueror is said to, satisfies the latter criterion.
Emacs, on the other hand, tends to be the kitchen sink - but, as I understand emacs, the core functionality is quite small when compared to that implemented by emacs users. I might be wrong - I'm not an emacs user - but an extensible framework is perfectly consistent.
Well, I can see a few things that gave Netscape the "advantage" over Mosaic (although I can hardly see a free application distributed by a government research facility as being subject to the normal rules of economic competition - it's not like NCSA gained or lost funding because of Mosaic).
Primarily, the ability to display inline jpg's and then the ability to render tables. These were both rather useful as extensions go.
On the other hand, Mosaic seems to have gained the decisive advantage in the browser wars at last; the NCSA codebase was licensed by Spyglass and then that was relicensed or bought by Microsoft. Most MS users use Mosaic without knowing it: Internet Explorer.
That's an excellent idea if you want to dump the entire unix philosophy of application design: one task, one application, one application, one task.
Admittedly, you might feel that a browser already does that (image viewer, html renderer, a plethora of plug-ins). However, that's not a reason to have a browser do more. In fact, that's an excellent reason to have a browser do less and do it better.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to think that it's BS. Not merely on the face of it, but it seems that the company's lawyers are overwilling to justify their own existence. I'm surprised that it happened in France rather than the US; French civil law is extremely conservative in both judgements and damages.
Consider the recent judgement against tobacco companies in France. Where in the US the settlement was in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the French settlement ended up in the record books - at around 150k$US.
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If they're into the world of money management, they speak english. And probably german as well. They may be snobs, but money speaks volumes.
;-)
And they're not from Quebec, after all
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What points to question this work is that most science (even back in the nineteenth century) is built off the back of other, older science. Even those scientists viewed as mavericks, such as Louis Pasteur, built off a considerable weight of work - they just took it in unexpected directions.
This science doesn't seem terribly indebted to other scientists, which makes me mistrust the theory. This doesn't mean that he is necessarily wrong, but that the effect of Mills cells is almost certainly caused by a different means (unsurprisingly, this is the explanation for cold fusion - energy created through a chemical reaction rather than a nuclear one).
I would be suspicious of Mills, and rightly so. The article doesn't touch on Mills' background for his entire working life - the twenty-odd years between graduation from Harvard Medical School and today are a blank. What has led him to this point? What research has he done in the interim? That he is very smart is without contest, but the very smart are apt to make mistakes of equal grandeur. Look at Ramanujan, who made important discoveries in modern mathematics but also made equally great errors in prime numbers. Like Ramanujan, Mills seems to have a great difficulty and impatience with the scientific method, and it is this that should make us most suspicious of his hypotheses.
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The main cause for contention with respect to the GPL is its ideological leaning. More specifically, it's seen as anti-business. Which, to a certain extent, it is.
RMS sees the interests of the developer and the corporation as, while not entirely orthogonal, at least not congruent. For that matter, I agree with him: if my company loses money on my employment, I'm out on my ass. My good judgement can be overridden at every turn. Any work that I do on their time, whether incorporated into client work or not, is their property. (I wonder if this post is their property, since I'm doing it at work - most likely, it is).
Is the GPL unenforceable? As much as any license, I presume. The power of a license dispute is that it almost invariably ties up the code in question prior to the suit being resolved. Given that the time between product revisions is much shorter than the time to go to trial, the business logic against using GPL'ed code surreptitiously is impeccable.
Look at the dispute between Symantec and McAfee. McAfee had to do a white-room rewrite of their antivirus software - *twice* - to avoid it being contaminated by a hundred-odd lines stolen by a programmer who had previously worked at Symantec. This was much cheaper and faster, believe it or not, than going out and litigating the matter to a settlement.
While free software advocates may not have the resources to reverse-engineer each and every possible violator, the stick is so much bigger than the carrot as to make it very difficult to rationalize using GPLed code on a systematic basis. I'm sure that small fragments have been grafted in by individual programmers, out of convenience or laziness, but violations are most likely to be individual, not organizational. (Of course, this was the case with McAfee, too).
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I think (the eternal IMHO) that the major advantage that a PA-RISC port presents is not blinding speed on the desktop or price-performance, but access to a family of mission-critical hardware. Linux, developed on PC's and ported to a wide range of workstation hardware, has historically been short on big iron. Access to PA-RISC hardware, whether legacy or new machines, will go a long way towards remedying that deficit.
If people (myself among them) spoke out against linux's reliability on commodity hardware, no one can question the reliability and stability of HP's unix hardware. It would be easy to sell me on a HP unix box running Linux - or at least, it would be, if I was still doing that kind of stuff.
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First of all, good move, Thawte. They've successfully maximized shareholder value. In other words, they've sold out at the right time. Verisign, having grabbed a lot of the big names, will probably go on to increase its market share; Thawte, having failed to, may be at the peak of its value - especially when, not if, the net stock bubble collapses.
:-), and a 200-lb gorilla, with enough marketshare, can drive the market into inferiority and incompetence quite easily. Look at the consumer operating system market if you don't believe me :-).
Bad move, Verisign. First of all, the net stock bubble is called a bubble for a reason. However, when acquiring other companies, you should buy for value or make acquisitions strategically. Does Thawte own anything, other than marketshare, that Verisign doesn't already have? In most mergers and buyouts, the purchaser usually ends up losing equity when the euphoria wears off. I doubt that this will be an exception to the rule.
I can deplore Microsoft's mania in acquisitions, but more often than not they acquire intelligently - taking out possible competitors, buying into new technologies. They don't acquire just for the hell of it. Paradoxically, they have too much money to do that.
Bad move, for the global net. Thawte is a South African company, and so the purchase takes an international venture with global reach and sucks it into the gaping maw of Silicon Valley. Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with the valley. It's just that something sticks in my craw with one location dominating an entire industry.
Bad move, for everyone. A 200-lb gorilla in any industry is bad for business. A 200-lb gorilla in the security industry is worse. The security industry is based on trust (or at least mistrust)
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You figure it by running a large sample for a short period of time, and then extrapolating the mean time according to a standard distribution.
Translation from statistician: you expect failures to follow a normal distribution, or bell curve. Let's say you run a thousand machines for a month or two as part of your testing. Even with a very long MTBF, you'll have a couple of failures.
You can also use component failure data to figure this out (what's the MTBF of the motherboard, of the processor and other critical components) but aggregating these numbers increases your errors somewhat.
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As many people on slashdot seem to forget, software companies are companies first and producers of software second. It is regrettable that company such and such does not file a patent for everything patentable because this unwillingness endangers its survival as a company.
A company can, as another poster has suggested, merely publish and leave patents unfiled. This is all well and good, but not really feasible for a company not founded in the public interest. As much as I'd like more companies to be in the public interest, I know that they are and will continue to be a minuscule proportion.
For that matter, perhaps it's especially important for companies doing research (for example, the FSF) in the public interest to file patents - after all, lacking large bankrolls to pursue litigation, they have little to trade except their patent portfolio. Publishing without patenting does not diminish litigation or points of contention; it would merely make the lines shorter at the patent office. Litigitous companies would be no less litigitous; ones less so would remain less so.
A patent itself is in the public interest. Companies are induced to publicize their advanced work with the reward of monopoly for a period of time. This is entirely consonant with, if not wholly inclusive of, the goals of free software. What we should fight is companies which seek to keep their research secret and out of the hands of the public. Trade secrets unpublished or unpatented are the real alternative to patents, not the trade or academic press.
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My mistake.
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I believe that if you have a patent you're required to enforce it and protect it against violations and other infringements. Otherwise, you may be deemed to have surrendered or otherwise nullified it. That doesn't mean that they couldn't have licensed it to Barnes and Noble for a token sum, of course, but I fail to see why they'd want to.
A point made by John Walker (founder of Autodesk) in his Autodesk File (North American mirror) is that software companies are regrettably low on patents when compared to industrial or hardware companies of similar size. These patents are used defensively, in a cross-licensing scheme, if a violation is made.
Consider this example: company A uses technology possibly patented by company B. Company B sues. The lawyers will work out a deal where company B is licensed technologies of equal value from company A's patent portfolio - it may go all the way to a full exchange of licenses for all marketable technologies from both companies. Intel and Digital did this relatively recently.
The problem is that if company A doesn't have a strong or viable patent portfolio, it cannot protect itself against patent infringement suits. It may be required to actually shell out cash to settle a suit, which is against the interest of the shareholders (and may lead to the sacking of the management, besides).
While Bezos may be the largest single shareholder, he isn't the only one, and his share will decrease over time. Not to mention that he probably has no desire to lose his shirt in the short term, either.
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I'm going to try very hard to not flame you but you're totally off base.
The cost figures you're quoting is the maximum, worst-case scenario for mental illness - say, if 20% of americans were paranoid schizophrenics, it might cost that much. Obviously (even to a foreigner), that's not so.
The treatment figures - well, drug therapy is actually a product of the 1950's. Yes, the fifties do seem a long way away, but they're not the middle ages. Perhaps a little remedial reading is in order.
Inpatient care is a transitory thing (1 or 2 weeks at a spell, maximum) for nearly all of the mentally ill. It's been like that since the late 1960's and 1970's, where a policy of deinstitutionalization was adopted.
The point is that you're creating a conspiracy to "take away our lives and our money" where none exists. Treating the mentally ill actually saves money; we lose massive amounts of economic productivity through illnesses like alcoholism, like depression or anxiety. True, many illnesses, such as schizophrenia, are only marginally treatable, but those represent a tiny fraction of the whole. What's more, those people are already treated at the state's expense.
Making the resources available to treat mental illness is an overall winner, not a loser. No doubt mental illness isn't as compelling as physical illness, but it's at least as important.
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I think that people don't discuss the artistic license because it isn't ideologically motivated. The Artistic license strikes me as entirely pragmatic, allowing people to modify the work in question so long as they distinguish between their version and the standard version or make their modifications available. This discourages philosophical flamewars - not many people can argue with a pragmatic license, especially one which is so strongly concerned with rights of authorship and proper attribution.
The point of the GPL is not to discourage forks. So far as I know, and so far as I've read and reread, the point of the GPL is to encourage forks and code reuse. In other words, they have almost totally opposite goals. The Artistic license doesn't even touch on code reuse, which speaks volumes.
GPL authors can still make money ("to pay the bills") by rereleasing under an alternative, proprietary license. I'm not sure if that's possible under the Artistic license - for that matter, I don't think that that's necessary under the artistic license. Which one has the potential to be more profitable is up for argument, of course.
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I've actually already read Postrel. Interesting book, although I'm not sure if I agree wholeheartedly.
Back to HGP. I happen to disagree with the assertion that genetic manipulation would be progress. Social progress, that is; it's certainly technological progress. When we start genetic engineering, even on a limited scale, we move into a position where we risk entrenching these differences in social and political life. (Look at Heinlein's Beyond this horizon for an interesting point of view on a society living with genetic engineering). A society of ubermenschen - even worse, a society ruled by ubermenschen - is a dangerous society for all.
I'm not voicing this opinion from a position of ignorance, either. My little brother does genetic research and my mother's been involved in medical research as well.What I am doing is thinking of the consequences - damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead is all well and good, but you can't base a society on that kind of attitude. Especially when they're your own torpedoes.
Believe it or not, progress will occur even without genetic manipulation. We, as a society, have turned away from social disasters in the past. There's no reason we couldn't do it here.
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Well, I rather think that there are different reasons for the 50's era virtues. If you've looked at American demography, more than half of Americans live in a suburban or "edge" city rather than within a core city.
:).
Most people move out into the suburbs for two main reasons: firstly, cheap land and larger houses. Secondly, to "escape the inescapable", to control the influences to which they or their children are exposed. These suburbs promote independence rather than teamwork and isolation rather than community; it's no surprise that american libertarianism was born in the suburbs. In essence, suburbanites seek to control and pay for their personal environment; it's only natural that they should pay for only the government they want or use.
Bringing this back to the possibility of genetic manipulation, this is a further act of control, not just of the social element but of the human element. Ironically, just as urbanites pay for suburban sprawl (while surburban taxes are marginally higher, the cost of building new services for low density suburbs more than overtakes this), the benefit of genetic engineering will be confined to the rich but the research which made it possible has been paid for by all.
If you're interested in the political ramification of urban issues (as it seems you may be), you might want to read Stephen Dale's Lost in the Suburbs (Stoddart, 1999), from which I plagiarize freely
Looking forward to your book reference.
Regards,
Marco
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Remember that Brave New World preceded 1984 by nearly 20 years. Both are products of their time: Huxley's work born from the Roaring 20's and Orwell's born from the dark years of Spain and World War II - 10 years where the world had more or less fallen into fascism. Even Britain and the US tended towards it, especially in their ruling classes.
Both BNW and 1984 represent a state of complete and utter stasis, where no progress is possible. Where one is a utopia and one a dystopia, you can't define BNW by "happiness" and 1984 by "unhappiness". They both end up in essentially the same position, which is a perpetuation of the present into the future. Both are run by true believers, whether Mustapha Mond or O'Brien. While Orwell's proletariat is utterly disregarded and duped, Huxley's is infantilized. This may be "progress", but is it really any different?
The problem with genetic engineering to enhance fitness (whether intellectual or physical) is that it will entrench existing class differences. As such, we will slowly but surely move towards political (class) stasis. Orwell's genius was in realizing that the proletariat did not need to be infantilized, with the attendant effort; it could be merely put to work, fed lies, and left to its own devices.
Genetic engineering of the upper class (and it will be confined to the upper class) re-entrenches that; while there may be political movement, while one member of the upper class or another wins power, there is no actual change. Then again, that might describe the modern world, too. The question is: do you want more of it or less?
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In my experience, JavaScript is an excellent way to pass some of the server-side processing on to the client, not to mention all the client-side tricks which can make your job much easier.
:).
I'd personally like to do mostly script-free sites, or at least offer script-free alternatives, but clients simply will not pay for that - it's their business to address the great majority of browsers, and that quite often means neglecting alternative browsers (or any other than the strict mainstream) and users who customize their browser config.
In other words, it's a no-win situation for an architect to suggest - "you want to spend how much money addressing the needs of how few users?". You start losing proposals if you end up playing technology pedant like this, and unfortunately consulting is the game of winning, not losing, proposals.
A lot of the cutting-edge UI stuff relies on javascript, but the core functionality shouldn't. IMHO, of course. But clients pay for as much eye-candy as they can afford, and because it tends to attract repeat visitors it is a strategy that works. I disapprove of it on personal and puritanical grounds, but it does pay the rent
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The big problem with cookies, I think, is that they're misused. You should maintain state, not useful information, using cookies. They're perfect for stuff like a session ID, a user ID, that kind of thing, which does not need to be kept secure.
:).
Credit card numbers should either be kept in a back-end database, or (preferably) not at all. I'd prefer it happen the latter way. I like net commerce as a bright idea (both generic and in the IBM-branded net.commerce) and have even worked on some commercial sites, but that's part of the problem: you don't want schmoes like me safeguarding your credit card
If Novell's CEO is having problems with credit cards kept in cookies, it isn't the fault of the medium but the way it's being used. If anything, we should adopt best practise standards which keep credit card numbers secure and press business software vendors, like IBM or MS, to do the same.
Of course, I suspect that it wasn't the fault of cookies at all; it was a cracked machine or even a shopclerk who swiped his card twice. But that's just my nasty, nasty suspicion.
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I would think that juries can be in the best interests of either the crown (or the state, if you're an american) or the defendant, but in either case do not best serve justice as an abstract.
Juries can be corrupted by the crown by exploiting popular prejudice against the defendant. The defendant, on the other hand, can attempt what's known as jury nullification: seeking a mistrial by finding at least one juror sympathetic enough to disregard the letter of the judge's charge. If there are enough sympathetic jurors, you may even get an acquittal.
On the other hand, juries keep the court in touch with the local population. Most of the world, unlike the US, has an appointed, independent, and professional judiciary. This can let a judge drift into the clouds, knowing his job is secure; on the other hand the judge is not necessarily subject to mob appeal.
I would not be overly secure in the competence of trial judges. A recent review by the law society of upper canada revealed that of 100 warrants, 60-odd contained some kind of technical error but only 7 of those were rejected.
The existence of appellate courts, on the other hand, at least allows judicial errors to be put right. A trial judge can set aside a wrongful conviction (or a wrongful civil decision) by jury in some jurisdictions; that, at least, allows errors in the favour of the crown to be put right.
Which, although unpopular, is how it should be.
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That doesn't really follow; the US Constitution's protection of free speech already excludes malicious speech (lying, libelling, cheating, yelling fire in a crowded theatre). In other words, you have the right to speak, but you can easily move beyond the limits of that right.
What we should consider is that there is no right to anonymity. While US courts have ruled in favour of a right to privacy in that there is a part of our lives which is not part of the public sphere, and it is incorrect to place it in the public sphere. Anonymity is another matter entirely.
That said, anonymity may be the only way to protect free speech of unpopular opinions in certain situations. Consider the McCarthy era: communists had hypothetical free speech, but many of those who exercised it had their careers ruined by the voluntary organizations to which they belonged.
Free speech should not be protected only by the state and its agents, although perhaps that's the only way it can be effectively be protected. When it comes to one's private life, it becomes not a matter of speech but of taste.
Consider your example: someone says that Pepsi contains 5% goat urine. It may be protected speech, since goat urine's no doubt expensive and nobody could reasonably think that the cheapasses in Pepsi corporate management would fork over that much dough for pee. However, if you are identified as the formerly anonymouse goat urine man, don't count on advancing too far in your career at PepsiCo.
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You can certainly make money from supplying the software in the first place. Your client can always redistribute by himself, but many clients, especially corporate/industrial ones, won't want to because your software represents a significant business advantage to them.
Shipping the source is hugely incidental. Trivial. Not really worth mentioning.
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I hate it when members of my team write unmaintainable code. Frequently, when time's short or when people need help, I have to dive in, and I've found it difficult to get my bearings in code that I did the initial design for - difficult to see the forest for the trees, even when I planned out the forest.
Good practises in programming isn't just for academics; it's the epitome of professional code writing. A manager once tried to draw the definition of a hack and a real programmer by the completeness and bug-free state of their code. I think he's wrong. I think that a real hack writes code that no one can pick up. A real programmer writes code that anyone can pick up and fix or expand - whether it's complete at any one point or not.
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Ah, the fabled red herring, second cousin to the well-battered straw man. A utility should do one thing, but not just one, atomic, thing. For example, there shouldn't be a million versions of ps, one for each option or combination of.
As for the unix philosophy or not: having modular and interoperable utilities is much more powerful than having one thing that does many things but works with nothing else.
More to the point, it's easier to develop something which does one thing well rather than everything and the kitchen sink. Everything and the kitchen sink applications usually suck heartily, no doubt because they're so hard to develop and maintain - I can't think of one that doesn't.
Perhaps that's what would attract someone now using Windows: the chance to discover instability and flakiness on another platform. As for me, no thanks.
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Hmm. I don't know. I would consider the Unix philosophy of design to have two parts: modularity and interoperability. An application should be able to do one thing well, an application should be able to operate with other applications.
(No doubt Kernighan or Ritchie, if they read Slashdot, would consider this a gross oversimplification, but it's good enough for my purposes).
I would consider the bare bones of a browser to fit well within the unix paradigm: they implement a single standard, HTML, as defined by the W3C.
The ability to pair the application with other applications, for purposes to which the former application is not suited, as Konqueror is said to, satisfies the latter criterion.
Emacs, on the other hand, tends to be the kitchen sink - but, as I understand emacs, the core functionality is quite small when compared to that implemented by emacs users. I might be wrong - I'm not an emacs user - but an extensible framework is perfectly consistent.
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Well, I can see a few things that gave Netscape the "advantage" over Mosaic (although I can hardly see a free application distributed by a government research facility as being subject to the normal rules of economic competition - it's not like NCSA gained or lost funding because of Mosaic).
Primarily, the ability to display inline jpg's and then the ability to render tables. These were both rather useful as extensions go.
On the other hand, Mosaic seems to have gained the decisive advantage in the browser wars at last; the NCSA codebase was licensed by Spyglass and then that was relicensed or bought by Microsoft. Most MS users use Mosaic without knowing it: Internet Explorer.
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That's an excellent idea if you want to dump the entire unix philosophy of application design: one task, one application, one application, one task.
Admittedly, you might feel that a browser already does that (image viewer, html renderer, a plethora of plug-ins). However, that's not a reason to have a browser do more. In fact, that's an excellent reason to have a browser do less and do it better.
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